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By 1933, that vein was long gone; but the miners who stuck around afterward had lots more company. Toiling with a pick, shovel, and sluice box for a few cents’ worth of gold a day and living a rustic life in a knocked-up mountain shack was, to many, far preferable to a life huddled in a “Hooverville” at night and waiting in bread lines all day, or tramping around the country being bitten by dogs and shot at by hostile farmers. Even if a claim yielded no gold at all, it was at least a place to live, and there were fish in the creeks, and deer in the woods, and acorns and wild camas roots to eat. So thousands of unemployed Americans joined the gold rush, interested as much in having a place to call home as they were in striking it rich.
The Depression eventually dissipated, but gold miners were still doing well enough in the early 1940s that the federal government, in October 1942, felt it had to issue a wartime limitation order to get the miners working on something that would help win the war. With the stroke of a pen, it became essentially illegal to do commercial gold mining. The Depression-spawned gold-mining party was over, long before the music stopped; and by the time the government blew the “all clear” in 1945, equipment had rusted or been stolen, mines had collapsed, mining towns had become ghost towns, and investors had taken their money elsewhere. The vast majority of mines simply didn’t bother to re-open, and very few of the small independent miners who left to go to war came back to their claims. Which means there’s still plenty of “gold in them-thar hills” today — waiting to get some more Oregon families through the next round of hard times.
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