Grubstaking the Palouse describes the activities of miners and how their search for riches influenced development of the Palouse country, one of Americas important agricultural regions.

Its name derived from the Nez Perce language, Latah County is the only county in the United States to have been created by an Act of Congress. The abundance of its natural resourcesfrom blue fields of camas to deep veins of gold, from great stands of white pine trees to vast green grasslandsattracted a diversity of dreamers seeking only the opportunity to build their own futures. Nestled in the heart of the Palouse, an agricultural area of extraordinary production, Latah County is a land of timber and, at Potlatch, was once the site of one of the largest sawmills in the world. At Moscow, it is also the home of the states land-grant institution, the University of Idaho. From the forests of Troy and the ridges of Juliaetta and Kendrick, from the homesteads of Genesee to Bovills hunting lodge and Dearys town site, Latah County has had a rich and varied history.

Working with the premise that there are much meaning and value in the "repelling beauty" of mining landscapes, Richard Francaviglia identifies the visual clues that indicate an area has been mined and tells us how to read them, showing the interconnections among all of America's major mining districts. With a style as bold as the landscape he reads and with photographs to match, he interprets the major forces that have shaped the architecture, design, and topography of mining areas. Covering many different types of mining and mining locations, he concludes that mining landscapes have come to symbolize the turmoil between what our society elects to view as two opposing forces: culture and nature.

A History of Gold Dredging in Idaho tells the story of a revolution in placer mining—and its subsequent impact on the state of Idaho—from its inception in the early 1880s until its demise in the early 1960s. Idaho was the nation’s fourth-leading producer of dredged gold after 1910 and therefore provides an excellent lens through which to observe the practice and history of gold dredging. Author Clark Spence focuses on the two most important types of dredges in the state—the bucket-line dredge and the dragline dredge—and describes their financing, operation, problems, and effect on the state and environment. These dredges made it possible to work ground previously deemed untouchable because bedrock where gold collected could now be reached. But they were also highly destructive to the environment. As these huge machines floated along, they dumped debris that harmed the streams and destroyed wildlife habitat, eventually prompting state regulations and federal restoration of some of the state’s crippled waterways. Providing a record of Idaho’s dredging history for the first time, this book is a significant contribution to the knowledge and understanding of Western mining, its technology, and its overall development as a major industry of the twentieth century.

Papers address concerns by contractors and agencies in how to survey and nominate properties to the National Register of Historic Places and how to mitigate adverse actions on significant resources, management concerns related to historic mining sites on public lands, and interpretation and display of mining sites and materials. The focus is on the western United States, but other parts of the U.S. and western Canada are covered.

Potlatch, Idaho, was a company town--a community completely owned by a large lumber firm. This is the story of the Pacific Northwest in microcosm: the exploitation of natural resources; the impact of big business on the development of a rutal area; of ordinary people making a place their home.