The Lost Blue Bucket Mine

Oregon’s great lost-gold story, and one of the few with a documented cause. In 1845 Stephen Meek talked roughly 200 wagons off the Oregon Trail near Vale onto a “cutoff” across the high desert. It went badly: no water, no feed, people dying of fever, the company close to hanging Meek. Somewhere in that wandering, children playing in a creek picked up heavy yellow pebbles and carried them in a blue bucket. Nobody thought anything of it until California went gold-mad four years later, and then every survivor of the Meek Cutoff tried to walk back to a creek none of them could find, because they had been lost when they crossed it. Search parties went out for decades. The wagon route itself is real and mapped in places; the creek has never been identified. Prospectors still work the Malheur and Harney country on the strength of it.