In the decade after gold was discovered in the California mill race in 1848, prospectors drawn by hopes of sudden wealth reached what is now north-central Idaho. In 1860, gold was found on Canal Gulch of Oro Fino Creek, a tributary of the Clearwater River, and soon afterward travelers on the Nez Perce Trail found gold in Elk City, while another small group struck rich in the remote Florence basin. Between September 1861 and October 1874, gold shipments from Florence totaled $13,000,000. Early mining centered on placer deposits of fine gold flakes in sandy or gravel stream beds, worked with pans and shovels, and later expanded to more complex high-pressure water methods that could move thousands of yards of material each day. As richer placer diggings were exhausted and many miners left for more lucrative fields, Chinese miners took over skim diggings on mining claims. Chinese people also ran restaurants and laundries in camps and communities such as Grangeville, treated miners with country cures, farmed the warm canyons along the Salmon River, and after completion of the Central Pacific Railroad came in greater numbers when laws allowed them to buy exhausted claims. Historians estimate that in the 1870s the Chinese made up 28% of Idaho’s population, and a December 1904 report said Chinese miners had shipped more than $5,000,000 in gold from Florence alone. The region also became tied to timber, first through lumber whipsawed from nearby trees for sluice boxes, rockers, and the new mining towns, then as a broader industry that expanded sharply in the post-World War II 1940s; more than a half-billion board feet of timber was cut on National Forest System lands between 1944 and 1956, leading the Forest Service to regulate timber sales more closely. Polly Bemis, born in China as Lau Nathoy, became a local legend after being sold by her father at age 14, smuggled into Portland, and later acquired in Warrens by Charley Bemis; she saved his life after he was shot in 1890, married him in 1894, lived with him along the Salmon River after 1898, and after his death in 1922 remained near the river until illness forced her back to Grangeville, where she died in 1933. In June 1987, her remains were moved back to her place on the river. The Nezperce National Forest, created by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908 on the traditional homeland of the Nez Perce people, contains nearly half of its 2.2 million acres in wilderness and reflects the region’s long connection to mining, timber, grazing, wildlife, fisheries, and recreation as mining and timber decline and tourism grows in importance.