Filling his pan with dirt, Joe Ellis, superintendent of South Pass City State Historic Site, scoops a pan-full of water from the creek and rhythmically sloshes the sediment back and forth. While loose dirt swirls into solution and then slops over the rim and back into the creek, heavier sediments snag on the circular ridges that ring the pan. Several more times Ellis fills his pan with water, washes the slurry around, then pauses to poke through the remains for flakes of "flower gold" that might have been deposited along the pan's ridges.
But that was only one pan. During the 1867 gold rush that swarmed this valley nestled at the southern tip of Wyoming's Wind River Range, miners might dip their pans into the willow-lined creek's waters 1,000 times a day in search of gold. Other, more industrious miners turned to shovels, dynamite and sweat to burrow like ants into the hillsides surrounding South Pass in their chase after the mother lode.
Those were heady days, when more than 1,000 folks – mostly miners, but also some saloon keepers, butchers and even a few ladies of the night – filled the tight valley rimmed by sagebrush hillsides broken here and there by aspen and conifers. By 1868, the lure of an overnight fortune saw 300 buildings rise in South Pass City. Two years later, Ester Morris became the nation's first female judge when she was appointed justice of the peace for the town. Equality might have come to Wyoming, but the focus in South Pass remained a fevered hunt for overnight wealth.