Elias Davidson Pierce
American
1824 – 1897
Elias Davidson Pierce was an American trader and prospector whose 1860 expedition onto Nez Perce lands found gold on Orofino Creek, the first discovery in what became Idaho. The rush that followed built the town of Pierce and opened the Clearwater mines.
Biography
Elias Davidson Pierce was born in 1824 in Harrison County, Virginia (now West Virginia). He moved west as a young man, studied law in Indiana, served as a volunteer in the Mexican War, and joined the California Gold Rush in 1849, afterward trading among the Nez Perce of the Columbia Plateau, whose country he came to know well.
Convinced there was gold on the Clearwater, Pierce prospected there as early as 1858-60 despite the 1855 treaty that closed the Nez Perce reservation to intruders. In August 1860 he led a small party, guided around the settlements by a Nez Perce woman, Jane Timothy, in some accounts, onto the reservation, and that fall the group found paying gold in Canal Gulch on Orofino Creek, where party member Wilbur F. Bassett is credited with the first strike. The discovery, the first in what became Idaho, drew thousands of miners up the Clearwater in 1861, planted the towns of Pierce and Oro Fino, and set in motion the treaty revisions and conflicts that culminated in the Nez Perce War of 1877, as well as the creation of Idaho Territory in 1863.
Pierce, always more discoverer than miner, chased other prospects across the West without comparable success. He died virtually penniless in 1897. The town of Pierce, Idaho, site of the state's oldest public building, preserves his name.