George Grimes
American
d. 1862
George Grimes was an American prospector who co-led the party that discovered gold in Idaho's Boise Basin on 2 August 1862. He was shot and killed days later near the diggings; Grimes Creek and Grimes Pass preserve his name.
Biography
George Grimes was an American prospector who in the summer of 1862 joined Moses Splawn in leading a small party from the Walla Walla and Auburn country into the unprospected Boise Basin of southwestern Idaho, drawn by an Indigenous account of gold-bearing gravels in a basin beyond the Boise River.
On 2 August 1862 the party struck placer gold on the creek that now bears Grimes's name, in the timbered mountains northeast of the future site of Boise. The discovery proved to be among the most important in the history of the Pacific Northwest: the Boise Basin rush that followed built Idaho City, Placerville, Centerville and Pioneerville, drew tens of thousands of miners, and by 1863 made Idaho City briefly the largest city in the Pacific Northwest. The basin ultimately produced well over two million ounces of gold.
Grimes did not live to see any of it. About a week after the strike he was shot and killed while the party worked near what is now Grimes Pass. The traditional account blames an attack by Indians resisting the intrusion, but accounts differ, and some contemporaries and later historians suspected he may have been shot by a member of his own party. His companions buried him in a prospect hole and retreated for supplies. His birth date and origins are not reliably recorded.