Jack Post
Jack Post was a veteran prospector from Sumas, Washington, who in August 1897 discovered the gold-bearing Lone Jack ledge near Mount Baker with partners Russ Lambert and Luman Van Valkenburg, setting off the Mount Baker gold rush. The mine was named in his honor.
Biography
Jack Post was the prospector whose persistence opened the Mount Baker gold district of northwestern Washington. A veteran of the Fraser River gold excitement, Post settled at Sumas, near the Canadian border, and spent years combing the rugged country around Mount Baker for the lode gold he was convinced it held.
In August 1897, prospecting with fellow Sumas residents Russ Lambert and Luman Van Valkenburg, he found a quartz ledge streaked with free gold high above Silesia Creek, near the border. The claim was named the Lone Jack in his honor, and news of the strike set off the Mount Baker gold rush, drawing hundreds of prospectors into the high Cascades. Within a year the partners sold the property to the newly formed Mount Baker Mining Company of Portland, Oregon, for $50,000 — a fortune for men who had packed their supplies over mountain trails for years.
The Lone Jack went on to produce gold intermittently for decades, with a stamp mill on Silesia Creek and an aerial tramway serving the workings by 1901. Of Post himself, beyond his years of stubborn searching and his moment of triumph, the record preserves little; his dates of birth and death are unknown.