In 1853 a group of volunteers out of Jacksonville under Lt. B.B. Griffin burned an Applegate Indian village to the ground a few hundred yards downstream from here. A few days later, the Griffin detachment was itself routed in a battle on Williams Creek by a small group of Applegates under their chief, "Old John," a wiley fighter. In 1854 gold was discovered about five miles upstream from here by a settler named James Sterling, and over the next three decades Sterling Creek yielded thousands of dollars in gold. A mining town called Sterlingville sprang up and ballooned to several hundred residents. Nothing is left of the town today, except for a network of trails maintained along the route of Sterling Ditch, originally built to provide water for hydraulic mining