It really wasn't THAT long ago that Oregon's major economic activity involved extraction: taking trees out of forests, taking minerals out of the ground. It's a very different place now, but the evidence of the work of past generations remains scattered across the landscape.
Archaeologist Tatiana Watkins has explored mining camps in Southern and Eastern Oregon as part of the Oregon Chinese Diaspora Project; many gold mine workers were Chinese.
Watkins presents some of her info in one of the "Windows in Time" lectures of the Southern Oregon Historical Society.
We get a preview when the archaeologist visits the JX.