HENRY KLIPPEL. – Mr. Klippel has been intimately connected with the public business and measures of our state, particularly in Southern Oregon. Like the most of our successful men, his progress has been by hard labor, and even by hard knocks; that is, he has, out of the capital of his own hands and brain, gained point after point, and succeeded in stamping his mind and character upon public affairs.
He was born in Hesse Darmstadt in 1833, and came to American five years later. After an industrious and active life in the old West, – losing his father by death at the age of fifteen, and making a new home for his mother in Missouri, – he crossed the plains to Oregon in 1851, finding a few months’ employment at Oregon City on a ferry boat, and afterwards driving an ox-team to Yreka. This introduced him to the mining life which he had been contemplating since 1848, and from which he has never wholly withdrawn.
His operations at Jacksonville in 1852 were cut short by the Indian trouble; and, under Colonel Lamerick, he took a hand in quieting the savages, and again became an Indian fighter in 1853 and again in 1855 and 1856. After this he took up whatever offered the prospect of bread or money, not drifting, but working for sea room. In 1866 he was able to undertake the hardware business in Jacksonville, Oregon, and was introduced to political life by his election as sheriff of Jacksonville in 1870. In 1872 he was appointed by Governor Grover as one of the commissioners to build the state capitol. In 1874 he was elected by the Oregon legislature to succeed himself as capitol commissioner, and resigned before the expiration of his second term. In 1876 he was intimately connected with the Tilden campaign, being nominated one of the electors on the Democratic ticket.
Mr. Klippel was the pioneer of quartz mining, having built the first stamp mill at Gold Hill, Oregon, in 1860; and in 1880 he engaged in hydraulic mining on a large scale at Squaw Lake. He was also elected county clerk in that year. Upon his retirement form this office in1884 he entered extensively into stock-raising in Lake county, which, together with farming, mining and his real-estate business, keeps him actively occupied. He was the first recorder of Jacksonville. He was married at that place in 1860 to Miss Elizabeth A. Bigham, a lady who was born in Missouri. They have one daughter and four sons.