'62 Days

Each June the doors of the F.C. Sels Brewery open on Washington Street in downtown Canyon City, and vendors set up along the street outside. That reopening began the 2026 ‘62 Days, held June 12 and 13. It was the 105th running of the celebration, which marks the discovery of gold here in 1862. Canyon City is the seat of Grant County. It stands 3,173 feet above sea level and counted 660 people in 2020. The nonprofit Whiskey Gulch Gang runs the celebration. In the 2025 parade its members rode their flatbed truck.

On the Friday evening of the 2026 celebration, the gang posted that vendors were “already set up” and that “the cornhole competition and band are on now!” The cornhole tournament is played at the brewery, is open to anyone 21 or older, and runs from Friday night into Saturday.

Saturday on Washington Street

Saturday begins early, with a miner’s breakfast at the Squeeze Inn restaurant and the Gold Rush Run, a 5000-meter race that starts at 8 a.m. The 2026 program put the parade at 11 a.m., the medicine wagon show at 1 p.m., and the hanging and shoot-out at 2 p.m. Immediately after the hanging, Curbside Cravings held a hot wing contest across the road, in front of the brewery. All ages could enter. The gang warned entrants to “be prepared to take the HEAT!” and listed seventeen local sponsors who donated prizes, from Les Schwab to the John Day Golf Course. At 3 p.m. a paint party filled the community hall. It cost $35, and $10 of each fee went to the Clarry family.

The program changes from year to year. The centennial edition in 2021 added gold-panning lessons for children, a chili cookoff, bed races, stick-horse races, and a Teen Costume Dance Party on the second night. Colby Farrell, who has served as the gang’s president, was born and raised in Canyon City. He said that year that the point of dressing in mid-1800s costume and staging shootouts and hangings in the town square is to have fun and to remember how Grant County came to be. “We learned a lot of Grant County, Canyon City history in school,” he said. “I don’t think there’s as much of that. Younger people just don’t know how much of a history Canyon City has.”

The small park at South Washington and Park streets stands where the Elkhorn Hotel once stood. A 1995 marker there tells the town’s story, and murals of earlier scenes cover building walls near the park. St. Thomas Episcopal Church, built in 1876, stands near the center of town.

The brewer as grand marshal

The 2025 grand marshals were Ken and Bev Peterson. For 2026 the gang chose a man dead since 1914. “We decided this year to kind of get away from just choosing people in the community, mostly because we feel like a lot of the history of Grant County and the stuff that we celebrate and promote is not being talked about like it was in the old days,” Farrell said. “We decided to start trying to help do that by choosing historical figures from the past as our grand marshals.”

The man they chose, Francis Clemens Sels, is the one whose name is on the brewery. According to Grant County Museum documents, he was born in Merschede, Westphalia, Germany, in 1837. He reached California in 1854 to mine for gold and came to Canyon City soon after the 1862 strike. That summer he mined at Prairie Diggins, about 4 miles northeast of town. In the spring of 1863 he opened a general store with E.J. Stemme. In July 1870 he bought the Canyon City Brewery from John H. Stahl, and the great fire of August 12, 1870, destroyed it. He rebuilt in stone. A fire in 1898 took the building again, and he rebuilt it once more with improvements. The beer won a medal at the St. Louis World’s Fair.

Sels also held a long list of public offices. He was appointed postmaster, served as justice of the peace from 1864 to 1866, and won election as county treasurer in 1866. In 1868 he won a seat as state senator and lost it on a technicality. According to the Morning Democrat, he was the only Republican to win in Grant County in the 1866 and 1868 elections. He served as county judge from 1870 to 1874. When he died at home in Canyon City on January 29, 1914, at 77, he was president of the First National Bank of Canyon City. “He was the lender who gave people loans, and he was very trusted in the community,” Farrell said.

Members of the gang began acquiring the brewery and the properties beside it in 1972. Restoring the building and raising its massive stone walls took years. The brewery now opens for ‘62 Days, for concerts, and for an Oktoberfest that honors Sels’ German heritage. The 2026 Oktoberfest was held September 26 with the James Gang Band. As of 2003, the gang had also put on fireworks from the hill behind the brewery since the eve of the new century, and it marked each new year with a cannon shot.

Whiskey Flat, 1862 and 1922

Accounts of the strike differ in their details. The town marker says that in June 1862 a company of miners from northern California, crossing the Strawberry Mountain Range eastward, found gold on Whiskey Flat, half a mile south of the park. The Grant County Gazette says the party was bound for the Idaho gold fields and struck rich deposits on the banks of Canyon Creek. It adds that within ten days at least a thousand miners were camped along the creek. The marker records more than $26 million in gold taken from Canyon Creek and the nearby mountains between 1862 and 1880. It also says that, by tradition, Canyon City had more people than any other town in Oregon from 1862 to 1864, at least 2,500. The Gazette is more cautious: “It is impossible to be certain, but it is likely” that Canyon City was the largest city in Oregon in the mid-1860s. The town became the county seat in 1864. Fire took much of it in 1870, Chinatown burned in 1885, a flash flood struck in 1896, and fire came again in 1898 and 1937.

The first ‘62 Days was held June 8, 1922, sixty years after the strike. Its sponsors, a group of businessmen and city fathers, named themselves after Whiskey Gulch, which lies above the old camp of tents and saloons on Whiskey Flat. Mayor Joe Klink was president, and C.P. Haight, who owned the newspaper, was a director. On May 22, 1922, work began on a dance hall and cook shack at the south edge of town. That building, the ‘62 Hall, held decades of dances and community gatherings. By 2003 it had become the Oxbow Trading Co., which displayed horse-drawn vehicles and antiques.

The first celebration staged what the Blue Mountain Eagle called the longest horse race in Oregon history. Jack McCarty of Dayville rode a relay of seven horses from The Dalles to Canyon City through rain, mud, and swollen streams. He finished in 19 hours and 17 minutes and collected $750 in gold dust. Frank McBean of Portland, the last surviving member of the 1862 discovery party, was the guest of honor, and his picture appeared on the gang’s fun money. Juanita Miller of Oakland, California, also attended. She was the daughter of Joaquin Miller, “Poet of the Sierras” and Grant County’s first judge. Prohibition was in force, and the Eagle reports that the crowd drank legal “joy juice.”

Lean years and a year of wristbands

The 1937 fire scaled back the celebration. During the Second World War it shrank to a picnic and a dance. It grew again in the 1950s, ahead of the Oregon State Centennial in 1959 and the centennial of the gold strike in 1962. In the mid-1980s the gang staged a Great Train Robbery on the Sumpter Valley Railroad. A damsel in distress was tied and laid across the tracks, with a cannon ready in case the conductor doubted they meant it. Dave Traylor of John Day joined the gang in 1967. By 2003 a July demolition derby at the Grant County Fairgrounds had served for fifteen years as the main fundraiser for ‘62 Days.

In 2020 the 99th celebration went ahead under Governor Kate Brown’s guidelines. It ran for one Saturday, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., with children’s events in the park and “stationary floats” placed around town. Gathering areas were limited to fewer than 25 people, who wore color-coded wristbands and rotated in and out every half hour. Nathan Gordanier of the Emergency Operations Center told Farrell he had spent 40 to 50 hours researching the regulations. “I mean, 100 years is a long time to walk away from something and not be able to keep it going for just one year,” Farrell said. Rain and the restrictions kept the crowd small. Afterward he said it would be nice to bring back some of the old attractions, such as the Medicine Wagon Show.

By 2026, Farrell said, turnout had been down for a couple of years. As far as he knew, only the Grant County Fair had run longer in the community. “That’s what we’re trying to do, just keep it going,” he said. The 2026 Saturday program listed the medicine wagon show at 1 p.m., an hour before the hanging.