A history of California and an extended history of its southern coast counties, also containing biographies of well-known citizens of the past and present, Volume I, Part 28

Author: Guinn, James Miller, 1834-1918
Publication date: 1907
Publisher: Los Angeles, Cal., Historic record company
Number of Pages: 1184

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March, 1852, inundated the city and the law- makers were forced to reach the halls of legis-

In the legislature of 1854 the capital question again became an issue. Offers were made by several aspiring cities, but Sacramento won with the proffer of her court house and a block of land betwen I and J, Ninth and Tenth streets. Then the question of the location of the capital got into the courts. The supreme court de- cided in favor of Sacramento. Before the legis- lature met again the court house that had been offered to the state burned down. A new and more commodious one was erected and rented to the state at $12,000 a year. Oakland made an unsuccessful effort to obtain the capital. Finally a bill was passed authorizing the erection of a capitol building in Sacramento at a cost not to exceed $500,000. Work was begun on the foundation in October, 1860. The great flood of 1861-62 inundated the city and ruined the foundations of the capitol. San Francisco inade a vigorous effort to get the capital re- moved to that city, but was unsuccessful. Work was resumed on the building, the plans were changed, the edifice enlarged, and, finally, after many delays, it was ready for occupancy in De- cember, 1869. From the original limit of half a million dollars its cost when completed had reached a million and a half. The amount ex- pended on the building and grounds to date foots up $2,600,000.

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CHAPTER XXV.

THE ARGONAUTS.

W HEN or by whom the name argonaut was first applied to the early Cali- fornia gold seekers I have not been able to ascertain. The earliest allusion to the similarity of Jason's voyage after the Golden Fleece and the miners' rush to the gold fields of California is found in a caricature published in the London Punch in 1849. On the shore of an island is a guide board bearing the inscrip- tion "California;" near it is a miner digging gold and presumably singing at his work. In a boat near the shore is a fat individual, a typical "Johnny Bull." He is struggling desperately with two individuals who are holding him back from leaping into the water, so fascinated is he by the song of the miner. Under the drawing are the words, "The Song of the Sirens."

If we include among the argonauts all who traveled by land or voyaged by sea in search of the golden fleece in the days of '49 we will have a motley mixture. The tales of the fabulous rich- ness of the gold fields of California spread rap- idly throughout the civilized world and drew to the territory all classes and conditions of men, the bad as well as the good, the indolent as well as the industrious, the vicious as well as the virtuous. They came from Europe, from South America and from Mexico. From Australia and Tasmania came the ex-convict and the ticket-of-leave man; from the isles of the sea came the Polynesian, and from Asia the Hindoo and the "Heathen Chinee."

The means of reaching the land of gold were as varied as the character of the people who came. Almost every form of vehicle was pressed into service on land. One individual, if not more, made the trip trundling his impedimenta in a wheelbarrow. Others started out in carriages, intent on making the journey in comfort and ease, but finished on foot, weary, worn and ragged. When the great rush came, old sailing vessels that had long been deemed unseaworthy

were fitted out for the voyage to California. It must have been the providence that protects fools which prevented these from going to the . bottom of the ocean. With the desperate chances that the argonauts took on these old tubs, it is singular that there were so few ship- wrecks and so little loss of life. Some of these were such slow sailers that it took them the greater part of a year to round Cape Horn and reach their destination. On one of these some passengers, exasperated at its slowness, landed near Cape St. Lucas and made the long journey up the peninsula of Lower California and on to San Francisco on foot, arriving there a month before their vessel. Another party undertook to make the voyage from Nicaragua in a whale boat and actually did accomplish seven hundred miles of it before they were picked up in the last extremities by a sailing vessel.

The Sierra Nevada region, in which gold was first found, comprised a strip about thirty miles wide and two hundred miles long from north to south in the basins of the Feather, Yuba, Bear, American, Cosumne, Mokolumne, Stanis- laus, Tuolumne and Merced rivers, between the elevations of one thousand and five thousand feet. In all these streams miners washed gold in 1848. The placer mines on the Upper Sacra- mento and in the Shasta region were discovered and worked late in the fall of 1848. The Kla- math mines were discovered later.

The southern mines, those on the San Joaquin, Fresno, Kern and San Gabriel rivers, were lo- cated between 1851 and 1855. Gold was found in some of the ravines and creeks of San Diego county. Practically the gold belt of California extends from the Mexican line to Oregon, but at some points it is rather thin. The first gold digging was done with butcher knives, the gold hunter scratching in the sand and crevices of the rock to find nuggets. Next the gold pan came into use and the miners became experts

HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL RECORD.

in twirling the pan in a pool of water, so as to wash out the sand and gravel and leave the gold dust in the pan. Isaac Humphreys, who had mined gold in Georgia, was the first person to use a rocker or gold cradle in California. Al- though a very simple piece of machinery those who reached the mines early found it quite an expensive one. Dr. Brooks in his diary, under date of June II, 1848, writes: "On Tuesday we set to work upon our cradle. We resolved upor the construction of two and for this purpose went down to the store in a body to see about the boards. We found timber extravagantly dear, being asked $40 a hundred feet. The next question was as to whether we should hire a carpenter. We were told there was one or two in the diggings, who might be hired, though at a very extravagant rate. Accordingly Brad- ley and I proceeded to see one of these gentle- men, and found him washing away with a hollow log and a willow branch sieve. He offered to help us at the rate of $35 a day, we finding pro- visions and tools, and could not be brought to charge less. We thought this by far too ex- travagant and left him, determined to undertake the work ourselves. After two days' work of seven men they produced two rough cradles and found that three men with a cradle or rocker could wash out as much gold in a day as six could with pans in the same time."

A rocker or gold cradle had some resemblance to a child's cradle with similar rockers and was rocked by means of a perpendicular handle fastened to the cradle box. The cradle box con- sisted of a wooden trough about twenty inches wide and forty inches long with sides four or five inches high. The lower end was left open. On the upper end sat the hopper, a box twenty inches square with sides four inches high and a bottom of sheet iron or zinc pierced with holes one-half inch in diameter. Where zinc or iron could not be obtained a sieve of willow rods was used. Under the hopper was an apron of canvas, which sloped down from the lower end of the hopper to the itpper end of the cradle box. A wooden riffle bar an inch square was nailed across the bottom of the cradle box about its middle, and another at its lower end. Under the cradle box were nailed rockers, and near

the middle an upright handle by which motion was imparted. If water and pay dirt were con- venient two men were sufficient to operate the machine. Seated on a stool or rock the operator rocked with one hand, while with a long handled dipper he dipped water from a pool and poured it on the sand and gravel in the hopper. When the sand and earth had been washed through the holes in the sieve the rocks were emptied and the hopper filled again from the buckets of pay dirt supplied by the other partner. The gold was caught on the canvas apron by the riffle bars, while the thin mud and sand were washed out of the machine by the water.

In the dry diggings a method of separating the gold from the earth was resorted to prin- cipally by Sonorans. The pay dirt was dug and dried in the sun, then pulverized by pounding into fine dust. With a batea or bowl-shaped Indian basket filled with this dust, held in both hands, the Mexican skillfully tossed the earth in the air, allowing the wind to blow away the dust and catching the heavier particles and the gold in the basket, repeating the process until there was little left but the gold.

The Long Tom was a single sluice with a sieve and a box underneath at the end and rif- fle bars to stop the gold. The pay dirt was shov- eled in at the upper end and a rapid current of water washed away the sand and earth, the gold falling into the receptacle below. Ground sluic- ing was resorted to where a current of water from a ditch could be directed against a bank of earth or hill with a sloping bedrock. The streani of water washing against the upper side of the bank caved it down and carried the loose earth through a string of sluices, depositing the gold in the riffle bars in the bottom of the sluices.

In the creeks and gulches where there was not much fall, sluice mining was commonly re- sorted to. A string of sluice boxes was laid, each fitting into the upper end of the one below, and in the lower ones riffle bars were placed to stop the gold. The sluice boxes were placed on trestles four feet from the ground and given an incline of five or six inches to the rod. The gravel from the bedrock up as far as there was any pay dirt was shoveled into the upper boxes and a rapid current of water flowing through the

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boxes carried away the gravel and rocks, the gold remaining in the riffles. Quicksilver was placed between the riffles to catch the fine gold. The gold amalgamated with quicksilver was cleaned out of the boxes at the end of the day's work and separated from the quicksilver in a re- tort. These were the principal methods of mining used by the argonauts. The machinery and ap- pliances were simple and inexpensive. Hy- draulic mining came in later, when larger cap- ital was required and the mines had fallen into the hands of corporations.

When the news spread throughout the states of the wonderful "finds" of gold in California, the crudest ideas prevailed in regard to how the precious metal was to be extracted from the earth. Gold mining was an almost un- known industry in the United States. Only in a few obscure districts of North Caro- lina and Georgia had gold been found, and but very few people outside of these dis- tricts had ever visited the mines. Not one in ten thousand of those who joined the rush to California in 1849 had ever seen a grain of virgin gold. The idea prevailed among the gold seekers that the gold being found in grains it could be winnowed from the sand and earth in which it was found like wheat is separated from chaff. Imbued with this idea Yankee ingenuity set to work to invent labor-saving machines that would accomplish the work quickly and enrich the miner proportionally. The ships that bore the argonauts from their native land car- ried out a variety of these gold machines, all guaranteed to wrest from the most secret re- cesses the auriferous deposits in nature's treasure vaults. These machines were of all varieties and patterns. They were made of cop- per, iron, zinc and brass. Some were operated by means of a crank, others had two cranks, while others were worked with a treadle. Some required that the operator should stand, others allowed the miner to sit in an arm chair and work in comfort.

Haskins, in his "Argonauts of California," describes one of these machines that was brought around the Horn in the ship he came on: "It was in the shape of a huge fanning mill, with sieves properly arranged for sorting

the gold ready for bottling. All chunks too large for the bottle would be consigned to the pork barrel." (The question of bringing home the gold in bottles or barrels had been seriously discussed and decided in favor of barrels be- cause these could be rolled and thus save cost of transportation from the mines.)

"This immense machine which, during our passage, excited the envy and jealousy of all who had not the means and opportunity of se- curing a similar one required, of course, the services of a hired man to turn the crank, whilst the proprietor would be busily engaged in shov- eling in pay dirt and pumping water; the greater portion of the time, however, being required, as was firmly believed, in corking the bottles and fitting the heads in the barrels. This ma- chine was owned by a Mr. Allen of Cambridge, Mass., who had brought with him a colored servant to manage and control the crank por- tion of the invaluable institution.

"Upon landing we found lying on the sand and half buried in the mud hundreds of similar machines, bearing silent witness at once to the value of our gold saving machines without the necessity of a trial."

Nor was it the argonaut alone who came by sea that brought these machines. Some of these wonderful inventions were hauled across the plains in wagons, their owners often sacri- ficing the necessities of life to save the prized machine. And, when, after infinite toil and trou- ble, they had landed their prize in the mines, they were chagrined to find it the subject of jest and ridicule by those who had some experience in mining.

The gold rush came early in the history of California placer mining. The story of a rich strike would often depopulate a mining camp in a few hours. Even a bare rumor of rich dig- gings in some indefinite locality would send scores of miners tramping off on a wild goose chase into the mountains. Some of these rushes originated through fake stories circu- lated for sinister purpose; others were caused by exaggerated stories of real discoveries.

One of the most famous fakes of early days was the Gold Lake rush of 1850. This wonder- ful lake was supposed to be located about two

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hundred miles northeast of Marysville, on the divide between the Feather and the Yuba rivers. The Sacramento Transcript of June 19, 1850, says: "We are informed by a gentleman from Marysville that it is currently reported there that the Indians upon this lake use gold for their commonest purposes; that they have a ready way of knocking out square blocks, which they use for seats and couches upon which to place their beds, which are simply bundles of wild oats, which grow so profusely in all sections of the state. According to report also they use for fishhooks crooked pieces of gold and kill their game with arrows made of the same material. They are reported to be thunderstruck at the movements of the whites and their eagerness to collect and hoard the materials of the very ground upon which they tread.

"A story is current that a man at Gold Lake saw a large piece of gold floating on the lake which he succeeded in getting ashore. So clear are the waters that another man saw a rock of gold on the bottom. After many ef- forts he succeeded in lassoing the rock. Three clays afterward he was seen standing holding on to his rope."

The Placer Times of Marysville reports that the specimens brought into Marysville are of a value from $1,500 down. Ten ounces is re- ported as no unusual yield to the pan. The first party of sixty which started out under guidance of one who had returned successful- were assured that they would not get less than $500 each per day. We were told that two hun- dred had left town with a full supply of pro- visions and four hundred mules. Mules and horses have doubled in value. Many places of business are closed. The diggings at the lake are probably the best ever discovered." The Times of June 19 says: "It is reported that up to last Thursday two thousand persons had taken up their journey. Many who were work- ing good claims deserted them for the new dis- covery. Mules and horses were about impos- sible to obtain. Although the truth of the re- port rests on the authority of but two or three who have returned from Gold Lake, yet few are found who doubt the marvelous revelations. A party of Kanakas are said to have wintered

at Gold Lake, subsisting chiefly on the flesh ef their animals. They are said to have taken out $75,000 the first week. When a conviction takes such complete possession of a whole com- munity, who are fully conversant with all the exaggerations that have had their day, it is scarcely prudent to utter even a qualified dissent from what is universally believed."

The denouement of the Gold Lake romance may be found in the Transcript of July 1, 1850. "The Gold Lake excitement, so much talked of and acted upon of late, has almost subsided. A crazy man comes in for a share of the re- sponsibility. Another report is that they have found one of the pretended discoverers at Marysville and are about to lynch him. In- deed, we are told that a demonstration against the town is feared by many. People who have returned after traveling some one hundred and fifty to two hundred miles say that they left vast numbers of people roaming between the sources of the Yuba and the Feather rivers."

Scarcely had the deluded argonauts returned from a bootless search for the lake of gold when another rumored discovery of gold fields of fabulous richness sent them rushing off toward the sea coast. Now it was Gold Bluff that lured them away. On the northwest coast of Califor- nia, near the mouth of the Klamath river, precipitous bluffs four hundred feet high mark the coast line of the ocean. A party of pros- pectors in the fall of 1850, who had been up in the Del Norte country, were making their way down to the little trading and trapping sta- tion of Trinidad to procure provisions. On reaching the bluffs, thirty miles above Trinidad, they were astonished to find stretching out be- fore them a beach glittering with golden sands. They could not stop to gather gold; they were starving. So, scraping up a few handfuls of the glittering sands, they hastened on. In due time they reached San Francisco, where they exhibited their sand, which proved to be nearly half gold. The report of the wonderful find was spread by the newspapers and the excitement began. Companies were formed and claims lo- cated at long range. One company of ninc locators sent an expert to examine their claims. He, by a careful mathematical calculation, as-

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certained that the claim would yield forty-three million dollars to each partner. As there were fifteen miles of gold beach, the amount of gold in the sands was sufficient to demonetize the precious metal. A laudable desire to benefit the human race possessed some of the claim owners. They formed joint stock companies with shares at $100 each. Gold Bluff mining stock went off like the proverbial hot cakes and pros- pectors went off as rapidly. Within two days after the expert's wonderful story was spread abroad nine ships were fitted out for Gold Bluff. The first to arrive off the Bluff was the vessel containing a party of the original discoverers. In attempting to land in a boat, the boat was upset in the breakers and five of the six occu- pants were drowned, Bertram, the leader of the party making the discovery, alone escaping. The vessel put back to Trinidad and the gold bunters made their way up the coast to the Bluff. But alas for their golden dreams! Where they had hoped to gather gold by the ship load no gold was found. Old ocean had gathered it back into his treasure vaults.

The bubble burst as suddenly as it had ex- panded. And yet there was gold at Gold Bluff and there is gold there yet. If the ocean could be drained or coffer dammed for two hundred miles along the gold coast of northern Califor- nia and Oregon, all the wealth of Alaska would be but the panning out of a prospect hole com- pared to the richness that lies hidden in the sands of Gold Beach. For years after the bursting of the Gold Bluff bubble, when the tide was low, the sands along Gold Beach were mined with profit.

The Kern river excitement in the spring of 1855 surpassed everything that had preceded it. Seven years of mining had skimmed the rich- ness of the placers. The northern and central gold fields of California had been thoroughly prospected. The miners who had been accus- tomed to the rich strikes of early years could not content themselves with moderate returns. They were on the qui vive for a rich strike and ready for a rush upon the first report of one. The first discoveries on the Kern river were made in the summer of 1854, but no excitement followed immediately. During the fall and win-

ter rumors were set afloat of rich strikes on the head waters of that stream. The stories grew as they traveled. One that had a wide circula- tion and was readily accepted ran about as fol- lows: "A Mexican doctor had appeared in Mari- posa loaded down with gold nuggets. He re- ported that he and four companions had found a region paved with gold. The very hills were yellow with outcroppings. While gloating over their wealth and loading it into sacks the In- dians attacked them and killed his four com- panions. He escaped with one sack of gold. He proposed to organize a company large enough to exterminate the Indians and then bring out the gold on pack mules." This as well as other stories as improbable were spread broadcast throughout the state. Many of the reports of wonderful strikes were purposely magnified by merchants and dealers in mining supplies who were overstocked with unsalable goods; and by transportation companies with whom busi- ness was slack. Their purpose was accom- plished and the rush was on. It began in Jan- uary, 1855. Every steamer down the coast to Los Angeles was loaded to the guards with adventurers for the mines. The sleepy old metropolis of the cow counties waked up to find itself suddenly transformed into a bustling mining camp. The Southern Californian of Feb- ruary 8, 1855. thus describes the situation: "The road from our valley is literally thronged with people on their way to the mines. Hundreds of people have been leaving not only the city, but every portion of the county. Every descrip- tion of vehicle and animal has been brought into requisition to take the exultant seekers after wealth to the goal of their hopes. Im- mense ten-mule wagons strung out one after another; long trains of pack mules and men mounted and on foot, with picks and shovels; boarding-house keepers with their tents; mer- chants with their stocks of miners' necessaries and gamblers with their 'papers' are constantly leaving for the Kern river mines. The wildest stories are afloat. If the mines turn out $10 a day to the man everybody ought to be satis- fied. The opening of these mines has been a Godsend to all of us, as the business of the en- tire country was on the point of taking to a

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tree. The great scarcity of money is seen in the present exorbitant rates of interest which it commands; 8, 10 and even 15 per cent a month is freely paid and the supply even at these rates is too meager to meet the demands." As the rush increased our editor grows more jubilant. In his issue of March 7, he throws out these headlines: "Stop the Press! Glorious News from Kern River! Bring Out the Big Gun! There are a thousand gulches rich with gold and room for ten thousand miners. Miners averaged $50 a day. One man with his own lands took out $160 in a day. Five men in ten days took out $4.500."

Another stream of miners and adventurers was pouring into the mines by way of the San Joaquin valley. From Stockton to the Kern river, a distance of three hundred miles, the road was crowded with men on foot, on stages, on horseback and on every form of convey- ance that would take them to the new El Do- rado. In four months five or six thousand men had found their way into the Kern river basin. There was gold there, but not enough to go around. A few struck it rich, the many struck nothing but "hard luck" and the rush out began. Those who had ridden into the valley footed it out, and those who had footed it in on sole leather footed it out on their natural soles.

After the wild frenzy of Kern river, the press of the state congratulated the public with the assurance that the era of wild rushes was past- "what had been lost in money had been gained in experience." As if prospectors ever profited by experience! Scarcely had the victims of Kern river resumed work in the old creeks and cañons they had deserted to join in the rush when a rumor came, faint at first. but gathering strength at each repetition, that rich diggings had been struck in the far north. This time it is Frazer river. True, Frazer river is in the British possessions, but what of that? There are enough miners in California to seize the country and hold it until the cream of the mines has been skimmed. Rumors of the richness of mines increased with every arrival of a steamer from the north. Captains, pursers, mates, cooks and waiters all confirmed the sto- ries of rich strikes. Doubters asserted that the

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A history of California and an extended history of its southern coast counties, also containing biographies of well-known citizens of the past and present, Volume I, Part 28

Author: Guinn, James Miller, 1834-1918 Publication date: 1907 Publisher: Los Angeles, Cal., Historic record company Number of Pages: 1184

Author: Guinn, James Miller, 1834-1918
Publication date: 1907
Publisher: Los Angeles, Cal., Historic record company
Number of Pages: 1184