USA > California > A history of California: the American period > Part 23
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In the more remote interior, where lay the actual mining
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fields, other cities, rivaling Sacramento and Stockton, came into being. Many of these, such as Marysville, Placerville, Auburn, and Grass Valley still survive. But relatively speaking, their glory has long since departed; and the posi- tion of supremacy they once occupied has been preëmpted by the less romantic cities of seacoast and plain. In many cases, too, those thriving communities of the gold rush now live in tradition and memory alone. The following analysis of the election returns of 1852 casts an interesting light upon the distribution of population in the mining day.
San Francisco, as might be supposed, headed the list with eight thousand odd votes. Sacramento City (not just Sacramento, if you please!) came next with five thousand. Nevada boasted seventeen hundred; Stockton fifteen hun- dred; Marysville nearly an equal number; Placerville (née Hangtown) thirteen hundred; Columbia, twelve hundred; So- nora something over a thousand; Downieville, with seven hun- dred and forty-six to its credit, outnumbered San José by a hundred and thirty-one. Shasta City and Santa Clara were almost equal. Mokelumne Hill cast four hundred and fifty- nine votes; while Oakland had only three hundred. Los Angeles straggled far to the rear of Murphy's, whose total was five hundred and nineteen. San Diego came at the tail of the list with a hundred and sixty-seven-two more, and she might have claimed half the voting strength of the flourishing City of Volcano, Mistress of Sutter Creek!
Every camp had its name, perpetuating the memory of some unusual incident, or given in the broad spirit of humor that came with the ox trains across the Sierras, where it found a more congenial soil than it had ever known before. Poker Flat, as was fitting, was not very far from Gomorrah. Hell-out-for-Noon City was offset by Alpha and Omega. Ground Hog Glory was almost as prettily named as Mug- fuzzle Flat or Slumgullion. Port Wine, Brandy, and Delir- ium Tremens perhaps had a certain logical connection. You- Bet and Poverty Flat were bona-fide names, and not the products of Bret Harte's imagination. Hangtown long since elected to be known as Placerville; and the respectable
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citizens of Red Dog, with commendable civic pride, changed its name to Brooklyn, and imposed a fine upon any one who ventured to use the former name.
Mining itself in California was at first of the most primi- tive kind. Pick, shovel, crowbar, tin pan and running water were the only requisites. Soon it was found that gold could be dug out of the crevices in rocks, so a long- bladed knife was added to the list. The cradle, or rocker, also came into use in very early times. This was a wooden box or hollowed log, closed at one end and mounted on rock- ers six or eight feet long, like those of an old fashioned cradle. A second box with perforated sheet iron bottom, making a sort of sieve or hopper, was fitted into the closed end of the cradle, leaving sufficient space beneath for the gravel and water to escape. The "rocking" was done by means of a stout pole fixed about the middle of the machine. This operation left the coarse rocks in the hopper and deposited the finer material on the bed of the cradle. Here and there were a number of cleats, or riffles, which served to catch the gold as it was slowly washed along.
The following account by one of the Forty Niners of the methods employed by himself and his companions, will per- haps give a clearer idea of some of the more home made types of these machines.
"Our machine was the half of a hollow log, resting on two cross logs, a crooked manzanita stick lashed around for a handle and a sloping screen of split sticks at one end. The dirt had to be carried about 100 feet. From a canvas sailor bag, two poles and cross sticks I made a hand barrow. In the forenoon we would dig and carry to the rocker by the river about 10 or 12 barrow loads and in the afternoon wash it out. One would keep the rocker rocking, another lay the gravel on the screen, and a third one of us throw water on the gravel with a tin pan fastened on a forked stick. Our machine was so imperfect we saved no gold finer than bird shot. I am sure we lost one half."
The rocker, which was a great improvement over the pan, about 1850 began in its turn to give place to another machine. This was the Tom, or Long Tom, as it was often
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called. The Tom consisted of a wooden trough, some twenty feet long and eight inches high. Near one end the wooden floor was displaced by a sheet iron riddle, perhaps six feet long, containing holes about the size of a large wal- nut. Beneath this riddle was a second trough, some ten feet long and six inches high, called the riffle box. Earth was shovelled into the head of the Tom and carried by a stream of water to the riddle, where it was kept constantly stirred. This caused all but the coarsest material to pass through to the riffle box beneath. Here the gold, mixed with heavy black sand and gravel, was caught by cleats nailed across the bottom, while the lighter earth was washed away.
A later improvement, which largely displaced both the rocker and the Long Tom, was the sluice. This was merely an open trough, or flume, twelve or fourteen feet long and from a foot to three feet wide. One end was somewhat narrower than the other, so that several sluices might be joined together, making a continuous line, sometimes a hundred feet in length. Each box was supplied with riffles of various patterns, but all easily removable; and as the earth was forced along by a current of water, the gold fell to the bottom and was caught by these riffles. In most cases it was customary to operate the sluices several days at a time before "cleaning up." Then the water was turned off, the riffles taken out, and the gold carefully swept from the sluice boxes into a pan at the lower end.
The first miners also learned that much gold lay hidden in pockets and crevices of the bed rock over which ran mountain streams. Where these streams were small, the miner easily turned them aside and dug out the virgin gold thus exposed with his butcher knife. But where the diver- sion of a large stream was undertaken, the task became one of great labor and uncertain outcome. Dams had to be built, races or flumes constructed to carry the water, and sometimes tunnels driven into which the river could be directed. In seasons of low water these measures were reasonably successful; and the arduous and unproductive labor of the preceeding months would find its reward,
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many times over, when the gold deposited year after year for untold centuries by one of the Sierra streams, was dug out of the cracks and pot holes of a half mile of newly ex- posed river channel.
Even at best, however, the outcome of this type of mining was on the lap of the gods. A dozen men, toiling day after day without a cent of reward from early spring until late in the fall to prepare for the diversion of a stream, might some night see the work completed and a fortune awaiting them the next day, when the river should be turned from its old channel. Before morning, if the fates were unkind (and they often were), a sudden storm would sweep away dams, ditches, and hopes alike, and render the months of toil barren of reward.
Most of the first placer mining in California was done on the bars of sand and gravel in which the mountain streams abounded. Scores of such bars (Bidwell's on the Feather, the Lower Bar of the Mokelumne, Park's Bar above Marys- ville, to mention only a few at random) enjoyed brief noto- riety and proved incredibly rich. It was soon found, how- ever, that the sides of the cañons yielded as good returns as the bars; and afterwards that the very hills themselves, en- tirely apart from the water courses, were full of the precious stuff. Hence there arose a division among the mines in 1849 and 1850 between the "wet diggings," or those of the river beds and bars; and the "dry diggings" of the gulches and flats, where water could be had only in limited quantities, if at all. Among the most famous of the dry diggings were those surrounding Placerville, from which one writer says three hundred men in three months took out a daily average of from three ounces to five pounds a man. Others scarcely less famous were opened up near the sites of Auburn and Georgetown. Dutch Flat, Dry Town, and Mokelumne Hill were only a few of the innumerable camps of similar kind.
In 1852 the discovery of the famous "Blue Lead," a deposit of very rich gravel apparently marking the course of an old river bed, greatly increased the practice of drift mining, which sought to reach the primitive granite under-
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lying such "pre-adamite" rivers, as they were called in that day. Quartz mining, practised for generations in Mexico be- fore the California rush, began to be introduced in the Grass Valley region about 1850, and the old Mexican arrastre, or grinding mill, became a familiar object in other sections shortly afterward. The system did not attain great signifi- cance, however, until 1855.
Hydraulic mining, another great advance over the old placer methods, was practised at least as early as 1852 at American Hill in Nevada County. It soon came to supersede all other forms where conditions favored; but the land so treated was ruined eternally for every other purpose. No idea of the destruction wrought by the hydrau- lic process can be gained, until one sees with his own eyes the boulder strewn desolation left behind.
The yield of the mines after 1848 continued to be phe- nomenal. What the annual total amounted to there is no accurate means of determining. Hittell, probably the most reliable authority, gives the following figures for the amount exported through the San Francisco customshouse, but the table means little or nothing except as a basis for comparison :
1849
$ 4,921,250
1850
$27,676,346
1851
$42,582,695
1852
$46,586,134
1853
$57,331,034
The California State Mining Bureau in 1912 published the following estimated table of production:
1848
$ 245,301
1849
$10,151,360
1850
$41,273,106
1851
$75,938,272
1852
$81,294,700
1853
$67,613,487
After 1853 there was a slow decline in production, but the total yield of the first decade was probably little short of
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half a billion dollars. The incredibly rich strikes which characterized the late months of 1848 were equalled or surpassed in succeeding years. But because of the larger number of gold hunters after the rush of 1849, good fortune from that time on was far from universal.
And in truth, while dazzling success came to a few, and fair returns to many, privation and hard work waited on all. For the life of the Forty Niner, gloss it and paint it as one may, was not particularly pleasant, except to that small number who found delight in its very hardships. Tents, which seldom kept out either rain or cold, and crude log cabins made up the typical miner's abode. Floors were generally of earth; window glass was rare, and not infrequently empty fruit jars were made to serve as a sub- stitute. Furniture was of the simplest kind and commonly the owner's handiwork, boxes and barrels serving as the material upon which he exercised his ingenuity.
Clothing, especially in the early years, was of every description; but the typical miner's garb consisted of flannel shirt, heavy trousers stuffed into thick leather boots, soft flannel hat, and generally a belt containing knife or pistol. Shaving was a lost art. Food was generally abundant and of surprising variety. The staples were sugar, bacon, beans, coffee, ham, mackeral, potatoes, onions, salt and flour. Beef and butter were sometimes on hand; wild game, such as pigeons, quail, fish, venison, and bear meat could easily be obtained by the miner himself, or purchased from professional hunters, many of whom made more at their occupation than the miner did at his. Canned goods and liquors were very plentiful. Bread was baked in the indispensable Dutch oven, which, with coffee pot and frying pan, completed the ordinary kitchen equipment.
Where gold was the chief stock in trade, and men reckoned values in ounces instead of dollars, prices necessarily attained unheard of levels. The old standards of value simply did not apply. A few instances will sufficiently illustrate this point. On the Stanislaus River in 1848, flour sold for a dollar and a half a pound. A like amount of brown sugar
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brought three dollars. Onions were a dollar a pound, and candles fifty cents each. Two barrels of liquor netted the fortunate owner seven thousand dollars in six days time.
A firm on the Middle Yuba in 1851 had the following account against one of the Peggsville miners, whose taste both for liquids and canned sea foods was perhaps more marked than that of most of his contemporaries:
1 can lobsters. $ 3.50
1/2 pound Onions. .75
1 Bottle brandy
3.00
3 Bottles Whisky 9.00
3 drinks.
.75
1 Drink.
.25
1 box sardines.
4.00
9 Do
2.25
10 drinks.
2.50
2 Do.
.50
7 drinks.
1.75
3 Bottles Porter.
6.00
1 Bottle Whisky
3.00
6 Drinks.
1.50
1 pair of Boots.
18.00
7 Do.
1.75
5 Drinks.
1.25
1 Box Sardines.
4.00
2 bottles Whisky
6.00
1 Box Lobsters.
4.00
5 Drinks
1.25
2 Pair Blankets .
28.00
Early travel to the mines was largely on horseback or by river steamer. Every sort of craft was pressed into service on the Sacramento and San Joaquin; and the parts of many small vessels were brought around the Horn on the decks of steamers to be re-assembled at San Francisco. In 1849 the fare between Sacramento and the Bay was $25 or $30. Meals cost $2 each, state rooms were $10, and freight paid $40 or $50 a ton. At such prices one of the Sacramento boats, the Senator, is reported to have cleared $60,000 monthly for her owners. But decrease of traffic and in- creased competition afterwards brought on a rate war, which at one time reduced the cabin fare to a dollar.
Travel in the mountains was at first on foot or by horse- back. Goods were carried by pack train or on the owner's back. But later, with the building of roads instead of trails, the stage coach (so inseparably connected in the public mind with the mining days) and the heavy freighter came into use. Hotels, so-called, existed in every mining commu- nity of any size. They lacked, naturally, in refinement,
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but made up for this deficiency in rates. Hinton R. Helper, better known as the author of the Impending Crisis, who spent "a weary and unprofitable sojourn of three years in various parts of California" during the gold excitement, thus describes the public house of Sonora :-
" The best hotel in the place is a one-story structure, built of unhewn saplings, covered with canvas and floored with dirt. It consists of one undivided room, in which the tables, berths and benches are all arranged. Here we sleep, eat, and drink. Four or five tiers of berths or bunks, one directly above another are built against the walls of the cabin by means of upright posts and cross pieces, fastened with thongs of rawhide. The bedding is com- posed of a small straw mattress about two feet wide, an uncased pillow stuffed with the same material and a single blanket. When we creep into one of these nests it is optional with us whether we unboot or uncoat ourselves; but it would be looked upon as an act of ill-breeding to go to bed with one's hat on."
Even at such hotels, however, the meals were generally bountiful and the fare varied, furnishing a welcome change, from their "own home cooking," to the miners of the sur- rounding country when they came into town to celebrate or purchase supplies.
Gold mining, even in '49, was full of the monotony of hard work, and those engaged in it naturally sought what- ever diversion they could find. The field of amusement, however, was rather limited, though much of it made up in intensity what it lacked in variety. The most common and prosaic relaxation was the hour of talk and story telling after supper, with pipes lit and camp fire throwing a bit of enchantment over the little circle of tired men. Where there was music, the songs most frequently sung were those old favorites of pre-Civil War days-"Ben Bolt," "High- land Mary," "The Last Rose of Summer," "Life on the Ocean Wave," or even "Coronation," and "Old Hundred." Other songs of a more temporary character also had wide popularity. One of these, "Joe Bowers from Pike," was universally sung from Shasta to the Stanislaus. It had an
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interminable number of verses, four of which will probably be sufficient to illustrate the general character of the master- piece:
My name it is Joe Bowers, I have a brother Ike: I came from ol' Missouri- Came all th' way from Pike. I'll tell you why I left thar, An' why I come to roam; An' leave my poor ol' Mammy, So far away from home.
I uster court a gal thar, Her name was Sally Black; I ast her if she'd marry me, She said it was a "whack." Says she to me, "Joe Bowers Before we hitch fer life,
You oughter have a little home,
To keep your little wife!"
"Oh, Sally, dearest Sally! Oh, Sally fer your sake, I'll go to Californy, An' try to raise a stake."
Says she to me, "Joe Bowers,
You are the man to win;
Here's a kiss to bind the bargain"- And she threw a dozen in.
At length I went to minin', Put in my biggest licks; Went down upon the boulders, Jes' like a thousand bricks. I worked both late and early, In rain, in sun, in snow; I was workin' fer my Sally, 'T was all the same to Joe!
The last verse recorded how poor Joe received word of Sally's fickleness. She had jilted him for a red-headed butcher and become the mother of a red-headed baby.1 1 Copied from McWilliams, John, Recollections, 96-97.
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Extemporaneous compositions, that had rich local flavor, were also produced in moments of deep inspiration. This chorus, for example, was an especial favorite with the miners of Selby Flat. To be properly appreciated it should be heard, shouted over and over again as a midnight serenade by a hundred lusty miners, each one beating his own ac- companiment on a tin wash pan with a stick. It ran thus:
"On Selby Flat we live in style
Will stay right here till we make our pile. We're sure to do it after a while, Then good-bye to Californy."
The more exciting diversions were drinking, gambling, and dancing. So much has been written of the part these played in the life of a mining community that little addi- tional can be said. Of course the picture has been over- drawn, for not every miner lost his pile at poker and faro, or drank himself into a drunken stupor every night. Many a Forty Niner, indeed, was as strict an abstainer as the straight- est sect of the Prohibitionists could desire; and also kept himself free from the vice of gambling, except as his pro- fession itself was one great game of chance.
Yet the common notion, so thoroughly standardized in modern motion picture scenes, that every mining town was merely a collection of saloons and gambling houses, adjoined by more saloons and gambling houses, has behind it an element of truth. The moderate use of liquor was looked upon in 1850, even by the sedate society of "the States," in much the same light that coffee drinking is regarded in our own generation. A population of young men, from which the accepted restraints of public opinion were largely absent, working long hours at the hardest kind of physical labor, craving excitement to break the monotony and loneliness and despair which many of them experienced; or else seek- ing an outlet for excess of animal spirits, would scarcely set for themselves more rigid standards in the new environ- ment than they were accustomed to in the old. And so the miners of California drank almost as unthinkingly as they
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ate or slept. But among the better element, constituting probably ninety per cent of the population, actual drunken- ness found little place, except perhaps on those rare occasions when the "mob" spirit, or some kindred influence, swept whole communities into one grand spree.
In nearly all the mines, Sunday morning was observed as wash day, or perhaps given over to baking the week's supply of bread; while Sunday afternoon was spent at such amuse- ments as the town afforded. Gambling was the universal pastime. The miner had his choice of roulette, monte, faro, poker, twenty-one, all fours, lansquenet, and as many other games of chance as were known to the world of that day.
Whatever the miner's selection, however, the professional gambler, with all the tricks of his trade, was pretty sure to take from him in the long run the gold he had managed to accumulate. Even where the professional element was absent, gambling between the miners themselves for sur- prisingly large stakes was often indulged in. One of the most interesting diaries of the time yet published has this description of a poker game at Coyoteville, on the South Fork of the Yuba: 2
"There were four partners in one of the richest claims on the hill and they got to gambling together. They started in playing five dollars ante and passing the buck. Then they raised it to twenty-five dollars ante each, and Jack Breedlove, one of the partners, cleaned out the rest of them, winning twenty-two thous- and dollars. Not satisfied with this they staked their interests in the claim, valuing a fourth at ten thousand dollars, and, when the game quit, Zeke Roubier, another of the partners, won back eight thousand dollars and held to his fourth interest. The other two went broke and Breedlove ended by owning three fourths of the claim and winning fourteen thousand dollars, so that altogether he was thirty-four thousand dollars ahead. He offered his old partners work in the mine at an ounce a day, which they refused, packed their blankets and started out in search of new diggings."
The establishment of a government and the preservation of a fair degree of law and order were naturally among the 2 Canfield, Chauncey L., ed., Diary of a forty-niner, Boston, 1920.
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most serious problems faced by the mining communities. Neither federal nor state officials were strong enough to meet the situation; and indeed for several years the regu- larly constituted authorities made no attempt to deal with it. Each mining camp, accordingly, almost literally did that which seemed right in its own eyes, without let or hindrance from the outside. Under such conditions, political institutions were necessarily very simple, and government was designed to meet only the most fundamental needs of the society which gave it origin. These needs were chiefly the protection of life and property, and the creation of some clear-cut, non-technical rules by which the business of mining might be carried on.
Such regulations, though lacking the sanction of formal law, had behind them the stronger authority of custom and public opinion. Violations were generally punished with startling directness and vigor, but only after conviction according to established rules. In all of this there was no great miracle of political evolution. It was due entirely to a certain Anglo-Saxon aptitude for self-government, mixed with a large amount of common sense.
Nearly all authorities agree that the mining communities were remarkably free from crime during the summer and fall of 1848. But the migration of the next year wrought a decided change. Deserters, desperadoes, professional gam- blers, undesirables from the States, men who deliberately shed their moral standards as they left civilization behind, criminals and outlaws from Mexico and other Hispanic American countries, the riff-raff of Europe and Asia-all these helped to make up the later mining population; and in the chaotic social conditions around them, found free play for all their vicious tendencies.
Drunkenness and gambling were responsible for much of the crime committed. Moreover, the very abundance of gold and the universal practice of carrying it on one's person, or leaving it in scarcely concealed hiding places, tempted to theft. Many men, not naturally law breakers, were driven to desperation by misfortune or hardship.
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Others, though not necessarily professional criminals, be- longed to a discontented, restless class, which moved con- tinually from camp to camp looking for a fortune without work, and naturally drifted into crime.
Society was reckless, drunkenness common, and every- one went armed with knife or pistol. Murder was therefore the commonest of crimes, and wherever self-defense could be pleaded was seldom punished. Theft was practiced in various forms, especially in the rifling of sluice boxes or the robbing of tents. Claim jumping was frequently attempted, usually with disastrous results to one or the other party. Disputes over water rights sometimes led to pitched battles and numerous deaths.
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