History of Kern County, California, with biographical sketches of the leading men and women of the county who have been identified with its growth and development from the early days to the present, Part 5

Author: Morgan, Wallace Melvin, 1868- [from old catalog]
Publication date: 1914
Publisher: Los Angeles, Cal., Historic record company
Number of Pages: 1682

USA > California > Kern County > History of Kern County, California, with biographical sketches of the leading men and women of the county who have been identified with its growth and development from the early days to the present > Part 5

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CHAPTER III Gold Mining From 1851 to 1875

Authentic records of mining in what is now Kern county date back to 1851. In the early '60s a shaft opened in the Tehachapi valley showed evidences that the ground had been worked over many years before, and in 1870 J. C. Crocker, then a cattleman with headquarters at Temblor, reported to the Kern County Courier the finding of a tunnel driven in solid rock in the Coast range west of Bakersfield which was proven by a tree growing in its mouth to have been dug long before the country came into the posses- sion of the Americans. Nothing remained in either case, however, to show by whose hands the work had been done, except that in the case of the tunnel, marks of a pick or other steel instrument seemed to furnish conclusive evidence that it was driven by civilized men.

In 1851 occurred the first rush to the Kern river placers. Indians car- ried vague reports of golden sands to the placer miners in the mountains farther north, and the surging tide of fortune seekers that swept over all the state in the days of '49 sent a little stream of prospectors to search out the new field. They found little, however, and little record was left of their adventures. The statement is made by early chroniclers, also, that some quartz mining was going on in 1852 at what was later Keysville.

But the real history of mining in Kern county dates from 1853, when a lump of gold, said to have weighed forty-two ounces, was dug out of the sands in one of the gulches between Keysville and Kernville. Word of the find spread rapidly through the camps of Mariposa and throughout the state, and Kern river took a foremost place among the numerous El Dorados that attracted the feverish crowds of gold seekers. Running out from the main bodies of ore farther back in the hills were little stringer veins from which the free gold washed down with the sands into French gulch, Rich gulch and all the other gulches and cañons leading into Kern river between Keysville and Kernville. Into these gulches the stream of prospectors poured. The placers were easy to work, and there was plenty of water. Very soon Kern river was one of the best known camps in the state, although but a little while before it was wholly unknown save to the few trappers, explorers and stockmen who had wandered through Walker's Pass and over Greenhorn mountain.

In 1854 Richard Keys discovered the Keys mine, and the working of the quartz ledges began. The road to Kern river, so far as there was a road, lay through Visalia, and during the year no less than 600 miners passed the Tulare county capital on the way to Kern river. In this year

HISTORY OF KERN COUNTY

A. T. Lightner, Sr., came to Keysville from San Jose, and his son, A. T. Lightner, Jr., gives a graphic account of the latter part of the journey, after all semblance of a wagon road had been left behind. Such wagons as were brought into the new district followed the gulches or the backbones of the ridges, the teamsters clearing the way with axes when necessary, some- times using as many as fourteen horses to haul one wagon up an especially steep place, and trailing felled trees behind the wagons to assist the brakes in going down hill.

For the most part, however, the first miners brought their outfits and supplies by pack animals. Even the first quartz mill machinery was packed in, and nowhere in the mountains did the fine art of balancing heavy and bulky loads on mule and burro back reach a higher degree of perfection. When Lightner hauled, or rather lowered, his first wagon down the mountain side into Keysville, the route he had by chance selected took him directly over the Keys mine.

The First Quartz Mill

Lightner brought the first quartz mill to Keysville in 1856, hauling it from San Francisco, via San Jose and Visalia, by wagon. He set it-up by the banks of Kern river a short distance below Keysville, where the gulch that ran through the camp met the stream, and built a flume to carry water to his wheel. Meantime he had engaged in mining, and was the owner of the Garnishee mine, later known as the Mammoth, which, with the Keys mine, yielded the best and largest part of the gold produced from quartz in the district. The Lightner mill crushed rock for the Keys mine, also, and Light- ner, the younger, although he was a small boy at the time, says he clearly remembers the old tin bucket in which Richard Keys used to carry his round balls of bullion back from the mill.

The vein of ore tapped by the Keys and Mammoth was traced for over two miles, and many lesser mines were opened into it. A legend noted by Stephen Barton, one of the later pioneers of the upper Kern river country, says that Richard Keys went back to his old home in 1861 with the laudable intention of making all his relatives rich, and when he came back he found his mine caved in and full of water-hopelessly out of commission. Years later Stavert Brothers ran a drainage tunnel at a level of 350 feet below the old Keys tunnel, and the rehabilitated mine yielded some $65,000 in gold.

Stephen Barton describes an old Chilean quartz mill he saw in the Keysville district as consisting of "two large wheels hewn from solid granite, seven or eight feet in diameter and a foot and a half thick, each weighing three or four tons," and both in good repair as late as 1888. The worn-out stamps which had carried wooden stems, and the cast-iron slabs that had lined a wooden battery box, continues Mr. Barton, were modelled after those used by Lord Sterling (General Alexander), north of Morristown in the reduction of iron ore in preparing solid shot for Washington's army.

For years the washing of the sands in the placers went on side by side with the quartz mining. At first the more fortunate of the placer miners made as high as $16 to $60 per day and more, but a larger number had to be content with $5 to $8, and many others panned out much less than this. Finally, when the white men had gleaned the gulches of their richest treasure, the Chinamen came, and these little men, content with small wages. shovelled and washed the sands over and over till they were clean and white to the

HISTORY OF KERN COUNTY

bedrock. For the Chinamen, the aftermath of the Kern river placers con- tained fabulous wealth.

The Town of Keysville

The placers began to lose their charm for the white miners about 1857, and at that time the quartz mines of Keysville probably were at their height. Between the discovery in 1854 and 1857 or '58 the town of Keysville had no apologies to offer to any mining camp in all the length of the Sierra Nevada mines. The town lay in a little cove where the southern slope of Greenhorn mountain melts into a flat at the edge of a short, rocky gulch. There were no streets. Marsh & Kennedy's store, the blacksmith shop and the office of Gen. J. W. Freeman, then justice of the peace and later district attorney of Kern county, stood near the center of the little semicircular flat. A little way up the slope of the hill to the west of the flat were the residences, grouped informally, as houses may well be where all travel is by foot or horseback.

The size of the townsite is well illustrated by a story told by Mr. Lightner. General Freeman slept in his office, which, as stated, was near the center of the flat, or "business section," and took his meals with the Lightners, who lived in the semi-circle of residences on the hillside. That was before the days of the handy alarm clock, and it was one of the early morning duties of Mr. Lightner's older brother to step out in the front yard and heave a small rock down on the roof of the courthouse to waken the slumbering justice to his breakfast.

But if Keysville was small in the amount of space it covered its gamblers could pile as many gold pieces on the table as those of many larger places, and no man's costume was complete without two Colt's revolvers and a bowie knife strapped about him. After four or five years when the town grew older and more conservative, the knife and guns were worn more as an ornament than otherwise, but up to the time of the Civil war no well dressed man, after he had shaved and put on his clean shirt on Sunday morning, forgot to buckle the big, and fully loaded, fire arms about his waist.

William Weldon and J. V. Roberts, among the first settlers in Walker's basin, supplied the Keysville miners with beef, but the bulk of the other supplies were brought in from Los Angeles by pack animals. This lasted up to 1857 or '58. when the pack trains began to be succeeded by ox-team freighters. In the days of the pack train its arrival in camp or the sight of it winding over the hills in the distance was the signal for universal rejoicing, for it nearly always happened that the stocks of provisions were getting low before the new supplies arrived.

The Keysville Fort

Rumor of an impending attack from the Indians caused the Keysville miners in 1855 or 1856 to erect the fort which still stands on the point of a ridge running out to the gulch just below the town. The point of this ridge is higher than the backbone that joins it to Greenhorn mountain, so that a garrison occupying it could look down upon an enemy approaching from any quarter. The fort, which was built of brush gathered from the chaparral and covered with dirt from the hollowed-out center, was shoulder high and large enough to accommodate 200 persons. As the Indians of those days were armed only with arrows the fort was considered almost as impregnable as Gibraltar, and its location on the gulch leading from the river to the camp

HISTORY OF KERN COUNTY

was almost as good from a strategic standpoint. W. R. Bower, afterward sheriff of the county, and Frank Warren were among the leaders in the building of the fort, but it proved that their labors were but an excess of caution, for the Indian war of 1856, exciting enough in Tulare county and farther north, never reached so far back in the mountains as Keysville. Some sixty of the Keysville miners were summoned by John W. Williams of Visalia and William Lynn of Linn's valley to assist the settlers along White and Tule river in the Tule river war. This war, or so much of it as has anything to do with Kern county, is dealt with in connection with the gath- ering up of the Indian tribes from the valley and foothills and their concen- tration at the Tejon and other reservations.

Meantime the early gold seekers began to search the other hills and ranges both above and below Keysville. General Freeman and others mined on Greenhorn mountain in 1855 or a little later. In 1856 Major Erskine had a stamp mill on what is now the Palmer ranch in the lower end of the Hot Springs valley, and was crushing ore for many miners thereabout. Later Major Erskine moved away, but his sons Thomas and M. E., remained, and Erskine creek was named in their honor.

The Big Blue Mine and Whiskey Flat

One day in 1860, it is related, the mule of "Lovely" Rogers, a Keysville miner, wandered away and "Lovely," being a true prospector, when he had picked up the trail and found that it led off up the river, tucked his pick under his arm and followed. Whether he recovered the mule or not, is a matter to be only presumed. What is more important, he brought back a piece of rock from the place where the Big Blue mine is now located. That was the beginning of Kernville, first known as Whiskey Flat.

Rogers' sample assayed well, and he returned to the place where his wandering mule had led him and began to uncover the ledge. Shortly after he sold his mine to J. W. Sumner. Sumner moved to the new camp, followed by many others, among the first being Adam Hamilton, who stood two barrels of whiskey on end, laid a plank across the top, and began to dispense the stimulant necessary to the proper development of a new mining camp. But Hamilton's bar was in too close proximity to the residences of Sumner and Caldwell, and he was ordered to move his whiskey down on the flat, a mile below, a circumstance which may or may not have suggested the name for the new town.

Hamilton opened a store as well as a bar. Kittridge & Company were among the early merchants in Whiskey Flat, and Lewis Clark was another of the pioneer saloon keepers. The Sumner mine, also the property of J. W. Sumner, the Jeff Davis, the Beauregard, the Nellie Dent, named for the wife of General Grant by William Ferguson, its owner, the Lady Belle and the Sarah Jane were among the early Kernville mines, and most of them were on the same ledge with the Big Blue and were later consolidated under that name by Senator John P. Jones, the bonanza king, and E. R. Burke. In 1867 Kern county was considered the most important of the mining counties in the southern part of the state, and Kernville was the most important mining town in the county. There were upward of a dozen important quartz mines, within a length of a couple of miles, and several extensive mills were in operation. At that time the entire county contained some seventeen quartz mills, and about 1200 people engaged in mining.

Senator Jones took over the Big Blue mine from Sumner in 1875, and at

HISTORY OF KERN COUNTY

once increased the activity of the Kernville district. Burke was the manager, and under his direction the most efficient mining methods of the time were employed. He imported a large number of Cornish miners, employing about 200 miners all told. The mine was equipped with an 80-stamp mill, and about 100 tons of ore were taken out and crushed daily.

In 1870 there had been but little doing in Kernville, and there were less than a score of people in the town. In 1876 there were six or seven stores, four saloons, a brewery, three hotels, a livery stable, and other busi- ness and private establishments in proportion.

The operations in the Big Blue went on swimmingly until 1879, when the bottom dropped out of certain of Senator Jones' Nevada mining stocks, and he ordered the work at Kernville shut down. Ed Cushman, who had been book-keeper for Jones, secured a lease on the Big Blue, and worked it for about a year. Then Jacoby and Michaels leased it, ran a drainage tunnel under the mine at the river level, and took out a large amount of very profitable ore. They carried their workings down to the level of their drainage tunnel and quit.

Founding of Havilah

Long before the glory of Whiskey Flat began to fade, the restless advance guard of prospectors had passed on and was exploring all the gulches and hillsides for many miles to the south and east. One of the prospecting parties about the last week in June or the first week in July, 1864, went down Kern river and up Clear creek and found the first color of gold at Havilah, the third famous mining camp of Kern county, and a little later, when the county was organized out of portions of Tulare and Los Angeles counties, the first county seat.

It is recorded that Benjamin T. Mitchel, Alexander Reid, George Mckay and Dr. C. De La Borde, the "French Doctor," composed the discovering party, but to a man by name of Harpinding goes the honor of giving the new camp its name. Harpinding was one of the few early miners who seem to have carried Bibles in their kits, or his memory served him well with recol- lections of his boyhood days in a more pious land, for he turned to the second chapter of Genesis and found it written in the tenth, eleventh and twelfth verses that "A river went out of Eden to water the garden ; and from thence it parted, and became into four heads. The name of the first is Pison ; that is it which compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold. And the gold of that land is good ; there is bdellium and the onyx stone."

The first camp of the prospectors was in a gulch just below the spot where the town was afterward located. A month later the Clear creek mining district was organized, with Havilah as its focal point, and the latest diggings rapidly assumed first rank in interest if not in importance among the county's mining towns.

The first company of prospectors called their mines the Havilah, and organized the Havilah Mining Company. They were prospectors rather than miners, however, and soon dissolved their partnership and continued to search for new leads on their individual accounts. Dr. La Borde and August Gouglat located some thirty-six claims in the Clear Creek district, among them being the Dijon Nos. 1 and 2, the Cape Horn, the Alma Nos. 1 and 2, the Rhone, Eagle, Rochefort, Navarre, Nievre, Lyon and Marengo. A little later, in October, La Borde and Gouglat sold their claims for $50,000.

The most productive mine in the district was the Delphi, located by

HISTORY OF KERN COUNTY

H. McKeadney and known also as the McKeadney mine. The Tyrone and Lexington also were McKeadney's property. Nicewander (or Nyswander), Park & Co. were among the early locators.

The first mill in the Clear Creek or Havilah district was brought by Joseph H. Thomas, from the Coso district, where it had been operated by the Willow Springs Mining and Milling Company, and the first rock crushed was from the Dijon mine. It yielded $37 per ton. In January, 1865, Gen. J. W. Freeman moved his 4-stamp mill to Havilah from his mine on Green- horn mountain. The first rock he put through the mill was from the mines of Nicewander, Park & Co., and out of twenty-seven tons of ore $5000 in gold was saved directly from the battery. The same week rock from the Rochefort ledge yielded $230 per ton, and a run of Delphi ore netted $180 per ton.

These fabulous returns, considering the crude facilities at hand for extracting the gold, served to fan the interest in the Havilah mines to a fever heat, and the little gulch was soon resounding by day to the sound of blasting powder and stamp mills, and by night to the golden clink of coin on the gambling tables. According to the graphic account of a woman whose home in those days stood on the hillside just below one of the gambling resorts, the sound was as though someone were continually pouring twenty-dollar gold pieces out of a tin pan. By day the interest in the gambling tables was only a little less absorbing. A man who had occasion to search the county records some years later said he always had to wait till a poker game was finished before he could drag an unwilling official away long enough to unlock the archives and give him access to the few and fragmentary docu- ments on file.

The Relief mine, or the Rand, as it was also known, was the property of Col. Arnold A. Rand, who bought out the locations of Nicewander, Park & Co. The prospectors generally were succeeded by men of larger capital who began the development of the mines, and when the county was organized in 1866 there was no settlement in all the territory embraced that could put forward a rival claim against Havilah for the county seat.

A writer in 1867 states that there were at that time thirty stamp mills in Kern and Tulare counties, twenty-five of them being in Kern county and a majority of the latter number being in the Clear Creek district. Throughout this district were found many veins of ore ranging from two to six feet in thickness, and most of them were worked with marked success. Speaking generally of the quartz mines of the county, the same writer says that above the line of permanent water the ores carried mostly free gold and the early miners extracted it readily. When they reached the sulphureted ores, how- ever, so much difficulty was experienced that in 1865 and 1867 not more than one-quarter of the mills were in operation, and the production of bullion had decreased proportionately.

Other Mining Districts

So early as 1861 prospectors had drifted over the hills fifty miles south- east of Havilah and twenty miles from Walker's pass and opened the Milligan mine in El Poso district. They had sunk a shaft to the depth of 175 feet and penetrated a ledge that yielded from $57 to $150 per ton.

In 1868, according to the Havilah Courier, the Sageland district was attracting so much attention as to make things a little dull at Kernville. The Sageland district is on the eastern slope of Piute mountain, skirting the desert

HISTORY OF KERN COUNTY

and is filled with broken ranges of dry, cactus-covered hills. The St. John, Hortensia, Burning Moscow and other quartz mines scattered through these hills yielded good quantities and qualities of ore, and justified, in the belief of the discoverers of the district, the pleasing name of the New Eldorado. Tom Bridger was one of the pioneers of the Sageland district.

In the early sixties, also, Henry and Deitrich Bahten were exploring the free gold ledges and placers on Piute mountain. The old Piute and Big Indian mines were among the best known producers in this district. Robert Palmer and Wade Hampton Williams discovered some very rich placers on Piute, and the thriving camp of Claraville was the result.

Some years later, about 1876, the Bull Run silver mine, located on Bull run about five miles above Kernville, was credited by contemporary writers with being one of the richest silver mines in the world.

In October, 1870. a Kernville letter to the Kern County Courier stated that forty men were employed about the Kernville mines, mostly working on shares and doing well. Three men in one month cleaned up $500. Ore from the Big Blue was paying about $25 per ton.

About the same time it was reported that Burdett and Tucker had struck a new lead in the Long Tom mine, the scene later of one of the memorable tragedies in Kern county history.

An optimistic correspondent of the Courier in 1870 wrote that the Joe Walker mine in Walker's basin was doing better than ever since new pumping machinery, recently installed, had enabled the miners to reach the lower ores. But water trouble finally caused the abandonment of the mine. Stephen Barton states that the last effort on the Joe Walker was made by Judge Colby with a Cornish pump that was warranted to throw 100 miners' inches of water 400 feet high. When the lift had reached 290 feet the pump was labor- ing very hard, and there was more than 100 inches of water to be handled. "A week of strain terminated the life of the pump, and the mine was per- manently closed."

A report from the Kern river mines to the Courier by C. Schofield, June 3, 1871, said that the Big Blue was in steady operation and keeping a 16-stamp mill going. The mine had been worked with an open cut to a depth of thirty or forty feet and about seventy feet in width across the vein. A drift had been run about thirty-six feet in the direction of the hanging wall, but neither wall had yet been seen. The ore was running $17.50 to the ton. About two years before there were thousands of tons of dump rock, but all of it had then been worked. A shaft was sunk sixty feet below the bottom of the cut, and a drift run, but the water was so troublesome that work had to be abandoned on the lower level. The Sumner ledge, the northeasterly half of the Big Blue, was then owned chiefly by A. Staples & Co. From the bottom of an 80-foot shaft, ore running as high as $75 to the ton had been taken out, together with immense quantities of a lower grade. The hanging wall had been barely touched, and the foot wall had never yet been seen. A black, massive, sulphuret rock was the best producing ore, but with the facilities at hand a large part of the sulphurets were lost.

Next in importance to the Big Blue at this time was the Bull Run, which had been worked to a depth of 200 to 300 feet with an engine and hoist, and from which several hundred thousand dollars had been extracted. Only two small companies, working on shares, were taking out ore at the time,

HISTORY OF KERN COUNTY

and these were working near the east end of the ledge on a vein about two feet in width which yielded ore running about $20 to the ton.

The Beauregard, which had paid well at the surface, was not worked at that time. Two small companies were taking ore from a narrow but very rich ledge, the rock paying $75 to $100 per ton. All these mines had been involved in litigation which interfered seriously with their development.

In 1873 a Tehachapi note in the Courier says that Green & Henderson had just cleaned up $1438 in their hydraulic mine near that place.

For some time past the Owens river mines had been an indirect means of revenue to Kern county, most of their freighting being via Tehachapi and Bakersfield to the end of the Southern Pacific railroad, then being built down the valley. On November 9, 1872, A. Cross arrived in Bakersfield with three teams bringing 335 bars or 30,000 pounds of bullion from the foot of Owens lake, to which point it had been brought by steamer from the furnaces on the opposite side. It took ten days to make the trip from the lake to Bakersfield. The trip from the lake to Los Angeles consumed considerably more time, and as a result the railroad officials were hopeful of getting all the Owens river trade via teams to the end of the track, then nearing Tipton.

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History of Kern County, California, with biographical sketches of the leading men and women of the county who have been identified with its growth and development from the early days to the present, Part 5

Author: Morgan, Wallace Melvin, 1868- [from old catalog] Publication date: 1914 Publisher: Los Angeles, Cal., Historic record company Number of Pages: 1682

Author: Morgan, Wallace Melvin, 1868- [from old catalog]
Publication date: 1914
Publisher: Los Angeles, Cal., Historic record company
Number of Pages: 1682