In a deep remote canyon on the east branch of the north fork of the Feather River, two Germans roll a boulder aside and under it find lump gold. Another couple of arriving miners wash four hundred ounces there in eight hours. A single pan yields fifteen hundred dollars. The ground is so rich that claims are limited to forty-eight inches square. In one week, the population grows from two to five hundred. The place is called Rich Bar.
At Goodyears Bar, on the Yuba, one wheelbarrowload of placer is worth two thousand dollars.
From hard rock above Carson Creek comes a single piece of gold weighing a hundred and twelve pounds. After black powder is packed in a nearby crack, the blast throws out a hundred and ten thousand dollars in gold.
A miner is buried in Rough and Ready. As shovels move, gold appears in his grave. Services continue while mourners stack claims. So goes the story, dust to dust.
From auriferous gravels of Iowa Hill two men remove thirty thousand dollars in a single day.
A nugget weighing only a little less than Leland Stanford comes out of hard rock in Carson Hill. Size of a shoebox and nearby pure gold, it weighs just under two hundred pounds (troy) — the largest piece ever found in California. Carson Hill, in Calaveras County, is the in the belt of the Mother Lode — an elongate swarm of gold-bearing quartz veins, running north-south for a hundred and fifty miles at about a thousand feet of altitude. There are Mother Load quart veins as much as fifty metres wide.
American miners come from every state, and virtually every county. Others have arrived from Mexico, India, France, Australia, Portugal, England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Germany, Switzerland, Russia, New Zealand, Canada, Hawaii, Peru. One bloc of several thousand is from Chile. The largest foreign group is from China. Over most other miners, the Chinese have an advantage even greater than their numbers: they don’t drink. They smoke opium, certainly, but not nearly as much as the others like to think. The Chinese miners wear outsized boots and blue cotton. Their packs are light. They live on rice and dried fish. Their brothels thrive. They are the greatest gamblers in the Sierra. They make Caucasian gambling look like penny ante.
Some of the early gold camps are so deep in ravines, gulches, caverns, and canyons that the light of the winter sun never reaches the miners’ tents. If you have no tent, you live in a hole in the ground. Your backpack includes a blanket roll, a pick, a shovel, a gold pan, maybe a small rocker in which to sift gravel, a coffeepot, a tobacco tin, saleratus bread, dried apples, and salt pork. You sleep beside your fire. When you get up you “shake yourself and are dressed.” You wear a flannel shirt, probably red. You wear wool trousers, heavy leather boots, and a soft hat with a wide and flexible brim. You carry a pistol. Not everyone resembles you. There are miners in top hats, miners in panama hats, miners in sombreros, and French miners in berets, who have raised the tricolor over their claims. There are miners working in formal topcoats. There are miners in fringed buckskin, miners in brocaded vests, miners working claims in dress pumps (because their boots have worn out). There are numerous Indians, who are essentially naked. There are black miners, all of them free. As individual prospecting gives way to gang labor, this could be a place for slaves, but in the nascent state of California slavery is forbidden. On Sundays, while you drink your tanglefoot whiskey, you can watch a dog kill a dog, a chicken kill a chicken, a man kill a man, a bull kill a bear. You can watch Shakespeare. You can visit a “public woman.” The Hydraulic Press for October 30, 1858, says “Nowhere do young men look so old as in Calfornia.” They build white wooden churches with steeples.
In four months in Mokelumne Hill, there is a murder every week. In the absence of law, lynching is common. The camp that will be named Placerville is earlier called Hangtown. When a mob forgets to tie the hands of condemned man and he clutches the rope above him, someone beats his hands with a pistol until he lets go. A Chinese miner wounds a white youth and is jailed. With a proffered gift of tobacco, lynchers lure a the “Chinee” to cell window, grab his head, slip a rope around his neck, and pull until he is dead. A young miner in Bear River kills an older man. A tribunal offers him death or banishment. He selects death, explaining that he is from Kentucky. In Kentucky, that would be th honorable thing to do.
- John McPhee “Assembling California”
