to be drained appearing on the right. In the flume are placed a succession of water-wheels, revolving on long shafts that extend over the pits dug out, and to the ends of which are attached pumps that keep these pits free from sippage water. As soon as the river has been turned into the flume, the miners commence digging up the bed, the gravel being thrown into sluices and washed, while the boulders are lifted out of the way with derricks and piled up on the bed rock, this having been first cleared away to receive them.

As this part of the business cannot be entered upon till the water has fallen to a low stage, which seldom occurs till midsummer, the working season vouchsafed the river bed miner is short, wherefore he has to make the most of it while it lasts. As many men are put to work as can be employed to advantage, and operations are pushed day and night, week days and Sundays, without ever a moment's intermission, till the advent of the rainy season admonishes the miner that it is time to stop, take out his pumps, derricks and sluices, if he would not see them go down the river. Oftener, how

ever, does it happen that the miner, being now in the midst of his harvest, disregards these warnings until it is too late, and sees his entire plant swept away and. his pits filled up in a single night. Sometimes, too, a premature rain occurs, raising the stream suddenly, and the river-bed operator is, in like manner, doomed to see everything borne away on the flood before the working season is half over, and may be when it is hardly more than just begun. Owing to the occurrence of these and other mishaps, this is a somewhat precarious style of mining. Generally, however, it pays fairly, the amount of gold sometimes taken out from this class of claims being very large. Lately the business has been on the increase; and when the large tunnels now being built to divert the rivers from their beds shall have been completed, there is good reason to believe that enormous quantities of gold will be taken from the sections of river beds reclaimed.

If the hills in the vicinity of one of these river bed operations become much denuded of timber, as shown in our picture, this comes of the large quantities of lumber required for constructing the dam, flume, and other portions of the plant.

HYDRAULIC MINING.

1

IT IS OF CALIFORNIA ORIGIN.

Briefly described, hydraulic mining may be said to consist in the plan of breaking down and disintegrating the auriferous gravel as it stands in place, and carrying it into the gold saving apparatus prepared for receiving and washing it, by means of water discharged through iron pipes. upon such gravel under great pressure. In drift mining, the gravel is reached and removed through shafts, inclines, or tunnels, and afterwards shoveled or piped into sluices and there washed in the same manner as that operated upon by the hydraulic process.

The business of searching after and securing gold by the drift method of mining, though not peculiar to California, nor yet wholly of modern origin, has, in this State, reached such proportions, and been prosecuted by means and appliances so varied, novel, and effective, that it may almost be said to have originated here.

As regards the hydraulic branch of the business, what constitutes its most noticeable features, the employment of water under pressure, the breaking up of the indurated

gravel with gunpowder or other explosives, and effecting its further disintegration by dropping it over precipitous falls -in short, all that is most characteristic about it is so new and wholly without precedent that it may be considered exclusively the product of California. Limited and imperfect at the start, this industry has developed into one of overshadowing magnitude, the mines worked by this process having turned out, before they were enjoined from running, more than a third of the annual gold product of the State.

Expanding, little by little, this hydraulic system has seemed more a growth than an invention, every year since its inception having witnessed such additions and changes as have sufficed to keep it constantly spreading and advancing. These gains, though sometimes small and seemingly unimportant, have been universal and continuous, consisting now in slight innovations upon previous methods, and again, in modifications of old or the introduction of new devices, or perhaps in improvements worked in the application of those already in use.

NEW DEPOSITS AND NEW MODES OF WORKING THEM.

The discovery of gold in California drew to this part of the Pacific Coast a numerous, eager, and energetic population. As the most of these newly arrived immigrants repaired at once to the mines and there engaged in the business of gold gathering, the more shallow and accessible placers were worked out with such rapidity that but for the timely discovery of more permanent deposits, and the employment of improved ways and means for working them, placer mining here would have undergone speedy curtailment and perhaps suffered early extinction. These later discoveries consisted of the auriferous gravel found in the inhumed beds of the pliocene rivers, and the vast accumulations of like material lying over and adjacent to these ancient channels.

THE DEAD RIVERS.

While drift mining is confined almost wholly to the beds of these ancient but long since obliterated streams, the superincumbent and outlying gravel banks constitute the principal sites of hydraulic operations.

The finding of these pliocene deposits was, like the original discovery of gold, the result of chance rather than of any preconceived theory or systematic plan of exploration. In the prosecution of their labors, the pioneer miners were early led to observe that the gulches and cañons entering the rivers immediately above the exceptionally rich bars, were apt to contain great quantities of gold dust. Following up and washing the gravel along such gulches and cañons, these miners encountered on either side thereof what appeared to be fertile streaks or "leads," to the breaking down and disintegration of which these depressions were evidently indebted for their special enrichment. These "leads," on being traced up, were found to run under the banks of the cañons, the courses of which, before their destruction, they had crossed at various angles. The further explorations of these strange formations not only showed them to be receptacles of great wealth, but disclosed the additional fact that they occupied deep, water-worn channels, once the beds of broad and swift-flowing streams. To these latter, so extinguished and entombed during the long ages of the past, the miners of the period gave the striking and appropriate name, "Dead Rivers," a term by which they have continued to be designated ever since.

EXTENT OF THE OLD RIVER SYSTEM AND ITS

CONTEMPORANEOUS GRAVEL DEPOSITS.

These gravel deposits cover, in one shape or another, a considerable portion of the California gold fields. Only, however, in the more central mining counties, being those reaching from Tuolumne to Plumas, inclusive, are the "dead rivers' proper, and their associate gravel banks met