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Gottville, Cala., an old roaring mining camp, of the Bret Harte type, now dead and buried. The bears come down from the hillside and steal little pigs from the streets.

Wing dams crept out into the brown hurrying current, shouldering the waters away from the work of the miners. Painstakingly the rocks were hoisted out of the bed of the stream, and then the precious gravel down to the storehouse of the red rock.

The upper Sierra camps of Bret Harte lived along the Klamath. Civilization lay far away. San Francisco lay four hundred miles to the southeither by the long, dangerous trail down river to the sea, and then south on ship, or else up river to the Oregon trail, and then down to Red Bluff, and the head of the navigation on the Sacramento.

When the Indians got to troubling -the symptom was the mutilated body of some miner turning up in some lonely canyon along the river-then, as was the custom of the West in the '50's, the miners laid aside their picks and pans and Long Toms, and devoted a week or so making good Indians out

of bad ones. The missionary appliances were simple, a muzzle-loader rifle, and shoot on sight. Two or three times soldiers came in via the sea, and helped to make the climate of the river more healthful for solitary miners in the lonely gulches.

Presently the impatient gold seekers deemed the bars petered out, and moved on. Swiftly the little settlements fell into decay. Goldsmith's Deserted Village was not more pathetic. Then came the Chinese, sympathetic, painstaking, knowing the value of co-operative labor-and driven out of Trinity County to the south by the intolerant and envious white men.

They gleaned the leavings of the hurrying argonauts, and they took out more gold than did the discoverers. The abandoned Roaring Camps became once more peopled, this time with pig-tailed heathen instead of the red-shirted argonauts. The nasal sing

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A hydraulic mine.

The huge basin back to the bluffs was torn out and washed away by the white plume of water.

song of the Chinese language profaned the silence of the hills, undisturbed save for the hearty oaths of the Anglo-Saxon miners. Fan-tan took the place of faro and monte and poker. Men were not killed in the open in fair fight-they disappeared overnight, if their disappearance became advisable to the powers that were, according to the Chinese method of thinking.

Then even the Chinese moved on, the river and its bars were no longer workable with their crude methods. The rough houses fell in or were hauled away by the few ranchers who seeped into the remote valley. The bears came down and snuffed through the few streets.

Kanakas from the Sandwich Islands drifted into the narrow gorge of the river, and settled down, and raised families and enough for them to live upon. Only here and there does the turbulent river allow room enough for a plot of ground that will do for a

home, and acreage enough to support the little family.

Fifty years have shown little change in the Klamath Gorge. Still the road winds up at Happy Camp. Crude ferries, current propelled and cable-held against the swift push of the stream, supplement the few bridges. Rumors there are that the strange, spontaneous combustion of one or two that have gone up in smoke were the result of the peeve of some ferryman or other who found his living gone with the coming of the bridge.

In the canyons-never canyons but always "creeks," in the vernacular of the Klamath, which is the vernacular of gold seekers still-the black and brown bears roam the summer long. Deer tracks across the road provoke no notice. One is shown the spot where a pair of mountain lions killed the small son of a rancher on the river as he trudged along the road in the twilight, very close to home.

Here and there modern methods,

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sadly handicapped by the rough mountain road and the distance from the rail, attack the problem of making the river and the bars give up the gold that was forbidden to the crude instruments of the argonaut of the '50's.

At Hamburg bar is a dredge held out in the swift current off the bar, a current which laughed at the efforts of the early gold seekers to block it off with crude wing dams. Divers, protected by steel caissons, go down to the bottom in the fierce, swift, cold current, and move the rocks. A suction pipe picks up the gravel that lies on the bed rock and runs it over the

screens on the dredge. Every plate in the boilers, every timber in the hull, was hauled down the long 60 miles of rough, rocky mountain road that lies 'twixt Hamburg and the Southern Pacific Railroad.

Farther up river, working remorselessly through a long bar nearly a mile long, and thirty feet deep, another dredge on rollers is solving the problem that baffled the angry argonauts who knew the richness of the gravel that lay down on bed rock, and who also knew the hundreds of thousands of tons of gravel that lay on that same strata of richness.

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