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The difference is immense. A stream of water rushing through a two-inch pipe, under a pressure of two hundred feet perpendicular, has tremendous force, and the everlasting hills themselves crumble down before it as if they were but piles of cloud blown away by a breath of wind or dissipated by a glance of the sun.

And yet even this terrific power has not sufficed. When the hills have been dried by months of constant heat and drought, the clay becomes so hard that the hydraulic stream, with all its momentum, does not readily dissolve it, and much of the water runs off nearly clear through the sluice, and thus is wasted for the purposes of washing.

The sluice could wash more dirt than the hydraulic stream will furnish when the clay is hard and dry.

To prevent this loss, the miner will often cut a tunnel into the heart of his claim, and by powder blast the clay loose, so that it will give way more readily to the water. There have been instances in which two tons of powder have been used at one blast in a hydraulic claim.

20.-HILL MINING.

As the introduction of the ditch led to the use of the sluice and hydraulic power, so the introduction of the latter led to a change in the mining ground. The miners were now able and they even preferred to attack high hills of gravel, which afforded them an immense mass of auriferous earth, and furnished profitable employment to large streams of water for months or even years.

Those counties which contained the most extensive districts suitable for the application of hydraulic power were the most prosperous, while the towns dependent on river mining or on shallow placers fell into decay, and were partially and in some cases entirely deserted.

21.-DECLINE OF RIVER MINING.

From 1850 till 1856 river mining occupied a very important place in the industry of the State. The beds of all the streams in the auriferous regions were rich in gold, which could only be obtained by taking the water from its natural course by means of dams and ditches or flumes. The beds being deep, and the banks steep, rocky, and crooked, these enterprises to drain the rivers were very expensive, and they were also very dangerous pecuniarily, since only a brief portion of the year was suitable for the work, and an early rain might come and sweep away dam and flume before an ounce of gold had been obtained. The comb of the Sierra Nevada along nearly its whole length rises almost to the limits of perpetual snow, and the white caps do not disappear, or the rivers reach a low stage until late in the summer, so that three months may be considered as the limit of the period in which a river could be flumed, and the bed emptied of its gold.

Every perennial stream of much note in the auriferous districts has been flumed at some time in its history, but within the last seven years such enterprises have become rarities. One of the most costly and most remarkable river Alumes in the State was erected in 1857 to drain the Feather river at Oroville. It was three quarters of a mile long and twenty feet wide; the expenditures of the company during the season were $176,985, and their profits $75,000. They flumed the river again in 1858, and then lost $45,000.

Since that year no extensive fluming enterprise has been undertaken in any part of the State, and the little work done in the beds of rivers is mostly left to Chinamen, who are content to work for much less pay than white men expect for their labor.

In some of the diggings the auriferous clay is so hard and tough that the hydraulic stream and sluice are unable to dissolve it, and mills have been built to

crush it fine, so that the water in the sluice can get an opportunity to dissolve all the earthy particles, and set free the metal.

The “

cement mills," as they are called, are mostly of late construction. The discovery of gold in Australia was made in 1851, by a miner from California, and it proved to be equal in magnitude to that in our own State; and, singular to say, it attracted little attention, and drew from us within two years only about a thousand of our residents, while many thousands were ready to rush to imaginary diggings in other directions.

22.—“RUSHES” TO AUSTRALIA.

Placer mining was at the height of its prosperity in 1852 and 1853. Wages were high, employment abundant for everybody that wished to hire out, and there was plenty of ground that would pay at least moderately for working with the rocker.

But the rich spots were few, and the miners who had shared the prosperity of 1849 were longing for the discovery of some new gold field that would again reward them with an ounce a day.

In the latter part of 1853, and the beginning of 1854, a series of newspaper letters and articles were published, asserting that there were very rich placers on the headwaters of the Amazon, in Peru.

These articles probably came from the same source, and must have been written with the deliberate purpose of throwing trade into the hands of a few ship-owners and merchants.

Whatever the design of the writer or writers may have been, the result was that two thousand miners went from California and Australia to Peru, where they found no placers, nor could they learn of any such place as that mentioned in the articles.

23.-THE KERN RIVER EXCITEMENT.

The next year was marked by a greater rush to Kern river, in the southern part of the State. Some small placers had been found there, and they served as the basis or the suggestion of a multitude of false letters, asserting that the basin of Kern river was as rich in gold as those of the American and Yuba rivers had been in 1849. These statements were copied into the newspapers, which had no means of verification, and the entire industry of the State was thrown into confusion. Miners abandoned good claims, farm laborers and clerks left their employers, the rate of wages and the cost of mining implements rose in the market, and soon six or eight thousand men were on the road to Kern river, and as many more were ready to start, when the newspapers began to show the folly of such a rush to diggings that had as yet produced no considerable amount of gold.

The tide of migration was arrested, and soon it turned back, the disappointed adventurers returning with the satisfaction of knowing that every river between the Mariposa and the Feather, even after seven years' working, was richer than Kern river had ever been.

24. ANCIENT RIVERS.

It was in October, 1855, that a very remarkable discovery was made near Columbia, in Tuolumne county..

In various parts of the State, the miners in following up rich deposits of gold had come upon what appeared to be the channel of ancient rivers, which had been filled up and covered over with beds of clay and gravel in some places a thousand feet deep.

The high banks, the bars, the bends, the rapids, the deep places, the tribu

tary gullies and brooks, the water-worn gravel, the remains of fresh-water mollusks, the flat stones pointing down stream, the heaps of gravel formed by eddies, the drift-wood, and the deposit of coarse gold in the centre and deep places of the channel-unmistakable evidences of a stream that had existed for centuries-were all distinctly recognizable.

In these ancient rivers the gold was distributed in the same manner as in those of the present geological era, but in greater abundance and usually in larger particles, as though it had not been subjected to so much wear.

The primeval streams were intersected in places by water courses of our own day, and these latter were usually richer just below the points of intersection than at any other places.

The largest and most noted of the ancient river beds yet discovered in California, called the Blue lead, runs nearly through the middle of Sierra and Nevada counties, has a width varying from a hundred to three hundred yards, and has been traced nearly forty miles.

Its course is at right angles to that of the present streams in the same neighborhood. The amount of gold taken from its bed has never been ascertained, but it cannot be less than $25,000,000, and perhaps twice as much.

25.-THE TUOLUMNE TABLE MOUNTAIN.

The traveller in the mining districts frequently sees table mountains ;" that is, high rocky elevations, with flat surfaces and steep sides. They are evidently remains of lava floods, from which the earth, by which they were once surrounded, has been washed away, leaving the basalt towering above the adjacent country.

The most remarkable of these table mountains is in Tuolumne county, through which runs the Stanislaus river, and with the same general course.

Its length, with its bends, is about thirty-five miles, its height from three hundred to one thousand feet above the clay and gravel near it, and its width from a quarter to half a mile. The smoothness of its surface, the gradual inclination to the westward, the basaltic nature of the rock, its proximity to a centre of great volcanic activity, and various other circumstances which cannot be stated here in detail, leave no room for doubt that this table mountain is a solidified bed of lava.

Some miners, sinking a shaft at a place where the lava had been carried away, leaving the sandstone or gravel under it bare, found gold, and some other miners, working along the side of the mountain, found a rich streak of pay-dirt, which ran down in a deep rocky channel obliquely under the mountain. They attempted to follow it, but they soon met a body of water, which they could neither avoid nor pump out. This put them on nettles. Further examination showed that there were other little channels running under the mountain and on both sides, and all going deeper as they went further in, and nearly all tending westward, with a course oblique to that of the mountain, and all containing more or less gold.

There must, then, be an ancient river bed under the mountain. This opinion, advanced by a few men without education, who wished to induce wealthy men to undertake the exploration of the mountain by tunnels, was met by incredulity and ridicule. Nevertheless, the projectors of the scheme had got the idea fixed in their minds, and they were determined to see what the mountain was made of. The storekeepers, in accordance with the general custom of assisting in developing the resources of their own neighborhood, willingly trusted them for provisions, tools, and clothes, while they were cutting a tunnel to reach the bed of the supposed ancient river.

They commenced their work at some distance from the basalt, and after cutting through clay and gravel reached a slate rock, which seemed to have been the an

cient bank, and then they came to a bed of gravel of such character that the theory of the primeval river was fully established. But the tunnel was not deep enough.

It was far above the bed rock, and the water stood, as before, between the miner and the gold. Months of labor had been lost, and it was uncertain whether the next tunnel would strike the right level, nor could it be known whether the bed would be rich enough to pay. Nevertheless, hope and confidence, the chief divinities of the miner, and he is happy in their smiles even when privation is his companion and when experience tells him that no gold fortune is in store, continued to sustain him.

The Table mountain prospectors, however, had reason and experience, as well as hope and confidence, to cheer them, and the second tunnel was undertaken with the encouragement of many men who had sneered at the first. The right. elevation had been struck this time, the bottom of the river bed was reached and was drained by the tunnel, and the gravel was found to be extremely rich. T'en feet square of superficial area yielded $100,000. A pint of gravel not unfrequently contained a pound of gold. The whole mountain was soon

claimed.

The State echoed with the discovery. A stream of lava had filled up the bed of an ancient river for thirty miles, and in the course of ages the earth and slate that once formed the banks were washed away, leaving the basalt to mark the position of the golden treasure. Other similar deposits were found elsewhere, and other explorations, as bold in their conception but less successful or less important in their results, were undertaken in nearly every county.

26. THE FRASER FEVER.

The years 1856 and 1857 were marked by no peculiar excitement or sudden change. The working of the gullies and river bars and beds was gradually becoming less profitable and productive, the quartz and ditch interests continued to grow larger, wages kept their downward tendency, and the number of hired laborers increased.

In 1858 the State received a shock that was felt in every fibre of her political and industrial organization. Rich diggings were found in the spring on a bar of Fraser river, and it was asserted and presumed that there were large tracts of excellent placers in the upper basin of the stream. The presumption was not without its foundation in experience and reason, but after all it was but a presumption.

The miners, however, were not disposed to listen to any doubts; they were ready to sacrifice everything in the hope of finding and being the first to enjoy another virgin gold field like that of California.

In the course of four months, 18,000 men, nearly one-sixth of all the voters in the State went to Fraser river, and many thousands of others were preparing for an early start. The confident belief prevailed that "the good old times of '49 were to come again.

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Servants threw up their positions, farmers and miners left their valuable property, wages rose, houses and land fell in value, and many persons believed that California would soon be left without a tenth part of her population.

All this excitement was made before any gold had been received in San Francisco, and before there was any direct and trustworthy evidence of the existence of paying diggings beyond the limits of a few bars, which could not give occupation to more than a hundred men.

Suddenly, and with no material addition to the evidence, the conviction burst on the people that Fraser river would not pay, and five-sixths of the truant miners had returned before the end of the year.

*27.-DISCOVERY OF THE COMSTOCK LODE.

A party of emigrants discovered placer diggings on Gold cañon, a little tributary of Carson river, east of the Sierra Nevada, in 1849, and a permanent mining camp was established there in 1852.

It was observed that the gold contained a large proportion of silver, in some claims nearly one-half in value, but this fact was not without precedent in the placers of California, and was regarded simply as a misfortune for the miner, who did not receive more than $10 or $12 an ounce for his dust, while that obtained on the western slope of the Sierra usually sold for $17 or $18.

The Gold cañon diggings had been worked for seven years, and gave employment to about fifty men, when, in the spring of 1859, the miners, following up a rich streak of placer gold, came upon a quartz lode in the place now known as Gold Hill.

A couple of months later, some miners, in following up a placer lead in which the gold was mixed with about an equal weight of silver, came on the lode from which the metal had been washed down.†

They were working here in a rude way, with no idea of the value of their claim, when James Walsh, an intelligent quartz miner from Grass valley, passed

* The credit of this discovery has been claimed by so many parties, and the testimony is so conflicting, that I am induced to give at least two of the popular versions. Substantially they agree upon the main points. (See section 4, Resources of Nevada.)

+S. H. Marlette, surveyor general of Nevada, in his annual report for 1865, gives the following history of the discovery of the Comstock lode :

"In 1852, H. B. and E. A. Grosch or Grosh, sons of A. B. Grosh, a Universalist clergyman of considerable note, and editor of a Universalist paper at Utica, New York, educated metallurgists, came to the then Territory, and the same or the following year engaged in placer mining in Gold cañon near the site of Silver City, and continued there until 1857, when, so far as I can learn, they first discovered silver ore, which was found in a quartz vein, probably the one now owned by the Kossuth Gold and Silver Mining Company, on which the Grosh brothers had a location.

'Shortly after the discovery, in the same year, one of the brothers accidentally wounded himself with a pick, from the effects of which he soon died, and the other brother went to California, where he died early in 1858, which probably prevented the valuable nature of their discovery from becoming known. In the mean time placer mining was carried on to considerable extent in various localities, principally in Gold cañon.

"In 1857, Joe Kirby and others commenced placer mining in Six Mile cañon, about half a mile below where the Ophir works now are, and worked at intervals with indifferent success until 1859. On the 22d day of February, 1858, the first quartz claim was located in Virginia mining district, on the Virginia croppings, by James Finney, generally known as Old Virginia, from whom the city of Virginia and the cropping have taken their name. This must be considered the first location of the Comstock lode, unless we consider the Kossuth claim as upon one branch of the Comstock, which may not be impossible in case we adopt the one lode system, for the lode is about one hundred feet in thickness, and its strike would take it to the eastern slope of Mount Davidson, as explorations prove, as I have been informed, the Virginia croppings to be the outcrop of the western portion of the Comstock.

"The discovery of rich deposits of silver ore was not made until June, 1859, when Peter O'Reilly and Patrick McLaughlin, while engaged in gold washing on what is now the ground of the Ophir Mining Company, and near the south line of the Mexican Company's claim, uncovered a rich vein of sulphuret of silver in an excavation made for the purpose of collecting water to use in their rockers in washing for gold. This discovery being on ground claimed at the time by Kirby and others, Comstock was employed to purchase their claim, whereby Comstock's name has been given to this great lode, by which those entitled to the credit of its discovery have been defrauded-a transaction, to compare small things with great, as discreditable as that by which Americus Vespucius bestowed his name upon the western continent, an honor due alone to the great Columbus.

"From this discovery resulted the marvellous growth of Nevada. Immediately the lode was claimed for miles; an unparalleled excitement followed, and miners and capitalists came in great numbers to reap a share of the reported wealth. The few hardy prospectors exploring the mountains for hidden wealth soon counted their neighbors by thousands; soon walked along miles of busy streets, called into existence by the throng of adventurers, and soon the prospectors were ransacking almost every part of the (at present) State of Nevada in search of silver lodes.'

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