by John McPhee
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 a 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 the “Chinee” to his 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 the honorable thing to do.
Some miners’ wives take in washing and make more money than their husbands do. In every gold rush from this one to the Klondike, the suppliers and service industries will gather up the dust while ninety-nine per cent of the miners go home with empty pokes. In 1853, Leland Stanford, twenty-nine years old, opens a general store in Michigan Bluff, about ten miles from Gold Run. John Studebaker makes wheelbarrows in Hangtown.
Stanford moves to Sacramento, where he sells “provisions, groceries, wines, liquors, cigars, oils & camphene, flour, grain & produce, mining implements, miners’ supplies.” Credit is not in Stanford’s vocabulary. Miners must “come down with the dust.” They come down with the dust to Mark Hopkins, a greengrocer who, sensing greater profit in picks, shovels, and pans, goes out of produce and into partnership at Collis P. Huntington, Hardware. They come down with the dust to Charles Crocker, Mining Supplies. When the engineer Theodore Judah comes down from a reconnaissance of the Sierra with the opinion that a railroad can be built across the mountains, these merchants of Sacramento have the imagination to believe him, and they form a corporation to construct the Central Pacific. The geologic time scale, rising out of the ground in the form of Cretaceous gold, has virtually conjured a transcontinental railroad.
It leaves Sacramento in 1863, and not a minute too soon, for in a sense—which is only a little fictive—it is racing the technology of mining. As the railroad advances toward Donner Pass at the rate of about twenty miles a year, the miners are doing what they can to remove the intervening landscape. Their ability to do so has been much accelerated in scarcely a dozen years. This is the evolution of technique:
Prospectors find the fossil rivers within two years of James Wilson Marshall’s discovery, and soon afterward vast acreages are full of holes that seem to have been made by very large coyotes. In the early form of mining that becomes known as coyoting, you dig a deep hole through the overburden and lower yourself into it with a windlass. You hope that your mine will not become your grave. You dig through the gravel to bedrock, then drift to the side. Some coyote shafts go down a hundred feet. One goes down six hundred. When water first arrives by ditch and flume, it not only washes excavated pay dirt but is allowed to spill downslope, gullying the gravel mountainsides and washing out resident gold. This is known as ground-sluicing, gouging, booming, or “picking down the bank.” Even now the terrain is beginning to reflect the fact that these visitors are not the sort who carry out what they carry in. Jack London will write in “All Gold Canyon”:
Before him was the smooth slope, spangled with flowers and made sweet with their breath. Behind him was devastation. It looked like some terrible eruption breaking out on the smooth skin of the hill. His slow progress was like that of a slug, befouling beauty with a monstrous trail.
So far, the technology is not new. From high reservoirs and dug canals, the Romans ground-sluiced for gold, as did Colombian Indians before 1500, and people in the eighteenth century in the region known as the Brazils. In the words and woodcuts of De Re Metallica (1556) the Saxon physician Georg Bauer, whose pen name was Georgius Agricola, comprehensively presented gold metallurgy, from panning and sluicing to the use of sheepskin:
Some people wash this kind of sand in a large bowl which can easily be shaken, the bowl being suspended by two ropes from a beam in a building. The sand is thrown into it, water is poured in, then the bowl is shaken, and the muddy water is poured out and clear water is again poured in, this being done again and again. In this way, the gold particles settle in the back part of the bowl because they are heavy, and the sand in the front part because it is light … . Miners frequently wash ore in a small bowl to test it.
A box which has a bottom made of a plate full of holes is placed over the upper end of a sluice, which is fairly long but of moderate width. The gold material to be washed is thrown into this box, and a great quantity of water is let in … . In this way the Moravians, especially, wash gold ore.
The Lusitanians fix to the sides of a sluice, which is about six feet long and a foot and a half broad, many cross-strips or riffles, which project backward and are a digit apart. The washer or his wife lets the water into the head of the sluice, where he throws the sand which contains the particles of gold.
The Colchians placed the skins of animals in the pools of springs; and since many particles of gold had clung to them when they were removed, the poets invented the “golden fleece” of the Colchians.
(Translation by Herbert Clark Hoover and Lou Henry Hoover, 1950.)
California’s momentous innovation in placer mining comes in 1853, after Edward E. Matteson, a ground-sluicer, is nearly killed when saturated ground slides down upon him and knocks his pick from his hand. Matteson thinks of a way to dismantle a slope from a safe distance. With his colleagues Eli Miller and A. Chabot, he attaches a sheet-brass nozzle to a rawhide hose and bombards a hill near Red Dog with a shaped hydraulic charge. That first nozzle is only three feet long and its jet at origin three-quarters of an inch in diameter. Soon the nozzles are sixteen feet long, and are called dictators, monitors, or giants. They require ever more ditches and flumes. In the words of Hutchings’ California Magazine, “The time may come when the whole of the water from our mountain streams will be needed for mining and manufacturing purposes, and will be sold at a price within the reach of all.” Where two men working a rocker can wash a cubic yard a day, two men working a mountainside with a dictator can bring down and drive through a sluice box fifteen hundred tons in twelve hours, and this is the technology that the railroad is racing to the ground at Gold Run.
Although the nozzle has the appearance of a naval cannon, it is mounted on a ball socket and is so delicately counterbalanced with a “jockey box” full of small boulders that, for all its power, it can be controlled with one hand. Every vestige of what has lain before it —forest, soil, gravel—is driven asunder, washed over, piled high, and flushed away. At a hundred and twenty-five pounds of pressure per square inch, the column of shooting water seems to subdivide into braided pulses hypnotic to the eye, and where it crashes at the end of its parabola it sounds like a storm sea hammering a beach. In one year, the North Bloomfield Gravel Company uses fifteen thousand million gallons of water. Through the big nine-inch nozzles go thirty thousand gallons a minute. Benjamin Silliman, Jr., a founding professor of the Sheffield Scientific School, at Yale, writes in 1865, “Man has, in the hydraulic process, taken command of nature’s agencies, employing them for his own benefit, compelling her to surrender the treasure locked up in the auriferous gravel by the use of the same forces which she employed in distributing it!”
To get at the deepest richest gravels, which lie in the hollows of bedrock channels, the miners dig tunnels under the beds of the fossil rivers. When they reach a point directly below the blue lead, they go straight up into the auriferous gravel, where they set up their nozzles and flush out the mountain from the inside. At Port Wine Ridge, Chinese miners make a tunnel in the gravel fifteen miles long. Surface excavations meanwhile deepen. Twelve million cubic yards of gravel are washed out of Scotts Flat, forty-seven million cubic yards of gravel out of You Bet and Red Dog, a hundred and five million cubic yards out of Dutch Flat, a hundred and twenty-eight million out of Gold Run. After a visit to Gold Run and Dutch Flat in 1868, W. A. Skidmore, of San Francisco, writes, “We will so
on have deserted towns and a waste of country torn up by hydraulic washings, far more cheerless in appearance than the primitive wilderness of 1848.” In the middle eighteen-sixties, hydraulic miners find it profitable to get thirty-four cents’ worth of gold from a cubic yard of gravel. In a five-year period in the eighteen-seventies, the North Bloomfield Gravel Company washes down three and a quarter million yards to get $94,250. Soon the company is moving twelve million parts of gravel to get one part of gold.
As the mine tailings travel in floods, they thicken streambeds and fill valleys with hundreds of feet of gravel. In their blanched whiteness, spread wide, these gravels will appear to be lithic glaciers for a length of time on the human scale that might as well be forever. In a year and a half, hydraulic mining washes enough material into the Yuba River to fill the Erie Canal. By 1878 along the Yuba alone, eighteen thousand acres of farmland are covered. Mud, sand, cobbles—Yuba tailings and Feather River tailings spew ten miles into the Great Central Valley. Tailings of the American River reach farther than that. Broad moonscapes of unvegetated stream-rounded rubble conceal the original land. Before hydraulic mining, the normal elevation of the Sacramento River in the Great Valley was sea level. As more and more hydraulic detritus comes out of the mountains, the normal elevation of the river rises seven feet. In 1880, hydraulic mining puts forty-six million cubic yards into the Sacramento and the San Joaquin. The muds keep going toward San Francisco, where, ultimately, eleven hundred and forty-six million cubic yards are added to the bays. Navigation is impaired above Carquinez Strait. The ocean is brown at the Golden Gate.
In the early eighteen-eighties, a citizens’ group called the Anti-Debris Association is formed to combat the hydraulic miners. On June 18, 1883, a dam built by the miners fails high in the mountains—apparently because it was insufficiently engineered to withstand the pressure of high explosives. Six hundred and fifty million cubic feet of water suddenly go down the Yuba, killing six people and creating a wasteland much like the miners’. On January 9, 1884, a United States circuit court bans the flushing of debris into streams and rivers. Although the future holds some hydraulic mining—with debris dams, catch basins, and the like—it is essentially over, and miners in California from this point forward will be delving into hard rock.
Edward E. Matteson—of whom the Nevada City Transcript said in 1860, “His labors, like the magic of Aladdin’s lamp, have broken into the innermost caves of the gnomes, snatched their imprisoned treasures, and poured them, in golden showers, into the lap of civilized humanity”—spends the last days of his life at Gold Flat, near Nevada City, working as a nighttime mine watchman and a daytime bookseller. Even in the high years of his invention, he never applied for a patent. From 1848 onward, James Wilson Marshall has been literally haunted by the fact of his being the discoverer of California gold. William Tecumseh Sherman will remember him as “a half-crazy man at best,” an impression that Marshall confirms across the years as he claims to consult with spirits, asking them where he might again find gold. Newcomers to California in midcentury believe that Marshall really does have some sort of divine intuition, and—to his bitter annoyance—follow him wherever he goes. With respect to further gold strikes, nowhere is where he goes. Drinking himself to heaven, he drips tobacco juice through his beard. It stains his shirt and dungarees. Looking so, he makes a visit home. From his family’s house, on Bridge Street in Lambertville, he goes up into the country toward Marshall’s Corner and the farmhouse where he was born, prospecting outcrops of New Jersey diabase, hoping to discover gold. He picks up rock samples. He carries them to a sister’s house and roasts them in the oven.
At the end of the twentieth century, the small farmhouse where he was born is still standing. Part fieldstone, part frame, it has long since been divided into three apartments, enveloped in a parklike shopping center called Pennytown. A boldly lettered sign on a screen door indirectly recalls Marshall’s compact with Sutter. It says, “Don’t Let the Cat Out.”
Beside I-80, Moores inserted a knife in the auriferous gravels and pried loose a few rounded stones. He carved them to demonstrate their softness, and said, “They are practically clay. They have weathered so much they could be in Georgia.”
In the nineteenth century, some of the nuggets found in the auriferous gravels were electrum—a natural pale-yellow alloy of gold and silver. Other nuggets were full of mothy cavities, where something had been eaten away—quite possibly silver. This was some of the first evidence that California enjoyed a coincidence of golds, for electrum was not characteristic of the hard-rock gold of the Sierra. The gravels had brought those nuggets from somewhere else. Rock soft enough to carve with a knife would disintegrate if it were tumbling in the bed of a stream; therefore, it had softened after it arrived. Because gold changes shape so easily, the mothy pitting of nuggets necessarily occurred after transport, too.
That the auriferous deposits were Eocene was affirmed by the fossil plants among them. The gravels themselves, with channel deposits six hundred feet deep and stones the size of basketballs, described the power of the river that brought them, the Himalayan loft of its headwaters. Fossils of subalpine Eocene vegetation have since been found in central Nevada.
“There is gold in the Carson Range, east of the Sierra, that is like the nuggets that were found in these gravels,” Moores said. “The source of some California gold is probably under Nevada now.”
If something as crazy-sounding as that had been said to miners in the eighteen-fifties, the miners in all likelihood would not have been surprised, for they were familiar with geologists, and geologists were not their heroes. In 1852, at Indian Bar, a miner remarked to a doctor’s wife, “I maintain that science is the blindest guide that one could have on a gold-finding expedition. Those men, who judge by the appearance of the soil, and depend upon geological calculations, are invariably disappointed, while the ignorant adventurer, who digs just for the sake of digging, is almost sure to be successful.” The doctor’s wife, Louisa Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe, is probably the most interesting writer who was on the scene in the early days of the gold rush. Indian Bar was close by Rich Bar, where the two Germans in the deep canyon rolled a boulder and found lump gold. The doctor and his wife became resident there in 1851. She wrote letters to a sister in Amherst, Massachusetts, which have been preserved in publication under her pseudonym, Dame Shirley. At times, she may be even more purple than the interior of the Rich Bar saloon, but when she speaks of “the make-shift ways which some people fancy essential to California life,” she is hitting for distance. She speaks of “red-shirted miners … reclining gracefully … in that transcendental state of intoxication, when a man is compelled to hold on to the earth for fear of falling off.” She speaks of “the Irishman’s famous down couch, which consisted of a single feather laid upon a rock.” And she has thoughts to add about geologists:
Wherever Geology has said that gold must be, there, perversely enough, it lies not; and wherever [geology] has declared that it could not be, there has it oftenest garnered up in miraculous profusion the yellow splendor of its virgin beauty. It is certainly very painful to a well-regulated mind to see the irreverent contempt, shown by this beautiful mineral, to the dictates of science; but what better can one expect from the “root of all evil”?
There were prospectors in the Sierra who wore over their hearts a device they called a gold magnet, explaining that in the presence of gold the magnet tingled and shocked. There were prospectors who carried forked hazelwood rods that were said to point to gold as if it were water. The miners had as much respect for them as they had for the geologists. Over their shoulders as they took off up the canyons the miners liked to say, “Gold is where you find it.” As early as 1849, the Sacramento Placer Times remarked:
The mines of California have baffled all science, and rendered the application of philosophy entirely nugatory. Bone and sinew philosophy, with a sprinkling of good luck, can alone render success certain. We have met with many geologists and p
ractical scientific men in the mines, and have invariably seen them beaten by unskilled men, soldiers and sailors, and the like.
All that notwithstanding, the legislature of the new State of California created in 1860 a state geological survey, and recruited the Yale-trained and already distinguished Josiah D. Whitney to be the state geologist. Nearly everybody imagined that Whitney would investigate and catalogue places in California where the earth could be turned for a profit. Instead, he gave them paleontology, historical geology, igneous petrology, stratigraphy, structure, tectonics. He gave them the minutest points of mineralogy, and he gave them the global setting. He gave them academic geology in the form that can least be turned into capital—the disciplines that lead to understanding of the history and composition of the planet. California fired him. They fired him in the modern sense that after a few years he was defunded. His name rests on the highest mountain in the Sierra Nevada.
By the erosive scenes at Iowa Hill, Poverty Hill, Forest Hill, North Bloomfield, Michigan Bluff, Gold Run, You Bet, Dutch Flat, Poker Flat, Downieville, and Smartville—the major Eocene-river deposits—Josiah Whitney was not appalled. He liked the hydraulic diggings. They flushed away the soft stuff and exposed solid rock, the better for geologists to see.