[4]For the relation of the Mormons and the Danites to the forty-niners and the emigrant trains going west, see the author's "The Book of Cowboys."
[4]For the relation of the Mormons and the Danites to the forty-niners and the emigrant trains going west, see the author's "The Book of Cowboys."
"You'll know the story o' Sutter's Mill, likely, Mr. Owens,"—Jim returned to the "Mr." in Clem's presence,—"but Clem, he don't know nothin' about it, an' he ought to be put wise if he's goin' to take a hand in this game.
"It all come about in queer fashion, a good deal like it did in Australia, as Mr. Owens was a-tellin' me a few days ago. The first signs o' gold was found on the Americanos River, which runs into the Sacramento. Found by accident, they was, too.
"There was a chap out them parts—an Indian-fighter—Cap'n Sutter by name. He owned a lot o' land an' used to run cattle in a small way, for the time I'm tellin' about was long afore the days o' the cowboys an' the ol' Texas-Drive trail.5This Sutter had a foreman called James W. Marshall, who, besides his reg'lar job o' handlin' cattle an' greasers, looked after the runnin' of a one-horse saw-mill on the Americanos. It was an over-shot water-wheel mill, an' jest roughly chucked together.
[5]For the history of the Texas trail and the winning of the West for the United States, see the author's "The Book of Cowboys."
[5]For the history of the Texas trail and the winning of the West for the United States, see the author's "The Book of Cowboys."
"By-'n'-by Marshall begin to notice that the ol' mill wasn't workin' any too good. A lot o' sand an' gravel had come down wi' the water, chokin' up the tail-race some. The run-off wouldn't get away fast enough an' churned up under the water-wheel, causin' a loss o' power.
"To get the tail-race clear an' to widen her outa bit, Marshall, he throws the wheel out o' gear, pulls up the gate o' the dam, an' lets the whole head o' water in the mill-pond go a-flyin'. That water hit into the tail-race like a hydraulic jet an' scooped her out clear, carryin' a mass o' sand an' gravel into the river below.
Sutter's Mill.
Sutter's Mill.Where Marshall discovered gold, January 19, 1848.
Sutter's Mill.
Where Marshall discovered gold, January 19, 1848.
The Rush to the Gold Mines.
The Rush to the Gold Mines.Scene in San Francisco in 1849.
The Rush to the Gold Mines.
Scene in San Francisco in 1849.
"Next day, that was January 19, 1848, Marshall goes down to the river below the tail-race to see how she's shapin' an' if the cut-out is big enough. He's walkin' along the bank when he notices something glitter. He looks again, an' sees what he thinks is a bit o' Spanish opal, not the real gem, Clem, but a soft stone they find out there which looks even prettier'n an opal, but wears off an' gets dull in no time. They sell 'em to greenhorns, still.
"Marshall don't worry none about that, but by-'n-by, seein' a lot more, as he thinks, he figures to pick up some, jest to show. Accordin' as he used to tell the tale, he didn't think it was worth the trouble, but spottin' one that looks different from the rest, he reaches down into the water an' fishes it out.
"It ain't no opal at all. It's a bit o' shiny white quartz wi' a line o' yellow runnin' through. That's what makes the glitter. He hunts aroundsome, rememberin' that he'd seen other bits shinin' yellow the same way, an' finds quite a few, all of 'em looking like scales o' pure gold. They was jest about the size an' thinness o' the scales that comes off a rattlesnake's skin after it's dry, an' for a while, Marshall figured they was some kind o' scale or horn, washed down thin by the water.
"In them times, the folks in Californy hadn't no idee o' minin'. It was still Spanish territory, for one thing, an', for another, there wasn't any minin' done. So Marshall wasn't thinkin' about gold. It was jest curiosity what made him hunt up some more o' those queer yellow scales.
"The more he found, the more puzzled he got. They was heavy; they bent like a bit o' metal, a thing a stone won't never do; they could be scratched with a pocket-knife; they didn't show no layers like horn does when it's old. The biggest bit he found weighed less'n a quarter of an ounce, an' this one was stickin' in the bank o' the tail-race, where the water had been washin' the earth away.
"He puts this last bit on a flat rock an' hammers it with a stone. It beats out flat quite easy. Marshall wasn't no fool, an' he knew therewasn't no yellow metal acted that way but gold or copper, an' native copper ain't that color.
"There was one o' the mill-hands wi' Marshall at the time, a chap called Peter Wimmer. He didn't know any more about gold'n Marshall did, but he'd heard said that every metal, savin' gold, gets black if it's boiled in strong lye. Marshall gets Wimmer to keep quiet by promisin' him a stake in whatever's found, an' tries the boilin' trick. The flakes o' metal stays put, an' shows nary a sign o' tarnishin'.
"By this time, Marshall was gettin' pretty sure that what he'd found was gold. He hadn't no notion of a gold mine, though, seein' he'd never heard of any. He reckoned that these flakes must be gold that had been buried by the Indians, long ago, an' had been washed down; from a grave, maybe, or some o' the treasure that the Spaniards had been huntin'.
"Jest the same, he was curious. He strolled away from the tail-race, idle-like, an' started huntin' promiscuous. He found specks o' gold all over. That settled him. He jumped on a horse an' rode down to Cap'n Sutter wi' the news.
"Sutter was a whole lot more excited thanMarshall was. He was educated an' knew the history o' Mexico. He knew the Indians in Californy had possessed gold in the time o' the first comin' o' the Spaniards, an' he reckoned that gold must ha' come from somewhere. There'd always been some talk o' gold around where the Spanish missions had started, and, jest three years afore, a Spanish don had sent some ore to Mexico, sayin' that there was gold an' silver a-plenty around, an' the government had better get busy an' develop it. But the Spaniards weren't havin' any. Ever since they got so badly fooled, a couple o' hundred years afore, in their hunt for the 'Golden Cities o' Cibola,'6they let Californy alone.
[6]For the gold-hunting expedition of the Spanish Conquistadores in North America—records of extraordinary heroism and adventure—see the author's "The Quest of the Western World." For the gold-stories of Ancient Mexico, see the author's "The Aztec-hunters."
[6]For the gold-hunting expedition of the Spanish Conquistadores in North America—records of extraordinary heroism and adventure—see the author's "The Quest of the Western World." For the gold-stories of Ancient Mexico, see the author's "The Aztec-hunters."
"Sutter didn't waste no time. He rode right back to the mill wi' the foreman. They didn't have to poke around long afore Sutter was plumb sure it was the real stuff. There was some of it in the Americanos, but the gold was even thicker in the dried-up creeks an' gulches that run into the river on both sides. With his penknife,Sutter pried out o' the rock-face a piece o' gold weighin' nigh two ounces.
"Some o' the mill-hands had got wise, too. Maybe Wimmer talked—though he said he hadn't. Maybe they just got a hunch, when they saw Sutter an' Marshall prospectin' around. They started huntin', too, but the flakes were small an' took a long time to find. None o' them knew enough to try washin' the sand, an' all they found didn't amount to much.
"Sutter took samples o' the gold to the fort at Monterey, where General Mason was in command. Mason was more interested in tryin' to keep the Apaches an' Comanches quiet than he was in fussin' about metals. He was a soldier, an' minin' wasn't his line. But he knew that the federal authorities at Washington ought to be notified.
"There weren't no post nor telegraph in them times—that was 'way afore the days o' the Pony Express,7even—an' Mason sent a special messenger. Politics were queer in Californy around that time. Spain claimed the territory, the United States claimed it, an' for a while—a month, maybe—Californy was a republic on herown. The messenger reached Washington, all right, an' his report hurried up the signin' o' the treaty which made Californy American. That happened jest six weeks after Marshall had picked up his first bit o' gold an' only two weeks after the messenger arrived. Word was sent to Mason to be sure an' keep law an' order, no matter what happened. It was a bit too late, then; goin' an' comin' from Washington took months.
[7]See the author's "The Boy with the U. S. Mail."
[7]See the author's "The Boy with the U. S. Mail."
"Things were happenin' out 'Frisco way. Geo. Bennett, who'd been workin' at the mill, left there about the middle o' February, takin' some flakes o' gold with him. When he got to 'Frisco, he met Isaac Humphrey, who'd worked on the Dahlonega strike, in Georgia, in 1830. Humphrey took jest one look at the stuff, an' said right away that it was gold.
"Bennett an' Humphrey hot-footed it back to the mill. They found it workin' jest as usual. Some o' the men had picked up more gold, but casual-like, after workin' hours. Marshall hadn't done any more prospectin'. Sutter was waitin' to hear from Mason.
"Humphrey, bein' a gold miner, panned up an' down the river, an' found plenty o' color. Hegot quite excited an' declared it was richer'n the Dahlonega field, which had been pretty good, though the surface diggin's had petered out fast."
"What do you mean by 'he panned up and down the river and found color?'" queried Clem.
Jim gave a short laugh of surprise.
"That's right," he said, "you don't know nothin' about prospectin', do you? I'll tell you. Pannin' is how a prospector gets gold. It sounds easy, but there's a trick to it, jest the same.
"A prospector's pan is just like an ordinary tin wash-pan, wi' slopin' sides, only it's smaller; about a foot across at the bottom, an' made of iron, not tin. Many a hundred men have got to be millionaires with nothin' but a pick, a shovel, an' a pan.
"Supposing now, you're at the gold diggin's. You fill your pan, near full, with sand or with gravel or earth, or whatever stuff you think may have a little gold mixed up with it—"
"Can't you see the gold, then?" queried Clem.
"Not often, you can't. It don't lie around the ground like twenty-dollar gold-pieces! Someo' the richest placers ever found have the gold ground down so fine that it ain't much bigger'n grains o' dust.
"Well, havin' nigh filled the pan, like I said, you take it to the river, an' squattin' down, you hold it jest below the surface o' the water, one side a trifle higher 'n the other, so the water jest flows continual over the lower lip o' the pan. Then you give it a sort of rockin' an' whirlin' motion, so,"—he illustrated with his hands, Owens smilingly doing the same, "lettin' the lighter mud flow out over the top.
"You keep on doin' that, without stoppin', for ten minutes or more. By the end o' that time, you're rockin' pretty hard, for the heavier stuff has got to be flicked out; but you've got to mind out, for if you go too hard, the gold—if there is any—will go out, too.
"Then you stop, pick out any pebbles in the bottom, lookin' at 'em hard—for they might show color—an' rock an' whirl the pan some more. If you've done it right, when you're through, there isn't more'n a handful o' sand an' grit at the bottom. You look at that as closely as you know how, an' if here an' there's a little speck o' yellow, you've found color. That's gold. Youspread that handful out in the sun to dry an' blow away the lighter part. What's left is gold."
The Prospector of To-Day.
The Prospector of To-Day.Gold-bearing stream of Western Canada being panned for dust.Courtesy of the Grand Trunk Railway.
The Prospector of To-Day.
Gold-bearing stream of Western Canada being panned for dust.
Courtesy of the Grand Trunk Railway.
Flume at the Melones Mine.
Flume at the Melones Mine.To carry 600 miner's inches of water from the Stanislaus River to the 120-stamp mill.
Flume at the Melones Mine.
To carry 600 miner's inches of water from the Stanislaus River to the 120-stamp mill.
"Always supposing that there was some gold there to start with," put in Owens. "How many times have you panned, Jim, without finding any color?"
"Millions, I reckon! I panned every day an' all day, once, for two years, without gettin' enough gold dust to fill a pipe-bowl, an' then I got a double-handful in half a day. In general, you're doin' all right if you can get out of each pan enough dust to cover a finger-nail. So now you know what pannin' is, Clem."
"It's not such a cinch, at that!" the young fellow commented.
"But you may strike it rich any day, any hour, any minute!" Jim exclaimed, the fever of search in his eyes. "When Humphrey got up to Sutter's Mill, the first man to know anything about gold-washin' that got there, he was takin' out a thousand dollars a day, easy, for a month or more. The placers were rich."
"A 'placer,' Clem," Owens interrupted to explain, "is a deposit where there is gold mixed with sand, or gravel or mud. It is always a deposit which has been washed down by water, either a river which is actually running, or which is found in a dry bed where a river used to run. Mining people call it an 'alluvial or flood deposit.' Most of the gold-strikes have been found in this way. Go ahead, Jim."
"Right about the time that Humphrey was prospectin' an' doin' handsomely, an Indian, who had worked on placers in Lower California, told another o' the mill-hands how to get hold o' the dust. Besides that, a Kentuckian, who'd been spyin' on Marshall an' Sutter, had noticed that they'd found gold not only in the tail-race, but up the creeks. Both of 'em went down to 'Frisco.
"It was interestin', but nobody got excited. Gold strikes weren't known yet. There'd only been two gold rushes in the United States afore, neither of 'em big ones.
"The first was in North Carolina. A young chap, Conrad Reed, was shootin' fish with a bow and arrow in Meadow Creek. He saw in the water a good-sized stone with a yellow gleam. Pickin' it up, he found it heavy—seventeen pounds it weighed—an' he reckoned it was some kind o' metal, but he didn't think o' gold. Thatwas in 1799. The stone was used to prop open a stable door for a couple o' years.
"One day, runnin' short o' groceries an' bein' shy o' ready cash, Reed thought he'd go into Fayetteville an' see if, maybe, he could raise a few dollars on the stone, as a curiosity. He took it to a jeweler, who said he thought there might be gold in it, an' told the young fellow to come back in the afternoon.
"When Reed came back, the jeweler showed him a thin wire o' gold, about as long as a lead pencil, an' said that was all the gold in the chunk. He offered Reed $3.50 for the gold an' Reed took it. How much the jeweler kept for himself, no one can't say.
"That started a little local talk, an' one or two men begun prospectin' in a shiftless sort o' way. They found nothin'. In 1813, some placers were found an' there was a mild rush, but it died right out. There was gold there, sure enough, but scattered so's a man didn't earn more'n a day's wages at washin'. Jest the same, all the gold in the United States came from North Carolina for twenty years after that, more'n a hundred thousand dollars' worth bein' sent tothe Mint. But that's durn little, when you come to look at it, less'n fourteen dollars a day. An' that's not much for a bunch o' men!"
"No," admitted Owens, "you couldn't start a gold rush on that. And the second strike, Jim?"
"That was the Georgia deposits, at Dahlonega, where Humphrey came from. They're workin' yet, though small potatoes beside Californy an' Colorado.
"Californy was jest about uninhabited, then. There was only fifteen thousand folks in the whole durn State in 1848. Over a hundred thousand more came in the two years followin'. O' that lot, ninety per cent. was prospectors an' the rest was sharks, livin' off 'em. At the time o' the strike, 'Frisco didn't boast a hundred houses wi' white folks in them, an' they didn't know nothin' about Georgia an' Carolina gold.
"On May 8th, though, one o' the mill-hands come down from Sutter's Mill. He'd quit work to try gold-findin' on his own, an' takin' a tip from Humphrey, he'd washed out 23 ounces in four days. A 'Frisco man paid him $500 for his dust, cash down. That was good earnin's for four days.
"Sudden, the fever hit! The news got overthe little town like a prairie fire durin' a dry spell. By night, half the town was talkin' gold; next mornin', the other half. Nine out o' every ten men quit work. A pick an' shovel an' a tin pan was worth a hundred dollars before night. One man paid a thousand dollars for an outfit, includin' a tent an' a month's grub. He was found dead half-way to the diggings, murdered for his outfit.
"The more excited ones an' those with the least money an' sense, started right off on foot, though it was all of a hundred an' fifty miles to Sutter's Mill, an' no trail, sixty o' these miles across a desert without water. No one ever did know how many o' that bunch ended up by feedin' the turkey buzzards.
"On the 14th an' 15th, a whole fleet o' launches an' small boats started out across San Francisco Sound an' Pablo Bay an' up the Sacramento River, every boat loaded to the gunwales. They said there was 2,000 men on the way.
"That wasn't jest a rush, it was a stampede. Not ten men in the entire crowd knew the first durn thing about prospectin'. They had some fool idee that pannin' gold was like pickin' flowers, all you had to do was to find it. Any one whatknew better could ha' told 'em, but there wasn't any one to tell 'em, an' likely, they wouldn't ha' listened if he had. What's the use o' talkin' to a crazy man? An' a gold-rush is a bunch o' lunatics. I know! I've been that way myself, more'n once.
"Out Salt Lake City way, the winter had been bad. We Mormons had gone to Utah to avoid bein' citizens o' the United States, an' the government had took in Utah as soon as we made it worth takin'. My grand-pap an' my father were sore at that, an' they decided to start off with a party for Californy, which was still Spanish.
"Right around the 1st o' May, they reached the Sacramento River an' heard about gold bein' found. They took it as a sign that Providence was protectin' 'em, an' settled right down there to pan out the stream. Travelin', as the Mormons always did, with a proper leader, they pitched an organized camp. Trained to the last notch by their wanderin's in the wilderness, there wasn't a tenderfoot or an idle man in the bunch, an', workin' steadily, they begun to clean up pretty good.
"Jest a month later come the first wave o' the rush from 'Frisco. They struck the placers, theirmouths fairly waterin' for gold, only to find the Mormons there already. That was a bit too much! After all their trouble an' misery, all the expense, all the deaths, they come to find all the claims along the strike staked out by Mormons.
"Durin' this time, Californy had been taken over by the United States. The 'Frisco bunch knew they'd be protected by law for anything they did against the Mormons, an', after a short pow-wow, they tried to rush the camp.
"But my grand-pap, an' some more o' the leaders, who were right handy with their rifles, were standin' at the ready. They'd fought their way across the plains, when the redskins were swarmin', an' they weren't the kind to take back water before a crowd o' tenderfeet. The 'Frisco men, city chaps a lot o' them, begun to waver, an' asked a parley.
"The Mormon leader, he told 'em, cold, what they'd get if they come any farther, an' hinted, pretty broad, that there was more cold lead around those diggin's than there was gold. But he told 'em, too, that there was a lot o' the other placers around wi' no one washin' 'em. The others grumbled but got out. Luckily, there was gold enough for all, at first. Later on, there wasa sure-enough fight over a sluice, and the bullets went thick. The Mormons knew how to shoot, an' there was fifty o' the Gentiles dead when they broke back. Our folks were let alone on the Sacramento, after that.
"Durin' this month, John Bidwell struck it rich on the Feather River, 75 miles away from Sutter's Mill, and Pearson B. Reading on the Clear River, 100 miles further on. The news scattered the 'Frisco crowd, many a man leavin' a good claim in hopes to find a better. Others went prospectin' on their own. By the end o' the year, along the whole western slope o' the Sierra Nevada, from Pitt River to the Tuolumne, there wasn't a stream or a creek or a dry ravine that didn't have some one prospectin' or pannin' on it.
"Most o' those that got on to the diggin's in the first two months made money an' made it fast. A few struck bonanzas and took out a thousand dollars a day. Quite a lot got good pickin's an' cleaned up at the rate of a hundred a day. The rest were doin' good if they cleaned up twenty, an' that was jest about enough to live on, at minin'-camp prices. I've seen potatoes sell at five dollars apiece to be eaten raw, when the scurvywas ragin', an' three men were killed in a fight over the buyin' of a fresh cabbage.
"Those was tough times, even for the first lot that come from 'Frisco. There was no sort o' law an' order in the camps, no sanitation an' no doctors. Typhoid an' dysentery got a good hold by the end o' June. You could get the reek o' fever an' disease a mile away.
"Men too sick to walk crawled out to their claims an' died there, scary lest some claim-jumper should seize their claims. Hope stuck with 'em to the last. Scores fell dead into the stream, wi' the pan still in their hands. One time, when they come to carry a dead man from beside his pan, that he hadn't time to clean up afore death took him, there was the first color in it that had been found on the claim. It brought in a pile o' money later.
"Later, when the real forty-niners came, men o' red blood, vigilance committees were organized an' the camps got sort o' human. But at the start, it was ugly. If a man didn't clean up quick, he starved. If he did, somebody jumped his claim, or put a bullet in him. If the body of a miner was found floatin', it was called accidental death,even if his head was blown off, for, the sayin' used to go, 'A miner ought to carry enough gold dust on him to sink.' Scores, aye, hundreds, died o' gun-play.
"About the fine breed o' men that come later, the forty-niners that crossed the whole plains o' the West from Missouri to Santa Fé an' beyond, men that brought their women an' children in long lines o' prairie schooners, keepin' scouts out ahead an' one each side, fightin' famine, thirst an' redskins all the way, you won't want me to tell you. Every American knows their story.
"But every one don't know what them trains o' gold-seekers looked like, when they reached the diggin's! My father's told me, though.
"He's seen 'em reach the Sacramento, half-scalped an' with wounds that never healed. He's seen swingin' at their saddles the scalp-locks o' Indians they'd scalped theirselves. He's seen women come in with nary one o' their men-folk left alive. He seen 'em come in crazy, never to be sane again, after the horrors o' that trail. He's seen a man come in safe an' untouched, after wheelin' a wheelbarrow nigh three thousand miles. He's seen seven men an' nine women getto the Sierras out of a party of 118, leaving 102 dead on the road.
The Coming of the Forty-Niners.
The Coming of the Forty-Niners.
The Coming of the Forty-Niners.
David Egelston.
David Egelston.A Forty-Niner, and the Discoverer of Gold Hill.
David Egelston.
A Forty-Niner, and the Discoverer of Gold Hill.
"I've heard tell, an' I believe it, that across the desert stretch a man could ha' walked for forty miles an' put his foot on a bone at every step. An' o' those who did reach, most o' them were so weak that camp fever an' dysentery took 'em off like flies. A good half died at the diggin's before they ever found a bit o' gold.
"How many o' the forty-niners died at sea? There's no tellin'. Ships set out from all corners o' the globe. There was a wild rush from England. That meant goin' round the Horn, an' there weren't many steamships, then. Sailin'-ships, so rotten that their owners were glad to get rid of 'em, were sold to forty-niners at fancy prices. In one week, eighteen ships sailed from England to go round the Horn to Californy an' seven arrived. The gold o' Sutter's Mill called many a good man to leave his bones on the ocean bottom.
"But it wasn't all bad luck an' dyin'. Lots o' the diggers struck it rich an' spent it quick. Gamblin' an' drinkin' an' work—that's all there was to a minin' camp in them days. Spendin'freely give a man a minute's glory. Treatin' the crowd was the only way to be popular. An', in a minin' camp, where there's no women to live with, no children to think of, no homes to go to, what is there but the saloon, an' what's the use o' the saloon without friends! A bag o' gold-dust was enough for a spree.
"Gold-diggin' don't go to make a man careful. It's always to-morrow that's goin' to be the lucky day. What's the use o' savin' ten dollars when a stroke o' the pick or a swirl o' the pan may suddenly give a man a thousand? So they thought. One miner found a pocket that netted him $60,000 in two weeks, an' when he sobered up, he hadn't six dollars' worth o' dust left.
"There was some that stuck to their earnin's, just the same, but they was either quick with a gun or slow wi' their tongues. Six brothers come out from England, none o' them ever havin' roughed it before, but they stuck together an' stayed sober. They were let alone, because to touch one meant to fight six. They went back to England, at the end o' the first season, with a million dollars between 'em.
"One man, who started out from 'Frisco wi' a drove of a hundred hogs, figurin' on sellin' 'emin the minin' camps for fresh meat, reached Feather River wi' five. But he sold those five for more'n twice as much as he'd paid for the hundred. An' that was only the beginnin'! On the way, his hogs rootin' in the ground had uncovered two pockets. He covered the places an' marked 'em wi' crosses, so's folks should think they was graves. On his way back, he took $5,000 out o' one pocket an' $10,000 out o' the other. An' then some folks try to make out that there ain't no such thing as luck!"
"But is it all so chancy as that?" queried Clem. "Surely if a chap knew in what sort of ground or near what sort of rock gold was generally found, he'd have some idea where to look."
"Sure he would," agreed Jim, "but gold goes where it durn pleases, an' that's the only rule I know. O' course, every prospector has his own idees, same as he has for playin' poker, but he don't win any quicker because o' that. Leastways, not so far as I've seen.
"As for judgin' by the rock an' the color o' the soil, why, you can take your pick. Take San Diego County, Californy, where I've worked, the gold lies in schist, sometimes blue, green, or grey. In the Homestake, South Dakota, red looks good,a sort o' rotten quartz stained with iron. Black flint's a good sign in Colorado. Snow-white quartz is often lucky. Purple porphyry sometimes has veins that work up rich. An' I've seen gold come out o' pink sandstone, yellow sandstone, all shades o' granite, an' even coal!"
Clem turned an incredulous glance at Owens, but the mine-owner nodded agreement.
"Jim's right," he said, "color isn't any clue. Gold can be found in any kind of rock. So far as that goes, it shows up in strata of any geological age. There's gold everywhere. There isn't a range of hills in any country of the world which may not contain gold. There isn't a bed of sand or gravel that may not be auriferous. Even the sea beach, in places, has yielded fortunes. For that matter, there's gold in every bucket of water you dip up from the sea.
"But there's not much of it. Geologists have figured that there's about one cent's worth of gold to every ton of rock in the earth's crust, but it would take fourteen dollars a ton to handle it. There's about a hundredth of a cent's worth of gold in a ton of sea water, and it would cost about ten dollars a ton to get it out. Not much chance of getting rich that way, is there?"
"I should say not," declared Clem, with decision.
"But, as Jim has been pointing out, gold isn't scattered evenly all through the earth. In some places, it's moderately plentiful, in others it's scarce or entirely absent. Prospecting for gold, Clem, doesn't mean looking for a place where there is gold, but looking for a place where the proportion of gold to the soil or to the rock is high enough to give a profit in the working of it.
"It isn't always the place where the gold is most plentiful that gives the greatest profit, either. A low-grade ore, that is a rock containing only a small proportion of gold, may be worth a great deal if it is near the surface, if the rock is easily crushed, if it is near water-power, and if transportation is not too difficult.
"A high-grade ore, in which there is a large proportion of gold, may be worth a good deal less, if it is more difficult to work and less easy of access. The richest gold-field in the world, that of the Rand, in South Africa, which gives one-third of the total gold output of the world, is of an ore so poor that a forty-niner would have turned up his nose at it, and the machinery, even of thirty years ago, could have done nothing withit. Nearly all the big mines of to-day are winning wealth out of low-grade ore.
"Some of these days, Clem, I'll explain the geology of gold to you, and show you how it is that the mines which give the richest specimens are sometimes the poorest mines to work. But I'm breaking into Jim's story."
"I was jest a-sayin'," continued Jim, who had listened with impatience to Owens' explanation, "that them as says there ain't no luck in minin' ain't never done no minin'. I've been showin' you how some men got rich in a minute an' hundreds got nothin'.
"But there was some fields that was a frost, right from the start. They promised big an' give big for the first scratch or two. Then—nothin'! Kern River was one o' those an' Father got bit.
"My grand-pap, he'd gone back to Utah to take command of a band o' 'Destroyin' Angels', as the Gentiles called the Danites, leavin' Father to go on pannin' on the Sacramento. The claims was peterin' out fast, but there was good day's wages to be got, still.
"Then, in 1855, come the news o' the Kern River strike. If folk had gone crazy in forty-nine, they got crazier still this time. There wasall the fame o' the last strike to lure 'em on. The same ol' story o' desert trails without water, o' minin' camps that were death-traps, was repeated, only ten times worse. Twenty thousand started in the same week. The last few miles was a trail o' blood. Men stabbed their friends in the back to get to the diggin's first. The stakin' o' claims was done, six-shooter in hand.
"And, o' the twenty thousand, there wasn't twenty that cleaned up rich. My father, he wasn't one o' the twenty. He prospected, up an' down, until he'd spent the last ounce o' gold-dust he'd got from five years' work, an' all but starved to death on his way across the desert, headin' for Utah.
"When he got into Nevada, he didn't have a pound o' flour left. He didn't have nothin' left, nothin' but his pick an' shovel an' pan. All the rest was gone. He didn't have no trade but prospectin'. Well enough he knew he'd leave his bones on the trail if he tried to foot it to Salt Lake City.
"He'd heard about gold being found on the Carson River, in Nevada, in 1850, by Prouse Kelly and John Orr, an' he knew that they'd gone back an' done well. Several other small placers hadbeen found, noways rich, but still enough to keep a busy man goin'. He'd learned from his Kern River experience that a man did better, stickin' to a small claim'n tryin' for the big prizes, an' he made for the small placers o' the Carson River. A store-keeper grub-staked him, to start with, an' in a month or two, he was clear.
"Next year, that was '56, his pard struck what looked like a silver vein, an' started off to the city wi' some samples. Father, he stuck by the gold. That's where he lost out. He prospected in Six Mile Cañon an' found little color—his bad luck again, for, in '57, two prospectors made a rich strike less'n a quarter of a mile away from where he'd been pannin'. They found signs o' silver, too, but chucked the stuff aside. Father plugged along, an' at last struck a little pocket in a creek off the Carson. A month's work gave him near a thousand dollars' worth o' dust, an' he reckoned he'd go back to Salt Lake City. He'd been away eight years.
"Grand-pap was still alive an' told Father to stay home an' go farmin'. But it didn't go. The prospectin' bug had hit Father too hard. In the spring o' '59 he started back for the Carson Riveragain, an' Mother come along. She reckoned she might never see him again, if she didn't.
"That summer, there was three folks on the claim. Another pard had come, a little one, what had for his first toy a nugget o' gold tied on a bit o' string. I was born on a minin' claim, for that little pard was—me!"
"You certainly started young enough in the prospecting game," said Owens, when Jim told of his birth in a mining camp, "and have you been at it all your life?"
"Ever since I was big enough to twirl a pan or rock a cradle!"
"How do you mean rock a cradle?" queried Clem. "I thought you were in the cradle!"
"Not that kind, boy," Jim answered, "what I'm meanin' is a miner's cradle, or a rocker, as some calls it. I gradooated from one to t'other."
"What's a miner's cradle, then?"
"It's a scheme to make pannin' easier. Pannin' is durn hard work, Clem. You're squattin' on your hams beside a river all the day long, you got to hold a pan full o' earth an' water at arm's length an' down at an angle what nigh tears your arms out o' their sockets, an' then keep revolvin' the mixture with a circular twistthat wrenches the muscles somethin' cruel. I've seen big men, tough uns, too, fair cryin' from the pain, at first.
"Not only that, but you got to work the sodden lumps o' dirt soft wi' your fingers, so's the grit gets right into the skin. Your hands are wet nigh all the time. The grit an' the constant washin' o' the water, in all weathers, cracks the skin all over, so's it's bleedin' most o' the time. You got to have hands like a bit o' rawhide to stand it.
"The cradle does the work quicker'n' easier, but it takes three men to work it right. It looks like a child's cradle from the outside, though most o' them I've seen was made pretty rough. About six inches from the top there's a drawer, or sometimes jest a tray, with a bottom o' iron, punched wi' holes o' different sizes, accordin' to the kind o' dirt you're workin' in. If your pannin' out don't show no big grains o' gold-dust, why, you keep the holes o' the cradle small, otherwise, you got to have 'em bigger. Below that drawer is another one, slopin' like. It hasn't got no holes. It has cross-bars or cleats, what we call 'riffles,' to keep the gold from washin' away.
"One man digs up the pay dirt an' chucks it in at the top o' the cradle. Another dips upbucket after bucket o' water, continuous, an' sloshes it in; it's his job, too, to break up the soft lumps an' keep stirrin' the pasty mess, an' to keep the cradle full o' water. The third man goes rock, rockin', without stoppin', hours at a time. Mostly, the pardners spell each other off."
"But I should think a good deal of gold would be washed away by that system," objected Clem, "surely the rocking must dash some of it over the riffles."
"Some does go," Jim agreed, "but a gang can handle so much more pay dirt in a day that it more'n makes up. Three men with a cradle can handle twice as much dirt as the three men workin' separately would, each with a pan. Team work pays, in minin'—if you can trust your pardners.
"Just about the time I was born, Father made pardners with five other prospectors, all pannin' on the Carson. Their claims were all in a string, one after the other, so they figures on makin' a sluice. That's jest a long trough. In richer an' more settled camps they're made of iron, length after length, all ready to be fixed together like a stove-pipe, but on the Carson, they was jest hollowed-out logs.
"Sluices was always a foot deep, a foot an' a half wide, an' as long as could be made, slopin' slightly, so the water wouldn't run too fast or too slow, an' wi' riffles every few inches all along. The six claims I'm tellin' about give a chance for a sluice over a hundred foot long. To save the trouble o' liftin' water up in a pail, or pumpin' it, Father made a sort o' small flume, leadin' from the river higher up right into the sluice, so's the water would run continuous.
"Bein' there was six o' them, the pardners worked three shifts, eight hours each. One man dug the dirt, wheeled it in a barrow to the head o' the sluice an' dumped it on a wooden platform. The other shoveled it into the sluice, stirred it up, an' broke up the lumps when they got pasty. Eight hours o' that was a day's work, I'm tellin'! Mother, she cooked an' washed for all six men, aside lookin' after me. Wi' meals to be got for all three shifts, she was kep' busy.
"The sluice didn't stop runnin', day nor night, for a month at a stretch. Then the water in the flume was turned off, the sluice, riffles an' platform were scraped clean wi' knives, an' all six pardners panned the scrapin's. That was the clean-up. It was divided by weight o' dust intoseven equal parts, Mother gettin' a man's share."
"Didn't they use any mercury at all on the Carson?" queried Owens.
"After a bit, our gang did. Not until each man had a bag o' dust set aside, big enough to buy a few weeks' grub, though. They'd all got badly bit in Californy, an' quicksilver cost a lot o' money in them days."
"What's the quicksilver for?" queried Clem.
"To catch the gold. If you spread it on the riffles it seems to grab a hold o' 'color' like glue, an', what's more, nothin' but gold'll stick to it."
"Why is that?"
"I don't know," Jim answered, a bit irritably, "it does, that's all."
Owens interposed.
"You can't blame Jim for not knowing why, Clem," he said. "So far as that goes, I don't believe any chemist in the world can tell you exactly why quicksilver catches gold. It does, though, sure enough. But I can show you how it does it, in a way.
"You know that if iron is exposed to damp air, it turns red with rust? That is due to the chumminess or the affinity of iron with oxygen. You know if silver is exposed to city air, where theburning of coal in furnaces and fireplaces sends a sulphurous smoke into the air, it turns black? That's due to the fact that silver is a natural chum of sulphur. Chemically speaking, they make compounds easily.
"It's the same way with mercury, or, as it is generally called, quicksilver. Gold and quicksilver are chums, and the minute they get together they join to form a mixture which is called an amalgam. That's one of the great discoveries of the age. Gold-mining has taken a big jump forward since that was found out.
"You can see yourself how that would work. Whether with a pan, a cradle, or a sluice, the only thing that enables a miner to separate the gold from the worthless dirt is that the gold is smaller and heavier. But suppose the gold dust is so fine as to be invisible, it will be so light as to wash away easily; if it is in fine flakes, the flakes will almost float. All that light gold would be lost in the dirt that flows out of the bottom of the sluice, the tailings, as they are called.
"In the days that Jim is describing, two-thirds of the gold was lost that way. Every one, absolutely every single one of the forty-niners would have made a fortune, if the chemistry of gold hadbeen as far advanced then as it is to-day. Even now, men are working over with profit the tailings that the forty-niners threw away.
"Suppose, now, you make your sluice, cover the bottom of it and the riffles with copper plates to hold the quicksilver better, and then cover your copper with quicksilver. What happens when the dirt and water come flowing down the sluice? The riffles will catch your heavy gold, just as well as before, and the quicksilver will catch a lot of the light gold that used to escape. You've got your gold in the riffles, then, and you've got a mixture of gold and quicksilver which has formed an amalgam.
"Now, the mixture has to be made to give back that gold. First of all it is pressed through canvas or buckskin in order to get rid of the liquid quicksilver, which will pass through the weave of the first and the pores of the second, leaving inside only such of it as has firmly allied itself with the gold to form the amalgam.
"The next thing to do is to put this amalgam into a retort, out of which leads a long pipe, and to subject this retort to intense heat. Quicksilver is vaporized at a comparatively low temperature—for a metal. It is driven from theamalgam in the form of vapor, much as water may be driven off in steam. The quicksilver vapor passes along this long pipe, which leads to several coils placed in a tank of running cold water. The cold chills the vapor, condensing it into the liquid state again, and the quicksilver runs out of the end of the pipe, ready for use once more. The pure gold is left.
"But, even with the use of quicksilver on the sluice there was still 40 per cent. of the gold that got away. For many years there was no practical way of recovering this loss, and the chemists of the world tore their hair in despair. What was needed was to find some other chum of gold, even more affectionate than mercury. The chemists found this new friend, at last, in cyanide, which is a salt of prussic acid. Cyanide, Clem, is an arrant flirt, as I'll show you, in a minute.
"Nowadays, the tailings, after passing over the long sluice or flume, and after having dropped the heavy gold in the riffles and given some of the light gold to the quicksilver, are led to a huge churn. There the earth and water are pounded together into a sort of slime. A wheel lifts this slime into a movable chute from which it is poured into a series of vats or tanks. These tanks contain cyanide, which has already allied itself with a chum—potassium.
"But cyanide likes gold even better than it does potassium, and, as soon as the slime strikes the vat, the cyanide lets go the potassium and clings to the gold. Cyanide of gold is formed. So far, so good. But what the miner wants is pure gold.
"The cyanide is pumped up out of those tanks into another chute, which pours it into a second lot of tanks, fastened to the side of which are large bundles of zinc shavings. The cyanide liked the gold better than the potassium, but it has the bad taste to prefer zinc even to gold. It releases the gold and flies to the embrace of the zinc. The gold, suddenly deserted of the friendship of the cyanide, powders down to the bottom of the tank, in absolutely pure form, ready to be melted down into bars. By other processes, which I won't bother you by describing now, the zinc is released from the cyanide, and the cyanide is led to its old friend the potassium, ready to begin work anew. So, you see, nothing is wasted.
"This process, and this only, has made the astounding wealth of South Africa, for, as I told you, the reefs there are of very low-grade ore, solow that Jim, here, would have turned up his nose at it. The modern ability of chemists to get out the tiniest particle of gold that lies in the most stubborn rock has made the Rand a richer region than a prospector's wildest dream."
"If I'd known all that, forty years ago, I'd be a rich man now," said Jim, regretfully.
"You'd have been a millionaire, ten times over," Owens agreed, "but, since it hadn't been found out, you couldn't have known it. But did you always stick to gold, Jim? That Carson River country has got more silver in it than it has gold."
"Don't I know it? 'Ain't it been rubbed into me, good an' hard? Father wasn't a cussin' man, noways, but he couldn't keep his tongue in order like a man should, when he got to talkin' about silver. He threw away any amount o' high-grade silver ore, while huntin' for gold. The richest silver mine in the whole world, I reckon, was found less'n a hundred yards from where he'd been pannin'.
"It was the same ol' story—he didn't know enough! Workin' hard may bring a man some money, but havin' savvy will bring him a lot more.
"Right where Father was workin', he washavin' all sorts o' trouble wi' a heavy black sand that kep' on fillin' up the riffles like it was gold. He shoveled away cubic yards of it! An' do you know what that was? That dirty black sand was nigh pure silver, an' Father was pannin' less'n quarter of a mile away from the richest section in all Nevada. He was campin' right on the Comstock Lode! I reckon you've heard o' that, Mr. Owens!"
"Every mining man has heard of the Comstock," the mine-owner replied. "Personally, I don't know a great deal about silver, although the Broken Hill mine, New South Wales, which is nearly as rich as the great Nevada deposit, is located not far from my home. I went straight from gold to coal. So I never did hear the real story of the Comstock. But you ought to know about it, Jim. Was it found by accident, too?"
"Rank good luck an' rotten bad luck mixed," Jim answered. "Do I know that story! The first week's pay I ever drew was on the Comstock. An' I was born, as I told you, near enough to throw a stone right on to the Comstock outcrop. This was how it begun!
"There was two prospectors, Patrick McLaughlin an' Peter O'Riley, Irishmen both, whathad been pannin' gold on Gold Cañon, where, I told you, Father had been. Luck was poor. Grub was hard to get. The water o' the Carson had a strong taste, an' wasn't none too healthy. So the two pardners started diggin' a water-hole down in the gulch, near where they was workin'. What come up out o' the hole was a yellow sand, all mixed up with bits o' quartz an' a crumblin' black rock, much the same as the black sand Father'd been worried with.