working it out. I knew well where they were, but no one thought of questioning me on the subject, for I was looked upon as a sort of amateur gold-hunter, very much given to splitting rocks and digging in unproductive places; and, indeed, this was not far from the truth, for my main object was information, and a specimen of wild mountain life. "But to return to the little Dutchman. All knew him to be a shrewd goldhunter, and determined to find him before he should exhaust his discovery. No child lost in the woods ever awakened half the concern: some started in this direction, others in that, till all the cardinal points in the heaven, and all glens between, had men travelling towards them. The most curious feature in this business is, that out of a regiment of gold-hunters, where the utmost apparent confusion prevails, the absence of two men should be noticed. But the motions of every man are watched. Even when he gathers up his traps, takes formal leave, and is professedly bound home, he is tracked for leagues. No disguise can avail him; the most successful war-stratagem would fail here. "FRIDAY, OCT. 27. I have just returned from another ravine, five miles distant, where there are eighty or a hundred gold-diggers. They are mostly Sonoranians, and, like all their countrymen, passionately devoted to gambling. They were playing at monté; the keeper of the bank was a woman, and herself a Sonoranian. There was no coin on the table; the bank consisted of a pile of gold, weighing, perhaps, a hundred pounds; and each of the players laid down his ounce or pound, as his means or courage permitted. The woman, on the whole, appeared to be the winner, though one man, in the course of half an hour, took ten pounds from her yellow pile. But such a loss was felt only for the moment, and only had the effect to stimulate others to lose what little they had left. A Sonóranian digs out gold simply and solely that he may have the wherewithal for gambling. This is the rallying thought which wakes with him in the morning, which accompanies him through the day, and which floats through his dreams at night. For this he labors, and cheerfully denies himself every comfort. All this is the result of habit. A Mussulman looks upon gambling as a species of larceny, as a crime which deserves the bastinado. I saw a Turkish cadi at Smyrna sentence a man to thirty-nine lashes for having, as he termed it, swindled another out of fifty dollars at faro. Give me a Turk where there is a rogue to be caught or a crime to be punished. The flashings of the sword of justice follow the crime as light the shark in a phosphoric sea. "SATURDAY, OCT. 28. A portion of the party that went in quest of the little Dutchman have found him, and helped him to dig out his new deposit-a sort of assistance for which he can feel no very profound obligation. It was much like that rendered by Prince Hal in the division of the spoils secured by the knight of sack at Gad's hill. A successful gold-hunter is like the leader of hounds in the chase-the whole pack comes sweeping after, and are sure to be in at the death. No doubling hill, or covert, or stream throws them upon a false scent. I advise all fox-hunters to come here and train their hounds, and throw away their horns. Even his Grace of Wellington, who is still so hotly keen in the chase, that the snows of eighty winters fall from his locks unperceived, might catch some valuable hints in the gold mines of California. "MONDAY, OCT. 30. I encountered to-day, in a ravine some three miles distant, among the gold-washers, a woman from San José. She was at work with a large wooden bowl, by the side of a stream. I asked her how long she had been there, and how much gold she averaged a day, She replied, "Three weeks and an ounce. Her reply reminded me of an anecdote of the late Judge Bwho met a girl returning from the market, and asked her, "How deep did you find the stream? what did you get for your butter?" "Up to the knee and nine-pence," was the reply. Ah! said the judge to himself; she is the girl for me-no words lost there: turned back, proposed, was accepted, and married the next week; and a more happy couple the conjugal bonds never united: the nuptial lamp never waned; its ray was steady and clear to the last. Ye who paddle off and on for seven years, and are at last perhaps capsized, take a lesson of the judge. That "up to the knee and nine-pence" is worth all the rose letters and melancholy rhymes ever penned. 1 1 "TUESDAY, OCT. 31. I have collected, since my arrival in the mines, several singular and beautiful specimens of the gold. One of the pieces resembles a pendulous ear-drop, and must have assumed that shape when the metal was in a state of fusion. That all the gold here has once been in that state is sufficiently evident from the forms in which it is found. I have a specimen, weighing several ounces, in which the characteristics of the slate rock are as palpable as if they had been engraved. I have another specimen in which a clear crystal of quartz is set, with a finish of execution which no jeweller can rival. I have another specimen still, where the gold gleams up, in the shape of buckshot, from a basis of sandstone; and another still, where it has taken the form of a paper-folder, and may be used to cut the leaves of a book which have escaped the knife of the binder. A most interesting cabinet of curiosities which the gold might be gathered from the variety of combinations and for Dinet of curiosities in these mines has assumed. Nature never indulged in fancies more elegant and whimsical. If these are the works of the volcano, then jewellers, instead of looking to the laboratories of Paris or Amsterdam for models, should come and seat themselves by the side of these craters. Here are laboratories which no human power has constructed, and models which no human skill can rival. "WEDNESDAY, Nov. 1. There are several persons among the gold-diggers here who rarely use any implement but their wooden bowls. Into these they scrape the dirt left by others, which they stir and whirl till the gold gradually works its way to the bottom. The earth, as these heavier particles descend, is thrown off by the hands, and the gold remains. This process is what they call dry washing; it is resorted to where there is no water in the vicinity, and will answer pretty well where the gold is found in coarse grains; but the finer particles, of course, escape. The Sonoranians obviate this difficulty to some extent by calling their lungs into requisition. They rub the earth into their bowls, through their hands, detaching and throwing away all the pebbles, and then blow off the sand and dust, leaving the gold at the bottom. But on some of the streams, particularly the Yuba, the gold is too fine even for this process. It is amusing to see a group of Sonoranians, seated around a deposit blowing the earth out of their bowls. But for the dust they raise, you would think they were cooling hasty pudding. Their cheeks swell out like the chops of a squirrel carrying half the beach nuts on a tree to his hole. A more provident fellow he than his two-legged superior! He lays in his stores against the inclemency of winter, while the Sonoranian squanders his at the gambling table. There is more practical wisdom in an ant-hill than is often found in a city. But I am digressing again—a propensity which I shall never get over. "THURSDAY, Nov. 2. Quite a sensation was produced among the golddiggers this morning by the arrival of a wagon from Stockton, freighted with provisions and a barrel of liquor. The former had been getting scarce, and the latter had long since entirely given out. The prices of the first importation were-flour, two dollars a pound; sugar and coffee, four dollars; and the liquor, which was nothing more nor less than New England rum, was twenty dollars the quart. But few had bottles; every species of retainer was resorted to; some took their quart cups, some their coffee pots, and others their sauce pans, while one fellow, who had neither, offered ten dollars to let him suck with a straw from the bung. All were soon in every variety of excitement, from prattling exhilaration to roaring inebriety. Some shouted, some danced, and some wrestled; a son of Erin poured out his soul on the beauties of the Emerald isle ; a German sung the songs of his fatherland; a Yankee apostrophized the mines which swelled in the hills around; an Englishman challenged all the bears in the mountain glens to mortal combat; and a Spaniard, posted aloft on a beetling crag, addressed the universe. The multitudinous voices which rang from every chasm and cove of the ravine, rivalled the roar that went up around the tower of Babel. But night has come-the camp-fires burn dim, and the revellers are at rest, save here and there one who strides about in his delirium, commanding silence among the wolves who bark from the hills. What exciting, elevating, and expanding powers there are in a barrel of New England rum! It makes one to-day monarch of peopled realms and their riches, but leaves him to-morrow in rags, and with only ground enough in which to sink his pauper grave. "Thou sparkling bowl! thout sparkling bowl And song and dance thy power confess- A scorpion to thy side that stings.? “FRIDAY, Nov. 3. At the head of the ravine, where our camping-trees wave, stands an amphitheatre reared by nature, and unrivalled in the grandeur of its proportions, and the stateliness and strength of its architecture. It unrolls its wild magnificence on the eye with a more majestic power than even Rome's great wonder. From its ample arena, circling ranges of crags soar one above the other to the lofty sweep of the architrave, where sentinel trees toss their branches against the sky. Had nature reared this theatre on the banks of the Tiber, the beauty and bravery of Rome would have flashed over the arena's gladiatorial tumult. But it was nere in California, where even the Roman eagle, in its earth-embracing circuit, flew not. i "A new deposit was discovered this morning near the falls of the Stanislaus, and in the crevices of the rocks over which the river pours its foaming sheet. An Irishman had gone there to bathe, and in throwing off his clothes, had dropped his jack-knife, which slipped into a crevice, where he first discovered the gold. He was soon tracked, and in less than an hour a storm of picks and crowbars were shivering the rocks. The accessible pockets were readily exhausted, but beyond these only the drill and blast of the practical miner can extend. And this is true of all the rock-gold in California; the present harvest glows near the surface; but there are under crops which the sunlight has never visited. Deep mining here, as elsewhere, will be attended with uncertain results but a fount so capacious on its rim must have its replenishing depths. The largest fish are taken with the longest line. SATURDAY, Nov. 4. The deposits here baffle all the pretensions of science. The volcanoes did their work by no uniform geological law; they burst out at random, and scattered their gold in wanton caprice. Were not those old Vulcans dead, they would laugh at the blundering vanity exhibited around them. The old landmarks are the quartz; these are general indications, but too vague when applied to alluvial deposits, and frequently serve only to bewilder and betray. We have a young geologist here who can unroll the whole earth, layer by layer, from surface to centre, and tell the properties of each, and how it came to be deposited there, who unsuspectingly walked over a bank of gold, which a poor Indian afterwards stirred out with a stick. I have seen this savan camp down and snore soundly through the night, with a half-pound piece of gold within a few inches of his nose, and then rise at peep of day to push his learned theory into somé ledge of rocks where not a particle of the yellow ore ever existed. I have seen a digger take from a bank of decomposed granite, in a space not larger than a man's hat, between three and four pounds of gold, while his only clue to it was a blast on the opposite side of the glen, through which he believed the deil had blown' the gold into the bank where he was at work. What a burlesque on all geological laws as applied to gold deposits! There is only one of these laws, in reference to alluvial deposits, worth a pin, and that is the simple fact that a heavy body will tumble down hill faster than a lighter one, or that a nut shaken from a tree will drop through the fog to the ground. "MONDAY, Nov. 6. Vein-gold in these rocks is as uncertain and capricious as lightning; it straggles where you least expect it, and leaves only a stain where its quick volume seemed directed. It threads its way in a rock without crevice or crack, and where its continuity becomes at times too subtle for the naked eye, and then suddenly bulges out like a lank snake that has swallowed a terrapin. The great Hebrew proverbialist says there are three things about which there is no certainty-the way of an eagle in the air, the way of a serpent upon a rock, the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and he might have added, the way of a thread of gold in a vein of California quartz; but probably California, with its treasures, had not then been discovered, though some of our wiseacres are trying to make out that this el dorado was the Ophir of the Old Testament; if so, the men of Joppa must have been pretty good seamen, especially as they had no compass. It may be, but I somewhat doubt it, that the Hottentots or Patagonians are the descendants of some shipwrecked men bound in a wherry from Tarsus to California. The adventurers, even in that case, would have been quite as sober in their calculations as some who put to sea on a gold hunt in these days. i "TUESDAY, Nov. 7. The price of provisions here is no criterion of their market value on the seaboard, or even at the embarcadaros nearest the mines, The cost of a hundred pounds of flour at Stockton, only sixty miles distant, is twenty dollars, but here it is two hundred dollars. This vast disparity is owing to the difficulty of transportation and the absense of competition. But few can be persuaded to leave the expectations of the pick for the certainties of the pack-the promises of the cradle for the fulfilments of the freighted wagon. All live on drafts upon the future, and though disappointed a hundred times, still believe the results of to-morrow will more than redeem the broken pledges of to-day. Though all else may end in failure, hope is not bankrupt here. "The soil in the mines is evidently volcanic; it resembles in places the ashes which cover Pompeii. You can walk through it when dry, though every footstep stirs a little cloud; but when saturated with the winter rain, you slump to the middle. No horse can force his way forward; every struggle but sinks him the deeper, and the miner himself retires to his cabin as thoroughly cut off from the peopled districts of the coast, as a sailor wrecked on some rock at sea. Years must elapse before human enterprise can bridge a path to these mines, or render communication practicable in the rainy season; nor at any period can heavy machinery be transported here with out an immense outlay of capital. The quartz rock has yet some time to roll back the sunlight before it crumbles under the steam-stamper. “ Wednesday, Nov. 8. Some fifty thousand persons are drifting up and down these slopes of the great Sierra, of every hue, language, and clime. tumultuous and confused as a flock of wild geese taking wing at the crack of a gun, or autumnal leaves strown on the atmospheric tides by the breath of the whirlwind. All are in quest of gold; and, with eyes dilated to the circle of the. moon, rush this way and that, as some new discovery or fictitious tale may suggest. Some are with tents and some without; some have provisions and some are on their last ration; some are carrying crowbars, some pickaxes and spades, some wash-bowls and cradles, some hammers and drills, and powder enough to blow up the rock of Gibraltar-if they can but get under it as the monkeys do, when they make their transit, through a sort of Thames tunnel, from the golden but barren sands of Africa to the green hills of Europe. Wise fellows they, notwithstanding the length of their tails-they won't stay on the Congo side of the strait to gather gold, when, by crossing, they can gather grapes. Wisdom is justified of her children. "But I was speaking of the gold-hunters here on the slopes of the Sierra. Such a mixed and motley crowd-such a restless, roving, rummaging, ragged multitude, never before roared in the rookeries of man. As for mutual aid and sympathy-Samson's foxes had as much of it, turned tail to tail, with firebrands tied between. Each great camping ground is denoted by the ruins of shovels and shanties, the bleaching bones of the dead, disinhumed by the wolf, : and the skeleton of the culprit, still swinging to the wind, from the limb of a tree, overshadowed by the raven. From the deep glen, the caverned cliff, the plaintive rivulet, the croaking raven, and the wind-toned skeleton, come voices of reproachful interrogation "Slave of the dark and dirty mine! What vanity has brought thee here?” MONDAY, NOV. 13. A mounted company of gold-diggers arrived on our camping premises last evening, and we struck in for four horses, which we purchased at their own prices Mine is an Indian pony from Oregon, full of heart and hardihood; but as for ease of motion, you might as well ride a triphammer. But an extremity makes the most indifferent gift of nature a blessed boon. 1 "We reduced our effects to the fewest articles possible, and packing these, with provisions for three or four days, upon little Nina, were ready for a start. Two Oregonian trappers joined us, and before the sun's rays struck the depths of the ravine, we were off, with three hearty cheers from the diggers. An hour brought us to the summit of an elevation, beneath which lay, in panoramic life, the ravines, rivulets, rambling paths, and roving groups of the gold-hunters. I have walked on the roaring verge of Niagara, through the grumbling parks of London, on the laughing boulevards of Paris, among the majestic ruins of Rome, in the torch-lit galleries of Herculaneum, around the flaming crater of Vesuvius, through the wave-reflected palaces of Venice, among the monumental remains of Athens, and beneath the barbaric splendors of Constantinople; but none of these, nor all combined, have left in my memory a page graven with more significant and indelible characters than the gold diggins of California.” We have thus followed our spirited and eloquent traveller through the goldmining regions of California, and given, by his help, a clear and picturesque description of life in this new and most interesting phase. With this, and a brief notice of the new cities in our empire on the Pacific, our condensed and comprehensive sketch of California must be brought to a close. "The growth of towns in California is so rapid, that before you can sketch the last, a new one has sprung into existence. You go to work on this, and dash down a few features, when another glimmers on your vision, till at last you become like the English surgeon at the battle of Waterloo; who began by bandaging individuals, but found the wounded brought in so fast he declared he must splinter by the regiment. "SAN FRANCISCO.-This town has twice been laid in ashes; but the young phoenix has risen on ampler wings than those which steadied the consumed form of its parent. It must be the great commercial emporium of California, in spite of competition, wind, and flame. Its direct connection with the sea, its magnificent bay and internal communications, have settled the question of its ultimate grandeur. It may be afflicted with grog-shops and gamblers, and the mania of speculation, but these are temporary evils which time, a higher moral tone, and the more steady pursuits of man will remedy. Three years ago only a dozen shanties sprinkled its sand-hills; now, even with its heart burnt out, it looks like the skeleton of a huge city. That heart will be reconstructed, and send the life-blood leaping through the system. “BENICIA.—This town on the straits of Carquenas has the advantage of a bold shore, a quiet anchorage, and depth of water for ships of any size. Even without being a port of entry, it must become in time a large commercial depot. The small craft which float the waters of the Suisun, Sacramento, and San Joaquin, and which are ill suited to the rough bay below, will here deposit their cargoes. It has been selected as the most feasible site for a navy-yard, and the army stores are already housed on its quay. It was first selected as the site of a city by Robert Semple, president of the Constitution Convention, and rose rapidly into importance under his fostering care, and the energetie measures of Thomas O. Larkin. |