Authors: H.W. Brands
They tested the gravel. The first pan yielded a quarter ounce. “What a windfall!” Their fortune seemed to be made. “We washed what we had extracted from the gold bed, counting on a marvelous result.”
Alas, reality was otherwise. Additional assays showed the ore to be only modestly endowed with the tantalizing yellow metal. “Farewell to our dream of a speedy fortune!” For three days Perlot and Bérenger dug a ditch connecting their test hole to the river; for four days they washed the gold- bearing gravel their ditch uncovered. They continued in this way: three days of ditching, four days of washing. Six weeks exhausted the claim—not to mention the claimants—and yielded the equivalent of somewhat less than a half ounce of gold per man per day. As they had earned more than this as wage-workers, they had reason to be disappointed. To make matters worse, by the time they finished, the area on all sides of them had been taken up. They were forced to move on, and start over again.
D
ITCHING WAS THE ANSWER
when pay dirt was covered by the detritus of old streams, but when present streams covered the golden sands, the solution was damming. William Swain, after entering the Sacramento Valley from the north, and late, not unnaturally decided to try his hand in the northern mining region. In mid-November a man couldn’t expect to do any serious mining before spring, so Swain and a small remnant of the Wolverine Rangers filled their days planning for when the rainfall diminished. Local experts, unobtrusively cultivated, guided them to a promising location. “We judged the South Fork of the Feather River to be the most likely to yield a pile another summer,” Swain wrote home, “for the following reasons: the main part of the Feather River and all the southern rivers have been overrun and consequently the best and richest placers found and worked. The South Fork of the Feather River was reported to be rich, and the gold on it coarse and not much worked. There is good timber for building (not the case on many of the streams of California), which with us is an important consideration as we believed our health next summer depended
upon having dry, warm, and comfortable habitation during the rainy season.”
This last point had been underscored for Swain by the recent death from disease of two of the Rangers, and he took no little pride in the dwelling he and his companions constructed, and the life they led therein.
Our house is a log cabin, sixteen by twenty feet. It is covered with boughs of cedar and is made of nut pine logs from one to two feet in diameter, so that it is quite a blockhouse. It has a good door made of cedar boards hewn out of cedar logs, but no window. [Glass was a luxury beyond reach at this stage of Swain’s finances and California’s development.] It faces the south and is on the north side of the river. In the east end is a family fireplace, in which large logs are burning night and day. At the west end is a bedstead framed into the logs of the cabin and running from side to side. The cords of the bedstead are strips of rawhide, crossing at every three inches, thus forming a bottom tight enough to hold large armfuls of dry breaks gathered from the sides of the mountains, which make a substitute for feather beds. On these are blankets and buffalo skins. Altogether it makes a comfortable bed. Moore has a bunk in one of the other corners.
Over the fireplace are our rifles, which are ever ready, cocked and primed, and frequently yield us good venison. In the other corner may be seen our cupboard with its contents, which consist of a few wooden and tin dishes, bottles, knives and forks and spoons, tin frying pan, boiler, and coffee pot.
Around the sides of the cabin at various points are the few articles of clothing belonging to the different members of the company. Under the bed are five cakes of tallow, under the bunk are three or four large bags of flour. Along the point of the roof is a line of dried beef and sixty or seventy pounds of suet. And out at the corner of the house in a trough made of pine may be found salt beef in the pickle, in abundance.
At ten in the evening you might see in this cabin, while
everything is still, a fire blazing up from the mass of fuel in the large fireplace, myself and Hutchinson on one end of the bedstead, Lt. Cannon on the other, Mr. Bailey stretched before the fire in his blankets on the ground floor, and Moore in his bunk. On the roof the incessant rain keeps up its perpetual patter, while the foaming stream howls out a requiem of the rushing torrent as it dashes on its way to the valley.
It was this rushing stream that Swain and the others planned to tackle when the rains let up. The logic of placer mining dictated digging at the lowest point of any streambed, where gravity concentrated the gold. Unfortunately, in the case of a currently active stream, this lowest point was almost always underwater. Yet if a person could build a dam and divert the flow, the streambed would be laid open to mining.
In practice, nearly all dams were beyond the capacity of single individuals. California mining quickly evolved from an occupation that could be undertaken by individuals (the washpan stage) to one that required two or three persons (the ditching and long-tom stage) to one that required teams of several individuals (the damming stage). Nor was cooperation the only new requirement. Capital was also needed. A miner with a wash- pan—and decent luck—might start making money his first day in the diggings, but building a dam required the ability to work for weeks or months before the gold started coming in. The high prices of provisions in the mining camps made this an expensive affair.
The high prices drove Swain and his partners out of their cabin and into the icy river even before the winter rains ceased. For weeks in January and early February 1850 they piled rocks for their dam and excavated a diversionary race for the overflow. Eventually they accomplished their preliminary goal. “Our dam is finished,” he wrote on February 17, “and the river, which is high and will probably be so for some months, is running through our race leaving its old channel bare.” At this point—after all this effort and expense—Swain found himself where Jean-Nicolas Perlot had been before digging his first test hole. “We have to remove some three feet of gravel and stone before we find the foundation rock where the gold always
lies,” Swain observed. Actually, Swain was worse off than Perlot, for the dams were never watertight. “On account of the water which leaches from the race to the channel, we have not been able to test it.” But they hoped to do so shortly.
The weather refused to cooperate. The rains lasted longer that winter than usual, preventing Swain and the others from discovering whether they were rich or ruined. “Four weeks ago we thought the rain over, but March has been the worst month of the season,” he wrote on March 17. “The waters are up, and our prospects for mining soon are dark, at least for two months to come.” The larder drew lower, and their wallets emptier, with each passing day.
They decided they couldn’t wait two months. Splashing through the high, bone-numbing water, they retrieved sufficient samples for an assay. The results were disappointing. On April 15, Swain recorded, “We finished our job on the Feather River and tested it, although under great disadvantages. I am satisfied it will
not pay
to work it out.” They had moved a river and many tons of rock, only to discover that the yield was too poor to bother with.
Perhaps it was his youth, perhaps a congenital optimism, but Swain refused to lose heart. “The job cost us a great deal and much hard work. Many a one has acquired a large fortune with half the exertion we have made, but we are not discouraged; on the contrary, we are confident of success.” Still, he couldn’t help admitting that it was “rather provoking to be disappointed in high hopes.”
River mining—as the method that involved ditching, damming, and other manipulation of stream flows was called—became more elaborate with each passing season. The dams grew longer and higher and more specialized. Sometimes they diverted the river entirely, baring the bed from bank to bank; sometimes they shunted the flow to one side, baring half the bed at a time. Pumps were installed, powered by the diverted current to remove the water that invariably seeped through the rock-and-earthen dams.
In many places, flumes complemented or replaced the diversionary ditches. Constructed of boards nailed together in U-shaped cross section, a flume received the water turned aside by a dam, carried it downstream parallel to the riverbed, and returned it to the channel below the claim of the company that built it—often dumping it right where the next set of claimants was building its own dam. Great effort and much duplication of expense went into the construction of the multiple systems. Magazine publisher James Hutchings calculated the cost of the ten dams along one stretch of the Feather River at $80,000, and noted that this amount bought insubstantial waterworks that lasted only a single season before being swept away in the following spring’s high water. “Should that sum be used,” Hutchings suggested, “to construct one permanent dam that should last
not only for one, but for many seasons—besides the advantages it would offer to other claim owners by not backing the water upon them, as now— it would be a piece of economy that must commend itself to the thoughtful consideration of all persons interested in river mining.”
As the miners grew adept at building flumes, they realized that in addition to carrying water away from places where it wasn’t wanted, the wooden aqueducts might be employed to deliver water to places where it was wanted. This idea was no more than an extension of the principle behind the ditch Jean-Nicolas Perlot dug to wash his claim on the Mariposa, but it was an extension that opened up whole new areas to mining. In due course flumes five, ten, twenty miles long snaked beside canyon walls and crisscrossed gorges on trestles, carrying water intended to mitigate the miners’ ultimately unquenchable thirst for gold. A Yuba County flume fairly flew across one canyon, reaching a height of two hundred feet above the ground and resting on the tops of tall trees along the way.
As the flumes freed the miners from proximity to rivers—and as the placer deposits on those rivers dwindled—the gold-hunters discovered that entire ridges and hillsides consisted of gravels laid down by ancient streams, long since diverted by natural forces. Digging revealed that those gravels contained gold-bearing placers, and that—just as with the contemporary placers—the ancient placers were richest where the gravels touched bedrock. But where bedrock for the contemporary placers might be six inches or six feet below ground level, the ancient bedrock might be sixty feet or six hundred feet below ground.
Reaching the ancient placers required removing the gravel that entombed them. Some miners resorted to the straightforward expedient of shovels. They dug “coyote holes” down to pay dirt, which they hoisted to the surface and washed by regular methods. But any large-scale exploitation of the ancient placers required a new method—a method capable of moving mountains as none but geological forces had moved them till now.
Hydraulic mining—as the new method was called—entailed magnifying and focusing the erosive power of water. The germ of the idea came to a Frenchman named Chabot, who employed a piece of hose some forty feet
long to direct a stream of water from behind his dam to the bottom of his diggings. The water from the hose washed away worthless overburden and allowed access to the richer material below.
Chabot’s idea inspired Edward Matteson (sometimes spelled Matter- son) to improve it the following season. Perhaps Matteson remembered fire hoses he had seen back home in Connecticut, for his innovation was to add a nozzle, much like the nozzle of a fire hose. This concentrated the energy of the water and allowed Matteson to aim the concentrated stream where he wished. To his delight he discovered that the blast of water tore into the earth, removing in minutes what would have taken days or weeks to dispose of with pick and shovel. Matteson’s neighbors appreciated the superiority of his technique and adopted it themselves.
Further improvements followed. Where a fall of several feet produced an impressive force, a fall of hundreds of feet produced an astonishing force. And the force was the more astonishing when the hoses exploded in the hands of their operators. Reinforcement—coils of rope, hoops of iron—remedied the situation. Iron pipe, although expensive and initially prone to splitting, permitted even greater pressures, and still more amazing results. Nozzles were replaced by “monitors”: swivel-mounted cannons that allowed the “hydraulickers” to bombard hillsides with barrages of water, creating flash floods that carried away eons of earth, sand, and gravel.
Supplying the artillery with ammunition was no small chore. The pressure at the nozzle was directly proportional to the “head” of water: the vertical distance from the nozzle to the reservoir that supplied it. A dam had to be built upstream and pipes laid to the claim. In steep country a single partnership might control enough land to keep the waterworks in-house, but more commonly the hydraulickers purchased water rights from others. The rights were often sold by the day; as a result, once the spigots were opened, the hoses generally roared from morning’s first light to evening’s last, and frequently by moonlight.
Reducing a hillside to rubble was straightforward, if violent; but capturing the gold the rubble contained required greater subtlety. Because the techniques employed in the placers would have been overwhelmed by the
sheer volume of material brought down by the water cannons, new techniques of capture were needed. “Sluices” were scaled-up versions of the long-tom, and in fact had been introduced in the placers before being adopted and expanded further by the hydraulickers. A sluice box looked much like a flume, except that its bottom was perforated, split, riffled, cleated, or otherwise roughened to catch the heavy gold while letting the light sand and gravel wash by. In a hydraulic operation, sluice boxes might be arrayed in a continuous line several hundred feet long. In some operations, “ground sluicing” was employed. Here the sluice was simply a ground channel into which boulders had been strategically placed. As the slurry flowed through the channel, the gold lodged behind the boulders. From time to time—as with the long-toms and the sluice boxes—the flow of water was shut off and the gold collected.