Authors: H.W. Brands
Hydraulic operations were breathtaking in their capacity—and rapacity. A correspondent for a Sacramento paper visited a site before the novelty wore off.
A claim at Iowa hill had been worked into the hill by the application of hydraulic power, until it was
one hundred and twenty feet from the top of the hill to the bedrock in the claim
. With a perpendicular column of water 120 feet high, in a strong hose, of which they work two, ten men who own the claim are enabled to run off hundreds of tons of dirt daily. So great is the force employed that two men with the pipes, by directing streams of water against the base of the high bank, will cut it away to such an extent as to cause immense slides of earth, which often bring with them large trees and heavy boulders….After these immense masses of earth are undermined and brought down by the streams forced from the pipes, those same streams are turned upon the tons of fallen earth, and it melts away before them, and is carried through the sluices with almost as much rapidity as if it were a bank of snow. No such labor-saving power has ever been introduced to assist the miner in his operations.
Hydraulic mining certainly saved labor. A government report compared the various methods of gathering gold: “The man with the rocker might wash one cubic yard of earth in a day; with the tom he might average two yards; with the sluice four yards; and with the hydraulic and sluice together fifty or even a hundred yards.” An engineering estimate reckoned the savings slightly differently. Assuming wages in the goldfields averaged $4 per day (this was by now a fair estimate), the cost of processing a cubic yard of soil with a washpan was $20; with a rocker, $5; with a long tom, $1; with hydraulic methods, 20 cents.
But the savings in labor came at the cost of capital. The waterworks that supported hydraulic mining were very expensive, and the expense exerted its own form of tyranny. Interest rates in California were outrageous by American standards of the period, reaching 10 percent per month. Moreover, with water rights running up to $75 per day, time truly was money, and every day that could be saved might mean the difference between profit and loss. As a result, in some cases even the enormous wrecking power of the hydraulic cannons was deemed insufficient. Where the soil refused to melt like snow—where the ancient gravels had congealed into a natural form of concrete—the miners added blasting powder to their kit. The miners—sappers now—burrowed into the hillside that was to be reduced, and laid depth charges to soften the hard-pack. A government report described the system in operation in Yuba County:
The quantity of powder for the blast depends upon the depth of the bank and the surface area to be loosened. If the bank is 50 feet deep a tunnel four and a half feet high and two and a half wide may be run in 75 feet; a cross-drift 60 feet long is cut across the end at right angles, and another similar cross-drift of equal length 55 feet from the mouth of the tunnel. 300 kegs may be used in such a blast, all distributed along in the cross-drifts and in the tunnel beyond the first cross-drift. 20 kegs near the intersection are opened by taking out the heads; the others are left closed, with the certainty that they will all be opened by the explosion of the 20. From the intersection to within 10 feet of the
mouth wooden troughs two inches wide and deep inside are laid, and a liberal supply of powder is poured in, leading to an open keg. The 10 feet next to the mouth are laid carefully with a fuse, and for that distance the tunnel is filled in with dirt. When the blast is fired a dull, heavy sound is heard, the earth rises slowly about 10 feet; it then settles down, leaving a dust behind it, and on examination an area about 120 feet square will be found all shattered.
The water-gunners then moved in, completing reduction of the ridge.
T
HE SPONSOR OF
this mining report was the United States Treasury Department. The Treasury’s interest in California mining was to determine how much gold was coming out of California, and how much might continue to come out; for if time was money in the goldfields, gold was money in the rest of country. The Treasury—the keeper of the nation’s currency, the minter of its gold—needed to know what to expect. County by county, mine by mine, the report listed the money sunk into the mines and the gold extracted. It described the techniques of placer mining, river mining, and hydraulic mining; the size of sluices and the length of flumes; the number of men and quantity of powder at work tearing down the terrain, washing the dirt, and retrieving the gold. To eyewitness observations were added the opinions of practical and scientific authorities. The result was an impressive tome, an encyclopedia of California’s current mineral wealth and a guide to its golden future.
In the section on the southern mines, the report included an account of the tract belonging to John Frémont.
The Mariposa Estate, or Frémont Grant, as it is sometimes called, contains 44,380 acres, or about 70 square miles. It reaches 12 miles from east to west, and 121/2 miles from north to south. Its greatest length, from northwest to southeast, is about 17 miles, and its average width nearly 5 miles.
From the first days of the Gold Rush, the report explained, the Mariposa had yielded large quantities of gold to placer and river miners. More recently the hydraulic miners had been at work.
But the striking characteristic of the Mariposa was the existence of veins of quartz mixed with gold, veins that came to the surface in several places about the tract. Such veins had drawn attention from the time the first prospectors stumbled upon them, for they appeared to be the source of all the placer deposits, the parent formation from which the ancient and modern gravel deposits derived their riches. The report described the richest part of the primary vein on Frémont’s property:
Near the mill the vein forks, one prong running westward in the line of the main lode, and the other running north of west. At a distance of 300 yards from the forks, the two prongs are not more than 60 yards apart. Each fork is about 3 feet thick. The rock is a white ribbon quartz; the walls are a black talcose slate….East of the fork the gold is in fine particles, while west of the fork the gold is collected in rich pockets, which are separated from one another by large masses of very poor quartz…. One pocket paid $30,000, another $15,000, and numerous others sums varying from $100 to $1,000. The great richness of the vein is proved by the facts that the decomposed quartz at the surface was worked or washed for a distance of half a mile, the ravines immediately below the lode were famous for their richness, and drifts have been run a quarter of a mile underground. It is said before Frémont obtained possession, squatters took $200,000 from the mine.
On this last sentence hung a tale of which the report’s authors knew but the outline. Frémont’s troubles with pirate placermen like Jean-Nicolas Perlot were merely the beginning of a long fight for control of the Mariposa. Much of the fight involved the terms of the grant defining the tract. Frémont had acquired title from Governor Juan Alvarado, who had received from the Mexican government the right to select ten leagues from
within a larger portion of the Sierra foothills. Alvarado had other matters more pressing, however (the war with the United States being one), and when Frémont bought the title, the selection remained unmade. In Alvarado’s time, and at the time Frémont took title, all parties assumed that the value of the grant, like the value of most land in California, lay in the pasturage it contained. Accordingly, Frémont initially instructed his surveyors to select land along the Mariposa River, where cattle might obtain water in an arid landscape.
The discovery of gold complicated matters, and the transfer of sovereignty from Mexico to the United States complicated them more. In principle, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo committed the United States government to honor contracts concluded and titles obtained under Mexican rule; in practice, American administrators insisted on close scrutiny of all such transactions and documents. Frémont, not having registered with the Mexican government the precise boundaries of his grant, found his claim scrutinized with special care.
Then there was the question of whether ownership of land entailed ownership of the minerals on and under the land. In the Mexican conception, based as it was on grazing and ranching, land titles didn’t normally convey mineral rights. Even if Frémont could defend his title under Mexican law, he might not win the gold. On the other hand, shortly after Marshall’s gold strike and the transfer of authority from Mexico to the United States, the new American regime abolished Mexican practices as they applied to mineral rights. Whether this made Frémont’s position better or worse wasn’t immediately apparent. The one thing certain was that the Frémont claim was a legal mess.
Meanwhile the squatters helped themselves to Frémont’s gold—or the gold he considered his. His Sonoran partners protected his interest while they remained, but their departure left him looking for new allies. In his hurry—Frémont was always in a hurry, but the thought of gold going off his property in other people’s pockets made him move even faster than usual— he confounded things still more. He authorized an agent to sell leases in England to companies desiring to dig California gold. At the same time he
gave power of attorney to his father-in-law, Senator Benton, who also sold leases. Unfortunately, the various leases overlapped, and the leaseholders sued one another and Frémont.
To add a final twist to the knot, Frémont, belatedly realizing that the value of the Mariposa property lay in gold rather than grass, changed his mind about where his boundaries should run. Redrawing the map, he included several of the most valuable deposits within the portion he claimed for himself.
Frémont’s fight for the Mariposa would keep his lawyers busy for a decade, long after the best placers ran out. What gave the matter its staying power was the discovery of the veins of quartz and gold the government mining report described in such detail. Although the miners on the Mariposa didn’t understand the geological history of these formations—how they were formed in the heat and pressure that accompanied the creation of the Sierra batholith—the miners recognized that the quartz veins were the source of the placer deposits downhill and downstream. And as they discovered the extent of the system of veins, which ran north along the Sierra front from the Mariposa to Coloma, they christened it the “Mother Lode.”
The Mother Lode inspired awe in the gold-hunters. The mere thought of this huge body of ore lying beneath the foothills set the crustiest miner quivering. In some cases awe induces respect; in this case it elicited avarice, and the miners began to plot how to rip the gold from the womb of its mother.
Q
UARTZ MINING
, as the techniques they devised were called, was more complicated than the other forms of mining. In placer mining, river mining, and hydraulic mining, nature had already separated the gold from the quartz; the miners needed only to effect the final sifting. In quartz mining, they had to do the separating themselves. The process involved several steps and required a working knowledge of physics and chemistry, not to mention geology and mechanical engineering.
Quartz mines varied from locale to locale, depending on the lay of the
land and the veins beneath, and on the predilections of the miners. As part of his effort to educate the public about life in California, publisher James Hutchings sent a correspondent down a typical mine. The correspondent, noting that the principal vein at this mine entered the earth at an angle of more than forty degrees, explained that the workers had dug a vertical shaft from a point on the hillside well above the outcropping of the vein. The idea was to intersect the vein (alternatively called the lead or ledge) and attack it in two directions at once: back up toward the surface and down toward the nether regions. A horizontal tunnel was fitted with a miniature, miner-propelled railway for transporting the ore from the vein to the vertical shaft for hoisting to the surface.
With some trepidation—the hole was very dark, and appeared bottomless—the correspondent received permission to enter the miners’ lair.
We descended their shaft—but not before the workmen had offered and we had accepted the loan of an India-rubber suit of clothing—and on reaching the bottom of it we found a considerable stream of water running in the centre of the railway, constructed along the tunnel to the shaft. This water was removed by a pump in one corner of the shaft, working by steam power, both day and night.
On we went, trying to keep a sure footing on the rail track, inasmuch as watertight boots even then became a very necessary accompaniment to the India-rubber clothing. Drip, drip, fell the water, not singly, but in clusters of drops and small streams…. The miners, who were removing the quartz from the ledge, looked more like half-drowned sea lions than men.
We did not make ourselves inquisitive enough to ask the amount of wages they received, but we came to the conclusion that they must certainly earn whatever they obtained. Stooping, or rather half lying down upon the wet rock, among fragments of quartz and props of wood, and streams of water, with pick in hand, and by a dim but waterproof lantern, giving out a very dim and
watery light, just about bright enough, or rather dim enough, and watery enough, as Milton expresses it, “to make darkness visible,” a man was at work, picking down the rock—the gold-bearing rock—and which, although very rich, was very rotten, and consequently not only paid well, but was easily quarried, and easily crushed; and although this rock was paying not less than three hundred and fifty dollars a ton, we could not see the first speck of gold in it, after a diligent search for that purpose.
Although that $350 rock was very rich, there was some question as to how deep it went. The correspondent’s guide invited him to see for himself.
We had the satisfaction of descending the Osborne Hill lead, under the guidance of Mr. Crossett, and after bumping the head against the rocky roof above, and holding on by our feet to the wet and slippery floor of rock below, on which we were descending, at an angle of forty-two degrees; now clinging to the timbers at the side… now winding among props, and over cast-iron pump tubes, now making our way from one side of the inclined shaft to the other, to enable us to travel as easy as possible.
On, on; down, down we go, until we hear the sound of muffled voices issuing from somewhere deep down amid the darkness, and uttering something very indistinct and hard to be understood; when again we cross over to and enter a side drift; where in the distance we see lights glimmering, in shadow and smoke, and hear the voices become more and more distinct, until my guide asks the question, “How does she look now, boys?”
“All right—better, sir.”