The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (Arbor House Library of Contemporary Americana) (52 page)

This Sutter was an important man, filled with energy and resource, my father said, but he lost all his employees overnight. And being extended for credit, he found himself in a first-class pickle. What happened was, his wheelwright, a man named Marshall, recognized gold in Sutter’s millrace. We met this Mr. Marshall during our stay on the Feather River, and he said (as my father copied it in the Journals):

“While we were in the habit at night of turning the water through the tail race, I used to go down in the morning to see what had been done through the night; and about half-past seven o’clock on or about the 19th of January—I am not quite certain to a day, but it was between the 18th and 20th of that month—1848, I went down as usual, and after shutting off the water from the race I stepped into it, near the lower end, and there, upon the rock, about six inches beneath the surface of the water, I DISCOVERED THE GOLD. I was entirely alone at the time. I picked up one or two pieces and examined them attentively; and having some general knowledge of minerals, I could not call to mind more than two which in any way resembled this—
sulphuret of iron
, very bright and brittle; and
gold
, bright yet malleable; I then tried it between two rocks, and found that it could be beaten
into a different shape, but not broken. Four days afterwards I went to the Fort for provisions, and carried with me about three ounces of the gold, which Capt. Sutter and I tested with
nitric acid.
I then tried it in Sutter’s presence by taking three silver dollars and balancing them by the dust in the air, then immersed both in water, and the superior weight of the gold satisfied us both of its nature and value.”

That was how it started; now we were in a sweat to get our share. People were strung out up and down all streams, because it was supposed to be there, and in canyons, gulches and ravines. The ravines were favorite places to work, being easy to get at and moderately free of underbrush and rock. A good many “companies,” or parties, of men kept passing through. These formed together, pooling their money, and went into the wildest kind of mountains, taking things like provender, cooking utensils, blankets, tools and firearms loaded on mules. If a hole was dug that delivered as much as a quarter’s worth of gold, they called that place a “good prospect,” so that the word prospecting came out of that. But if the pan showed only very fine grains, too small to save, that was called “finding the color” and wasn’t worth pursuing, though it was interesting as a clue.

We parked our wagons, staked out our livestock, set up our tents, and made ready for the grand search. But first my father and Mr. Kissel and I went into Marysville to get supplies—mostly mining tools, since the ones my father bought in Independence had burned with the Kissels’ wagon—taking almost the last of our money. Mr. Coe wrote on his book.

This Marysville was no more than temporary structures, a few rough shells of framing, some weather-boarded with clapboards, covered on the inside with domestic cotton, sides and top, over a wood frame. But most of the dwellings were tents, holey and ragged, and lean-tos made of zinc sheets. We came back with lots of stuff packed on mules, after my father had jawed considerable about the prices. To start off, we wanted a good gold washer, with a sieve, but the man asked forty dollars for a secondhand one
that had a hole in it where the original owner, now deceased, he told us, “failed to entirely stop a bullet with his stummick” My father blew up; he said you could buy a new one back home for twelve dollars.

The trader, a very smart-aleck-looking fellow with a patch over one eye, said, “I hadn’t heerd a man could purchase a new stummick at any price. What locality do you hail from?”

“I mean a washer,” said my father sourly. He and Mr. Kissel settled for an ordinary tin washing pan, costing ten dollars, which made him mad all over again. He said you could buy
this
article in a Louisville store for seventy-five cents.

It was an interesting argument. You probably
could
buy a new gold washer for twelve dollars back home, but what good would it do? You could sit on the Ohio River bank for two years, washing out mud, and if you got as much as an old turtle shell you’d be lucky. Or suppose you
sent
for a washer; wrote back home, had a man buy it, bring it out and deliver it. The trip alone would run as high as two hundred dollars, if he made it at all, and by the time he got here, there wouldn’t be enough gold in these hills to stuff a tooth with.

Forty dollars seemed cheap to me, and I said so.

Flour, bacon, sugar and coffee were each fifty cents a pound, biscuits ran as high is $1.25, beef was forty cents, and pickled pork a dollar. There was a kind of boardinghouse near us, made of log and clapboards, with a long common table, where a man named Sumner sold “full board” for twenty-one dollars a week or single meals at $1.25 a throw. He had what he called lodging, too, which meant that a body could sleep outside in a tent with several others, furnish his own blanket, for a price of three dollars, “bedbugs and lice at no extra charge,” he said, but nobody laughed.

We paid twelve dollars for three picks, eighteen dollars for three shovels, eight dollars for a new pair of shoes for Mr. Kissel, and a dollar a foot for two planks: then we were all but cleaned out

Mr. Kissel couldn’t go right to farming, as he planned to in the beginning, because his stake, including what I’d put up at Laramie,
had dwindled down too low. He had some tools but no seed, so he was obliged to join us and hope to make a strike. It was a pity, because my father wrote in his Journals: “Fine places along this river for farmers to squat on, since it is yet unoccupied.” As for Mr. Coe, I don’t think he had any more interest in gold-mining than he did in raising hogs, but he was observing and annotating, he said, and besides, he wanted to help out. He appeared to have plenty of money, but my father and Mr. Kissel refused to let him pay more than his share, at least at this stage of our adventures.

Well, that night at supper we found that the flour the trader sold us was full of long black worms. My father said a fair exchange would be to go back and fill the trader full of long lead bullets, but we strained the worms out instead, then went ahead and used it. Nobody suffered; the meal was so satisfactory my father swung around to believe that the worms had
improved
the flour, saying they likely “aerated” it, same as they did soil, and he hoped to introduce the idea to millers when he returned home.

Most of this food we bought came from a long way off, the pork and butter clear around Cape Horn from New York, beans and dried fruit from Chile, yams and onions from the Sandwich Islands, and sea gull eggs from someplace called the Farallones. These eggs sold for a dollar each. California was so crazy over gold that nobody was raising any food, you see. People were starved for flavor things like sweet and sour and salt. When we bought our provisions three men were sitting on a log out in front, eating a mixture of vinegar and molasses, sopping it up with bread, wolfing it down like animals.

At dawn we got up and climbed the wooded slopes into the hills. Away from the river proper, there was plenty of ground not spoken for. We found a handy ravine and started to dig, the three men handling picks and me standing by with the pan. We’d left the women and children behind, of course, and given them guns for a precaution, but this wasn’t necessary in that spot, because decent people were camped nearby, and a medium-sized yowl would fetch assistance in a jiffy. One of our neighbors, too, had given us a lot
of information about gold, so we hoped to fill a sack full of nuggets and cash in at Marysville before dark. First (according to instruction) the men chose a hole about the size of a hat, in the lowest part of the ravine, after rolling away stones on top; then they filled the pan with the dirt taken out. Carrying this to a stream, we washed out the pebbles and dirt, using a kind of circular motion. Mr. Kissel did it first, squatting down beside the stream and holding the pan by both sides. This first dirt was washed several times, but nothing showed in the bottom, so we dug another hole, farther up. Nothing here, either. Altogether, we tried as many as a dozen places and then moved to another ravine.

On the first washing in the new spot we found three or four small black particles, looking like discolored bronze, in the pan. Everybody gave a big whoop, even Mr. Coe, because there’s something about gold, looking for it and finding it, that makes you feverish. It’s just as they say in the books. It does something funny to you, not all of it good. For instance, when we were digging without luck, we had a fine, enjoyable time, but now we’d washed up say two dollars’ worth of gold, we looked around uneasily, as if somebody might burst in and snatch it out of our hands. We had something to
protect
, now, so our free and easy outlook was gone for a little.

But we got busy, on fire to drive ahead, and dug one hole after another. Most had nothing; every fifth or sixth turned up a few bits like the first ones, say as big as very small gravel. These we tucked away in our sack. Some of the washings were little more than dust, not positively gold, but we dumped it in, anyhow, whatever failed to wash out with the dirt and stones. By noon we had what they estimated was better than an ounce, net, which meant that, with gold bringing sixteen dollars an ounce, we’d made about twenty dollars. This wasn’t bad; but as my father said toward late afternoon, when the pickings were growing slim, we’d done a square day’s work for it. Also, with prices the way they were, we wouldn’t pile up much of a backlog at this rate.

We got home early enough to ride into Marysville and have the
“dust” weighed out. And right here we got a new shock. It didn’t seem to weigh what we’d estimated. Our total haul came to $18.50. Not until several days afterward did we learn that this particular weigher was a known crook. He’d cheated everybody for upwards of a month, but he wasn’t due to go on much longer, because in a week a party of sailors from Sacramento, once bit, weighed their next dust first on an honest scale, then took it to this fraud and got the same cheating treatment. So they waltzed him right out of there, down to the riverbank, stripped him, tied him face up on a raft of three logs and shoved him out into the stream. They told him, “Come back and we’ll fill you so full of holes you can serve as the underside of a cradle.”

After buying more provisions we laid into the diggings early the next day. We’d worked out the good ravine, so we pushed up into the hills. For an hour we got nothing but mud and stones, then we hit more gold, in about the same amount as before. Taking turns at the pick and the pan, we toiled away, adding up our store, one after another calling off how much we thought it was.

“I’d say well over an ounce, maybe two. And if my considerable researches on the subject are correct—”

“Nigh an ounce, not more.”

“Oh, come now. We must have two here at least. There might even be three, actually.”

“Let’s dig another hole,” I said.

At suppertime on Saturday, at the end of five days, we went over everything to see how we’d done this first week. The way it shook down was, we’d made plenty to buy provisions and had put away eighty dollars besides.

“The implication is perfectly clear,” said my father, “There’s gold here, but it’s spread out thin. Until we make a real strike, the answer is larger production. I vote to invest in a cradle.”

Next morning we scouted around among the traders, hoping for a bargain. It being the Lord’s Day, a good many miners had knocked off and came in to visit the saloons and gaming houses. Although they were as rough a crew as you could meet outside of
jail—many of them foreigners like Mexicans, Chileans, Chinamen and islander savages—it was interesting that they believed in the Bible lesson of working six days and resting on the seventh. So in they tramped, the mud scraped off their clothes, shaved, too, some of them, except the Chinamen and Indians, which hadn’t any beards to start with, and passed the Sabbath getting drunk and shooting craps and fighting, not working even for a minute. It gave me a warmer outlook, and made me wonder if there wasn’t something to religion after all. Altogether I saw five fights, except one shouldn’t count because both men were so drunk they couldn’t exactly see each other, so that one hit an awning post, breaking two knuckles, then fell in the river. I stood by while they fished him out and examined him.

We went into one saloon to talk to the proprietor, who had a cradle for sale. My father, after a look around, a long smell of the sour, yeasty air, and a big sigh, made a drawing of the interior for his Journals on the sly: two very rude tables, a four-legged bench, several wooden food boxes with names of far places printed on them, canvas walls with squares of light ribbing to fix them in place, a pine bar made out of boxboards, an earthenware pitcher of water on top, bartender with scraggly moustache and a low-cornered hat standing behind it with his hands in his pockets, and a row of flimsy shelves behind, holding five or six bottles; two men wearing hats seated at a table examining a sackful of dust; a rough, black-bearded fellow with a hat full of holes leaning against the bar, right foot against a rolled-up blanket on the floor, so as to keep tabs on it, I expect.

The proprietor said he’d “hoped to fetch three ounces”—forty-eight dollars—for the cradle, which though small was in tiptop condition; he’d used it only a few weeks before deciding he could get rich quicker by peddling grog at fifty cents a drink. He was a confidential sort of man, not at all ashamed of swindling the poor, thirsty miners with his outrageous prices. And he said, indicating the ramshackle mess around us, “I’ve built up a nice place here
and I haven’t got hardly no overhead except for whiskey and spring water to cut it with.”

Being in a testy mood, because of the price, my father made one of his typical jokes. “You haven’t even got enough overhead to keep out the rain,” and he looked up at the roof, through which the sun was sifting about every few inches.

“It’s funny about them holes,” said the man. “The water washes right across; it forms a little film. She only leaks in three or four spots—those there the size of your fist, and nary a one of them’s over the bar. Anyhow, you take most of my customers, and they’re too drunk to notice.”