following spring all the adventurous young Americans east of the Rocky mountains wanted to go to the new Eldorado, where, as they imagined, everybody was rich, and gold could be dug by the shovelful from the bed of every stream. Before 1850 the population of California had risen from 15,000, as it was in 1847, to 100,000, and the average increase annually for five or six years was 50,000.

As the number of mines increased, so did the gold production and the extent and variety of the gold fields.

In 1849 the placers of Trinity and Mariposa were opened, and in the following years those of Klamath and Scott's valleys. During the last sixteen years no rich and extensive gold fields have been discovered, though many little placers have been found, and some very valuable deposits, previously unknown, have been brought to light in districts which had been worked previous to 1851.

6.-PAN WASHING.

In the first two years the miners depended mainly for their profits on the pan and the rocker. The placer miner's pan is made of sheet iron, or tinned iron, with a flat bottom about a foot in diameter, and sides six inches high, inclining outwards at an angle of thirty or forty degrees.

We frequently see and hear the phrase "golden sands," as if the gold were contained in loose sand; but usually it is found in a tough clay which envelops gravel and large boulders as well as sand. This clay must be thoroughly dissolved; so the miner fills his pan with it, goes to the bank of the river, squats down there, puts his pan under water and shakes it horizontally, so as to get the mass thoroughly soaked; then he picks out the larger stones with one hand and mashes up the largest and toughest lumps of clay, and again shakes his pan; and when all the dirt appears to be dissolved so that the gold can be carried to the bottom by its weight, he tilts up the pan a little to let the thin mud and light sand run out; and thus he works until he has washed out all except the metal which remains at the bottom.

7. THE ROCKER,

The rocker, which was introduced into the California mines at their discovery, is made somewhat like a child's cradle. On the upper end is a riddle, made with a bottom of sheet-iron punched with holes. This riddle is filled with paydirt, and a man rocks the machine with one hand while with a dipper he pours water into the riddle with the other. With the help of the agitation, the liquid dissolves the clay and carries it down with the gold into the floor of the rocker, where the metal is caught by traverse riffles or cleets, while the mud, water, and sand run off at the lower end of the rocker, which is left open. The riddle can be taken off so that the larger stones can be conveniently thrown out.

In places where there was not water enough for washing, and where the gold was coarse, the miners sometimes scratched the metal from the crevices in the rocks with their knives; but the pan and rocker were their main reliance for three or four years.

In many places the rich spots were soon exhausted, and there was a rapid decrease in the profits of the miners. It was necessary that they should devise new and more expeditious methods of working, so that they could wash more in a day, and thus derive as much profit as they had obtained by washing a little dirt.

8.-MINING DITCHES.

The chief want of the placer miner is an abundant and convenient supply of water, and the first noteworthy attempt to convey the needful element in an artificial channel was made at Coyote Hill, in Nevada county, in March, 1850.

This ditch was about two miles long, and, proving a decided success, was imitated in many other places, until, in the course of eight years, six thousand miles of mining canals had been made, supplying all the principal placer districts with water, and furnishing the means for obtaining the greater portion of the gold yield of the State. Many of the ditches were marvels of engineering skill. The problem was to get the largest amount of water at the greatest altitude above the auriferous ground, and at the least immediate expense, as money was worth from three to ten per cent. per month interest. As the pay-dirt might be exhausted within a couple of years, and as the anticipated profits would in a short time be sufficient to pay for an entirely new ditch, durability was a point of minor importance. There was no imperial treasury to supply the funds for a durable aqueduct in every township, nor could the impatient miners wait a decennium for the completion of gigantic structures in stone and mortar. The high value of their time and the scarcity of their money made it necessary that the cheapest and most expeditious expedients for obtaining water should be adopted. Where the surface of the ground furnished the proper grade, a ditch was dug in the earth; and where it did not, flumes were built of wood and sustained in the air by frame-work that rose sometimes to a height of three hundred feet in crossing deep ravines, and extending for miles at an elevation of a hundred or two hundred feet.

All the devices known to mechanics for conveying water from hill-top to hill-top were adopted. Aqueducts of wood and pipes of iron were suspended upon cables of wire, or sustained on bridging of wood; and inverted siphons carried water up the sides of one hill by the heavier pressure from the higher side of another.

The ditches were usually the property of companies, of which there were at one time four hundred in the State, owning a total length of six thousand miles of canals and flumes.

The largest of these, called the Eureka, in Nevada county, has two hundred and five miles of ditches, constructed at a cost of $900,000; and their receipts at one time from the sale of water were $6,000 per day. Unfortunately these mining canals, though more numerous, more extensive, and bolder in design than the aqueducts of Rome, were less durable, and some of them have been abandoned and allowed to go to ruin, so that scarcely a trace of their existence remains, save in the heaps of gravel from which the clay and loam were washed in the search for gold.

As the placers in many districts were gradually exhausted, the demand for water and the profits of the ditch companies decreased; and the more expensive flumes, when blown down by severe storms, carried away by floods, or destroyed by the decay of the wood, were not repaired.

9.-MINERS' "RUSHES."

The year 1850 was marked by the first of a multitude of "rushes" or sudden migrations in search of imaginary rich diggings.

The miners, although generally men of rare intelligence as compared with the laborers in other countries, had vague ideas of the geological distribution of gold, and the marvellous amounts dug out by them, sometimes ascending to thousands of dollars per day to the laborer, excited their fancy so much that they could scarcely have formed a sound judgment if they had possessed the information necessary for its basis. Many believed that there must be some volcanic source from which the gold had been thrown up and scattered over the hills, and they thought that if they could only find that place, they would have nothing to do but to shovel up the precious metal and load their mules with it. More than once, long trains of pack animals were sent out in the confident expectation that they would get loads of gold within a few days.

H. Ex. Doc. 29--2

No story was too extravagant to command credence. Men who had never earned more than a dollar a day before they came to California were dissatisfied when they were here clearing twenty dollars, and they were always ready to start off on some expedition in search of distant diggings reputed to be rich. Although the miners of to-day have better ideas of the auriferous deposits than they had sixteen years ago, and no longer expect to dig up the pure gold by the shovelful, they are now, as they have been since the discovery of the mines, always prepared for migration to any new field of excitement.

10.-GOLD LAKE AND GOLD BLUFF.

In the spring of 1850 a story was circulated that gold was lying in heaps on the bank of Gold lake, a small body of water eastward of where Downieville now is. Thousands of men left good claims to join this rush, but after weeks or months they returned much poorer than they started. The next year witnessed a rush to Gold Bluff, on the ocean shore about latitude 41°.

The sea beating against a high auriferous hill had left a wide beach containing much gold, which was mixed with sand that was very rich in spots, but was shifted about under the influence of a heavy surf. A gentleman of much intelligence, secretary of a mining company which claimed a portion of the beach, examined the place and seriously wrote to his associates that each one would receive at least $43,000,000 if the sand proved to be only one-tenth as rich as that which he had examined.

Several other similar statements were made in corroboration. The mining population were wonderfully excited by these reports, and preparations were made for a large migration to the golden beach; but more precise information was soon published, and most of the adventurers who had started were disenchanted before the vessels in which they were to sail could get to sea.

The construction of hundreds of ditches within three or four years after the successful experiment at Coyote Hill gave a great impulse to placer mining, and had much influence to change its character. Before the water had been carried in artificial channels to the tops or high upon the sides of the hills, nearly all the miners spent their summers in washing the dirt in the bars of the rivers and their winters in working the beds of gullies, which were converted into brooks during the rainy season. In the gullies the supply of pay-dirt was usually small, and the claims were exhausted in the course of a few weeks.

On the bars the water was below the level of the pay-dirt, and had to be dipped or pumped up by hand.

These circumstances were favorable to the use of the rocker; but the ditch brought the water to places where the dirt was far more abundant and could be obtained with more facility, though it was poorer in quality, and, therefore, the washing of a larger quantity would be necessary to yield an equal profit.

New modes of working and new implements must be introduced to accomplish the greater amount of work, and the tom and the sluice came rapidly into use. The tom had been employed for years in the placers of Georgia, and some Georgians had their sluices in Nevada county in the latter part of 1849, and in February of the following year a party at Gold Run, in that county, finding that the bed of the ravine did not give them enough fall, made a long board trough on the hill-side leading down to their tom, and the pay-dirt from the claim was thrown up to a board platform, and from that thrown up to the head of the trough, and the water carried the dirt down to the tom.

I am indebted for information on this point to B. P. Avery, esq.

The purpose of this trough was mainly to save the labor of carrying the dirt by hand from the claim to the tom; but the trough having been once built, its

value in washing gold was soon apparent. It was, however, the ditch that gave opportunities for the general introduction of the tom and sluice, and in most districts they were unheard of until late in 1850 or 1851.

The tom is a trough about twelve feet long, eight inches deep, fifteen inches wide at the head and thirty at the foot.

A riddle of sheet iron punched with holes half an inch in diameter forms the bottom of the tom at the lower end, so placed that all the water and their mud shall fall down through the holes of the riddle and none pass over the sides or end. The water falls from the riddle into a flat box with transverse cleets or riffles, and these are to catch the gold.

A stream of water runs constantly through the tom, into the head of which the pay-dirt is thrown by several men, while one throws out the stones too large to pass through the riddle, and throws back to the head of the tom the lumps of clay which reach the foot without being dissolved.

12. THE SLUICE.

The tom was a great improvement on the rocker, but it was soon superseded by a still greater, the sluice, which is a board trough, from a hundred to a thousand feet long, with transverse clects at the lower end to catch the gold. With a descent of one foot in twenty the water rushes through it like a torrent, bearing down large stones and tearing the lumps of clay to pieces. The miners, of whom a dozen or a score may work at one sluice, have little to do save to throw in the dirt and take out the gold.

Occasionally it may be necessary to throw out some stones, or to shovel the dirt along to prevent the sluice from choking, but these attentions cost relatively very little time. The sluice is the best device heretofore used for washing gold, and is supposed to be unsurpassable. It has been used here more extensively than elsewhere, although it has been introduced by men who have been in our own mines, into Australia, New Zealand, British Columbia, Transylvania, and many other countries.

The sluice, though an original invention here, had been previously invented in Brazil; but it was never brought to much excellence there nor used extensively, and no such implement was known in 1849 in the industry of gold mining.

At first the sluices were made short, and afterwards lengthened, until some were a mile long, the length being greater as the gold was finer; that is, if the surface of the earth in the direction of the sluice was favorable. There were many little variations in the form of the sluice, to suit different circumstances. The ground sluice is a mere ditch on a hill side or slope, and the miners dig up the bottom and dig down the banks, while the water carries away the clay and leaves the gold; but the dirt at the bottom of the ground sluice must afterwards be washed in a board sluice.

The ground sluice has been used to grade roads and to carry away snow from the streets of mining towns, as well as to wash gold.

In claims where many large stones were found in the pay-dirt, and had to be carried by the water through the board sluice, or where the sluice was to be used for a long period, they were paved with stones, because any wooden bottom was rapidly worn out. Sometimes the bed of a stream into which many sluices emptied was converted into a "tail sluice," which yielded a large revenue, with no labor save that of occasionally "cleaning up" or washing out the metal from the sand deposited in the crevices between the stones.

13.-PLACER LEADS TRACED TO QUARTZ.

The placer gold had originally been confined in rocky veins which were disintegrated by the action of chemical or mechanical forces, and the lighter

material was swept away by the water, while the heavier remained near its primeval position.

The gold found in the bars of large streams far from the mountains, after having been carried a long distance, is in small smooth particles, as though it had been ground fine and polished by long attrition.

In small gullies in the mountains the gold is usually coarse and rough, as if it had suffered little change after being freed from the quartz by which it was once surrounded.

In hundreds of instances the abundance of gold in a gully has been traced unmistakably to an auriferous quartz lode in the hill side above it, and the placer miners, following streaks of loose gold, have been brought to the rocky source from which it came.

In this manner the Allisen mine and the Comstock lode, not to mention other less celebrated mines or veins, were found. Such discoveries were made in 1850, and in the following year capitalists in New York and London, anxious to get their share of the marvellous wealth of the Sierra Nevada, formed companies to work the quartz mines at Grass valley and at Mariposa.

Millions of dollars were invested in machinery, and superintendents, with the wildest ideas, were sent to erect mills and to take charge of the precious metals. All these ventures proved complete failures. In most instances the machinery was utterly useless, and the superintendents utterly incompetent.

The castings for the mills lay about the wharves of San Francisco for many years, objects of curiosity for experienced miners, and of ridicule for the general public.

In one mill the metal was to be caught in a course sieve, and in another the quartz was to be crushed by a rolling ball. The mismanagement was so gross and the losses so severe that foreign capitalists became very shy of California quartz mines, and the development of that branch of industry was much retarded.

14.-A GOLD-DREDGING MACHINE.

It was not, however, in quartz mining alone that ridiculous blunders were made. Large sums of money were expended in the eastern States by men who had never seen a placer mine, and had no correct idea of the nature of the gold deposits, in making machinery to take gold more expeditiously from the river beds and bars than could be done by hand. One enterprising New York company sent a dredging machine to dig the metal from the bottom of the Yuba river, never questioning whether that stream was deep enough in the summer to float such a machine, or whether the tough clay and gravel in its bed could be dug up by a dredger, and entirely ignorant of the fact that the gold is mostly in the crevices of the bed-rock, where the spoon and knife of the skilful and attentive miner would be necessary for cleaning out the richest pockets.

15.-DECREASE OF WAGES.

With the introduction of the sluice, the ditch, and the hydraulic process, it became customary to hire laborers. The pan and the rocker required every man to be his own master.

In 1849 each miner worked for himself, or the exceptions were so few that they were almost unknown.

The method of working made it impossible for the employer to guard against the dishonesty of the servant, who could always make more in his own claim than any one could afford to give him. Men become servants usually because they have no capital, and cannot get into profitable employment without it; but there was no lack of profitable employment for the miner in 1849, nor did