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Ella M. Sexton - Stories of California
cyanide, a peculiar acid that melts the gold as water does a lump of sugar. So all of value is saved, and
the worthless "tailings" go to the dump. Even the black sands on the ocean beach have gold in them. In
the desert also there is gold, which is "dry-washed" by putting the sand into a machine and with a strong
blast of air blowing away all but the heavy scales of gold.
Though the Argonauts of '49 found much wealth in yellow gold, our "Golden State," on hillsides, in
river-beds, or deep down in hidden quartz ledges, still holds great fortunes waiting to be found.
MINING STORIES
A large book might be filled with the stories told by the men who found gold in the early days. Their
"lucky strikes" in the "dry-diggings" sound like fairy tales. Imagine turning over a big rock and then
picking up pieces of gold enough to half fill a man's hat from the little nest that rock had been lying in for
years and years!
And think of finding forty-three thousand dollars in a yellow lump over a foot long, six inches wide and
four inches thick! This was the biggest nugget on record and actually weighed one hundred and
ninety-five pounds. The next one, too, you might have been glad to pick up, as it held a hundred and
thirty-three pounds of solid gold. Little seventy-five and fifty-pound treasures were common, and a
soldier stopping to drink at a roadside stream found a nugget weighing over twenty pounds lying close to
his hand.
It paid to get up early those days, also for a man in Sonora, while taking his morning walk, struck his foot
against a large stone, and forgot the pain when he saw the stone was nearly all gold. Another man, with
good eyes, got a fifty-pound nugget on a trail many people used all the time. One day, after a heavy rain,
a man who was leading a mule and cart through a street in Sonora, noticed that the wheel struck a big
stone; he stooped to lift it out of the way, and found the stone to be a lump of gold weighing thirty-five
pounds. In less than an hour all that part of the town and the street was staked off into mining-claims, but
no more was found. One of the largest of these nuggets was found by three or four men, who took it to
San Francisco and the Eastern states, and exhibited it for money. They guarded the precious thing day
and night, but at last quarrelled so that it had to be broken up and divided between them.
The first piece Marshall found was said to be worth about fifty cents, and the second over five dollars.
Almost all, though, that was found was like beans or small seeds or in fine dust. No one tried to weigh or
measure such gold more correctly than to call a pinch between the finger and thumb a dollar's worth,
while a teaspoonful was an ounce, or sixteen dollars' worth. A wineglassful meant a hundred dollars, and
a tumblerful a thousand. Miners carried their "dust" in a buckskin bag, and this was put on the counter,
and the storekeeper took out what he thought enough to pay for the things the miner bought. A large
thumb to take a large pinch of the gold-dust meant a good many extra dollars to the storekeeper in '48
and '49. Yet nearly every one was honest, and gold might be left in an open tent untouched, for there was
plenty more to be had for the picking up. Those who would rather steal than work were driven out of
camp.
Some of the "sand bars," or banks of gravel and earth, washed down by the Yuba River were so rich that
the men could pick out a tin cupful of gold day after day for weeks. One place was called Tin-cup Bar for
this reason. Spanish Bar, on the American River, yielded a million dollars' worth of dust, and at Ford's
Bar, a miner, named Ford, took out seven hundred dollars a day for three weeks. At Rich Bar, on the
Feather River, a panful of earth gave fifteen hundred dollars.
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