By and by, an old friend of mine, a miner, came down from one
of the decayed mining camps of Tuolumne, California, and I went
back with him. We lived in a small cabin on a verdant hillside,
and there were not five other cabins in view over the wide
expanse of hill and forest. Yet a flourishing city of two or
three thousand population had occupied this grassy dead solitude
during the flush times of twelve or fifteen years before, and
where our cabin stood had once been the heart of the teeming
hive, the centre of the city. When the mines gave out the town
fell into decay, and in a few years wholly disappeared—streets,
dwellings, shops, everything—and left no sign. The grassy slopes
were as green and smooth and desolate of life as if they had
never been disturbed. The mere handful of miners still remaining,
had seen the town spring up spread, grow and flourish in its
pride; and they had seen it sicken and die, and pass away like a
dream. With it their hopes had died, and their zest of life. They
had long ago resigned themselves to their exile, and ceased to
correspond with their distant friends or turn longing eyes toward
their early homes. They had accepted banishment, forgotten the
world and been forgotten of the world. They were far from
telegraphs and railroads, and they stood, as it were, in a living
grave, dead to the events that stirred the globe’s great
populations, dead to the common interests of men, isolated and
outcast from brotherhood with their kind. It was the most
singular, and almost the most touching and melancholy exile that
fancy can imagine.—One of my associates in this locality, for
two or three months, was a man who had had a university
education; but now for eighteen years he had decayed there by
inches, a bearded, rough-clad, clay-stained miner, and at times,
among his sighings and soliloquizings, he unconsciously
interjected vaguely remembered Latin and Greek sentences—dead
and musty tongues, meet vehicles for the thoughts of one whose
dreams were all of the past, whose life was a failure; a tired
man, burdened with the present, and indifferent to the future; a
man without ties, hopes, interests, waiting for rest and the
end.
In that one little corner of California is found a species of
mining which is seldom or never mentioned in print. It is called
“pocket mining” and I am not aware that any of it is done outside
of that little corner. The gold is not evenly distributed through
the surface dirt, as in ordinary placer mines, but is collected
in little spots, and they are very wide apart and exceedingly
hard to find, but when you do find one you reap a rich and sudden
harvest. There are not now more than twenty pocket miners in that
entire little region. I think I know every one of them
personally. I have known one of them to hunt patiently about the
hill-sides every day for eight months without finding gold enough
to make a snuff-box—his grocery bill running up relentlessly all
the time—and then find a pocket and take out of it two thousand
dollars in two dips of his shovel. I have known him to take out
three thousand dollars in two hours, and go and pay up every cent
of his indebtedness, then enter on a dazzling spree that finished
the last of his treasure before the night was gone. And the next
day he bought his groceries on credit as usual, and shouldered
his pan and shovel and went off to the hills hunting pockets
again happy and content. This is the most fascinating of all the
different kinds of mining, and furnishes a very handsome
percentage of victims to the lunatic asylum.
Pocket hunting is an ingenious process. You take a spadeful of
earth from the hill-side and put it in a large tin pan and
dissolve and wash it gradually away till nothing is left but a
teaspoonful of fine sediment. Whatever gold was in that earth has
remained, because, being the heaviest, it has sought the bottom.
Among the sediment you will find half a dozen yellow particles no
larger than pin-heads. You are delighted. You move off to one
side and wash another pan. If you find gold again, you move to
one side further, and wash a third pan. If you find no gold this
time, you are delighted again, because you know you are on the
right scent.
You lay an imaginary plan, shaped like a fan, with its handle
up the hill—for just where the end of the handle is, you argue
that the rich deposit lies hidden, whose vagrant grains of gold
have escaped and been washed down the hill, spreading farther and
farther apart as they wandered. And so you proceed up the hill,
washing the earth and narrowing your lines every time the absence
of gold in the pan shows that you are outside the spread of the
fan; and at last, twenty yards up the hill your lines have
converged to a point—a single foot from that point you cannot
find any gold. Your breath comes short and quick, you are
feverish with excitement; the dinner-bell may ring its clapper
off, you pay no attention; friends may die, weddings transpire,
houses burn down, they are nothing to you; you sweat and dig and
delve with a frantic interest—and all at once you strike it! Up
comes a spadeful of earth and quartz that is all lovely with
soiled lumps and leaves and sprays of gold. Sometimes that one
spadeful is all—$500. Sometimes the nest contains $10,000, and
it takes you three or four days to get it all out. The
pocket-miners tell of one nest that yielded $60,000 and two men
exhausted it in two weeks, and then sold the ground for $10,000
to a party who never got $300 out of it afterward.
The hogs are good pocket hunters. All the summer they root
around the bushes, and turn up a thousand little piles of dirt,
and then the miners long for the rains; for the rains beat upon
these little piles and wash them down and expose the gold,
possibly right over a pocket. Two pockets were found in this way
by the same man in one day. One had $5,000 in it and the other
$8,000. That man could appreciate it, for he hadn’t had a cent
for about a year.
In Tuolumne lived two miners who used to go to the neighboring
village in the afternoon and return every night with household
supplies. Part of the distance they traversed a trail, and nearly
always sat down to rest on a great boulder that lay beside the
path. In the course of thirteen years they had worn that boulder
tolerably smooth, sitting on it. By and by two vagrant Mexicans
came along and occupied the seat. They began to amuse themselves
by chipping off flakes from the boulder with a sledge-hammer.
They examined one of these flakes and found it rich with gold.
That boulder paid them $800 afterward. But the aggravating
circumstance was that these “Greasers” knew that there must be
more gold where that boulder came from, and so they went panning
up the hill and found what was probably the richest pocket that
region has yet produced. It took three months to exhaust it, and
it yielded $120,000. The two American miners who used to sit on
the boulder are poor yet, and they take turn about in getting up
early in the morning to curse those Mexicans—and when it comes
down to pure ornamental cursing, the native American is gifted
above the sons of men.
I have dwelt at some length upon this matter of pocket mining
because it is a subject that is seldom referred to in print, and
therefore I judged that it would have for the reader that
interest which naturally attaches to novelty.
