60. CHAPTER LX.
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
slodge-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.