Downieville

[From Robert Welles Ritchie, The Hell-roarin' Forty-niners (1928)]

Chapter 7

DOWNIEVILLE

WHEN I, very amateur showman, started to lead you around the faded cyclorama of the Days of Gold, pointing this and that painted tableau with my Highly Moral Lecture, my first pause was before a lighted tent in the winter solitude of the gorge of Yuba's north fork; within Major William Downie and a rag-tag crew drinking corn meal steeped in brandy water, the while they listened to a frozen stranger's tale of a lake of gold. Now see this lighted tent spawn into fifty—a hundred. See the roaring camp' of Downieville—high-falutin'est of all the Northern Mines.

Before the snows had gone three months the following year of '50, the richness of the diggin's Downie and his Kanaka and negro partners had discovered had brought a thousand men to the Forks and—marvel of all that section of the Yuba—one woman, Mrs. Jim Galloway. Then, not only down both sides of the rushing green river ranged claims —an early miners' meeting fixed their size at thirty feet square—but up the gulches where little threads of water trickled under ferns miners ripped and haggled fat gravels.

The Hell-roarin' Forty-niners

Gold ! Gold beyond all believing !

Down from Kanaka Creek comes riding one day a Pike from Missouri; a sad-eyed, ague-shaken man with a nugget that tips the beam of Cut-Eye Foster's gold scales at twenty-one pounds—$5376 at the then current sixteen-to-one exchange. From Kanaka Creek he comes, so named after the discoverer of gold gravels there: that perfidious cousin to King Kamehameha who'd left Major Downie and the other boys to starve when he was sent down country to fetch grub only a few months back.

Sluefoot Thompson, tall, spindlin' State-o-Mainer who'd lost part of a foot in a bear trap, comes in from Slug Creek with his pack mule. Both cowhide alforjas slung on that mule's back cram-jammed with coarse gold—gold rocks, by the Jumpin' Jehosophat !Thompson sinks the whole kit an' b'ilin' in four days over Kuntz's monte game: the same slick Kuntz who wears his long beard tucked inside the neckband of his shirt and once was caught caching nuggets from the other fella's pile in that handy hairy pocket.

Gold! A pinch of gold for a drink. A pound of gold on the fall of a card out of the box.

Comes the year '51, and now the camp boasts five thousand. Now the panners and the Long-Tommers are going in for a new wrinkle—combines. Men of adjacent claims pool their titles and their labor, buy whipsawed boards from Durgan's saw pit, build a wing dam of brush and bowlders across the river and divert the stream into a wide flume.

Downieville

That leaves their section of the river channel dry, to work right down to the rich bed rock.

The Jersey Company of twenty members, following this scheme, cleans up the riffles for from twenty to sixty ounces a day. Tincup Diggin's, next door, gets that name because the boys who've pooled their claims knock off work and call it a day when each has filled a pint cup with nuggets and dust.

But have I told you the various methods of washing out placer gold? Even Alaska's Klondike rush now is so far back in the years that many readers will have to admit themselves tenderfeet in the matter of panning and riffling.

When the early gold grubbers were forced to forego the easy trick of "crevicing" gold from rim rock and took to the stream gravels, their auxiliary machinery was pick, shovel and gold pan—"washbowl" it was first called. I think the panning process is familiar to everybody: the slow dip-and-shake of a pan of gold-bearing sand until the heavier gold appears in the bottom. Some genius improved upon this laborious process by evolving the "rocker," which was an improvisation on the baby's cradle. Where the child's head would be was a square box to hold the pay dirt, bottomed with a cast iron sheet punched with holes through which finer gravel and gold dropped with the rocking motion and the sloshing of water on the mass. The under channel of the rocker was cleated crosswise to catch the gold—though the lighter flakes could wash away and be lost.

The Hell-roarin' Forty-niners

Next improvement, the Long Tom.

This machine is a trough, generally about twenty feet long and eight inches in depth, formed of wood with the exception of six feet at one end called the "riddle," which is made of sheet iron perforated with holes about the size of a large marble. Underneath this collanderlike portion of the Long Tom is placed another trough, about ten feet long, the sides six inches perhaps in height, which—divided through the middle by a slender slat—is called "the riddle box."

It takes several people to manage properly the Long Tom. Three or four men station themselves with spades at the head of the machine; while at the foot of it is another armed with a shovel and a hoe. The spadesmen throw in large quantities of the precious dirt, which is washed down to the "riddle" by a stream of water leading into the Long Tom through wooden gutters or "sluices." When the soil reaches the "riddle" it is kept constantly in motion by a man with a hoe. Of course, by this means all the dirt and gold escapes through the perforations into the "riddle box" below; one compartment of which is placed just beyond the "riddle." Most of the dirt washes over the side of the "riddle box"; but the gold, being so heavy, remains at the bottom of it.

Downieville

When the machine gets too full of stones to be worked easily, the man whose business it is to attend to them throws them out with his shovel, looking carefully among them for any pieces of gold which may have been too large to pass through the holes of the "riddle." At night they "pan out" the gold which has collected in the "riddle box" during the day.

These methods, you see, required plenty of water. Where that lacked, notably all about the "dry diggin's" of Nevada City, men were forced to another expedient which soon grew to become the main adjunct to hydraulic mining. This was ditch digging to a water source above the placer workings. From the first Musketo Creek ditch, a mile and a half long, which was dug back of Nevada City in 1850, this branch of the mining industry leaped to gigantic proportions. Skilled engineers and their labor gangs went away back under the very eaves of Sierra crest, there dammed little snow water reservoirs and led their water streams over trestles and along the sides of precipices for distances of sixty miles and upward. Companies capitalized in the millions sold their water to the dry diggin's and the hydraulic properties; fought lawsuits and, on occasions, infuriated miners armed with barrels of black powder to blow up the ditches of corporations popularly held to be robbers.

All through the green silences of the old mining

The Hell-roarin' Forty-niners

country can be found, now, remnants of these remarkable engineering achievements; some murmuring with green water hurrying down, not to operate the engines of gold rooters but to feed the roots of fruit trees.

But, after this very unscientific diversion, back to Downieville. . . .

Look at the town which two years ago was a miserable huddle of huts and canvas shacks under the shadow of Piety Hill. Stores, hotels, saloons and gambling palaces straggling down a single main street, which jumps by rope suspension bridge across the river dividing Durgan's from Jersey Flat. Cut-Eye Foster's store: $3 a pound for spuds; $14 for a sack of flour; with a pair of boots running a fella' into $20 gold money.

Here's a sample sheet from a store ledger which echoes the financial—and, incidentally, the social—tempo of life in a roaring camp :

Major Briggs

10 drinks $ 5.00

One box matches .50

3 drinks 1.50

1/2 bottle brandy 4.00

1 bottle wine 5.00

1/2 dozen cigars 2.25

1 handkerchief .75

Watermelon 4.00

8 drinks 4.00

1/2 bottle brandy 4.00

Pants 23.00

Downieville

Wonder what Major Briggs wanted with the handkerchiefs, the watermelon and the pants. . . .

A restless, driving tide of men sifting in and out of Downieville and as far down river as Goodyear's Bar, where they buried Miles Goodyear in a buffalo robe and a gold rocker in the winter of '49. Busted men; men who'd just made their strikes and were stepping wide; men who had abandoned claims that paid $20 a day to find others paying $100. Fella' makes a $3000 strike down on Goodyear's Creek and comes into Cut-Eye Foster's to grub up; has to quit the camp at night to keep the whole town from trailing him to discover where he got those thick pokes full of nuggets he flashed over the bars. Fella' with a chip out of his right ear—mark of the Sydney duck—is caught robbing sluice boxes and gets thirty lashes on his back in front of the St. Charles House. First miners' meeting to decide upon hanging a man happens in '52.

The winter of '52 was the Bad Winter over all the Northern Mines, when river flumes were ground into toothpicks; when Dr. Robinson's Dramatic Hall, built on stilts over Deer Creek down in Nevada City, went downstream with an audience in it; when the bridge between Durgan's and Jersey Flat went out at Downieville. On one flat was the bakery, two butcher shops and Foster's store; on the other, all of the saloons. Desperate situation!

For a day folks vainly tried to make a crossing over the yellow water which filled the gorge with

The Hell-roarin' Forty-niners

such a tumult that even a shout would not carry across from one marooned group to the other. Then in the blackest hour an unnamed genius rose superior to the elements. Says a chronicler of the times :

A section of stovepipe was rigged up on the Jersey shore, and from it a ball of yarn was shot by gunpowder charge across the torrent. Eager hands seized the unwound ball on the Durgan side and pulled over after the yarn a heavier strand, then a stout rope, which was propped at both ends on jury struts. With the rope came a message from the Jerseyites : "What do you need most?"

They pulled back over the aerial tramway a single word scrawled in a shaky hand: "Whisky." So Jersey, munificent in its riches, sent over to the thirsting Durganites a basket of champagne and a demijohn of O-Be-Joyful, and received back several hunks of sowbelly and some bread. A fairer exchange nobody could ask.

A fairer picture of the convivial conventions of the Days of Gold nobody could ask, either.

Oh, the pioneers,

Had hairy ears. .. .

There was the Washington Saloon and Dance Hall : Before women came to Downieville—before

Downieville

the hurdy-gurdy gals were organized for their triumphal progress of a more or less regular Terpsichore through the diggin's, yet must there be dancing, even though the frailer sex lacked. So there was dancing at the Washington and at rival amusement places in Downieville. Simple enough : Certain men came with a patch of flour sack on the seat of their pants or—rarely—wearing a crinoline. The distinguishing white patch, or the precious hoops, indicated that the husky wearers thereof made themselves for the night partners to be led through the steps of the mazurka or the schottische—and to be treated at the bar.

And the newspapers of Downieville. . .

Well, the old files which still are tucked away in the county surveyor's office—and the present surveyor, inheriting them, hasn't much of an idea of their value—would appear to indicate that Ye Editor of the gorgeous Fifties kept abreast of the times. Believe it or not, Ye Editor of the rampaging Fifties was a tough bird. He went long on politics and longer still on personalities. He reflected in large measure the barroom talk of the times—for that was the only talk there was—and occasionally set a pace which was considered dueling stuff; it all depended upon whether the aggrieved party possessed what was popularly known as "the guts" or whether the offending scribe carried a reputation as a dead shot. This latter qualification was far from being a handicap to an editor in Downie-

The Hell-roarin' Forty-niners

ville. Subscribers to his paper were more than casually interested in his sporting rating as a marksman.

Consider these items, chosen at random, for their reflection of a delightful raciness of the times:

Poker Flat: Six fights came off in this place on the 9th inst.; and the blood and hair laying round loose the following morning gave the town quite a businesslike appearance.—Sierra Democrat, Nov. 27, 1858.

An hombre who had been "wooding up" was arrested at Port Wine last week after he had broken into several cabins and made other hostile demonstrations to attract notice. When taken, he announced he was "going to join his fathers."

Well, he was headed on the right road when the sheriff saved him.—Sierra Democrat, July 31, 1858.

Rogue Alley is gradually resuming the characteristics from which in times past it deserved the name. Thornton & Campbell have a law office on the West Side next door to the bridge; Taylor & Tyler are in the building next to that, and Wigenstein is putting up still another alongside of T. & T., which he can shape either into a law office or a barroom.— Sierra Democrat, Oct. 16, 1858.

Downieville

Our rooster Dick, a last year's chicken, is a gay bird and will fight any chicken of his age for any sum from $20 up to $100. So trot out your game birds.—Mountain Messenger, June 21, 1862.

The Widow Grizzle, of Lady's Canyon, her husband lately died on her hands of cholera. In the midst of his most acute bodily pain, when the hand of Death was nigh touching him, the gentle wife said to Grizzle : "Well, Mr. Grizzle, you needn't kick round so and wear out the sheets, if you're dying."—Sierra Journal, June 27, 1863.

Where the calcium glowed fiercest on Downieille I have reserved for other chapters.

Downieville would not be alive to-day but for he little white county courthouse which lifts its squat tower like a reef over the green surf of the locust trees ; thither go the dribble of taxes from a starving county, and the occasional lawsuit. Downieville lives by virtue of the circumstance, established in its heyday, that once it was created the county seat, and there have been no better contenders since Jory passed from the Northern Mines.

One approaches Downieville by a good highway which comes out of Nevada City and follows the sinuosities of an old gold stream through a gorge so crammed with Alpine beauty as to shorten the

The Hell-roarin' Forty-niners

breath of the most seasoned mountain lover. Bare mountain scarps with snow scars down to timber line; azaleas with a swooning fragrance along the marge of a stream which once was played with by puny man but which is now master of itself again; glades and pine shadowed coverts all brown with pine needles.

Then suddenly a turn of the road gives you Downieville : a few white roofs and spires thrusting above the lagoon of locust green. A town asleep.

The single business street which once roared with life is now a shaded lane of silence. Every other store building either is in decay or has its windows blinded by iron shutters. The great gold scales still under their glass housing in a general store haven't tipped to fat nuggets in forty years. If the sheriff is approached with a degree of comraderie he may show you the gallows which was used in the last county hanging in 1877 and which has been dismantled and stowed away, with canny foresight, in the attic of the county courthouse.

The tempo of the sleeping town is best marked by the Sunshine Club, a select organization of graybeards of the generation that followed Downieville's prime : men who have had no urge to see the great world beyond the portals of the Gorge. The daily meetings of this club are held a reasonable time after breakfast in the chairs on the sidewalk before the old St. Charles House and remain in session until the first mountain chill after sunset suggests

100

Downieville

adjournment. Order of business is without complexity; it embraces mostly settin' and occasionally, when a "towerist" automobile threads down the narrow street to give food for speculation, settin' and talkin' both.

The nigh side of a locust tree there at the scene of the Sunshine Club's gathering has been flattened and worn through to the cambium layer by a half century of propping boot heels.

A dog fight to-day is pabulum for a week's casual conversation by members of the club.

Nevada's Online State News Journal

Nevada History: