Grass Valley

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

Chapter 4

GRASS VALLEY

IN October of '48 three Oregonians who'd come skyhooting down from the north country in answer to the gold cry were about the then common business of blundering hit-or-miss over Sierra ridges, sampling every stream met for "colors" and shoving on to the next one. Mere "colors" wouldn't do in those frantic first days of the gold mania, nor yet "paying pans"; men must locate "pound mines" — claims yielding at least twelve ounces to the man between sunup and dark—or they must find rich rim rock above stream beds out of which the precious stuff could be carved like cheese flakes. There's not enough gold in this country for everybody, so grab the rich stuff first : that was the slogan of '48.

The trio, David Stump, a man named Barry and a third whose name has been lost in the shuffle of years, went northward from Bear River because they saw where somebody had been whittling the rim rock there and judged that field was no good. They burst out of heavy timber onto a little mountain meadow in a dish of the hills, a sweet spot where wild grasses and pea vines laid a carpet of chenille

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on both sides of a meandering stream and early frosts had set aflame the dogwood and the aspen.

Here in this grassy valley the three Oregonians panned the stream's gravels and "creviced" the stream's banks, with great profit, for three weeks and until the threat of winter sent them scurrying down into the Valley. They did not know that under this carpet of green lay the richest deposit of deep gold in all California. Had a jaybird on a hazel bush been miraculously endowed with oracular speech and told these three Oregon rustlers that a stream of gold would flow steadily from this grassy valley for eighty years to come, that more than ninety miles of subterranean passageways would crisscross through living rock three thousand and more feet below their boot heels, I believe it would not be the marvel of a jaybird's using human speech that would have startled them half so much as what that jaybird said.

So three primitive Oregonians passed on just because the eye of man has not been designed to permit his seeing below the crust of earth. Following year of '49 when Rough and Ready, four miles to the west, and Deer Creek Dry Diggin's, an equal distance east, began to fill up, this little grassy valley in a dish of the hills lay almost fallow. A party of immigrants seeking strayed cattle found them here, up to their knees in lush pasturage. Another party of five built a cabin on Badger Hill overlooking the meadows. The Boston Company, arriving in

Grass Valley

September, built four cabins in what came to be called Boston Ravine and there wintered. Doubtless they worked their rockers along the shores of the meandering stream but with no sensational results. Rough and Ready and Deer Creek Dry Diggin's—later to become Nevada City—were the roaring camps; this Grass Valley was but a halfway stop for a man with a traveling urge to sample the licker of a rival camp.

Then, in 1850, when the bottom had pretty well dropped out of Grass Valley and folks were selling for $50 thirty-foot squares of ground potentially worth $50,000, came discovery.

A man named McKnight went up on a hillside on an October day in 1850 to gather an armful of pitch pine for his fireplace. He carelessly kicked at a low ledge of rock just showing above the pine needles. A fragment crumbled away from the toe of his boot. Some God-given spur of curiosity prompted this fellow McKnight to stoop and examine this chunk. The cleavage surface showed white as coconut meat, and through the glassy crystalline substance ran a ribbon of rich yellow, all clotted like honey in the comb. The wood gatherer took his piece of rock back to his cabin and pounded it to powder in the bottom of an iron kettle. He washed that coarse powder in a gold pan.

The white powder slopped away over the pan's edge with the dribblings of water leaving—pure gold !

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Picture this fellow McKnight, pop-eyed, and with his boots carrying him at top speed back up the hill to where that gray outcropping of soft rock showed above the pine needles. His pick goes point down into the ledge—sign of a claim appropriation—and he paces off a square of thirty feet with the ledge as a center; thirty feet is the claim limit set by miners' meetings both at Rough and Ready and Deer Creek Dry Diggin's.

"Gosh a-mighty! Gold in solid rock; it jist don't make sense. But thar she be !"

When McKnight came down from Gold Hill—for so the eminence promptly was dubbed—he must have walked wide and lofty. Maybe his imagination whispered that, along with Marshall's, his name would ring round the world. Yet no statue has been erected to McKnight. His name is not in the school histories ; I venture to believe it is given general currency here for the first time.

McKnight, discoverer of gold quartz in California; daddy to an industry which long outlived the ephemeral dazzle of the placer diggin's. . . .

The strange strike on Gold Hill could not be kept a secret over a day. Folks in the row of cabins along Boston Ravine saw McKnight straddling down the hill to his cabin with sacks of rocks on his back—heard the noise of pounding come from behind the closed door of his cabin. You may be sure it was not long before he was displaying to bulging eyes the rich yellow residues in his gold pan.

Grass Valley

Over in Grass Valley [writes Chauncey L. Canfield's 'Forty-niner'] they have found veins of white stone which we call quartz and some of it has great masses and leaves of gold mixed in. It is the same sort of rock that most of the pebbles in our gravel are made of, and we have found in our claims several of these pebbles that had gold in them. We thought they were curious and had no idea that they were solid streaks of it. I saw one piece in Hamlet Davis' store to-day that had been brought up from Grass Valley. It was as big as my head and all covered over with gold. Davis said there was as much as $500 in it.

There was a big crowd looking at it, discussing its origin; and a great many were of the opinion that this was the Source of Gold we had been looking for. Others agreed that if there was much more like it, there would be so much gold that it would get to be cheaper than iron.

And then another entry in a Forty-niner's diary concerning this seven days wonder of gold sealed up in rocks:

At the hotel that night there was a lot of discussion and argument as to how the gold came there, but none of them was very convincing. An old fellow said to me: "Never mind these scientific cusses. I'll give you the right one.

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Gold is just where you find it, and you are as likely to come across it one place as another."

Next day I crossed over the trail to Grass Valley and had a look at the quartz mines. There is something that upsets all our notions. In two or three places they have followed these veins of white, glassy rock down into the bed rock for seventy-five feet and they don't seem to pinch out. I did not find anybody to explain how gold got inside this rock and I guess nobody knows.

A puzzle indeed: how gold got inside this white rock! One wiseacre delivered a weighty lecture in Nevada City wherein he sought to prove that when the world was very young and soft as a baby's head, a titanic explosion at its core had shot the gold particles right through miles of semifluid substance until they found lodgment in the cooled surface strata!

After all, how she got thar was just a convenient trip latch to barroom conversation; fact was, thar she be. And how to get the gold out of the hard quartz was a much more pertinent question. In the many essays at answering that question, essays both theoretical and practical, lies one of the most variegated patterns in the whole mosaic of the Days of Gold.

The first quartz miners, neighbors of McKnight who had marveled at what he got out of white rocks

Grass Valley

by pounding them in an iron kettle, were quick to locate similar outcroppings all around the rim of hills inclosing their valley—on Ophir Hill, atop and along the flanks of Massachusetts Hill. The whole brim of the mountain cup was prickly with these mysterious gold-bearing ledges. Men came down from the wooded heights with "specimens," as they called their fragments : cloven rock with snowy surfaces across which the virgin gold lay in delicate fern leaves or from fissures of which the precious stuff lifted in miniature fountain gouts. Much more beautiful—a hundred times more alluring than the dull grains of placer gold found in gravel bars!

Everybody within a day's ride of Grass Valley promptly went mad.

First off, there was a run on the hardware stores and drug shops of Sacramento and San Francisco for mortars and pestles wherewith to bray the precious rocks. Every miner's cabin became a miniature quartz mill. Fast as he got his quartz out of the vein he smashed it up at home and washed it out by laborious panning. But, unless the rock ran very rich—what the modern gold miner terms "high grade"—this hand process did not pay. Quantity production alone made this new sort of mining worth while.

A Judge Walsh and his partner Collins evolved the first quartz mill—the first in the world, unless my back tracking through scientific references is faulty. It ran by water power and its four head of stamps

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with shanks made of pine saplings could barely macerate two tons of quartz a day. Wags said that after a man had worked a week in the clatter and banging of those four stamps he'd have to be shot for his own good and the protection of the public. Some worthy who'd served with Taylor in the war with Mexico remembered having seen arrastras working in the mining region below the Rio Grande and duplicated that primitive machine at Grass Valley; it is a circular stone floored pit on which the ore is crushed by a heavy revolving stone roller, ox drawn.

Water power, man power, ox power; but no steam.

Let us go down Mill street and examine the quartz mills. See that pile of stones; each one contains gold. Watch that man, how he breaks into small pieces the large stones; see, another shovels it into those large iron mortars; see those heavy iron pestles, how they descend into the mortars, crushing the stones to a coarse powder. A small stream of water is made to run through each mortar, which carries of the powdered rock into a large trough lined with muslin, the bottom covered with quicksilver. The gold, being the heaviest, sinks to the bottom; the gravel passes over. The thump-thump-thump is heard all day. At evening the mill is stopped, the gold is carefully scooped out, taken to the

Grass Valley

retort room where it is separated from the mercury; and that is all we can see.

To-day, within rifle shot of where this primitive mill stood, the great Empire Mill on Ophir Hill fills all the shallow cup of Grass Valley with the roar of its eighty electrically driven stamps, which cease not from their pounding day and night. The Empire has operated continuously since 1850 on the very veins whose surface rock used to go into the primitive mortars above described; only to-day its hard-rock miners work more than 3000 feet below ground instead of in the shallow gopher holes of the Fifties. The Empire has cut sixty-six miles of channels out of the living rock. Grass Valley mines have become the postgraduate college of mining engineers from Russia to the Rand.

Now you have the scene: A raw town with its sawmill, its hotel, its rows of board-and-canvas shacks; one street set aside for the new-fangled quartz mills whose thump-thump-thump sounded nerve racking to the contemporary whose impressions I've just quoted; on the encircling hills, already being ruthlessly shorn of their great pines, beginning piles of gray spoils marking the badger holes of the quartz miners. Enter the serio-comic villain of the piece, Dr. Rodgers.

I like to fancy this Dr. Rodgers a man of portentous mien—he called himself Doctor, didn't he?—and a mellifluous voice. Even I am inclined to trim

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his ruddy cheeks with side whiskers and to put a rosewood cane with an ivory eagle's head into his hand, though I shall not insist upon his having a woven hair watch chain. Oil over steel—that's the Doctor.

He came to Grass Valley and Nevada City just at the time when men were blundering most in their efforts to solve the problem of how to get gold out of rocks; when the croakers and the crepe hangers were loudest in their lamentations about dam'd fools who thought they could get rich breaking large rocks into little ones. Whence the good Doctor came is a minor fact lost in the wash of Time; it is what he did to the twin camps of Grass Valley and Nevada City that really counts.

Dr. Rodgers got himself the fanciest room at the Beatty House in Nevada and signalized his arrival by giving an oyster supper, with plenty champagne, to a hand-picked group of the camp's most prominent men. During the course of the evening the host gently led the conversation into a favorite channel: how did gold get into solid rocks? He waited until each man had advanced his pet theory, and then Dr. Rodgers told them the real scientific truth of it—for, of course, he knew.

"And now, gentlemen, with me and with me alone reposes the secret of how to extract gold from those solid rocks—solid appearing, that is, to the unaided human eye. As with all the great secrets of Nature,

Grass Valley

this one is so simple to the scientific mind as to be laughable. Laughable, gentlemen!"

Thereupon he proceeded to reveal this laughable secret to eager listeners. Quartz, said the Doctor, revealed itself under the highest-powered microscope as being of cellular structure, like a cross section of pine or oak. "For Nature follows one grand scheme, gentlemen, in all her creations, whether organic or inorganic." Between the cells, or crystals, of white quartz a foreign matter we call gold had been infused in the way and manner just expounded by the Doctor. Such an infusion was abhorrent to quartz nature because, as any schoolboy knows, the injection of a foreign substance into any homogeneous body was against the scheme of Nature. But there was nothing quartz could do about it without intervention of the human intelligence.

"Gentlemen, I ask you: Heat any metal and what happens? Why, it expands. Heat quartz and what inevitably must happen? The solid appearing body of quartz crystals expands. And what then? Simple as A B C ! With the expansion of the quartz crystals, the infused gold particles must fall out because the quartz crystals that hold them locked have separated. And there you are !"

Well, that oyster supper started things. In Nevada City and Grass Valley folks talked about Dr. Rodgers' expansion of quartz until the birth of a Rodgers Gold Smelting Company appeared but the logical answer to universal speculation.

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A scientific cuss in Nevada has formed a company to get the gold out of the quartz by a new method and is selling shares like hot cakes at ten dollars a share. He is going to build a furnace and melt the gold out of the rock. It may be all right, but I don't know anything about quartz mines and have not bought any stock.

I hear, as a rule, miners have fought shy of the investment, as the majority are skeptical and don't believe in any new-fangled process for getting gold out of the rocks; but the business men don't feel that way. I am told that the merchants, lawyers and a great many sporting men have put money into the scheme and the inventor has raised about forty thousand dollars. He is grading off a site for his furnace on Deer Creek, opposite the town, has sent below for fire bricks and machinery, and is burning a kiln of charcoal for fuel. His idea is to raise sufficient heat in the furnace to melt the rocks and run it off at a spout; contending that the gold, being so much heavier, will sink to the bottom and then can be taken out pure and solid. . . .

To hear the investors talk, however, you would think they were already millionaires.

This diarist seems to have been among the conservatives and, perhaps, one who never had come

Grass Valley

under the full jet of Dr. Rodgers' personality. But there were plenty less cagey : the big gamblers of Grass Valley and Nevada City, the kiters of mining stocks, small-time store clerks. One contemporary says that Dr. Rodgers' scheme was "a veritable South Sea bubble."

At last the big day arrived. The great brick stack which had been built near Deer Creek was filled with alternate layers of pitch pine, charcoal and rich quartz. The big mechanical blower, run by water power, was set whirring before a vent in the stack's base. Flames leaped from the tall chimney top and a volcano gout of smoke. Men came from all the near-by camps, from Rough and Ready, from Selby's Flat and even far-away Humbug, to witness a prodigy or give the laugh to dupes.

The fire burned two days. Meanwhile saloons did a roaring business. A meandering trail was worn between the belching stack on the edge of Deer Creek and the collected bars of the town. The investors brought cold snacks to eat close under the smelter's shadow; they dared not lose one minute of tingling fascination.

Finally the stack cooled sufficiently to permit approach. The great Dr. Rodgers himself opened the iron door at the bottom of the flue, and while enthusiasts banged their revolvers into the blue he raked out the pan which was to be filled with pure gold.

The pan was heaped and running over—with

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ashes. Not a spot of gold the size of a pinhead in it.

Not only did capitalists who generally subscribed to promote the enterprise lose their entire investment, but many a poor fellow lost his whole summer's wages, besides being in debt for his board at twelve dollars a week. Rigby and Dr. Rodgers, the manager and projector, were enabled, through the handling of stockholders' money, to make themselves whole.

But Dr. Rodgers' fiasco did not halt men's efforts to mine and extract quartz gold. Slowly and with sharp financial pains—occasionally with sudden tragedy interjected—pioneers made themselves masters of a new mining craft. Because of the heavy expenses, both in digging and crushing, quartz mining was not an undertaking for a single man, as with placer working, nor yet for groups of three or five "pardners." To follow a gold bearing ledge down into the flinty heart of a mountain required large capital, which meant the organization of companies and flotation of stock with all the chances for swindle inherent in that operation. In the following chapter is detailed an episode from the dark side of pioneer quartz working.

Yet I say the industry worried ahead. A meticulous German observer visited Grass Valley in 1857 and published in London the next year a report of what he saw.

Grass Valley

The Allison Ranch mill [wrote this Ernest Seyd] has been at work some six weeks, during which time they have reduced only some five hundred tons of ore, which has yielded about 500 pounds (not ounces) of gold—value about $100,000. . . . The grand prize of the Allison boys, which two years ago might have been purchased for $600, could not now be obtained for much, if any, less than half a million. The ledge is very thick, in parts as much as eight feet; none of it poor.

The Gold Hill Mill is now at work upon ore from its own mines, and upon custom work, which is yielding from $15 to $100 a ton. At Lee's Mill they are reducing ore which is paying $100 per ton.

An interesting speculation rises here which, perhaps, some mining engineer acquainted with the Grass Valley field could answer : How much gold did these first quartz miners throw away? The German Seyd's report of richness per ton reckoned only the "free" gold captured from reduced ores; that is, gold uncombined with other metals. Perhaps the operators of the Fifties did not even recognize as valuable pyrites and galena and other gold compounds to-day broken up by elaborate processes of metallurgy; certainly these elements of quartz veins were allowed to wash down onto the growing fan of "tailings" below each primitive mill.

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Grass Valley was just in the knee pants stage of its growth, just beginning to be socially self-conscious in the mid-Fifties, when a red flaming star blazed into its periphery—Lola Montez.

There has been a recent quaint revival of interest in this international Bad Girl of the Mid-Victorians. Essays about her have appeared and a few of our rebel intellectuals have taken up Lola in a serious way. Odd that the raw mining town of Grass Valley should contribute its paragraph of Monteziana.

The Montez—to recapitulate for those who do not draw their pet heroines from the demimonde—was Limerick-born Maria Dolores Eliza Gilbert. A creature of fire and fascination, she made her appearance as a dancer on the London stage in 1843, caused a great amount of tut-tutting among the prigs of that capital, ruled Bavaria as the favorite of King Ludwig—costing that monarch his pretty crown—contracted a bigamous marriage with a coronet in the Life Guards in London and came to New York in 1851. San Francisco, where miners cast nuggets at the feet of dancers, lured Lola two years later. There she was up to her old tricks of marrying bigamously—the spirited Irish woman never had time to bother with divorces—and after a little while she quit her latest spouse to go off hunting grizzlies with a German Nimrod. When he accidentally shot and killed himself, the restless vessel of passion suddenly plumped upon Grass Valley, bought herself a cot-

Grass Valley

tage, put a half-grown bear cub on a chain in the front yard and settled down for a little rest.

Grass Valley's reaction to the presence of the notorious Montez undoubtedly was expressed in a communal snigger. Women in the rough camp were still so rare that the coming of a new one caused suspension of business on Mill and Main streets. A woman whose daintily slippered foot had kicked over a throne—well!

Nevertheless there were men, the local gallants, who were distinctly not averse to having their names entered on Lola Montez's list of social eligibles : the Messieurs Chavanne and Fricot, French bankers ; the brothers Watt; Lawyer William M. Stewart, who was later a brilliant United States Senator from Nevada. The "Irish Countess," as she was called by Grass Valley folk, was a liberal entertainer and an educated provider.

Langton's Express used to bring up from San Francisco hampers of the finest vintages to be delivered at the Montez cottage. The ladies of Grass Valley—need one cite the obvious? —never gave the dashing beauty the social accolade.

Two years Lola Montez lived in Grass Valley, surrounded by her pet bear, dogs, horses, birds, goat, sheep, hens—and gentlemen. Then one day she publicly horsewhipped Henry Shipley, editor of the Grass Valley Telegraph, for something he'd said about her in his paper—at least, so legend assigns the cause—and shortly thereafter left town. So did Mr. Shipley.

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Grass Valley in 1928 is one of the scant half dozen mining camps of the riotous Fifties that survive in prosperity; and all because of that chunk of gold-bearing quartz McKnight kicked from a ledge atop Gold Hill on an autumn day seventy-eight years ago. The tidy little city in the cup of surrounding hills has been undercut in its every precinct by crisscrossing of shaft and scope deep down in the viscera of earth below. A large part of its male population—Cornishmen mostly—go down in "skips" to the 4800 level and the 6200 level to spend the day or the night underground, where live mules with eyes as useless as those of Mammoth Cave fish. Ever so often tidy bricks of solid gold go from Grass Valley down to the mint in San Francisco.

The savor of the old days of heartbreak and hazard still is strong. Under wooden sidewalk awnings are entrances to many a one-time famous saloon and gambling palace: the Alta, the Empire, Madame Moustache, the French woman's—she killed herself in bad Bodie in '79. Up on Osborne Hill, on Ophir and on Gold Hill, everywhere amid the thickets of manzanita and poison oak, are prospect holes of the first quartz mines, tunnels, skeletons of abandoned shaft house; and heaps and moraines of splintered rock haggled from the bowels of earth by black powder blasts.

The promise implied by the tricky genius of gold when she put that block of gold-veined quartz in the way of McKnight's boot has been fulfilled year upon

Grass Valley

year—and will continue to be many years in the future. When all the river camps and the hydraulic diggin's long since have been deserted and left to the healing silence of the mountains, Grass Valley mines will continue to spout their golden streams.

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