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

 

Chapter 6

NEVADA CITY

            RIGHT here I am going to dip my hand in another fellow's gold poke. Thirty lashes on my bare back would be my portion if I were caught at this business seventy years ago, up there in the hellroarin' diggin's. But passage of the years and the luck of living in softer times make me bold. So I lift from the worthy Edwin F. Bean's Directory of Nevada County, published in the Sixties, the story of the birth of a mining camp from the pen of one M. P. Avery, gold seeker and editor:

            On the way from Sacramento to Vernon [Avery detailed his experiences in '49] I encountered a party on horseback who were coming from Deer Creek and who told me big stories about "pound diggin's" in Gold Run. As "pound diggin's"—i.e., claims that would yield twelve ounces a day to the man—were just what I was in search of, I inquired the way to this El Dorado, followed the old Emigrant Trail up Bear River to Johnson's Ranch, at the edge of the foothills, and then took a trail for the creek.

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            The first night in the foothills I had company —Caldwell, who was after a winter stock for his store on the creek at a point seven miles below what is now Nevada City, and several Southern and Western men. There was an encampment of United States soldiers near Johnson's Ranch at the time and the Indians were troublesome, sometimes putting an arrow through a lone sleeper or driving off cattle and horses. . . .

            Arrived at Caldwell's store—the only trading post on the creek at that time—I found it a square canvas shanty stocked with whisky, pork, moldy biscuit and gingerbread; the whisky four bits a drink, the biscuits a dollar a pound.

            A few tents were scattered over the flat and about a dozen parties were working the bars with dug-out cradles and wire or rawhide hoppers; only one or two persons having cradles made of boards and sheet iron.

            I prospected with good success in a claim that had just been abandoned by the notorious Greenwood, carrying dirt in a pan to a dug-out cradle. Went with shovel and pan seven or eight miles up the creek, testing several ravines as high up as the top of the ridges, seldom—in my ignorance--going deeper than a few inches and always getting gold.

            A preacher whose name I forgot was then

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hauling dirt from one big ravine back of Caldwell's store in an ox cart and washing it at the creek with good success. A few other men were carrying dirt from other ravines in sacks on their backs or on those of mules. All were close-mouthed about the yields and regarded me as an interloper. They were Southwestern men, apparently, and mixed with their jealously was contempt for a smooth-faced "Yorker," whose long brown hair lying on his shoulders ought to have conciliated their prejudices, since it looked like following a fashion set by themselves.

            In my prospecting I somehow failed to get on the Gold Run side of the creek and so missed my objective point; but I struck the conjunction of ravines in the little flat known afterwards as the site of Dyer's store; and in Rich Ravine, winding about American Hill, I got a prospect that satisfied me immediately to return to Mormon Island, near Sacramento, for my companions. That locality was then (Oct. 10) completely unworked ; I saw no prospect holes anywhere in the vicinity.

            While camping out alone in the thick forest that covered the place I awoke one night oppressed for breath and saw a small gray wolf at my feet; fired at his eyes gleaming among the rocks, but missed him. . . .

            [Avery was held up by winter storms in Sacramento and again at Nye's Ranch—later Marys-

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ville—and did not return to the scene of his rich strike in a virgin field until mid-February.]

            To my intense disgust [his narrative continues] I found that my ravine was occupied from one end to the other by long-haired Missourians who were taking out their "piles." They worked in the stormiest weather, standing in the yellow mud to shovel dirt into cradles or Toms; one of them had stretched a canvas awning over their claims, which were only 30 feet along the ravine. All the other ravines leading into the flat at the foot of American Hill were occupied almost as thickly.

            Dyer had a log cabin store in the midst where whisky and brandy were sold at $6 and $8 the bottle, molasses at $8 a gallon, flour at $1 a pound and pork, $2. American Hill was covered with tents and brush houses, while a few had put up log cabins. At nights the tents shone through the pines like great transparencies; and the sound of laughter, shouting, fiddling and singing shattered those primeval silences strangely. . . .

            The diggin's yielded wonderfully. From one to twelve ounces a day was common with the cradles; while many a Long Tom party took home to their cabins at night a quart tin pail full of gold, much of which was coarse as wheat grains. Many a lucky fellow left with a fortune in the spring; and at the same time the embargo

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of snow and mud was lifted, so that teamsters and packers arrived with supplies from the lower country.

            So Nevada City sprang full grown out of the wilderness. And even though Avery, the discoverer, felt himself cheated of his due reward, to him belongs the honor of having been the father of one of the few mushroom camps that has weathered the years. To-day automobiles crossing Deer Creek over a steel bridge climb that same American Hill on a paved business street, and a chamber of commerce points with pride at what covers a one-time sea of mud.

            A great camp; for many years supreme in all the Northern Mines. In its heyday it was the hub-center of life for all the subordinate diggin's for ten miles roundabout. Saturday night meant for the sluicer of Selby Flat and the river panner from Saleratus Ranch a long hike over trails to the bright lights of Nevada and—like as not—precious little inclination for work on Monday. Its saloons were the gaudiest. The stiffest games ran in its gambling halls. Nevada City sports clinked as they walked from the linked nuggets spanning their fancy waistcoats in the guise of watch chains.

            Look at Madame Moustache's genteel resort—Madame the sprightly Frenchwoman who could fling a crisping oath, or if need be a dirk, with admirable precision. A long, rough boarded room

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fully fifty feet in extent, its walls draped with colored cloth and decorated with provocative art studies in the nude which were imported straight from the Madame's home land. Fanciest bar in California, behind which a corps of gin slingers could serve fifty at a round of drinks if pressed. At one end where a cleared space gave invitation for dancing, an orchestra of fifteen pieces sobbed out sentimental waltzes or brayed mazurka measures. The rest of the resort was given up to twelve or fifteen tables: monte, twenty-one, poker, or name your game. "Make your game, gentleman. All down. . . ."

            An episode at the Maison Moustache, neatly packed with drama:

            In Nevada City of the Fifties lived a stray, a twelve-year-old boy whose mother had eloped with a slick gambler and whose dad had died of dysentery. The camp adopted him, dubbed him Shell-bark, doted on him. He was everybody's pet. Man after man took Shellbark to live with him because he was credited with being a better mascot than a humpbacked man or even a nigger. At twelve, Shellbark's education included the art of tobacco chewing without apparent evil results, drinking bottled ale—the boy was zealously kept from the hard stuff—and with a higher course in card playing. There he exhibited unusual talents. He could raise you out of your boots with one ace showing and another in the hole.

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            Another citizen of Nevada was one Blue Dick, a bad, bad gambler. Blue Dick knew he was bad, and that's what made him bad. Blue Dick let folks know he was a ravenin' catamount, an' a Pecos River tornader, an' a blood-sweatin' B-hemoth all packed into one hairy hide. Likewise, he played a dirty game of draw poker.

            One dull afternoon at Madame Moustache's Blue was sitting into a little draw with three whom he counted easy pickin's. Luck plus, perchance, a native dexterity with the cards, favored Blue for a while. Then occurred something very disconcerting to the bad man: he found himself being raised right out of his chair, after the draw, by one of those players counted stupid. His professional dignity prompted him to raise back; also, he hoped to bluff this upstart into quitting. Conceive of the bad man's mortification when the last bet was greater than his dwindling stack of chips. Blue shoved in his last dollar and demanded a "sight" on the pot.

            "Not," said the unruffled opponent, "when you're packin' a couple hundred dollars worth of jewelry, to say nothin' 'bout them two pearl handled revolvers in your belt. Go raise the wind from a Jew."

            Blue stormed and scowled his worst. The other was obdurate: either the show down would be delayed until Blue could go out on the street and finance himself on his personal collateral, or the pot was forfeit without a show down.

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            "To hell with yuh, then !" Blue whipped out hi bowie knife, laid his five cards face down on the table and drove the blade through them deep into the wood.

            "When I come back, of thet thar knife's been so much as tetched somebody's goin' to meet his Maker." Blue stalked out to find a pawnshop. For a while the others in the game and the few hangers-on hovered about, fascinated by the cold glimmer of that blade where it sank through pasteboard into the top of the card table. Deadly menace there. Finally waiting palled on them they drifted to other tables to watch the fall of the cards. Minutes passed, then --

            "Good God !" One of the erstwhile players pointed to the table of conflict. There on top of the table knelt Shellbark, the camp's stray. He had worked loose Blue's Bowie-knife and was casually studying the speared hand.

            Two of the men who'd been sitting in the game fled. The third—he who'd had the temerity to bluff Blue to his last extremity—took his life in his hands, undoubtedly, when he went over to the card table, swept Shellbark off and hastily readjusted the five cards as to the slit through their surfaces. Barely had he driven the knife home again in proper order when the door to Madame Moustache's opened and Blue Dick appeared, glowering. He was minus his watch chain and minus his two pearl handled revolvers.

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            Minus, too, all the confidence he had in himself as a blood-sweatin' B-hemoth. While onlookers held their breath, Blue strode to the table, jerked out the bowie knife and studied his hand. He looked up at the bland face of his opponent—he who so lately had dared a taste of that steel; looked again at the five pierced cards. Then with an oath he tossed his hand into a spittoon and quit Madame Moustache's, and the camp.

            With the discomfiture of Blue Dick to prompt the thought, may one interpose here a mildly iconoclastic observation upon the whole genus of gold camp gambler as mirrored from the pages of our lighter fiction? Mr. Bret Harte started the vogue of the handsome, heart-of-gold card riffler. For the present generation the type was firmly set by the thin-lipped Sheriff in "The Girl of the Golden West," both in its dramatic and operatic interpretation. All the world believes the gambler of Argonaut days was a gentleman with a broad Southern accent and Paderewski hands who had slipped temporarily from his caste but whose fine, inborn instincts inevitably came to the fore in a moral crisis. Yet so few of us believe in Santa Claus!

            The testimony of the surviving Old Timers agrees with the chroniclers of the Days of Gold in stenciling the professional gambler as a merciless, cold-blooded crook—more often than not a coward to boot—who was classed in the camp's social scale just one peg

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higher than the Chinaman. He was tolerated only so long as his cold decks were not rung in too shamelessly. Not a camp in the Northern Mines but had its housecleaning of gamblers ever so often; sometimes they went out under the lash of a bull whip, occasionally under the sting of a bullet.

            The writer was amusing himself in a ghost town of the diggin's on an occasion; reading the columns of faded print in newspapers of the Sixties with which the interior of a deserted cabin was plastered over. He found a highly moral verse which had been blue-penciled by some long vanished tenant of this shack—was it a stinging conscience that moved that blue pencil? "The Gambler's Wife" was the title of the newspaper verse. . . .

                                    He brings no food; all hope is dead.

                                                I have lived too long, a broken reed.

                                    Five children crying, each for bread—

                                                Oh, God! it makes my poor soul bleed.

                                    Is it for this to him I gave

                                                My hand and heart, my hope and youth:

                                    To starve and be a gambler's slave

                                                That's lost to honor; home and truth?           

            Nevada City takes high place in the roster of the old diggin's because it was there that hydraulic mining was evolved; thence it spread, to leave its vast scars along three hundred miles of Sierra slope; to circle the globe even to the Russian gold fields. As with every successive step in the development of

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placer mining, the evolution of the hydraulic monitor was the answer of man's inventiveness to fortuitous discovery.

            Shortly after rich stream gravels were discovered in the flats at the bottom of American Hill two miners, Heath and Hale, working up to the head of a ravine, discovered that the rich placer gravel "paid into" the side of the blocking hill. Here was a prodigy : gold away off a stream course and apparently locked in an old stream bed which had been covered by a mountain. Heath and Hale began sinking shafts through this hillside gravel until they hit the bed rock of a vanished river and then, by timbering exploratory channels along that bed rock, to scrape rich gold from the solid under surface of the mountain. Their example was followed by hundreds who began "coyoteing"—the name taken from the domicile holes of the despised animal—wherever gravel outcrop showed on the mountain side.

            A desperate business. Hardly a week passed without some luckless wretch being caught by a cave-in of his flimsily timbered shaft. Yet rich returns prompted the burrowers to laugh at death. Coyoteville, up on the mountain side overhanging Nevada City, was a nest of burrows—and a bad place for a man to walk coming home from "doing the line" in Nevada.

            Some unknown genius next was struck by the notion that a down-hill pitch of water would do the work of fifty shovels in stripping surface gravel

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down to pay dirt; and so a company was formed to dig a ditch one and a half miles long from Musketo Creek to carry a head of water to gravel claims on the hillside. Thus the upper gravels above bed rock were sluiced away.

            In July of '52 Col. William McClure, at Yankee Jim's down in Placer County, improved upon ground sluicing by bringing water in a wooden flume to a spot high above his gravel claim and then chuting it down against the bank he designed to work. The same year Chabot, a Frenchman at Buckeye Hill, back of Nevada City, copied the McClure rig, but added a canvas fire hose to the flume end to increase the head of water and enable the operator to turn the stream in any direction. A Connecticut Yankee, a E. Matson, completed the evolution of the hydraulic monitor by adding a heavy brass nozzle to the fire hose. Not long before cast iron pipe supplanted the weaker canvas hose and great steel nozzles of from eight- to ten-inch diameter at the snout were shooting jets of water under 200 pounds pressure.

            In the experimental stage of the monitor the nozzle was almost unmanageable because of the terrific water pressure behind it; the thing had to be anchored into position before the gravel wall its stream was to attack by heaps of rocks piled on top of it. A half dozen strong men were required to turn the nozzle while power was still on. One day a half-witted Chinaman held his shovel to the stream

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a few inches away from the nozzle mouth to clean it. The Chinaman's arms were broken but—happy by-product!—it was noticed that the intrusion of the thin blade of steel had caused the nozzle to move of its own accord. Followed the perfecting of a balancing and turning device which completely harnessed the monster.

            No intent of mine to stray into technicalities of hydraulic operations; I am not proficient in them myself. Suffice to say that an entire new system of mining technique had to be evolved, as in the instance of the gold quartz discoveries at Grass Valley four miles away. A technique requiring great capital and the combination of many men's efforts : water companies to bring streams down from ever-flowing sources up in the high country; corporations to float stock and provide the money for mounting pay rolls. Moving mountains was a far different business from shaking a panful of gravel on a stream's edge.  Now, in the mid-Fifties and on for thirty years, gold rooting became sophisticated. With the gradual exhaustion of the placer claims of one-man or five-man standard, the hydraulic and the deep mines of quartz became supreme.

            Beginning with Coyote Hill back of Nevada City, the great slashes in the mountains spread northward and southward. Fumbling geologists at last solved the riddle of placer gold lying under mountains: Once in Tertiary and Neocene ages before the Sierras were raised from a plain, rivers ran north

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and south, laying down beds of gravel sometimes 700 feet deep. And in these primitive river beds water-worn gold accumulated: that very placer gold which was washed into present-day streams when the tilting of the Sierras sent new rivers cutting at right angles through the channels of the old. So, wherever ancient gravels showed from beneath superimposed overlays of lava, there went men with their ripping water jets to cut through to rich bed rock.

            In their heyday the hydraulic mines of the Sierras represented an investment of around $100,000,000.

            New towns sprang up on the flanks of these great pits. Swollen pay rolls lured men from their independence in their waning placer claims and set them to work in rushing water streams. Nabobs—the engineers and the managing directors of properties valued in the millions—rolled high; there are several heaps of trash on scenic points of old toll roads which once were gilded resorts; names of these hotels still are given with a wink and a sly nod.

            Rip up mountains! Get the yellow stuff on bed rock and to hell with everybody!

            But the disdainful nabobs finally were forced to bow their proud necks.

            The blow came from the valleys, the fertile sun drenched valleys which sported herds of antelope on their grassy plains when the first gold seekers pushed into the cañons of the mountains. And during the stern preoccupation of the gold rooters over

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two decades these valleys had begun to fill with farmers. Fruits flourished where Indian campoodies once stood. Wheat fields strode out over black bottom lands. Here were the beginnings of a solid empire laid by men who cared nothing for gold that wasn't minted.

            On the lower courses of the American, the Yuba, the Feather and the Sacramento farms began to be covered by trash from the hydraulic mines back in the hills. Some arable lands were covered to a depth of seventy feet. By 1880, so engineers estimated, 100,000,000 cubic yards of gravel and silt had been moved into the lower channels of the Yuba River alone. Every winter disastrous floods resulted from the filling of these river beds.

            The Valley farmers organized themselves into an Anti-Debris Association and began to fight the hydraulic nabobs.

            In all the spectacular legislative history of California no such battle ! Staggering sums were raised by both sides; sums to be used, frankly, for "sweetening" senators and assemblymen. Lobbies were organized on the strategy of war boards at Sacramento. Fine scandals popped. Finally a legislature passed an Anti-Debris Act which was supported under a test suit in 1884. Permanent Federal injunction was levied against all hydraulic mining companies except a very few washing their debris directly into the Pacific.

            Then swift decay for the great gold pits up in

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the Sierras. Some suspended operations at once. Others tried to evade the stern eye of justice by operating during the winter only when natural discoloration of the streams would mask the presence of their tailings. But a host of deputy marshals—many of them venal—snooped on the operators and haled them up for contempt of court. These "spies," for so the mountain folk denominated them, made themselves broad targets for rifle sniping on occasions. More than one mining camp was the scene of lively reception for a suspected spy—at Downieville it was custom to signalize the suspected presence of a hated servant of the law by hanging a stuffed pair of overalls from the flagpole of the St. Charles House; then let even the most innocent newly arrived stranger look out for himself!

            But in the end the law prevailed. A whole population of miners moved out, leaving behind them dying towns and ineradicable scars against the green flanks of the mountains.