CHAPTER 60
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Ⓔexplanatory note. 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Ⓔexplanatory note—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Ⓐemendation from brotherhood with their kind. It was the most singular, and almost the most touching and melancholy exile that fancy can imagine.Ⓐemendation 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Ⓔexplanatory note—dead and musty tongues, meet vehicles for the [begin page 413] 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Ⓐemendation 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Ⓐemendation pocket-minersⒶemendation 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 hillsidesⒶemendation every day for eightⒶemendation months without finding gold enough to make a snuff-box—his grocery bill running up relentlessly all the time—and then findⒶemendation a pocket and take out of it twoⒶemendation thousand dollars in two dips of his shovel. I have known him toⒶemendation take out three thousand dollarsⒶemendation 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Ⓐemendation the most fascinating of all the different kinds of mining, and furnishes a very handsome percentage of victims to the lunatic asylum.Ⓐemendation
Pocket hunting is an ingenious process. You take a spadeful of earth from the hillsideⒶemendation and put it in a large tin pan and dissolve and wash it gradually away till nothing is left but a teaspoonful of fine [begin page 414] 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Ⓐemendation 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Ⓐemendation 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Ⓐemendation of earth and quartz that is all lovely with soiled lumps and leaves and sprays of gold. Sometimes that one spadeful is all—five hundred dollarsⒶemendation. Sometimes the nest contains ten thousand dollarsⒶemendation, and it takes you three or four days to get it all out. The pocket-miners tell of one nest that yielded sixty thousand dollarsⒶemendation and two men exhausted it in two weeks, and then sold the ground for ten thousand dollarsⒶemendation to a party who never got three hundred dollarsⒶemendation out of it afterward.
The hogs are good pocket hunters. All the summer they root around the bushes, and turn up [begin page 415] 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 five thousand dollarsⒶemendation in it and the other eight thousand dollarsⒶemendation. That man could appreciate it, for he hadn’t had a cent for about a year.
In Tuolumne lived twoⒶemendation miners who used to go to the neighboring village in the afternoon and return every night with householdⒶemendation 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 eight hundred dollarsⒶemendation 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 a hundred and twenty thousand dollarsⒶemendation. 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Ⓐemendation is gifted above the sons of men.
I have dwelt at some length upon this matter of pocket-miningⒶemendation 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.