Explanatory Notes
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Apparatus Notes
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CHAPTER 60
[begin page 412]

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 himexplanatory 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 disappearedexplanatory 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 outcastemendation 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 sentencesexplanatory 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 thatemendation 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 twentyemendation pocket-minersemendation 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 hillsidesemendation every day for eightemendation months without finding gold enough to make a snuff-box—his grocery bill running up relentlessly all the time—and then findemendation a pocket and take out of it twoemendation thousand dollars in two dips of his shovel. I have known him toemendation take out three thousand dollarsemendation 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 isemendation the most fascinating of all the different kinds of mining, and furnishes a very handsome percentage of victims to the lunatic asylum.emendation

the old collegiate.

Pocket hunting is an ingenious process. You take a spadeful of earth from the hillsideemendation 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 yellowemendation 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, twentyemendation 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 spadefulemendation 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 dollarsemendation. Sometimes the nest contains ten thousand dollarsemendation, and it takes you three or four days to get it all out. The pocket-miners tell of one nest that yielded sixty thousand dollarsemendation and two men exhausted it in two weeks, and then sold the ground for ten thousand dollarsemendation to a party who never got three hundred dollarsemendation out of it afterward.

striking a pocket.

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 dollarsemendation in it and the other eight thousand dollarsemendation. That man could appreciate it, for he hadn’t had a cent for about a year.

In Tuolumne lived twoemendation miners who used to go to the neighboring village in the afternoon and return every night with householdemendation 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 dollarsemendation 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 dollarsemendation. 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 Americanemendation is gifted above the sons of men.

I have dwelt at some length upon this matter of pocket-miningemendation 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.

Editorial Emendations CHAPTER 60
  outcast (C)  ●  out-  |  cast (A) 
  imagine. (C)  ●  imagine.— (A) 
  In that (A)  ●  centered CALIFORNIA—CONTINUED. centeredpocketmining. [¶] In (BE) 
  twenty (A)  ●  20 (BE) 
  pocket-miners (C)  ●  pocket miners (BE) 
  hillsides (C)  ●  hill-sides (BE) 
  eight (A)  ●  8 (BE) 
  find (A)  ●  I have seen him find (BE) 
  two (A)  ●  a (BE) 
  known him to (A)  ●  seen him (BE) 
  three thousand dollars (A)  ●  $3000 (BE) 
  is (A)  ●  is perhaps (BE) 
  asylum. (A)  ●  asylum. Honest toil and moderate gains in shops and on farms have their virtues and their advantages. When a man consents to seek for sudden riches he does it at his peril. [No charge.] (BE) 
  hillside (C)  ●  hill-  |  side (BE) 
  yellow (A)  ●  shining (BE) 
  twenty (A)  ●  20 (BE) 
  spadeful (A)  ●  spade full (BE) 
  five hundred dollars (C)  ●  $500 (BE) 
  ten thousand dollars (C)  ●  $10,000 (BE) 
  sixty thousand dollars (C)  ●  $60,000 (BE) 
  ten thousand dollars (C)  ●  $10,000 (BE) 
  three hundred dollars (C)  ●  $300 (BE) 
  five thousand dollars (C)  ●  $5,000 (BE) 
  eight thousand dollars (C)  ●  $8,000 (BE) 
  lived two (A)  ●  livedtwo (BE) 
  household (A)  ●  house-  |  hold (BE) 
  eight hundred dollars (C)  ●  $800 (BE) 
  a hundred and twenty thousand dollars (C)  ●  $120,000 (BE) 
  American (A)  ●  American miner (BE) 
  pocket-mining (C)  ●  pocket mining (BE) 
Explanatory Notes CHAPTER 60
 an old friend of mine, a miner, came down . . . and I went back with him] The old friend was James Norman (Jim) Gillis (1830–1907), the brother of Steve Gillis (see the note at 323.30–325.2). He was born in Georgia, and in 1848 obtained a medical degree in Memphis, Tennessee. The following year he went to San Francisco with his father, Angus Gillis. After an early period of ranching in Sacramento County, he spent most of the remainder of his life mining in Tuolumne County, living on Jackass Hill near Tuttletown. Periodically he visited San Francisco, where his parents lived; following such a visit late in 1864, he took Clemens back with him to his cabin on Jackass Hill. Clemens was spurred to leave San Francisco not only by his straitened financial circumstances, but by his fear that he would be called to honor a $500 bail bond he had posted for Steve Gillis, who had injured someone in a bar fight and fled to Nevada to escape prosecution. (In November 1866 the receipts from Clemens’s second San Francisco lecture were confiscated to satisfy this bond: see “A Missionary’s Troubles,” San Francisco Morning Call, 18 Nov 66, 3.) Clemens arrived at Jackass Hill on 4 December 1864 and remained until 23 February 1865. Jim Gillis’s wide-ranging intelligence and humor, his hospitality, and his love of nature were well known: Dan De Quille dubbed him the “Thoreau of the Sierras” and noted that his cabin was the “headquarters of all Bohemians visiting the mountains” (William Wright 1891). Clemens considered Gillis a “born humorist,” a facile and imaginative spinner of “impromptu tales” (AD, 26 May 1907, CU-MARK, in MTE , 358–62). Among his creations were Dick Baker’s tale of Tom Quartz, in the next chapter; the blue-jay yarn, in chapter 3 of A Tramp Abroad; and “The Tragedy of the Burning Shame,” the basis for the Royal Nonesuch episode in chapter 23 of Huckleberry Finn (“James N. Gillis—His Life and Death,” Sonora [Calif.] Sierra Times, 14 Apr 1907, clipping in CU-MARK; [begin page 704] Gillis, 17, 57–59; L1 , 320–21; Fulton, 54–55; Goodwin, 90–94).
 a flourishing city . . . fell into decay, and in a few years wholly disappeared] The first recorded discovery of gold on Jackass Hill was made in 1848 by the Means brothers, who earned an estimated ten thousand dollars from their claim. By 1849 well over three thousand miners were working in the immediate area, which was considered “without doubt the richest in the state” at the time (Heckendorn and Wilson, 80). The settlement on Jackass Hill, however, was never more than “a small community of homes, not a town, not even a village” (Gray, 8–13, 20). Within two years most of the miners had drifted away to more productive mining regions; the population of Tuolumne County reached a peak of over eighteen thousand in 1852, declining to eight thousand by 1870. The area nevertheless continued to yield significant amounts of gold: in January 1866, for example, the Gillis brothers struck a rich pocket that yielded up to forty dollars per pan (MacKinnon, 5, 79–80; Buckbee, 337).
 One of my associates in this locality . . . for eighteen years he had decayed there . . . Latin and Greek sentences] None of Clemens’s known acquaintances on Jackass Hill exactly fits this description, which may draw on at least two men, Dick Stoker (the model for Dick Baker in the next chapter) and Jim Gillis. In 1907 Clemens noted that Stoker had lived in his cabin for eighteen years by 1864 (he had actually lived there only fifteen years, since 1849: see the note at 416.4). Furthermore, Albert Bigelow Paine’s description of Stoker as a passive, serene man who “had no world outside of the cabin and the hills, no affairs” is consistent with the portrait of this “decayed” miner ( MTB , 1:267; AD, 26 May 1907, CU-MARK, in MTE , 362). While Stoker was “slenderly educated” (416.5–6), however, Gillis, in addition to having a medical degree, was reputed to know Latin and Greek (William Wright 1891).