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In an interview with the Nevada County Historical Society, Mike Nevis, a collector and preservationist, shared his life story and experiences growing up in Nevada County during the 1940s and 50s. He recounted his father's purchase of a Union Hill store in 1949, a time of economic prosperity fueled by the mining industry. Mike helped out in the store, doing odd jobs and occasionally cooking for the school children who frequented the store. However, the closure of the mines in 1957 led to unpaid debts from miners, ultimately causing his father to lose the store. Mike's passion for mechanics blossomed at a young age, and he fondly remembered his first car, a 28 model A cabriolet, which he purchased at 13 and learned to repair with his father's guidance. After the store's closure, Mike's family moved to Susanville, where he finished high school and met his wife, Levita. Despite enjoying his time in Susanville, Mike yearned to return to Nevada County, and eventually secured a job with the Forest Service, allowing him and Levita to settle back in the area. Throughout his life, Mike maintained a deep fascination with the local mining history, collecting artifacts and exploring abandoned mines. He shared anecdotes about high-graders, miners who stole gold from the companies, and his own experiences panning for gold and even trading it for goods and services. Mike's dedication to preserving the region's mining heritage led him to amass an extensive collection of artifacts, which he generously shared with the community through tours and educational programs. He emphasized the importance of preserving this history for future generations, highlighting the ingenuity and resourcefulness of the miners who played a crucial role in shaping the community's development.
Full Transcript of the Video:
Hello, my name is Robert Moore, I'm with the Nevada County Historical Society, and this morning we are in the presence of Mike Nevious, who on his business card says, collector and preservationist. Mike, welcome. Thank you for being here, Bob. Mike, I know you came up from Southern California, and you were nine years old when you first came to Nevada County. Your father bought purchase a store. Could you tell us a little bit about that store? Yeah, it was a Union Hill store right next to the Union Hill School, which there is just a vacant lot there now where they park cars, but it was a store with one gas pump there, and probably built in maybe the early 20s, and he always wanted a store of his own, and he could develop it into what he wanted. He was a professional meat cutter. We came from Southern California. He worked in Redlands, California. We lived in Mentone, and so when he had the opportunity to buy the store, that's what he wanted to do, is do professional custom meat cutting, and then he developed the store since it was close to the school, a little, I guess you'd call it a fast food place where they could cook hamburgers and have sandwiches for the kids as they came in, and so it was a great time there, and enjoyed it for many years until, as you know, the mines closed in 57, and he had credit out to the miners, which is the way you did business in those days. You had a tab, and you'd put everything you bought on a tab, and so when the mines closed, unfortunately, those that lived in the area, they left the area and didn't pay their tab, and so we struggled along for another year before he actually lost the store. He went bankrupt there, and couldn't no longer stay there. When did he buy the store? What year was that? In 1949, so the area was booming with all the mines that were working, and the sawmills that were working, and the industry was really great. Hardware stores, just everybody was busy. It was good time, good economic times. And what was your role in that store? Did you eat just the hamburgers, or did you help behind the counter also? No, I helped a little, mainly clean up, and sometimes I'd cook for some of the kids coming in, and of course, I was probably 10 years old when he really developed the store into the serving counter with the seats, and so forth, and it was cooking, so I didn't really do a lot of work there, just help where I could. Trucks, command, I'd unload merchandise, and box, and stock shells, and things like that. Did you inherit your mechanical abilities from your father? Probably, yeah. It's a God-given gift, I think. I had an ability early on to just work on things with my hands, and he always supported me, and he bought my first car when I was 13 years old. What car was that? It was a 28 model A cabriolet, and just the neighbor up the street had it, and I think I gave $20 for it, and then worked that off in the store with my dad, and then he taught me how to work on it, and he was always busy in the store, didn't have much time, father and son time, so I had a little shop out behind the store, and I just tore into it, and went through, and worked on it all the time, and enjoyed it, and just had an ability to be able to look at and figure out the mechanics of a car, or even other things that I worked on to bicycles, and so forth. At 13 you couldn't legally drive, could you? I got my driver's license when I was 14. You could do it under restricted permit, drive to and from work. I got a job at a ranch down in Browns Valley, and applied for a special restricted driver's license, and I could drive from Grass Valley to Browns Valley and back. I bet you wish you still had that car, I'm just guessing here. No, it was a fun car, you know, it was a learning experience, I don't know if it was too good a shape or not, but we we had fun, and the neighbor kids would all come down, and behind the school all there was was parorchards, and so I couldn't drive on the highways with unless I went to work because of my restricted license, but we would take it out into the parorchard and drive around and just have fun with it. And then did you drive it to high school later? I don't believe so. No, I think we we caught the bus at Union Hill, and I went to Nevada City Junior High School my freshman year, and then senior high school we just rode buses, and you got to realize even though gasoline was only 20 cents a gallon, I got 25 cents a week for my lunch money at school, and we'd save maybe a nickel out of that, and so by the end of the month I may have enough for a gallon or two of gas, and then from there we'd usually use that to go to Red Dog and UBAT and explore that country. So even at a young age you were real curious about those mines out there? Yeah, the the Empire Mine, as you know, was running then, and you could hear the noise. It wasn't extreme noise, but a constant industrial roar, and the kids that I went to school with played with their fathers would trade at the store, and they would always come in with a story about how their work day was, and I was always listening to those stories, and then we would go over at the mine, the Empire Mine, and sneak around as young kids have the curiosity to see what's going on, and we'd watch the miners coming up and down, and they're the man skips, and they work hours coming up and down too. Did you have ambitions of perhaps one day being in those mines? No, not really. We explored all the country around the Empire Mine Union Hill area, went into every hole in the ground we could find, and we built a couple of the holes we found. The porcupines would make their dens in there, and so that would always scare us, so we made spears with a metal point on them, and so we'd take those in with us, and once in a while we'd get confronted with a wild porcupine, and we'd have to do it in so we could get out of there. They'll get your attention, that's for sure. So business slowed at your daddy's store, times were tough, you saw a huge transition going from a vibrant community to one that was struggling. What happened, what did your dad do to keep his family intact and make a livelihood? Well, after he finally let the store go, he came to Grass Valley and he worked temporarily as a mail carrier for the post office department, and then he kept looking for work and found a ranch foreman job opening in Susanville, California, and so he applied for that, and I can remember when we first got the map out to find out where that was, there was a nice big lake up there called Honey Lake, and so I was excited about that, being able to move and live up there by this Honey Lake, but it was called Honey Lake because it was just like honey. It was an alkali lake, it wasn't fresh water at all, so it wasn't good for boating or fishing or anything at all. That's a little bit of a transition to get from behind the counter of a mercantile and then work in cattle. The ranch job was a furnished house and food, and so all they had to do was put in their hours and work. My mom who helped, she was the seamstress, so she did a lot of sewing for the family who owned the ranch, and then dad would feed the cattle, and it wasn't a real large ranch, and he would take the tractors and mow the hay and put that up, and I really enjoyed it. That was my last year in high school, so I left here in my junior year, and I went there as a senior and finished high school there in Susanville. And you met somebody up there rather special? That's where I met my wife, yeah, 53 years now, and we just hit it off, and of course I always kid her that I was new blood in town, so she glommed on to me, and I was very happy though, we've been very happy. We've made it made it made it work, have three fine boys to. . . I think 53 years is a California record, I'm not sure on that, but you liked your work up there, but after you graduated and you met Levita, you still kind of pine for Nevada County, and. . . Yeah, I would, I'd bring her down to see the area here, and the clean nice rivers that we had, where they were kind of, they weren't polluted, but they were dark. I think it was a tannic acid from the trees up there and the lava rocks, they weren't very clean, so we'd always spare time, or the case, you know, we'd come down and bring her down here to see this area and explore the area that I knew so well. Did she fall in love with it, or was she reluctant to leave home? No, she loved it, yeah, she still does, and even after my career started, and we transferred here and through my work, she was a little disappointed, she left home with friends, because she was raised there as a young child, and, but it wasn't long before she made friends here, and, and says that's the best thing we ever did, was to move here and raise our kids. Well, that's comforting to hear your those words. You say you started your career, tell us about that guy. Well, we married in Sacramento, I was working in a sawmill there, an oldie mill in West Sacramento, and she lived downtown Sacramento and worked for the Agriculture Department, and I had a room in Sacramento, so I'd go visit her and go to walk across town, so I would go buy the old post office down there, and one day I was in, and there was an ad on the, on the wall for postal employees, civil service job, permanent job, so I applied and got a job, and the job took me to McClellan Air Force Base, where I worked there, but I was, watched the airplanes going back and forth, and so the mechanical ability I had, it started to surface, and I don't want to do this postal work, I want to work on the airplanes, so I took a couple of exams there on the base and was able to get a job as an aircraft mechanic, and hydraulic systems mechanic for McClellan Air Force Base, so I stayed there for eight years, but then my heart was in Grass Valley, so we'd come up here most weekends, we lived in North Highlands, and explore the area in which she still loved, and so we, how can I stay in civil service and have that career opportunity, and I thought well the only thing up here was forest service, and I thought if I could transfer from Department of Defense to Department of Agriculture Forest Service, I could maintain my time in civil service, so we applied and it took, I don't know, about five years, where they offered me a job back in Susanville, believe it or not, on the last, on the last of National Forest, so I worked there from 1966 to 1974, and then an opportunity came open here in Nevada City, so then I transferred here and finished my career here 35 years of civil service and forest service. You're a young man and you're exploring these tunnels and going underground, and you spent a little bit of time over there at the Empire Mine site. Yeah, and the way they brought the ore up, they dropped it into ore bins where they had some waste and some mill rock, and the waste rock went out to the waste dome, and they hired a guy, lived down there in one of the houses, he would go out with a hose and hose off the rock, and quite often they'd find rock with gold in it that got thrown out. They didn't do a good sorting job, so we would do that too, just sneak along the waste dump and find pieces of quartz with gold in it, but my biggest find was when they sorted the rock and it went to the mill, there was a separate track, they put the ore in a car and they'd run it down to where the stamp mills were, and so we found that track and were following along one day, and I guess this piece I found fell out of one of the ore cars, probably had it heaped up, and it was probably the size of a hardball, just chuck full of gold, yeah, I mean today it would be worth, you know, several thousand dollars probably, so we, I picked it up and my buddies that were with me, they said that's gold, that's real gold, you're so lucky to find that, so we ran home with it, we put it out on the concrete sidewalk and beat it up with a hammer, just broke it all the pieces, and oh look, we got gold and kind of threw it away, never kept a piece of it. You don't have it in the house under the mattress or anything, and how old were you when this happened? I was about 14, 13, 14 years old, yeah, but one of the neat pieces I did keep was my father having the store, the miners would come in, and some of the miners weren't too honest, they were called high-graders, and a high-grader is nothing more than a thief, it steals from the company, so they would bring in samples of rock in a, in a ore bag, and my dad would take this, and he would make a call to a guy named Nick in Nevada City, and Nick had an old model A coupe, he'd come over and they'd talk a while, and they'd pass, my dad would pass this bag of high-grade to the, to Nick, and a week later, Nick would come back and give my dad some money, and then a few days later, the miner who had high-graded that would come back, and my dad would pay him, so I didn't realize what was going on at that age, probably 13 years old, the one day this miner dropped off a bag of high-grade, and my dad says, well Nick's gone for a while, so we can't work this up, or get this taken care of for you, he said, so, but he said my son's been interested in how to pan for gold, and how to crush up rock, and we did have a little mortar and pestle, so I went out in the back room and took this bag of ore in my neighbor boy that helped me too, we panned it all out, and we got about two and a half ounces out of this bag of ore, well I happened to keep one of two pieces out of it, and I still have those pieces, so the big joke about when we're doing charter schools and talking about gold is that I high-graded from the high-grader, so it's kind of fun to think about, and so that's really the only highlight from gold, except for the one kid I ran around with, his dad was a driller, so the driller got to be the one underground drilling, and then the next day he'd go back, and they'd muck out, and he'd be able to see some of the gold in the rock, and he came in with fantastic stories of massive amounts of gold that they found in the rock, and then he said in the later years in 1955-56 they'd make discoveries, they were doing mostly exploration work, and the story was that they would find a good vein that's producing well, and they would go in with cement, and they would cement it off and record on their the values that were in that vein, and never did mine, so that leads us to believe that if that's really true story that there's a lot of gold still underground that never was mined out. You know, if you could elaborate a bit on a high grader, what would be his likely position in the mine, and how exactly would he get that home? Yeah, that's always an interesting topic, and even Jack Clark, who was a superintendent at Idle of Maryland, we talked about it quite often when I meet with him, I said there should be a book written about high graders, and he just kind passes the subject off, he didn't want to talk about it, because I guess he was in a position there that even today he's been probably retired, you know, 50 years from, but he just avoids the conversation. But the miners had different ways, they had change rooms, or they had to change their dirty clothes into clean clothes, and supposedly they had to walk in front of a superintendent or someone there without their clothes on, and they checked all their lunch pills, because they'd always take their lunch pill with them to go underground for eating. But somehow or another, they had ways to get that out, if it weren't, if they didn't carry it out, they knew somebody, a hoist man, or somebody that was dealing with the animals down there, and they would give them a percentage of it, if they could get it to the surface. And so they had ways, I don't know, I wish we could get some old timers and really document it thoroughly to see how they did it. Well, in an area that has gold mining, or a lot of money changing hands, there's always going to be people to exploit that. There's going to be some nefarious characters come up to Nevada County. I imagine there are ladies of the night that frequented the area. So you high graded from the high graders, that's a great story. Was it common for minors to pay their tab in gold? No, no, no, no, they never, I never saw any gold exchange to my dad, and they usually paid in cash when they came around, because they didn't make more than probably three to five dollars a day in that time in the fifties, so. Was that enough to sustain a family of two or three? Sure, sure, it was enough to sustain it. You got to figure that, you know, the cost of goods was way down at that time, too. I want to go back a little bit about my career. I was a mechanic for the Forest Service. I did not do a hands-on fire fighting at all. I went to many, many fires, slept out on the ground, and then my truck and all, maintaining fire equipment, and then Levita was able to get a job as a forest supervisor secretary for the Tahoe National Forest, and then she became what is called the information officer on a lot of the fires, and would go out and sometimes even fly over the fires and get the information put together for for the papers and television, you know. That just gets us back to what our careers were, and then with my mechanical abilities, like I said before, it was mainly a God-given gift that I pursued the kind of work I do, and then I just loved the machinery and the massive machinery that was used in mining and how it was used, and so I studied that just through books, and and observed, went to many museums, observing how people had put things together, or even active mines that we explored. We at one time went all the way across to Nova Scotia and stopped at almost every mine we could in museum to learn how they process their oars and stuff, and so my first collecting was probably around 1951-52, and I just happened to be in an area called Poker Flat, and we eventually got a mining claim there, and so when you're mining you're always picking up artifacts that would have been left over by the miners, and so we started with a small collection of nuts and bolts and hooks and drills, square nails, and all those kinds of things, and then what's not to the last 25 years, I get serious about collecting larger items, and then acquiring large items that maybe I couldn't use, but the city here can use, and we displayed them all around town now, and then I volunteer at the North Star Mine Museum and help them in different displays, and the Empire Mine has asked me several times to be involved with them in making working displays and stuff, but I never could get along with the way their politics were and how the organization wanted to do things, so it never did develop into anything there. I did sell them one of my mining displays. I had a mobile unit on a trailer, so it's up there now at the park. Poker Flat, you had a mining claim? Was that for dredging or panning or both? Poker Flat was a very unusual area, and then we went in. Where exactly is it? That Poker Flat is 17 miles north of Downeyville on Canyon Creek, but we went in there in 1961 with just a wetsuit and a mask and sniping tools, where the sniping tools are just little crevicing tools and little suction bulbs, and scanned the bedrock, and we picked up some real nice nugget gold. Prior to that, I had to explore the Deer Creek and the American River drainage just because I like exploring and trying to find gold, and so then we got into Poker Flat, we started finding nugget gold, and I thought, well, this is what it's all about, and so we got more serious and acquired a claim in there, and developed into, well, 120 acres of property that we had for 38 years, and mined there with a suction dredge, five inch suction dredge. Okay, you're there in Poker Flat with your family, and you're finding some nuggets, what did you do with this stuff? Each of the boys had their own gold bottle, and I think, I don't know, I think they've taken them all back to their home now, but they'd have their own special nuggets and special bottle they'd hold their nuggets in, but it got to be very profitable. We made several ounces a season, so what do you do with it, whether you put it in the safe or in a bottle, and so I started making jewelry since I was, I had the abilities I taught myself how to weld, how to gold solder, and so I thought, well, this is something that I could sell, and you could usually get three times the amount of the value in a jewelry piece as you could as a natural gold nugget, so I would, I let word out, I started making this stuff, and actually I had a dental bill one time where I took a bunch of the gold independence and stuff, and traded for my dental work, and there was a lab technician that came in while we were doing trading, and he took some too, but it became pretty profitable, and I made the pieces, I never did advertise anything at all, it just kind of went outward of mouth, so one particular time some people wanted to look at my stuff, and we made an appointment at McDonald's in Grass Valley, and went in there and got a table off to the corner, and laid out all my nuggets on the table, and they bought several, several pieces from me, and, but I've traded a lot of the gold, I've traded for a tractor, traded for a truck, I traded for a pelton wheel, oftentimes you find items you want to buy, an artifact, and people won't sell it, and I say, well, will you trade for some gold? Back in the 80s, he said, I'm mining up in the out of Fairbanks, would you like to come up and mine with me, and I said, I can't, because I have a Forest Service, Civil Service job, I can't just leave my job and go, and so he showed me pictures of the gold they were finding, and the process they were doing, and it intrigued me so much that I begged the Forest Supervisor to let me have off time, a leave of absence to go, so in 1984, then I was free to go that summer, and from May till August, and she always says how many days it was, it was 11 weeks, by himself up there in the wilds of Alaska, me and Bill Anderson at one other, yes, was that right around Fairbanks, that area, by himself up there in the wilds of Alaska, me and Bill Anderson at one other, yes, was that right around Fairbanks, that area, no, we were, we were halfway between Fairbanks and Nome, Alaska on the Yukon River, and the company, there was a company there that took a lease on the property, so they hired the three of us to go up there, and flew us in to the old camp that they had set up, and we set up an Alaska sluice box, and then, well before that, we set up two hydraulic monitors, so you see the monitors around here today, I actually got to operate, rebuild two of them, and operate them, so the ground was, the bay gravel was covered with glacial silt, because there was a period about 30,000 years ago that was dry up there, and this, the silt from the, what do you call the, the glacier, glacial silt covered the area, and it blew, and it covered this gravel pay gravel up to 100 feet deep, and so some of the mine operations had what we call yellow equipment running, and we'd clear that off to go into the pay gravel, but the company I worked for, they decided, if we got some old hydraulic monitors and set up, and we could hydraulic this silt off, this would be more economical, so we set up a 14-inch water pump down in the mainstream, and it was my job to do all the mechanical work, and set it up, and get it going, then we had 2,000 feet of 12-inch pipeline leading up to our diggins, and then, so we set up the monitors, and we hydrauliced them off an area about the size of two football fields down to the pay gravel, and then from the gravels, then we set up the Alaska sluice box, which was 4 feet wide and 58 feet long, and it had a 12-foot feet bend in the front, and we had one small little nozzle that we'd set up on top, so Bill, he'd set up on, on a platform, and run the small nozzle, and I'd push in with a D6 cat about two to three yards at a time, and he'd break it up, and then the gravel would go down through the sluice box, so every night, we'd work about 10 hours, 12 hour days, but every evening, before we shut down completely and went up for dinner, we'd have to bar the riffles, and that was, took a small hand pick, and the riffles would get tight with gravel, so we have to bar them and loosen them, so the next day run would still catch gold, but during that time of barring the riffles, I would hand pick four to five ounces of gold out of there, just nuggets, you know, you know, quarter to half inch diameter, fill them, put them in my sandwich bag, and go back to camp, and so we worked a little over two weeks, and we got 113 ounces in two weeks. I don't know the numbers, but that sounds phenomenal, and did you go back? No, I never went back, Bill went back, one of the stipulations the force supervisor had was, it's a good experience for you, because you work in a remote area, and it might benefit the government if, by your experience there, so I'll let you do it once, and that's it, so I only did it once, and Bill went back another additional year, and did it some more. So you were a young man when you first started with gold interest, and you started accumulating a collection, which is now spread over an extensive area in off of cement hill here, and you've had entertained a few tours over the years. Who would come and take your tour? Well, fortunately, we've had people that truly were interested. We had geology classes from Folsom Community College, and different homeschool, charter school kids that are studying California history, fourth, fifth graders. We've had a lot of those students come too, but part of the collecting was going back to early days when running around here in the area. There was a lot of artifacts everywhere, and so we had me and another friend would go out and collect these pieces, and to us it was just a piece of iron, and we'd take them down to the local scrap yard and sell them for, you know, five cents a pound, and we realized, I started to realize that I was destroying some very good pieces and artifacts, and then as later years go on, I realize how rare some of these pieces were, so then I decided it's time to really start collecting and preserving these pieces for future generations, and so as much as I could afford, and much as I could do, I would try to buy or trade and or talk people out like Lowell Robinson. We got the two big monitors down on Highway 49 from him, just free, and then a couple of the dredge buckets I got from Tiker were free, you know, just because of what I do in restoring, preserving, and even stuff for the museums they've given us things, mainly because of my reputation of being a preservationist and wanting to stay. Why do you think that's important? Well, because it's disappearing, and the more things we can preserve for generations to come, I realize it more when we have charter school kids here, they have no idea what a Peltonville is, or a rock crusher is, or even how an ore car works, and so bringing that stuff back to life is very important to each of us, and we wanted to share with the community and those that come to our area too, that have no concept of what the historic value of our whole area is, and it's rapidly disappearing with the newcomers that keep coming in. They have no idea of what we're appreciation for. Do you have any idea how many people have visited your place here off of Cement Hill, and when did you start giving tours? Well, I actually kept a logbook for several years, and then people get so excited when they come here and get to talking before they even get through the area, or through our whole tour, I forget. I used to have them sign in, and we'd had as high as 45-50 people at a time come, and there's been several hundred people come and spend time, and some of the kids have actually come and brought their lunches, their pasties, brought us stuff. One year I set up a trough out here with some concentrated concentrates I'd had from poker which was sand, black sand with gold in it, and I got little bottles for each of the kids, taught them how to pan, and what I taught them more was greed, because they wanted to, oh that's, I want that piece, I want this piece, and they were jumping all over each other's shoulders trying, it's my turn, it's my turn. When we were here a couple of days ago with the historical society, you threw out a little nugget, shall we say, about having grease on your fingers when you're panning for gold. Yeah, that's the fact that you don't want any oil on your fingers, it will actually float, float the gold in the water. The oils will go to the surface of the water, and for some reason it'll pick up the gold, and that was another process that the mines used, it was a flotation device. Mike built a mobile mining unit, and it had history, history mobile, we called it, and it was a pelton wheel that was run by a six horsepower Fairbanks Morse engine that ran a water pump that then ran the pelton wheel, and belted to the pelton wheel was a generator, and which produced electricity, and a stamp mill, a rock crusher, and air compressors, because we had a train whistle that blew, because you have to have a whistle blow when you go to work, and so everyone, we had it at the Fair for many years, and everyone enjoyed it, but one of the particularly fun days was Gold Rush days that Gold Rush, no it wasn't Gold Rush School, it was Deer Creek School, did at Pioneer Park, and so we'd go through our explaining how everything worked for the kids and parents and teachers that were there, and it was really interesting because so many of the adults did not realize that we get our electricity from hydroelectric power, and they had no idea how a pelton wheel worked, and so that was one of the gratifying parts of doing things, presentations like that, was to give them an appreciation for the pelton wheel that was invented by Lester Pelton in Camptonville many years ago, and his little invention that he did to run his wife's sewing machine, she had a treadle sewing machine, and so he built this thing to run her machine, it was belted off of the pelton wheel, and from there it, they're still building pelton wheels today, and they're used all over the world, a neighbor of ours who's moved here from Germany brought us a picture of one in Denmark that was in front of a museum, and here's the pelton wheel, they're made in Japan now out of stainless steel when they were originally made, started here in Miner's Foundry in Nevada City being made out of cast iron, so that was one of the pleasurable things that we did with the mining equipment too. A lot of the artifacts that we've collected when we do charter schools, we get asked to do one down in Auburn, we've done it twice, two years now, and then we've done a show at Miner's Foundry, but they ask us to bring all kinds of artifacts and lay out on the table and talk about those pieces, and I have several pieces that actually work, models of a snap mill, models of a pelton wheel, they're good little generators and things, the hands-on kids, I had a jaw crusher, they could crush up rocks, but when the kids of that age can relate to, this is what mining is all about, or how it was done years ago, and the different ingenuous, ingenuous things that develop from machinery, and I try to tell the kids that if it wasn't for the miners, they didn't have TVs and radios, they sat around in brainstorms at night, you know, maybe under a candlelight, how can we make this job easier, how can we get more gold, what can we do, and so they started coming up with machinery, all types of machinery and things that to help them in the mining aspect. My collection, I've documented every piece I have here, where I got it, when I got it, how much I paid for it, and the value I estimate today, and then in my little logbook, I also wrote down what my desires are for the pieces. I'd like to maintain it as a collection right here, and possibly one of my sons would be able to take it over. I also belong to the native sons of the gold in west, and our goal is to preserve California history, and so I would probably turn over the collection to them, or I could, and then there's various museums in the area. As I have worked with them, that would be willing to accept some of the pieces, but not all, and then probably ultimately, if I don't, Maryland gets their mine opening, we'll create a visitor center and place most of my items there. I've already donated the big stamp mill I have on the road to them, if this happens, and so that would be a nice piece for them to start with. So you're a preservation of the past, you're a preservationist of the past, and for the future also. Yes, sir. Yes, I want to continue on here with the future of making people knowledgeable of the importance of our community, and if it weren't for the miners that came here, they did a lot of damage, there's no doubt about it, but under the laws today, they cannot do that any longer, but it's very important that mining would keep going here in our area, and there's still valuable assets in the grounds that could be mined and done economically, and without polluting the streams, or the air, or even bothering people, I think, and some people are so ignorant about that process, they just think they're going to go in and rape lands like it did a hundred years ago, so they have a term for that, some kind of mining, I can't think of it right now. No, no, the type of mining that was done years ago that stops, yeah, anyway, they just ignorant of that fact that we're not going to do it the way it was many years ago, you can't do that, you know, the rules, laws, regulations that prohibit that kind of stuff, so they have to abide by that in order to mine. The other part of that is so many people think of mining for gold as just mining and making jewelry, which is one of the things that of course gold is used for, but more importantly, if you have a cell phone, a TV, an automobile, many things like that, computers, they need gold, and so many people are ignorant of the fact that in our daily lives, there's many minerals that are mine, and if we didn't have those, we wouldn't have a lot of the items that we use in our everyday life. Mike and Levita Nivias, I want to thank you very much for spending this time. you
Hello, my name is Robert Moore, I'm with the Nevada County Historical Society, and this morning we are in the presence of Mike Nevious, who on his business card says, collector and preservationist. Mike, welcome. Thank you for being here, Bob. Mike, I know you came up from Southern California, and you were nine years old when you first came to Nevada County. Your father bought purchase a store. Could you tell us a little bit about that store? Yeah, it was a Union Hill store right next to the Union Hill School, which there is just a vacant lot there now where they park cars, but it was a store with one gas pump there, and probably built in maybe the early 20s, and he always wanted a store of his own, and he could develop it into what he wanted. He was a professional meat cutter. We came from Southern California. He worked in Redlands, California. We lived in Mentone, and so when he had the opportunity to buy the store, that's what he wanted to do, is do professional custom meat cutting, and then he developed the store since it was close to the school, a little, I guess you'd call it a fast food place where they could cook hamburgers and have sandwiches for the kids as they came in, and so it was a great time there, and enjoyed it for many years until, as you know, the mines closed in 57, and he had credit out to the miners, which is the way you did business in those days. You had a tab, and you'd put everything you bought on a tab, and so when the mines closed, unfortunately, those that lived in the area, they left the area and didn't pay their tab, and so we struggled along for another year before he actually lost the store. He went bankrupt there, and couldn't no longer stay there. When did he buy the store? What year was that? In 1949, so the area was booming with all the mines that were working, and the sawmills that were working, and the industry was really great. Hardware stores, just everybody was busy. It was good time, good economic times. And what was your role in that store? Did you eat just the hamburgers, or did you help behind the counter also? No, I helped a little, mainly clean up, and sometimes I'd cook for some of the kids coming in, and of course, I was probably 10 years old when he really developed the store into the serving counter with the seats, and so forth, and it was cooking, so I didn't really do a lot of work there, just help where I could. Trucks, command, I'd unload merchandise, and box, and stock shells, and things like that. Did you inherit your mechanical abilities from your father? Probably, yeah. It's a God-given gift, I think. I had an ability early on to just work on things with my hands, and he always supported me, and he bought my first car when I was 13 years old. What car was that? It was a 28 model A cabriolet, and just the neighbor up the street had it, and I think I gave $20 for it, and then worked that off in the store with my dad, and then he taught me how to work on it, and he was always busy in the store, didn't have much time, father and son time, so I had a little shop out behind the store, and I just tore into it, and went through, and worked on it all the time, and enjoyed it, and just had an ability to be able to look at and figure out the mechanics of a car, or even other things that I worked on to bicycles, and so forth. At 13 you couldn't legally drive, could you? I got my driver's license when I was 14. You could do it under restricted permit, drive to and from work. I got a job at a ranch down in Browns Valley, and applied for a special restricted driver's license, and I could drive from Grass Valley to Browns Valley and back. I bet you wish you still had that car, I'm just guessing here. No, it was a fun car, you know, it was a learning experience, I don't know if it was too good a shape or not, but we we had fun, and the neighbor kids would all come down, and behind the school all there was was parorchards, and so I couldn't drive on the highways with unless I went to work because of my restricted license, but we would take it out into the parorchard and drive around and just have fun with it. And then did you drive it to high school later? I don't believe so. No, I think we we caught the bus at Union Hill, and I went to Nevada City Junior High School my freshman year, and then senior high school we just rode buses, and you got to realize even though gasoline was only 20 cents a gallon, I got 25 cents a week for my lunch money at school, and we'd save maybe a nickel out of that, and so by the end of the month I may have enough for a gallon or two of gas, and then from there we'd usually use that to go to Red Dog and UBAT and explore that country. So even at a young age you were real curious about those mines out there? Yeah, the the Empire Mine, as you know, was running then, and you could hear the noise. It wasn't extreme noise, but a constant industrial roar, and the kids that I went to school with played with their fathers would trade at the store, and they would always come in with a story about how their work day was, and I was always listening to those stories, and then we would go over at the mine, the Empire Mine, and sneak around as young kids have the curiosity to see what's going on, and we'd watch the miners coming up and down, and they're the man skips, and they work hours coming up and down too. Did you have ambitions of perhaps one day being in those mines? No, not really. We explored all the country around the Empire Mine Union Hill area, went into every hole in the ground we could find, and we built a couple of the holes we found. The porcupines would make their dens in there, and so that would always scare us, so we made spears with a metal point on them, and so we'd take those in with us, and once in a while we'd get confronted with a wild porcupine, and we'd have to do it in so we could get out of there. They'll get your attention, that's for sure. So business slowed at your daddy's store, times were tough, you saw a huge transition going from a vibrant community to one that was struggling. What happened, what did your dad do to keep his family intact and make a livelihood? Well, after he finally let the store go, he came to Grass Valley and he worked temporarily as a mail carrier for the post office department, and then he kept looking for work and found a ranch foreman job opening in Susanville, California, and so he applied for that, and I can remember when we first got the map out to find out where that was, there was a nice big lake up there called Honey Lake, and so I was excited about that, being able to move and live up there by this Honey Lake, but it was called Honey Lake because it was just like honey. It was an alkali lake, it wasn't fresh water at all, so it wasn't good for boating or fishing or anything at all. That's a little bit of a transition to get from behind the counter of a mercantile and then work in cattle. The ranch job was a furnished house and food, and so all they had to do was put in their hours and work. My mom who helped, she was the seamstress, so she did a lot of sewing for the family who owned the ranch, and then dad would feed the cattle, and it wasn't a real large ranch, and he would take the tractors and mow the hay and put that up, and I really enjoyed it. That was my last year in high school, so I left here in my junior year, and I went there as a senior and finished high school there in Susanville. And you met somebody up there rather special? That's where I met my wife, yeah, 53 years now, and we just hit it off, and of course I always kid her that I was new blood in town, so she glommed on to me, and I was very happy though, we've been very happy. We've made it made it made it work, have three fine boys to. . . I think 53 years is a California record, I'm not sure on that, but you liked your work up there, but after you graduated and you met Levita, you still kind of pine for Nevada County, and. . . Yeah, I would, I'd bring her down to see the area here, and the clean nice rivers that we had, where they were kind of, they weren't polluted, but they were dark. I think it was a tannic acid from the trees up there and the lava rocks, they weren't very clean, so we'd always spare time, or the case, you know, we'd come down and bring her down here to see this area and explore the area that I knew so well. Did she fall in love with it, or was she reluctant to leave home? No, she loved it, yeah, she still does, and even after my career started, and we transferred here and through my work, she was a little disappointed, she left home with friends, because she was raised there as a young child, and, but it wasn't long before she made friends here, and, and says that's the best thing we ever did, was to move here and raise our kids. Well, that's comforting to hear your those words. You say you started your career, tell us about that guy. Well, we married in Sacramento, I was working in a sawmill there, an oldie mill in West Sacramento, and she lived downtown Sacramento and worked for the Agriculture Department, and I had a room in Sacramento, so I'd go visit her and go to walk across town, so I would go buy the old post office down there, and one day I was in, and there was an ad on the, on the wall for postal employees, civil service job, permanent job, so I applied and got a job, and the job took me to McClellan Air Force Base, where I worked there, but I was, watched the airplanes going back and forth, and so the mechanical ability I had, it started to surface, and I don't want to do this postal work, I want to work on the airplanes, so I took a couple of exams there on the base and was able to get a job as an aircraft mechanic, and hydraulic systems mechanic for McClellan Air Force Base, so I stayed there for eight years, but then my heart was in Grass Valley, so we'd come up here most weekends, we lived in North Highlands, and explore the area in which she still loved, and so we, how can I stay in civil service and have that career opportunity, and I thought well the only thing up here was forest service, and I thought if I could transfer from Department of Defense to Department of Agriculture Forest Service, I could maintain my time in civil service, so we applied and it took, I don't know, about five years, where they offered me a job back in Susanville, believe it or not, on the last, on the last of National Forest, so I worked there from 1966 to 1974, and then an opportunity came open here in Nevada City, so then I transferred here and finished my career here 35 years of civil service and forest service. You're a young man and you're exploring these tunnels and going underground, and you spent a little bit of time over there at the Empire Mine site. Yeah, and the way they brought the ore up, they dropped it into ore bins where they had some waste and some mill rock, and the waste rock went out to the waste dome, and they hired a guy, lived down there in one of the houses, he would go out with a hose and hose off the rock, and quite often they'd find rock with gold in it that got thrown out. They didn't do a good sorting job, so we would do that too, just sneak along the waste dump and find pieces of quartz with gold in it, but my biggest find was when they sorted the rock and it went to the mill, there was a separate track, they put the ore in a car and they'd run it down to where the stamp mills were, and so we found that track and were following along one day, and I guess this piece I found fell out of one of the ore cars, probably had it heaped up, and it was probably the size of a hardball, just chuck full of gold, yeah, I mean today it would be worth, you know, several thousand dollars probably, so we, I picked it up and my buddies that were with me, they said that's gold, that's real gold, you're so lucky to find that, so we ran home with it, we put it out on the concrete sidewalk and beat it up with a hammer, just broke it all the pieces, and oh look, we got gold and kind of threw it away, never kept a piece of it. You don't have it in the house under the mattress or anything, and how old were you when this happened? I was about 14, 13, 14 years old, yeah, but one of the neat pieces I did keep was my father having the store, the miners would come in, and some of the miners weren't too honest, they were called high-graders, and a high-grader is nothing more than a thief, it steals from the company, so they would bring in samples of rock in a, in a ore bag, and my dad would take this, and he would make a call to a guy named Nick in Nevada City, and Nick had an old model A coupe, he'd come over and they'd talk a while, and they'd pass, my dad would pass this bag of high-grade to the, to Nick, and a week later, Nick would come back and give my dad some money, and then a few days later, the miner who had high-graded that would come back, and my dad would pay him, so I didn't realize what was going on at that age, probably 13 years old, the one day this miner dropped off a bag of high-grade, and my dad says, well Nick's gone for a while, so we can't work this up, or get this taken care of for you, he said, so, but he said my son's been interested in how to pan for gold, and how to crush up rock, and we did have a little mortar and pestle, so I went out in the back room and took this bag of ore in my neighbor boy that helped me too, we panned it all out, and we got about two and a half ounces out of this bag of ore, well I happened to keep one of two pieces out of it, and I still have those pieces, so the big joke about when we're doing charter schools and talking about gold is that I high-graded from the high-grader, so it's kind of fun to think about, and so that's really the only highlight from gold, except for the one kid I ran around with, his dad was a driller, so the driller got to be the one underground drilling, and then the next day he'd go back, and they'd muck out, and he'd be able to see some of the gold in the rock, and he came in with fantastic stories of massive amounts of gold that they found in the rock, and then he said in the later years in 1955-56 they'd make discoveries, they were doing mostly exploration work, and the story was that they would find a good vein that's producing well, and they would go in with cement, and they would cement it off and record on their the values that were in that vein, and never did mine, so that leads us to believe that if that's really true story that there's a lot of gold still underground that never was mined out. You know, if you could elaborate a bit on a high grader, what would be his likely position in the mine, and how exactly would he get that home? Yeah, that's always an interesting topic, and even Jack Clark, who was a superintendent at Idle of Maryland, we talked about it quite often when I meet with him, I said there should be a book written about high graders, and he just kind passes the subject off, he didn't want to talk about it, because I guess he was in a position there that even today he's been probably retired, you know, 50 years from, but he just avoids the conversation. But the miners had different ways, they had change rooms, or they had to change their dirty clothes into clean clothes, and supposedly they had to walk in front of a superintendent or someone there without their clothes on, and they checked all their lunch pills, because they'd always take their lunch pill with them to go underground for eating. But somehow or another, they had ways to get that out, if it weren't, if they didn't carry it out, they knew somebody, a hoist man, or somebody that was dealing with the animals down there, and they would give them a percentage of it, if they could get it to the surface. And so they had ways, I don't know, I wish we could get some old timers and really document it thoroughly to see how they did it. Well, in an area that has gold mining, or a lot of money changing hands, there's always going to be people to exploit that. There's going to be some nefarious characters come up to Nevada County. I imagine there are ladies of the night that frequented the area. So you high graded from the high graders, that's a great story. Was it common for minors to pay their tab in gold? No, no, no, no, they never, I never saw any gold exchange to my dad, and they usually paid in cash when they came around, because they didn't make more than probably three to five dollars a day in that time in the fifties, so. Was that enough to sustain a family of two or three? Sure, sure, it was enough to sustain it. You got to figure that, you know, the cost of goods was way down at that time, too. I want to go back a little bit about my career. I was a mechanic for the Forest Service. I did not do a hands-on fire fighting at all. I went to many, many fires, slept out on the ground, and then my truck and all, maintaining fire equipment, and then Levita was able to get a job as a forest supervisor secretary for the Tahoe National Forest, and then she became what is called the information officer on a lot of the fires, and would go out and sometimes even fly over the fires and get the information put together for for the papers and television, you know. That just gets us back to what our careers were, and then with my mechanical abilities, like I said before, it was mainly a God-given gift that I pursued the kind of work I do, and then I just loved the machinery and the massive machinery that was used in mining and how it was used, and so I studied that just through books, and and observed, went to many museums, observing how people had put things together, or even active mines that we explored. We at one time went all the way across to Nova Scotia and stopped at almost every mine we could in museum to learn how they process their oars and stuff, and so my first collecting was probably around 1951-52, and I just happened to be in an area called Poker Flat, and we eventually got a mining claim there, and so when you're mining you're always picking up artifacts that would have been left over by the miners, and so we started with a small collection of nuts and bolts and hooks and drills, square nails, and all those kinds of things, and then what's not to the last 25 years, I get serious about collecting larger items, and then acquiring large items that maybe I couldn't use, but the city here can use, and we displayed them all around town now, and then I volunteer at the North Star Mine Museum and help them in different displays, and the Empire Mine has asked me several times to be involved with them in making working displays and stuff, but I never could get along with the way their politics were and how the organization wanted to do things, so it never did develop into anything there. I did sell them one of my mining displays. I had a mobile unit on a trailer, so it's up there now at the park. Poker Flat, you had a mining claim? Was that for dredging or panning or both? Poker Flat was a very unusual area, and then we went in. Where exactly is it? That Poker Flat is 17 miles north of Downeyville on Canyon Creek, but we went in there in 1961 with just a wetsuit and a mask and sniping tools, where the sniping tools are just little crevicing tools and little suction bulbs, and scanned the bedrock, and we picked up some real nice nugget gold. Prior to that, I had to explore the Deer Creek and the American River drainage just because I like exploring and trying to find gold, and so then we got into Poker Flat, we started finding nugget gold, and I thought, well, this is what it's all about, and so we got more serious and acquired a claim in there, and developed into, well, 120 acres of property that we had for 38 years, and mined there with a suction dredge, five inch suction dredge. Okay, you're there in Poker Flat with your family, and you're finding some nuggets, what did you do with this stuff? Each of the boys had their own gold bottle, and I think, I don't know, I think they've taken them all back to their home now, but they'd have their own special nuggets and special bottle they'd hold their nuggets in, but it got to be very profitable. We made several ounces a season, so what do you do with it, whether you put it in the safe or in a bottle, and so I started making jewelry since I was, I had the abilities I taught myself how to weld, how to gold solder, and so I thought, well, this is something that I could sell, and you could usually get three times the amount of the value in a jewelry piece as you could as a natural gold nugget, so I would, I let word out, I started making this stuff, and actually I had a dental bill one time where I took a bunch of the gold independence and stuff, and traded for my dental work, and there was a lab technician that came in while we were doing trading, and he took some too, but it became pretty profitable, and I made the pieces, I never did advertise anything at all, it just kind of went outward of mouth, so one particular time some people wanted to look at my stuff, and we made an appointment at McDonald's in Grass Valley, and went in there and got a table off to the corner, and laid out all my nuggets on the table, and they bought several, several pieces from me, and, but I've traded a lot of the gold, I've traded for a tractor, traded for a truck, I traded for a pelton wheel, oftentimes you find items you want to buy, an artifact, and people won't sell it, and I say, well, will you trade for some gold? Back in the 80s, he said, I'm mining up in the out of Fairbanks, would you like to come up and mine with me, and I said, I can't, because I have a Forest Service, Civil Service job, I can't just leave my job and go, and so he showed me pictures of the gold they were finding, and the process they were doing, and it intrigued me so much that I begged the Forest Supervisor to let me have off time, a leave of absence to go, so in 1984, then I was free to go that summer, and from May till August, and she always says how many days it was, it was 11 weeks, by himself up there in the wilds of Alaska, me and Bill Anderson at one other, yes, was that right around Fairbanks, that area, by himself up there in the wilds of Alaska, me and Bill Anderson at one other, yes, was that right around Fairbanks, that area, no, we were, we were halfway between Fairbanks and Nome, Alaska on the Yukon River, and the company, there was a company there that took a lease on the property, so they hired the three of us to go up there, and flew us in to the old camp that they had set up, and we set up an Alaska sluice box, and then, well before that, we set up two hydraulic monitors, so you see the monitors around here today, I actually got to operate, rebuild two of them, and operate them, so the ground was, the bay gravel was covered with glacial silt, because there was a period about 30,000 years ago that was dry up there, and this, the silt from the, what do you call the, the glacier, glacial silt covered the area, and it blew, and it covered this gravel pay gravel up to 100 feet deep, and so some of the mine operations had what we call yellow equipment running, and we'd clear that off to go into the pay gravel, but the company I worked for, they decided, if we got some old hydraulic monitors and set up, and we could hydraulic this silt off, this would be more economical, so we set up a 14-inch water pump down in the mainstream, and it was my job to do all the mechanical work, and set it up, and get it going, then we had 2,000 feet of 12-inch pipeline leading up to our diggins, and then, so we set up the monitors, and we hydrauliced them off an area about the size of two football fields down to the pay gravel, and then from the gravels, then we set up the Alaska sluice box, which was 4 feet wide and 58 feet long, and it had a 12-foot feet bend in the front, and we had one small little nozzle that we'd set up on top, so Bill, he'd set up on, on a platform, and run the small nozzle, and I'd push in with a D6 cat about two to three yards at a time, and he'd break it up, and then the gravel would go down through the sluice box, so every night, we'd work about 10 hours, 12 hour days, but every evening, before we shut down completely and went up for dinner, we'd have to bar the riffles, and that was, took a small hand pick, and the riffles would get tight with gravel, so we have to bar them and loosen them, so the next day run would still catch gold, but during that time of barring the riffles, I would hand pick four to five ounces of gold out of there, just nuggets, you know, you know, quarter to half inch diameter, fill them, put them in my sandwich bag, and go back to camp, and so we worked a little over two weeks, and we got 113 ounces in two weeks. I don't know the numbers, but that sounds phenomenal, and did you go back? No, I never went back, Bill went back, one of the stipulations the force supervisor had was, it's a good experience for you, because you work in a remote area, and it might benefit the government if, by your experience there, so I'll let you do it once, and that's it, so I only did it once, and Bill went back another additional year, and did it some more. So you were a young man when you first started with gold interest, and you started accumulating a collection, which is now spread over an extensive area in off of cement hill here, and you've had entertained a few tours over the years. Who would come and take your tour? Well, fortunately, we've had people that truly were interested. We had geology classes from Folsom Community College, and different homeschool, charter school kids that are studying California history, fourth, fifth graders. We've had a lot of those students come too, but part of the collecting was going back to early days when running around here in the area. There was a lot of artifacts everywhere, and so we had me and another friend would go out and collect these pieces, and to us it was just a piece of iron, and we'd take them down to the local scrap yard and sell them for, you know, five cents a pound, and we realized, I started to realize that I was destroying some very good pieces and artifacts, and then as later years go on, I realize how rare some of these pieces were, so then I decided it's time to really start collecting and preserving these pieces for future generations, and so as much as I could afford, and much as I could do, I would try to buy or trade and or talk people out like Lowell Robinson. We got the two big monitors down on Highway 49 from him, just free, and then a couple of the dredge buckets I got from Tiker were free, you know, just because of what I do in restoring, preserving, and even stuff for the museums they've given us things, mainly because of my reputation of being a preservationist and wanting to stay. Why do you think that's important? Well, because it's disappearing, and the more things we can preserve for generations to come, I realize it more when we have charter school kids here, they have no idea what a Peltonville is, or a rock crusher is, or even how an ore car works, and so bringing that stuff back to life is very important to each of us, and we wanted to share with the community and those that come to our area too, that have no concept of what the historic value of our whole area is, and it's rapidly disappearing with the newcomers that keep coming in. They have no idea of what we're appreciation for. Do you have any idea how many people have visited your place here off of Cement Hill, and when did you start giving tours? Well, I actually kept a logbook for several years, and then people get so excited when they come here and get to talking before they even get through the area, or through our whole tour, I forget. I used to have them sign in, and we'd had as high as 45-50 people at a time come, and there's been several hundred people come and spend time, and some of the kids have actually come and brought their lunches, their pasties, brought us stuff. One year I set up a trough out here with some concentrated concentrates I'd had from poker which was sand, black sand with gold in it, and I got little bottles for each of the kids, taught them how to pan, and what I taught them more was greed, because they wanted to, oh that's, I want that piece, I want this piece, and they were jumping all over each other's shoulders trying, it's my turn, it's my turn. When we were here a couple of days ago with the historical society, you threw out a little nugget, shall we say, about having grease on your fingers when you're panning for gold. Yeah, that's the fact that you don't want any oil on your fingers, it will actually float, float the gold in the water. The oils will go to the surface of the water, and for some reason it'll pick up the gold, and that was another process that the mines used, it was a flotation device. Mike built a mobile mining unit, and it had history, history mobile, we called it, and it was a pelton wheel that was run by a six horsepower Fairbanks Morse engine that ran a water pump that then ran the pelton wheel, and belted to the pelton wheel was a generator, and which produced electricity, and a stamp mill, a rock crusher, and air compressors, because we had a train whistle that blew, because you have to have a whistle blow when you go to work, and so everyone, we had it at the Fair for many years, and everyone enjoyed it, but one of the particularly fun days was Gold Rush days that Gold Rush, no it wasn't Gold Rush School, it was Deer Creek School, did at Pioneer Park, and so we'd go through our explaining how everything worked for the kids and parents and teachers that were there, and it was really interesting because so many of the adults did not realize that we get our electricity from hydroelectric power, and they had no idea how a pelton wheel worked, and so that was one of the gratifying parts of doing things, presentations like that, was to give them an appreciation for the pelton wheel that was invented by Lester Pelton in Camptonville many years ago, and his little invention that he did to run his wife's sewing machine, she had a treadle sewing machine, and so he built this thing to run her machine, it was belted off of the pelton wheel, and from there it, they're still building pelton wheels today, and they're used all over the world, a neighbor of ours who's moved here from Germany brought us a picture of one in Denmark that was in front of a museum, and here's the pelton wheel, they're made in Japan now out of stainless steel when they were originally made, started here in Miner's Foundry in Nevada City being made out of cast iron, so that was one of the pleasurable things that we did with the mining equipment too. A lot of the artifacts that we've collected when we do charter schools, we get asked to do one down in Auburn, we've done it twice, two years now, and then we've done a show at Miner's Foundry, but they ask us to bring all kinds of artifacts and lay out on the table and talk about those pieces, and I have several pieces that actually work, models of a snap mill, models of a pelton wheel, they're good little generators and things, the hands-on kids, I had a jaw crusher, they could crush up rocks, but when the kids of that age can relate to, this is what mining is all about, or how it was done years ago, and the different ingenuous, ingenuous things that develop from machinery, and I try to tell the kids that if it wasn't for the miners, they didn't have TVs and radios, they sat around in brainstorms at night, you know, maybe under a candlelight, how can we make this job easier, how can we get more gold, what can we do, and so they started coming up with machinery, all types of machinery and things that to help them in the mining aspect. My collection, I've documented every piece I have here, where I got it, when I got it, how much I paid for it, and the value I estimate today, and then in my little logbook, I also wrote down what my desires are for the pieces. I'd like to maintain it as a collection right here, and possibly one of my sons would be able to take it over. I also belong to the native sons of the gold in west, and our goal is to preserve California history, and so I would probably turn over the collection to them, or I could, and then there's various museums in the area. As I have worked with them, that would be willing to accept some of the pieces, but not all, and then probably ultimately, if I don't, Maryland gets their mine opening, we'll create a visitor center and place most of my items there. I've already donated the big stamp mill I have on the road to them, if this happens, and so that would be a nice piece for them to start with. So you're a preservation of the past, you're a preservationist of the past, and for the future also. Yes, sir. Yes, I want to continue on here with the future of making people knowledgeable of the importance of our community, and if it weren't for the miners that came here, they did a lot of damage, there's no doubt about it, but under the laws today, they cannot do that any longer, but it's very important that mining would keep going here in our area, and there's still valuable assets in the grounds that could be mined and done economically, and without polluting the streams, or the air, or even bothering people, I think, and some people are so ignorant about that process, they just think they're going to go in and rape lands like it did a hundred years ago, so they have a term for that, some kind of mining, I can't think of it right now. No, no, the type of mining that was done years ago that stops, yeah, anyway, they just ignorant of that fact that we're not going to do it the way it was many years ago, you can't do that, you know, the rules, laws, regulations that prohibit that kind of stuff, so they have to abide by that in order to mine. The other part of that is so many people think of mining for gold as just mining and making jewelry, which is one of the things that of course gold is used for, but more importantly, if you have a cell phone, a TV, an automobile, many things like that, computers, they need gold, and so many people are ignorant of the fact that in our daily lives, there's many minerals that are mine, and if we didn't have those, we wouldn't have a lot of the items that we use in our everyday life. Mike and Levita Nivias, I want to thank you very much for spending this time. you