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Collection: Books and Periodicals

Three Years in California by John D. Borthwick (1857)(LoC) (423 pages)

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170 NOMENCLATURE OF THE DIGGINGS. besides of course the towns and villages which have been called into existence, have received their names at the hands of the first one or two miners who have happened to strike the diggings. The individual pioneer has seldom shown much invention or originality in his choice of a name; in most cases he has either immortalised his own by tacking “ ville” or “town” to the end of it, or has more modestly chosen the name of some place in his native State; but avast number of places have been absurdly named from some trifling incident connected with their first settlement ; such as Shirt Tail Cafion, Whisky Gulch, Port Wine Diggins, Humbug Flat, Murderer’s Bar, Flapjack Cafion, Yankee Jim’s, Jackass Gulch, and hundreds of others with equally ridiculous names. Spanish Bar was about half a mile in length, and three or four hundred yards wide. The whole place was honeycombed with the holes in which the miners were at work; all the trees had been cut down, and there was nothing but the red shirts of the miners to relieve the dazzling whiteness of the heaps of stones and gravel which reflected the fierce rays of the sun, and made the extreme heat doubly severe. At the foot of the mountain, as if they had been pushed back as far as possible off the diggings, stood a row of booths and tents, most of them of a very ragged and worn-out appearance. I made for the one which looked most imposing—a canvass edifice, which, from the huge sign all along the front, assumed. to be the “ United States” Hotel. It was not far from