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Page: of 436
INTRODUCTION
lama second generation Californian, but until I married Ardis Hatten
in 1967 I was ignorant of Nevada County history and its import. From
her and others who grew up here, I soon learned enough to pique my
curiosity. This interest grew when in 1971 we moved into Ardis’s family
home near the town of Grass Valley. It is only a short distance from this
house to the homestead established by her grandparents in 1898 on
Sontag Hill (a current misspelling of the Sonntag family name).
Past this homestead winds the road to the former mining camps of
You Bet and Red Dog. The road is paved only as far as the last cluster of
mailboxes west of the bridge over Greenhorn Creek. Beyond that point
the road is dirt and gravel. If you follow the road a few miles to the
vanished site of You Bet you will be rewarded with a breathtaking view
of the You Bet hydraulic diggings. This immense scar on an otherwise
beautifully wooded mountain landscape stretches grandly north and
south between the road on its western rim and the white cliffs of Chalk
Bluff on the eastern boundary. Despite Nature’s valiant effort to reclaim
the rocky basin, it remains a shocking reminder of the environmental
havoc created by the removal of millions of tons of earth in the ninetyyear-long search for gold.
Above Chalk Bluff the forest begins again, although these trees are
new growth, and nothing like the vast, dense forest which once shaded
arriving emigrants. From the Chalk Bluff Ridge one can look across
Steephollow Canyon to Lowell Hill, where the old California Trail led
oe of newcomers down the ridge to Johnson’s Ranch and Sutter’s
ort.
When Ardis and I built our house in 1973-74 we chose a site in this
rugged and somewhat remote area. We built the house with our own
hands, and today we cook and heat with wood cut from our land. We
read by the light of oil lamps; kerosene is hauled in with our other
supplies over the same unpaved roads used long ago by Ardis’s family to
haul lumber in wagons from a steam-powered sawmill high in the
mountains.
The people who formerly occupied these lands are often in our
thoughts, miners as well as members of the nisenan tribes who left behind
grinding rocks, tools, and stone flakes to remind us of their tenure. To
learn more about these vanished neighbors I consulted books, librarians,
and local historians. But the more I learned, the more I desired to know,
and I found my sources waning at the very time my curiosity grew most
intense. I was beginning to sense the existence of an exciting story. In the
spring of 1977 I decided to find and write it.
My first resolution was to write about people rather than historical