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Collection: Directories and Documents > Historical Clippings
Historical Clippings Book (HC-12) (520 pages)
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Page: of 520
OMEGA.
"THE METROPOLIS OF THE MOUNTAINS"
In 1850 William Black, John Dixon and L. Guthrie, prospecting
Scotchman Creek, discovered at it's headwaters a rich, ancient river
channel. First called Dixon's Diggings, it was after the discovery
of anotner diggings, about a mile west, given the name of Omega. A
scholarly miner, realizing that both diggings were on the same channel,
took the name Alpha, the first letter, or beginning of the Greek alphabet for the new discovery and Omega, the last letter, or ending of the
same alphabet, for Dixon's Diggings.
Todaylthe actual site of the first town of Omega is not known.
The buildings were moved, at least twice, so that the ground on whith
they stood could be mined.
The mines of Omega got off for a slow start. The first claims
were 100 feet square and the gravel sixty-to-seventy-five feet deep.
They yielded an average of $8,000 in gold. Many claims were located,
but due to a lack of water little development work was done. Many of
the locators soon became discouraged and drifted waay. The few hardy
Ss souls remaining filed on the abandoned claims and went after water.
Several short ditches were dug from Scotchman Creek, but it was not until 1854, when the Diamond Creek ditch was completed, that enough water
was available to use the recently developed method of hydraulic mining,
invented by Edward E. Matteson, to reach the deep, rich deposits.
The first hotel was opened in 1855 and William Black opened the
first store the same year. A post office was established June 19,1857.
By 1858 the town had four-provision stores, one-clothing store,
two-meat markets, three-blacksmith shops, two-hotels, a sehool house,
a tin shop, where hydraulic pipe was fabricated for the mines, a Chinese laundry, a jail and the usualCalifornia mining town gomplex of
saloons, gambling establishments and bawdy houses.
Four-provision stores may seem an excessive number for a population,
which never exceeded 200, but the old maps show trails from the town
leadine to Fall Creek, Biamond Creek, Shellback, Spiritville and Remington Hill, etc; with branches extending to many other points where
aggressive prospecting and mining in both gravel and quartz were going
full-blast, and many men were employed infligging and building the many
miles of flumes and ditches to bring the needed water down from the
higher mountains. It was along these trails that the pack trains crawled with supplies from the Omega stores to the many camps and cabins.
Saw-mills at Skillman Flat and four or five other points in the
area, were kept going at full capacity for years to supply lumber to
@ ruild the flumes and cabins. :
Page l.