Collection: Books and Periodicals > Nevada County Historical Society Bulletins

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Title: Volume 049-1 - January 1995 Collection Type: Books and Periodicals Collection Name: Nevada County Historical Society Bulletins # of Pages: 8 Download PDF: User Login Required Download OCR Text: User Login Required

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Original Held At: Searls Historical Library Location: 161 Nevada City Hwy, Nevada City, CA 95959

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A Visit to Nevada County in 1860 by Thomas Starr King (This article is taken from letters written first to the Boston Transcript in 1860 and reprinted on December 20, 1860, and January 3, 1861 in the Nevada City Democrat .) Nevapa [CITY] LIES 2600 FEET ABOVE THE SEA, on the first slope of the Sierras. It is a bright, cheery, stirring place, with more conspicuous and brilliant advertising on its shop-fronts and awnings than I have seen anywhere in the State, and a more decided steel-trap air about all the movements of the population. Two things I was especially impressed with on the first night of my visit—the marvelous beauty of the clear western evening sky after sunset, and the energy of a chorus of frogs near the lecture room. They must have been under good drill by some leader, for they kept up an incessant, rhythmical, and even concert for half an hour after the lecture commenced, and at precisely 9 o’clock they all stopped as suddenly as the orchestra does after that furious burst and thump in Hayden’s “Surprise Symphony.” Not another croak was heard during the evening. The same phenomenon was repeated the next evening, at the second lecture, and deserves to be inquired into as an illustration of the “Laws of Disorder.”! The loveliness of the twilight and moming skies arrested my attention particularly, because they were the first revelations to me of any peculiar translucence and charm of atmosphere in the State. I have often heard San Franciscans at the East boast of the far greater clearness of their skies and air, contrasted with Boston and New England. If my senses are trusty, judging by five months of the summer, this is all brag and folly. The summer atmosphere in San Francisco is peculiarly hazy, opaque and unfavorable for distant seeing. There have not been five days in five months when the Pacific could have been seen from the top of Mount Diablo, twentyfive miles, air-line; and a clear sunset and lovely twilight we rarely know, on account of afternoon fog. What the winter airs and nights may be I don’t know, and certainly I don’t trust what anybody tells me; but that pure, soft, transparent blue that hung over Nevada, holding a new moon whose silver edge seemed twice as wide as I had ever noticed it before, and not hard either, but iambent, was the first revelation to me here of any sky clearer, lovelier in hue, more poetic, than those of the New England coast. The great interest of Nevada, town and county, is mining. One can see in the neighborhood of the town, within a compass of two or three miles, all the operations and methods of mining which the State has ever seen. Chinamen may be found “prospecting” or working over the “leavings” of former parties, with the pick and pan, and some with the “cradle,” which was the first advance on the pan-method. Near by, we can discover Americans working with the “long 2 tom,” the next triumph of mining enterprise. This is an oblong trough of wood with a perforated sheet iron bottom at the lower end, beneath which is a riffle-box. Dirt is shovelled into the trough at the upper end, and washed down to the lower part by water, where a man stands who stirs it briskly over the perforated iron, that the precious yellow particles may be sure to find their way by gravitation into the trap of the riffle-box underneath. “Sluicing,” which is a method of washing out a much larger amount of dirt, quickly succeeded the “long tom,” and that has been left behind in importance by the process of tunnelling, shafting, river-fluming, gulching, crushing and hydraulic tearing, by which now the soil, the rock, the beds of powerful streams, and the hidden strata of a mountain’s heart, are made to yield the shining dust that was mixed with them, ages ago. What would the early miners who made easily their five hundred dollars a month, net, have thought if the changes of ten or eleven years had been foretold to them? If they could have foreseen that surface diggings were to be superseded by subterranean searches, and that instead of depending on personal energy and luck the whole business was so soon to pass into the dominion of capital and costly machinery, systematically working large and moderately lucrative claims in gravel — and quartz? What would the first adventurers, who found“ themselves so cramped by the scarcity of water in the long rainless season, have thought if they were told that in 1860 there would be over seven thousand miles of artificial water courses in the State, tapping the unfailing sources of the rivers in the heart of the Sierras, and at an expense of nearly fifteen millions of dollars, carrying the indispensable flood into the heart of a thousand mining districts, over obstacles that look unconquerable? Everywhere in the interior counties we see these aqueducts which have been engineered and built with energy and speed that can hardly be accounted for even by the enormous profits which many of them pay. Without them the gold product of the State must have fallen, during the last ten years, to less than half its present amount. The first quartz mill I visited, or had seen, in the State, was in Nevada. It was originally called the Bunker Hill mill, and was erected nine years ago, at an expense of over a hundred thousand dollars. It was supposed, when the quartz discoveries were made, and the earliest mills erected, that the fortune of every man who had a moderate interest in one was secured, and that gold would be ground out about as plentifully as meal. A year or two pretty effectually dispelled this dream. Not one in ten of the mills erected in the season of wild speculation paid expenses; most of them used up all the gold“) and more too, which the stockholders put into them. The folly with which many of them were worked, is ludicrous enough. ~ In the case of this “Bunker Hill Mill,” in Nevada, a man who