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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course, if we did not allude to “hydraulic mining.” The inventor of this process is Mr. Edward Matteson, of Sterling, Conn., and he first applied it in Nevada, in 1852.* Astronomers tell us that there are pits in the moon, seventeen thousand feet deep; they say, also, that any object on the moon, two hundred and fifty feet high, may be detected by the most powerful glasses now in use. If there are astronomers on the moon with equally potent instruments, they will soon be able to detect changes in the surface of California, through the agency of hydraulic mining. All other methods of dealing with the soil for gold are “one-horse concerns” compared with the hydraulic process. It is fast changing mountains on the face of the State into pits. It is, too, an invention, which, to the end of time, will defy all competition for tearing all beauty out of a landscape, and setting up the “abomination of desolation” in its place. Connecticut Yankees have been supposed to possess so little sentiment, or taste for beauty, that they would not hesitate, for profit, “to whittle the cedars of Lebanon into clothes pins’; and perhaps it is in accordance with the eternal fitness of things that a process like hydraulic mining, which so thoroughly blasts the beauty of a State and so largely enriches its treasury, should issue from a Connecticut brain. (It ought to be said in justice, here, however, that Connecticut has more beautiful villages and towns, and displays more taste in them, than any State in New England.) Most of your readers know, undoubtedly, how the tremendous hydraulic power is gained and applied. It is simply playing water through a pipe like a fire engine, upon the side of a hill, which contains gold in its soil, and is to be washed out through sluices. But the water is brought from such a height and with such a “head” that stones a foot in diameter, when struck with it, are thrown up ten feet, and a man, if fairly hit by it, might as well have been visited by a sixpounder in full force. Such a stream three inches in diameter tears into a hill as though it were a light heap of powder; and often to hasten matters, the hoseman directs its wrath at the base of a wall of earth, eats it out quickly and sees the whole upper works tumble in with a frightful crash—perhaps paying the penalty of his boldness with his life. The rivers are already perceptibly affected, not only in color, but in sediment, by the wide ravage which this leveling of the hills and choking of the smaller streams in the upper country is producing. By and by the Sacramento may not be navigable, owing to the rapid emigration of the interior hills to settle along its bed. But so long as the process pays, the navigation interest may plead and warn in vain. It is said that earth which yields only a cent’s worth of gold to the pan, returns good profit to the hydraulic companies, and that sometimes a thousand dollars a day is obtained out of the mud that rushes along a single sluice. And—horrors!—there are a hundred millions of acres, from ten to two hundred feet deep, that may be profitably torn up by these water batteries. I say—"horrors!"—after seeing in Nevada a specimen of what hydraulic mining does to the landscape. It was a dozen acres that had been washed over, and had produced nearly five hundred thousand dollars, leaving the land useless for any other purpose, and a plague spot to the eye. A dozen acres of good California land, thoroughly tilled by scientific skill, I think it probable, would produce more than the interest on the amount which had been extracted by a method that leaves the district a ruin forever. If so, I do not believe the Creator intends such ravage as the price of gold. Let the quartz be tunnelled and pounded ad libitum, let enterprise turn the mountain streams from their beds for a time, so that the boulders can be overturned, beneath and around which the precious flakes have been settling for ages; let the wretched looking and barren hills be washed level with the plains, if they have gold to pay for the water and toil that slaughters them; but if the hydraulic method is to be indefinitely used, without restraint, upon all the surface that will yield a good return, the California of the future will be a waste, as though demons had inverted the Creator’s intention in it—a waste more repulsive than any denounced in prophecy as the doom upon a guilty race. One curiosity I saw amid the destruction which this hydraulic force had left in Nevada, that was very interesting. It was an uncovered ledge of granite into which workmen were driving piles as easily as into dock mud. At a little distance one cannot trust his senses in seeing this. But it was true. The granite was as soft as putty. It seemed to the eye as compact as any ledge in Quincy, but it took the impress of our feet" easily, and could be hacked or spaded out like dough. It is to be hoped that the whole State does not lie on such a basis. If so, there is danger of a slump of the gold region, some day, on a very large scale. The gentleman who is now conducting the hydraulic business I am speaking of in Nevada, soon recognized me as an old acquaintance. He was a Bostonian. He did not seem to think worse of me because my collar had often been supplied with coal from his wharf; and I did not think any the worse of him on learning that he had frequently been a Sunday visitor in a church which I hope stands in Hollis street. Another of the pleasures with which my Nevada visit was crowded, was a drive upon higher land, nine or ten miles away, to see some of the great peaks of the Sierra Nevada range. The gentleman [Charles Marsh] who was kind enough to take me in his carriage was the first inhabitant of the village, July 1849, and built the first ditch which offered its service to the miners.> He had experienced all the hardships and changes of fortune of the mining life, and does not, I am glad to know, like so many of the noble pioneers, stand to-day in the shadow of fortune. A more instructive and charming companionship for a drive in that region would have been impossible. Every creek, and caiion, and “divide? he knew, and had his mining legend to tell in connection with ~-