Collection: Books and Periodicals > Nevada County Historical Society Bulletins

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Title: Volume 050-4 - October 1996 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

Date Scanned: 2014-03-05 07:32:30 OCR Software Version #: tesseract 5.4.1 Item Sourced From: PDF First Created: 2025-03-17 04:06:00 Last Updated: 2025-03-17 04:06:00

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

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endure so long as any of the participants of this drama remain alive. This story will bring to mind the days of the Hatfields and the McCoys. This is the story of French Corral. To properly begin the story, we must turn back the pages of history to that day in 1848 when James Marshall discovered gold at Coloma. That day was the turing point in the history of California, a turning point that would eventually make California the most populous state in the Union. Within a few short months of that discovery, thousands of gold-seeking prospectors fanned out over the mountainous country on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada. There were many nationalities among them: Chinese, Swedes, Spaniards, and Yankees from the eastern seaboard. A colony of French nationals from nearby Grass Valley were active participants in the search for gold. Some of these Frenchmen found their way to San Juan Ridge, which separates the South Fork from the Middle Fork of the Yuba River. They, like the others, found gold. In the fall of 1849, they built a corral on a level spot on the southern slope of San Juan Ridge and opened a store. They called it French Corral. In 1853, a fire swept through the town and half a hundred homes were burned. By a grant from the U.S. government, a townsite was established in the 1860s, and at one time 2,000 people lived there. Today (in 1969), the French Corral site is a small community off the beaten track, with a population of no more than two dozen souls. The area around French Corral and the San Juan Ridge is placer country. The word “placer” may be properly defined as “an alluvial or glacial deposit of soil, sand and gravel, containing gold in particles large enough to be recovered by washing.” Gold could not be separated from the alluvium without a good supply of water. Water was the very lifeblood of placer mining, and was almost as important as the gold itself. Either the gold-bearing soil had to be taken to the water or the water taken to the soil. The former was sometimes done, a practice too costly to have much merit. Panning or using hand rockers or shovel-in sluice boxes was difficult and slow. Any method used, however, required a great deal of water to separate the gold from the soil. A Nevada County Frenchman, Antoine Chabot, is credited by the authors of the 1880 History of Nevada County, California and other authoritative writers of mining history with originating a means of washing gold-bearing soil down to the place of recovery by using a high pressure jet of water, a process called hydraulic mining, that required a great abundance of water, as much as 20 million gallons in a twentyfour hour period of time. Hundreds of claims were staked and mining companies were formed. Both riparian and appropriative water rights were obtained and guarded as precious commodities. Streams were dammed, ditches and tunnels dug, and flumes erected. Water was brought to the gold, at French Corral. In 1865, the Eureka Lake and Yuba Canal Co. consoli32 dated most of the water distribution facilities of the San Juan Ridge area into a composite system of over 200 miles of ditches. It sold water to users as a public utility until it ceased operation in 1926. Strife was not invented at French Corral but it certainly flourished there. In addition to claim jumping and battles over water rights, a feeling of great animosity arose against the many Chinese that settled at French Corral. With guns and knives, the miners drove them out in December 1867. The French Corral area was the site of the world’s first commercial venture in long distance telephone communication. In June of 1867, a line was in operation between French Corral and French Lake, a distance of nearly 60 miles. This was only two years after Alexander Graham Bell received a patent for his invention. This line’s primary purpose was to advise ditch tenders more quickly when to regulate the flow of water to the mines, especially in late summer when water was in short supply. Great amounts of precious water had frequently been wasted when a horseback rider had to travel 50 or 60 miles to a diversion dam to shut off a flow of water that wasn’t needed. Unfortunately, millions of cubic yards of silt and gravel washed down by hydraulic mining clogged streams and rivers and damaged farm lands in the Sacramento Valley. In January 1884, a federal court issued a decree prohibiting the placing of hydraulic debris in natural water courses. This decree was, in effect, the death warrant for all hydraulic“ -\ mining, a decree that would eventually leave a hundred million dollar enterprise in ruin. An era of physical and legal combat began, an era of trouble that would last for many years and bring further bloodshed to an already troubled land of mines. In 1894, another order of the court made it unlawful to mine hydraulically at all, unless dams were built to impound all mining debris, a tremendously costly procedure. These orders of the court were hard to enforce and were often disobeyed. It was then that new uses were found for the telephone. For purposes of security, banks and officers of the law could be informed by coded messages when a shipment of gold was about to leave the mine. The telephone was also useful in informing miners when a suspected government agent was headed in their direction to investigate violations of orders prohibiting disposal of mining debris in streams. A message saying “Aunt Tillie will be on the Marysville stage this afternoon” might well bring total cessation of work at all hydraulic diggings. When the agent arrived at French Corral no water would be flowing in the ditches and the miners would be hoeing com, cutting wood or just resting in the shade of an oak. Farmers in Sutter, Yuba and Colusa Counties formed an ) Anti-Debris Association and tried to have the orders of the court obeyed, but with only limited success. They sent spies into the area, who were promptly roughed up and sent aad