Collection: Books and Periodicals > Nevada County Historical Society Bulletins

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Title: Volume 055-4 - October 2001 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: 2014-03-12 07:12:14 OCR Software Version #: tesseract 5.4.1 Item Sourced From: PDF First Created: 2025-03-17 04:06:01 Last Updated: 2025-03-17 04:06:01

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

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Historian and Union editor Edmund Kinyon and ". Doris Foley at __. adinner meeting of the historical society they helped found in Nevada County. hd ome Streets] in front of what is The Buttonworks today (1977)— it was another building at that time—there was a milliner who had a little shop and she was always in the newspapers because of some lawsuit over a mine. I think her name was Rudimende. She liked me, and as a teenager I used to go into her shop and she’d let me decorate hats for her on Sundays. Not for sale or anything, but just for the fun of it. Q: What got you involved with the historical society? DF: I was always interested in the Chinese. There were a om lot of Chinese characters around here. In fact there were many Chinese stores operating at that time on Commercial Street, and as teenagers we used to go there and buy little tulip cups and things like this. And Eddie, who was Chinese, was quite a favorite of ours. Whenever we put up an art exhibit he would always come and help us put up the pictures. He got half of them upside-down but it didn’t make any difference. And then there was a little Chinaman on our ranch. Oh, he was really such a comical fellow. My stepfather was called Bud, and he would always call me “Little Bud.” He had a cabin over the hill on the creek, but it was still on our ranch, and he’d come to our place. My mother spoiled him. She always would give him a meal— she’d load him down with potatoes and other things. He could hardly make it over the hill with all the things she had for him. Q: Was he a laborer helping to build the flumes? DF: No, he was a miner on the creek, placer mining. Q: How did the Chinese people come to this area? DF: Some came to hunt gold, and then they imported a lot of them to build the railroad. Q: What were the conditions like for the Chinese laborers? Were they treated better than slave labor? um DF: Yes. They were paid for what they did and they lived in these camps. Once in a while you would read in the papers where they had a fight or a stabbing, but that’s just about all you read about, not what they accomplished in the way of building the railroad. After the railroad was NCHS Bulletin October 2001 completed, they moved down from the mining areas into the valleys where they did vegetable gardening. Q: How did the white settlers feel towards them? DF: The Chinese stayed very much to themselves. The whites liked them, they accepted them. It was not like other minorities—the Chinese were really accepted. Q: Was this very different from the treatment given to the native Maidu Indians? DF: They seemed to accept the Maidus very well, too, when I was at that age. Louie Kelly, a Maidu who is still living, he’s 91, worked continuously as a young man at different jobs around town, and they accepted him. His grandmother used to come to town barefooted with a friend who guided her. Once the merchants decided they should have shoes so they gave them a pair of shoes each. But the next day they came back to town and were still barefooted. Q: But weren’t the Maidus wiped out within a short period of time because of the white settlers? DF: They were still living out at the campoodie while I was going to school. Do you know where that is? It’s on Cement Hill Road. I understand that [President]. Woodrow Wilson deeded that to them for a lifelong estate. But the Bureau of Indian Affairs sold it. I was quite surprised to hear that. They said it was because there were so few Maidus here, so they transported them down to Auburn. Q: How did you become interested in writing Gold Cities? DF: Jim Morley, a photographer, was instrumental in getting me started. The book was his idea. The reason he wanted to publish that book was to show Nevada City and Grass Valley as they were before the freeway went in. People say now, “Why don’t you redo that book and bring it up to date?” But the idea was to show the towns before the freeway. For instance, there was National Alley—an alley that went back to Spring Street, and overhead was this walkway with all types of plants and flowers. But now it’s completely gone. I heard one man ask one of the people in the town, “Will you show me something from the Gold Rush Days that is still here?” Because so much of it is gone, even the big skip they had at the Empire Mine— that’s gone too. [Skips were the cars used for hauling men, ore and materials down into the mines. They descended at the rate of 800 feet a minute.] It took seven years to complete Gold Cities. Jim was very particular about the pictures. He’d stay there and get up early in the morning to get shots before there were many cars around. Q: Why do you think the town hasn’t tried harder to preserve all of these things? DF: Well, at that time I think so many of the pioneers moved away and there was a new element that thought of making this area more “commercial.” They were always trying to modernize it. Now the trend is the other way. The younger people are interested in preserving history. I wouldn’t be surprised if the narrow gauge came back, or something like that.