Calaveras Gold: The Impact Of Mining On A Mother Lode County

By Ronald H. Limbaugh and Willard P. Fuller

California’s Calaveras County—made famous by Mark Twain and his celebrated Jumping Frog—is the focus of this comprehensive study of Mother Lode mining. Most histories of the California Mother Lode have focused on the mines around the American and Yuba Rivers. However, the “Southern Mines”—those centered around Calaveras County in the central Sierra—were also important in the development of California’s mineral wealth. Calaveras Gold offers a detailed and meticulously researched history of mining and its economic impact in this region from the first discoveries in the 1840s until the present. Mining in Calaveras County covered the full spectrum of technology from the earliest placer efforts through drift and hydraulic mining to advanced hard-rock industrial mining. Subsidiary industries such as agriculture, transportation, lumbering, and water supply, as well as a complex social and political structure, developed around the mines. The authors examine the roles of race, gender, and class in this frontier society; the generation and distribution of capital; and the impact of the mines on the development of political and cultural institutions. They also look at the impact of mining on the Native American population, the realities of day-to-day life in the mining camps, the development of agriculture and commerce, the occurrence of crime and violence, and the cosmopolitan nature of the population. Calaveras County mining continued well into the twentieth century, and the authors examine the ways that mining practices changed as the ores were depleted and how the communities evolved from mining camps into permanent towns with new economic foundations and directions. Mining is no longer the basis of Calaveras’s economy, but memories of the great days of the Mother Lode still attract tourists who bring a new form of wealth to the region.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2003
• ISBN: 9780874175783

Book preview

CALAVERAS GOLD

Wilbur S. Shepperson Series in History and Humanities

Calaveras Gold

The Impact of Mining on a Mother Lode County

RONALD H. LIMBAUGH & WILLARD P. FULLER JR.

University of Nevada Press

Reno & Las Vegas

Wilbur S. Shepperson Series in History and Humanities

Series Editor: Jerome E. Edwards

University of Nevada Press, Reno, Nevada 89557 USA

Copyright © 2004 by University of Nevada Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Design by Carrie House

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Limbaugh, Ronald H.

Calaveras gold : the impact of mining on a mother lode county / Ronald H. Limbaugh, Willard P. Fuller, Jr.

p. cm.— (Wilbur S. Shepperson series in history and humanities)

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 0-87417-546-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Gold mines and mining—California—Calaveras County—History—19th century.    I. Fuller, Willard P., 1918–    II. Title.    III. Wilbur S. Shepperson series in history and humanities (Unnumbered)

TN423.C2 L48    2003

338.4′76223422′0979444—dc21    2003011142

ISBN-13: 978-0-87417-578-3 (ebook)

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1: The Early Placer Era

2: The Beginnings of Lode Mining, 1850–1885

3: Mining Society in the Early Years

4: Ancillary Industries

5: Preparing for Modern Mining

6: Lode Mining in the Golden Years

7: The Unstable Twenties and Thirties

8: A Half Century of Change

Appendix

Notes

Glossary

Suggested Reading

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURES

Oro y Plata mine

Charles M. Weber

Miner with poll pick

Ah See Wahn

Winnowing woodcut

Hydraulicking, 1880s

Quartz outcrop

William M. Gwin

Gwin mine, 1894

James G. Fair

Gabriel K. Stevenot

Arrastra near Mokelumne Hill

Stamp mill battery

Roasting ore at the Union mine, ca. 1864

Three Calaveras miners

Miwok at Sonora, ca. 1852

Miwok roundhouse, ca. 1910

John Jeff and family, ca. 1935

Limpy, 1920s

Wade Johnston

Grandma Olivia Ellen Rolleri

Delivering vegetables, ca. 1895

River mining

Sixteen-mule team

Stockton waterfront, 1852

Jerk-line team at Utica, 1890s

Manuel Company logging, ca. 1890

Altaville Iron Works, ca. 1890

Employees of the Altaville Iron Works

Butte Company dredge, ca. 1910

Driller stoping, ca. 1930s

Double-drum hoist, 1902

Knight impulse wheel

Ralph Lemue’s blacksmith shop, ca. 1890

Inside the Royal Company mill, ca. 1903

Gwin mill vanners, ca. 1899

Manuel Company log pond

Sierra Railroad trestle, ca. 1905

Sultana mill

Angels mine, ca. 1895

Lightner mill, 1890s

Maltman mine

Lightner compressor

Charles D. Lane

Utica mill and headframes, 1890s

Unidentified miners

St. Sava’s Church

Slavonians on Camp Nine road

Frederick F. Thomas

Gwin mine, ca. 1905

J. C. Kemp van Ee

Royal surface plant

Underground crew at Royal, ca. 1902

Sheep Ranch mine, 1890s

Sheep Ranch mine

Sluicing on Carson Hill

Union-Keystone concentrator

Union shaft house, ca. 1903

Penn smelter at Campo Seco, ca. 1906

Tapping floor, Penn smelter, 1900

D. C. Demarest, William J. Loring, Lawrence Monte Verda, and Percy Wood

Archie Stevenot, 1961

Frank Tower

Lawrence Monte Verda, Charles Segerstrom, Sol Grossbard, and other important financial figures

Carson Hill ball mill, 1930s

Carson Hill mill revamped, 1930s

Open cut on Carson Hill, 1930s

Doodlebug at Coyote Creek

Moundwell doodlebug, 1952

McSorley brothers and others panning for quartz crystals, 1897

Guy Castle

Dismantling the Sheep Ranch mill, 1942

Calaveras Cement plant, 1926

Environmental requirements

Royal Mountain King open pit, 1991

Calaveras Central hoist house

MAPS

County map

Mother Lode

Carson Hill

Southern Mines

Sierra Railroad

Angels Camp mine

CHARTS

Gold production

Calaveras minorities, 1850–1890

Decline of miners in Calaveras

Calaveras gold production, 1848–1994

Calaveras lode gold mine production, 1848–1968

Calaveras timber production, 1947–present

TABLES

6.1 California vs. Calaveras Gold Production, 1848–1995

8.1 A Century of Mining Tax Revenue, Angels City and Township

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many people were involved in helping the authors select materials for this manuscript and complete its preparation. The staffs of the Calaveras Heritage Council and the Calaveras Museum supported the project in its beginning stages back in the 1970s, and have continued to be helpful over the years. The Segerstrom family of Sonora was particularly helpful in allowing the authors access to family archives that have subsequently been deposited at the Holt-Atherton Library at the University of the Pacific. Daryl Morrison and her staff at the Holt-Atherton Library aided materially in locating and organizing resources. Gene Gressley and Carlo de Ferrari reviewed an early version of the manuscript and provided many helpful suggestions.

Special thanks are due to the following individuals and organizations for their cooperation and assistance during the long years of preparation: William B. Clark and the California Division of Mines and Geology, Dale M. Stickney of the California Mines and Geology Library, Mike Kizer and Grandview Resources of Carson Hill, Linda Guerra and the Sonora Mining Company at Jamestown, Bonnie Hardwick and Mary Morganti of the Bancroft Library, Peter Blodgett of the Huntington Library, Mrs. Lorrayne Kennedy of the Calaveras County Archives, the Calaveras County Historical Society, the Tuolumne County Museum, the Calaveras Cement Company, the Conference of California Historical Societies, Ted Bird, Philip R. Bradley, Julia Costello, Richard Dyer, Michael Dell’Orto, Donald Dickey, Anthony Dutil, E. M. Gerick, Ella McCarty Hiatt, John W. James, Robert E. Kendall, Judith Marvin, Glen Nevens, Duane Oneto, Richard Rolleri, Carlos Schwantes, Edgar Smith, Barden Stevenot, Charles Stone and Rhoda Stone, and Howard Tower.

Introduction

Sam Casoose slung a burlap bag over his shoulder and headed for town. At fifty cents each, his burden of eviscerated salmon commanded a ready market in Murphys, a mile due south of his cabin on the rancheria above the Oro y Plata mine. Caught and dried at Clark’s Flat on the Stanislaus a few weeks before, the spring chinook had been sluggish and easily trapped as they neared the end of their life cycle after spawning. The seasonal run had brought out dozens of Central Sierra Miwok, from rancherias at Six Mile, Vallecito, Sheep Ranch, and others. But fishing had been good, and the rocky beach had been covered with drying fish.

As he trekked down the ridge path toward the dusty wagon road leading to town, his thoughts were interrupted by the sight and sound of miners at work. Two hundred yards downslope, a miner had taken an option on the Oro y Plata, sluicing the old tailings and figuring what it would cost to dewater the underground levels. The scene reminded Sam of earlier times, when the noise from the mine’s stamp mill, now quiet, had echoed across the valley. Perhaps that was why Miwok elders had named the rancheria Mol-Pee-So, or earplugs.

* * *

The story of Sam Casoose and the Oro y Plata mine exemplifies the interaction of people and mines along the lower slopes of the central Sierra in what is now Calaveras County. Some inhabitants had been born in the region or had ancestors whose bones had rested there for more than a thousand years; others were recent arrivals from foreign lands; still others were Americans born in the States but inflected with the accents and attributes of their European antecedents. The newcomers came singly, in pairs, or in groups and companies at different times and by different conveyances, but the means of their arrival are not as important as the motives. To borrow an old cliché, they were hoping to get something or to get away from something, but what they found was not always what they expected, and whether they stayed or moved on often depended on economic or social forces beyond their control.

The land they came to provided an abundant resource base for social and economic development. A 660,352-acre wedge of land on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada, Calaveras is a diversified landscape with a wide range of natural resources and climatic conditions. The narrow eastern border lies in rugged alpine terrain 7,200 feet above sea level, where total snowfall approaches 50 feet in an average winter. The broader western border is drawn across the low-lying Sierra foothills adjacent to the great Central Valley, a fallow but hot and rainless land from May until storms begin in the fall. The ragged lines of the flanks follow the northeasterly trend of two major tributaries of the San Joaquin River, the Mokelumne on the north and the Stanislaus on the south, almost to their sources high in the mountains. Those rivers supply much of the water for farmers in the San Joaquin Valley, and for industrial and domestic users along the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay. In between the county’s northern and southern borders is the Calaveras River, actually much smaller in recent geologic times than the ancient river system that once traversed the central Sierra. It still drains much of the county and provides the principal water resource for San Joaquin County communities and farms downstream.

Gold miners first gained access to the southern Sierra foothills by following the rivers upstream from the San Joaquin plains through the Bear Mountain Range, a north-south trending barrier the Calaveras River breached near Toyon Flat. Gold Rush overland routes evolved into major arteries—Highways 4, 12, and 26 today—connecting the supply centers in the Central Valley to the mining camps, once the county’s principal population centers. Now, new structures are sprouting along these transportation corridors all the way from Wallace and Copperopolis on the western boundary to neighboring Alpine County on the Sierra crest. Most of the newcomers, however, settle in the foothill towns and suburban developments, close to the Central Valley but still part of the Mother Lode. Angels Camp, the county’s largest town with an estimated 3,150 residents as of 2001, is growing about 2.3 percent a year, slightly faster than the county as a whole.¹

The varied life zones ranging from lower Sonoran to Canadian in this angular country support an abundance of wildlife, with many species endemic to the area, although some have been endangered by human and exotic plant intrusions over the past century. The forest canopy extends from the scattered digger pines and oaks at lower elevations through the foothills to the mixed pine, fir, and cedar forests in the higher elevations. The diversity of surface resources attracted the first humans to Calaveras shortly after the last ice age some 10,000–12,000 years ago. For thousands of years Native Americans lived quietly and successfully on the land, adapting to its rhythms and natural cycles, utilizing its animals and fibers, learning to drive game by setting fire to the grassy rangeland and the brushy understory of the upper slopes, moving higher and lower as the food supply and living conditions changed with the seasons, keeping population in tune with the resource base.² Environmental historians recognize the impact of early human changes on natural ecosystems, correcting distorted pioneer portrayals of starving diggers as well as romantic views that fostered an idyllic image of Indians living in unchanging harmony with the land.³ But the pace of change accelerated rapidly with the coming of Europeans, and escalated explosively with the arrival of Americans during the Gold Rush.

Beneath the placid Calaveras foothills, the Mother Lode angles across the western part of the county in a northwestern-southeastern direction. This deep and tectonically significant structure of faulting and mineralization testifies to the long and violent geological history of the Sierra Nevada range. A relatively narrow zone stretching more than one hundred miles from Mariposa to El Dorado Counties, the Mother Lode is sliced by numerous faults, many of which were mineralized with gold-bearing quartz veins. The subsequent deep geologic erosion of the Sierra Nevada freed the gold from the grip of quartz, and concentrated it in many placer deposits in the rivers and streams. The Gold Rush followed directly from the discovery of nuggets in these deposits.

In Calaveras for the past 150 years, mining has been the most dynamic of the external forces affecting the lives of individuals and families. It is one of the counties within what was called in early days the Southern Mines, a region that began at the Mokelumne River on the Amador-Calaveras boundary and included the counties of Tuolumne and Mariposa as well as the lower valley counties from San Joaquin to Kern. With an estimated gold production of more than twenty-five million ounces, the Southern Mines rank second in total California gold production, well below the seventy-five million ounces attributed to the Northern Mines along a 120-mile stretch of the Sierra foothills between the Mokelumne and Feather Rivers. The Southern Mines include a large part of the Mother Lode, a celebrated zone stretching from Georgetown in El Dorado County to Mariposa 120 miles south.⁴ While the Mother Lode perhaps is better known in song and story than any other mineralized region in the world, production figures show it to be less significant economically than those districts extending into the northern Sierra Nevada. Calaveras ties with Butte and Sierra Counties for fourth place in recorded gold production, with about nine million ounces recovered between 1848 and 1965. It is therefore a major California producer, but less than its neighbors Tuolumne to the south and Amador to the north, and far behind the state’s number-one gold county, Nevada, with twenty-two million ounces.⁵

This is a book about mining in Calaveras and its economic impact from the Gold Rush to the present. It looks in depth at mining as an industry and the technology that shaped it in a typical county in the southern Sierra foothills. Though technically precise and factually detailed, it is geared to general audiences, with just enough geology and technology included to help readers understand what problems miners had to contend with and how they tried to solve them. Technical terms are defined in the text and more fully explained in the glossary. An appendix provides details on county population data.

Mining in Calaveras is a complex story. Rather than use a topical approach, like many modern Gold Rush books, or hit the highlights in a broad survey, as Mary Hill did recently in an intriguing combination of geology and history, we provide a chronological case study of mining and its economic dimensions in a single region.⁶ Starting with the initial discoveries, chapter 1 discusses the methods used by the pioneer placer miners, and the changes brought about by evolving placer technology. The next chapter follows mining underground with the first hardrock efforts. It explains how lode mining was financed, and explores the first base-metal developments in the copper deposits of the West Belt. Although our primary focus is economic, in chapter 3 we consider the social consequences of the Gold Rush, especially the impact on people of color and ethnic minorities suddenly juxtaposed against Euro-American immigrants. Chapter 4 shows how mining spawned supportive networks of economic activity that often evolved into separate industries. The emergence of modern technologies and subsidiary industries is covered in chapter 5. Chapter 6 surveys the major mines and districts during the prosperous era from the 1890s to World War I. How the mines and miners struggled through the twenties and thirties is the subject of chapter 7. The final chapter brings the Calaveras story down to the present with the decline of mining and its ancillary industries after World War II.

Today the pace of change in the foothill counties is again accelerating, but the main engine this time is not mining but lifestyle. Attracted by visions of cleaner air, quieter neighborhoods, and lower costs, thousands of retirees from the coastal cities and inland valleys have literally headed for the hills. Thousands more fully or semiemployed workers, with jobs in Sacramento, Stockton, Modesto, and other valley cities and towns, are moving to the lower Sierra despite a long daily commute. Along the southern Mother Lode, the county growth rate is among the highest in the nation.⁷

The impact of gold mining on regional economic development is one of the oldest themes in historical literature, so why produce another book on the subject? The simplest answer is that scholars and storytellers alike have largely overlooked Calaveras. A few monographs can be found describing Calaveras in the Gold Rush, but aside from technical publications, the region has lacked a comprehensive mining narrative. Mark Twain’s venerable jumping-frog tale proves the rule.⁸ Even though it virtually launched his career as a humorist and writer, and was the inspiration for an annual jubilee that attracts thousands to Angels Camp, the story has little to do with Calaveras history. Jubilee visitors leave the region knowing little more about its connection to gold mining than they did before. The primary purpose of our book is to make that connection explicit, to inform readers about the region’s gold mining heritage and its economic ramifications as they changed over time.

Did those economic ramifications have a positive or a negative impact? Most contemporary observers were overwhelmingly positive: They saw the quest for wealth as the primary engine of economic growth and development that propelled California into a modern industrial state. By the mid-twentieth century, however, older progressive models were giving way to more complex interpretations. Modern historical scholarship on the meaning of the Gold Rush began with pathbreaking monographs by Rodman Paul in 1947 and John Walton Caughey a year later. With critical insight and broad perspective, Paul reformulated the classic case that California’s mining legacy provided a constructive framework for western economic development. Caughey’s work was more voluble and philosophical. In considering whether the gold of California did not do more harm than good, he answered in the positive, though his explanation amounted to a critical review of the Gold Rush’s darker, more troubling side.⁹

A second reason for our book is to test broad economic generalizations by applying them to a specific region. As two sociologists wrote recently, new scholarship has questioned many earlier views about the implications of resource extraction for socio-economic development, but analyses of long-term historical data have been quite limited.¹⁰ While we do not overload the text with data analysis, our story rests on empirical evidence gleaned from both primary and secondary sources. This volume is a descriptive history of events that heretofore have not been adequately chronicled, but it is also an interpretation of gold mining and its economic significance for Calaveras and its resident population.

Since the 1960s, with the advance of postmodern thinking and the new history, scholars have rewritten much of California’s golden legacy. No serious study of Calaveras or any other mining region in California can ignore the implications of new interpretations that have added social, urban, environmental, and multicultural dimensions to what was once primarily a progressive chronicle of political and economic events. Although our book concentrates on economic themes, mining was not just a matter of methods, results, and production records. The mines had a profoundly human impact. They brought people together from all ethnic backgrounds, sometimes with unhappy and even tragic consequences. They made a few rich and bankrupted many more. They gave some men their start to fame and fortune, and drove others to crime or insanity. By generating and distributing capital, they stimulated growth and development everywhere the money flowed, but they also contributed to exploitation of those who were unable to protect themselves from wealth and power. They gave rise to towns and permanent settlements, stimulated subsidiary industries like logging and hydroelectric power generation, guided the growth of transportation networks, and laid the foundations of the region’s modern economy. They also despoiled the streams, denuded the landscape, and left a toxic residue for others to face. The impact of the mining industry can be traced in the region’s political institutions, government, laws, courts, and law enforcement efforts. From the mining age came schools, churches, libraries, opera houses, and recreational activities, but also came the downside of growth in an age without regulatory agencies or safety nets. In short, more than any other single enterprise, and for good or ill, mining urbanized, industrialized, and modernized Calaveras County.

As most readers are aware, historically gold has been both a commodity and a monetary unit. For most of the time period covered by this book, governments rather than market forces determined the price of gold. For more than 180 years in the United States, the federal government set gold prices and generally required American gold producers to sell gold bullion directly to the U.S. Mint, although there were some exceptions. Before 1933 the official U.S. price was $20.67 per ounce for pure gold, that is, 1,000-fine or 24-carat gold. In California gold bullion usually varied between 750 and 980 fine. The impure part was almost entirely silver, which between 1792 and 1893, except for a five-year period in the 1870s, also had a fixed monetary value, set at a ratio to gold of fifteen or sixteen to one. During the Depression, President Roosevelt raised the gold price to $35 per ounce, and there it remained until 1971, when Congress dropped the gold standard and allowed the price to float on the open market.

In this book production values are given generally in numbers of ounces, although sometimes it was more expedient to use dollar amounts. In converting from dollars to ounces, to compensate for variations in actual payments received by miners, we used an average of $17 per ounce for gold before 1933, and $30 per ounce between 1933 and 1971.

For modern investors who purchase gold today at around $350 an ounce, the historic prices fixed by the government may seem incredibly low. Mining itself a century ago was quite limited and simple compared to operations of the global giants that constitute modern mining corporations. But size and value are relative terms. Variations in the size and scope of individual mines, as well as incomplete, uncertain, or undisclosed financial transactions, make comparisons difficult. Fluctuations in the price of gold over nearly two centuries reflect the inflationary forces that have affected all aspects of the U.S. economy. When gold was $20 an ounce, the daily wage of a common laborer was little more than $1 per day. A gold mine worth $50,000 in 1870 might well be the equivalent of a $5 million property or operation today. But simple price conversions do not tell the whole story. In addition to size, readers must take into consideration changes in labor costs, commodity prices and supplies, the availability of capital, and especially living standards. In short, converting yesteryear’s economic and social values to modern equivalents is very difficult, not just for readers but also for historians.

Though mining today is a fading force in the U.S. economy, its legacy is still visible in the hard places of the western landscape, to borrow a phrase from historian Richard Francaviglia, and its political clout is felt whenever Congress tries to revise the 1872 mining law that still provides the rules for locating and acquiring mining property on federal lands. Its darker social and environmental dimensions are also with us today, whether we recognize them or not. As author and California state librarian Kevin Starr puts it, the Gold Rush is not something back there in time. The Gold Rush is everywhere around us, even in its tragic consequences. The Gold Rush is who we are as a people.¹¹

What happened in one mining region happened elsewhere, though perhaps not in the same ways.¹² With Calaveras as our main arena, and with gold our central theme, we offer in this narrative an example of how mining influenced a small geopolitical region over time. While our findings may be applicable to other mining regions, we recognize the limitations of trying to conclude too much from too little. Richard White’s caveat is well worth repeating: The Gold Rush had consequences, but specifying those consequences—and not overplaying them—that is the trick.¹³ Though we offer a broader perspective than most regional histories, this book is not about present controversies, nor does it attempt to extrapolate cosmic lessons from a regional focus. Let readers draw their own conclusions about the role of mining in the making of modern America. We will be satisfied if we help put Calaveras on the mining map, explore its mining life and lore, and in the process tell a good story.

1: The Early Placer Era

The Gold Rush, in a technical sense, did not begin with James Marshall’s discovery at Coloma on January 24, 1848. That was only the spark. The fire did not break out until May, when Sam Brannan rode through the streets of San Francisco with a pouch full of nuggets, shouting, Gold, gold, from the American River! The first epidemic of gold fever emptied San Francisco and spread quickly through the coastal countryside from Sonoma to Monterey. It started the mass movement that over the next three years poured nearly two hundred thousand people into the Sierra foothills. Out of this great convergence of newcomers came new towns and new political units even before California became a state. At the first legislative session on February 18, 1850, Calaveras was created, one of twenty-seven charter counties in California. Initially a bat-wing-shaped county stretching across the crest of the Sierra to the Nevada border and containing most of what became Amador, Alpine, and Mono Counties, it was cut down to its present boundaries by subsequent legislation over the next decade.¹

Calaveras in the Gold Rush

The story of gold mining in Calaveras begins curiously not in the Sierra foothills, but in the enterprising mind of Charles M. Weber, Stockton’s founder and presumptive empire builder. A friend and former employee of John A. Sutter, Weber was one of northern California’s most prosperous entrepreneurs. Within two years after immigrating to California in 1841 with the Bidwell party, he was a successful merchant, with a general store in San Jose that profited handsomely in the early 1840s. By 1845 he had acquired full title to a forty-four thousand-acre rancho on the lower San Joaquin River after buying out his business partner who had secured a land grant from the Mexican government two years before at Weber’s instigation. Weber retained his San Jose store and his Bay Area business connections after he moved to his rancho in 1847 as land baron, town founder, and colonizer. At the head of navigation on the San Joaquin he founded Tuleburg, but soon changed the name to Stockton to honor the boisterous commodore who commanded the successful U.S. land forces during the brief California phase of the Mexican War.

The town of Stockton was still in its infancy on January 28, 1848, when James Marshall, after a hard ride in a rainstorm, reached Sutter’s fort. He gleefully showed his boss the first glittering yellow samples that he had recovered four days earlier from the tailrace at Sutter’s Mill. Despite Sutter’s efforts to keep the discovery a secret, the news spread quickly among Sutter’s inner circle of friends and acquaintances. One of those friends was Charles Weber, who frequently traveled to Sacramento on business. He was at Sutter’s fort early in March 1848, and must have learned of the discovery at that time. However, Frank Gilbert, who interviewed Weber thirty years later and wrote the first published history of San Joaquin County, said Weber did not catch the spark from the flame until one of Sutter’s men turned up in Stockton with a few shiny specimens later in March.²

As a businessman and entrepreneur in a territory desperately short of hard currency, Weber needed gold for Stockton’s development, but neither he nor anyone else at the time knew much about gold or how to find it and mine it. In spite of the long history of gold mining and milling from ancient times to the nineteenth century, Americans in northern California before the summer of 1848 had almost no personal mining knowledge or experience.³ Fortunately for these young gold hunters, California surface placer deposits were so widespread and so easily tapped that practically anybody with a strong back had a good chance of locating pay dirt. Some went exploring with little more than a pick and a long knife for probing creek-bed crevices. Weber was more systematic: He rejected the idea of a quick scramble in favor of an organized expedition. From the first he also had commercial interests in mind. Like Collis P. Huntington, Leland Stanford, and other merchant-Argonauts, Weber was perceptive enough to realize that there was more profit and less work in supplying miners than in mining himself. It took no depth of insight to recognize the market possibilities of selling scarce merchandise to gold seekers isolated from easy sources of supply.

Weber spent most of March and April gathering information, supplies, and men for a mining expedition. At least two members of his party later became prominent in Calaveras County. Although no record of the original party has been located, doubtless it included the two Murphy brothers John and Daniel, sons of Martin Murphy Sr., who had brought the first wagons over the Sierra in 1844. Weber had known most of the twenty-six members of the Murphy clan since their arrival, and knew them intimately as in-laws after courting and eventually marrying their younger sister Helen.⁴ Late in April, two weeks before Sam Brannan’s giddy gallop through San Francisco, Weber’s party headed east toward the Stanislaus River. They explored the river and its tributaries, but found nothing of real interest. Then they turned north toward Coloma, prospecting as they traveled. For nearly two months they worked the foothill streams and gulches, digging closer to bedrock than had the first hasty prospectors out of Coloma. Along the Mokelumne River their luck changed. They found gold in several rich pockets, perhaps the first from what became Calaveras County, although the exact location is unknown. But they kept moving north, leaving the river to the remnants of Colonel Jonathan D. Stevenson’s New York regiment of Mexican War volunteers. These newcomers had arrived in California nearly too late to fight, but promised to remain after the war to help Americanize the country. Soon after the unit disbanded in September 1848, some of these young adventurers came to the Mokelumne, taking up claims the Weber party had probably explored briefly on their way north.⁵

Just above Coloma, on a small tributary of the American River, Weber’s company found the most promising prospects yet. Here was the literal pot of gold they had been looking for! They staked claims and settled in for some serious mining. Soon Weber’s Creek was a flourishing camp, with miners recovering thousands of dollars in small nuggets and fine gold at the field price of ten dollars per ounce. Weber, calmly mercantile despite the excitement, seemed to recognize where the real money was. He controlled the distribution of supplies from a hastily erected brushwood store. James H. Carson, arriving a few weeks later, reported that Weber was daily sending out mules packed with gold.⁶

By June, all of northern California had caught gold fever, and Weber realized that he would have to reprovision and reorganize to keep ahead of the crowd. Leaving some men behind at Weber’s Creek to hold their claims, he returned to his rancho and organized the Stockton Mining Company as a joint stock mining and trading venture. Among his friends and acquaintances along the Cosumnes River, at San Jose, and elsewhere, he sought out supplies and enlisted stockholders in the enterprise.

He also contracted for a group of local Native Americans to labor in the mines. Indians were cheap and exploitable, living on lands they once called home that had been appropriated by Mexican and American impresarios with government acquiescence. As historian Jim Rawls has made clear, in California the Hispanic system of labor exploitation was transferred from the ranchos to the mines. In 1847, when Weber had taken possession of his San Joaquin rancho, scattered remnants of plains and mountain Miwok tribes were still living in the large rectangle roughly bounded by the San Joaquin, Cosumnes, and Fresno Rivers.⁷ These were the survivors of the devastating European diseases that had wiped out so much of the Native population prior to the U.S. takeover. One nearby subgroup of Plains Miwok, known as Síakumne or Siyakum, inhabited a small village on the south bank of the Mokelumne, with a range that extended south to the Stanislaus. They were led by José Jesús, described as a tall, stunning figure clad in colorful Hispanic garb. Jesús had assumed a leadership role after the death of Estanislao, the leader of a combined Yokuts-Miwok renegade band that had been nearly wiped out in 1829 by a Mexican force under Mariano Vallejo. Estanislao’s successor harbored strong resentment against the Mexican government, a feeling that played into the hands of Charles Weber. He befriended Jesús by convincing him that the development of his rancho on the San Joaquin would serve as a buffer between coastal Hispanic settlements and the interior Indians.⁸

A year later, in the spring or early summer of 1848, Weber came once again to Jesús, this time as a friend offering opportunities for Indians to work in the mines. Contracting for Native labor was not unusual in pre-Gold Rush California. Sutter used Native help in constructing the sawmill at Coloma.⁹ In the northern Sacramento Valley, Pearson Reading and John Bidwell also employed Indians under labor contract, and continued to use them as miners. In Tuolumne and Mariposa Counties, James D. Savage, according to contemporaries, had thousands of Indians mining for him.¹⁰ Weber and Jesús worked out an agreement by which Weber would be supplied with a Native crew to prospect ground along the Stanislaus and the Tuolumne, an area Weber’s initial discovery party had skimmed over without success or had missed entirely. Brought to Weber’s Creek for a short course in placer mining, the Indians departed with instructions to deliver any yellow metal they unearthed to Weber’s ranch foreman at French Camp. They would receive in exchange blankets, utensils, beads, and other trade goods. Whether they got fair value in the exchange is debatable. Weber had tried to cultivate goodwill among the Miwok, but he still charged them one hundred dollars in gold per blanket.¹¹ Unsuspecting Indians were fair game for unscrupulous traders who weighed Indian gold with the Digger Ounce, an overweight lead slug used instead of standard weights. As James H. Carson observes, weighing gold for Indians and white people was a different matter, and traders saw no harm in throwing the lead when naive Natives were the customers.¹²

The first established gold discovery site in what is now Calaveras County is not precisely known, nor is the date recorded. George Tinkham, an early regional historian who interviewed Weber long after the event, places the discovery on the Stanislaus, but does not identify the site or the date. Others identify the date as late July or early August 1848, and place the site on the north side of the Stanislaus below Carson Hill along a steep and dusty gulch first called Dry Diggings, later Indian Gulch.¹³ Regardless of location, the honor of discovery goes to Native Americans. Sometime in late July or early August, some of Weber’s hired Miwok appeared before his representative at French Camp with a handsome collection of Calaveras nuggets that were the largest yet discovered in California, and the first found in what became known as the Southern Mines.

Gold from the Stanislaus created a wild excitement that summer when it reached Weber and his partners in the Stockton Mining Company, still working claims on Weber’s Creek that were declining rapidly.¹⁴ Many decided on the spot to abandon the local diggings and head for Indian Gulch, detouring through Weber’s rancho in Stockton long enough to gather supplies. Joined by others who had heard the news, the miners reached the Stanislaus by the latter part of August. Soon the whole countryside was astir with prospectors spreading out to explore the gulches and streambeds throughout the region. In September, Weber also left his diggings near Coloma, and the company dissolved not long afterward. Stockton’s founder recognized the importance of his town as the Gateway to the Southern Mines, and he wanted to develop its waterfront and transportation connections.¹⁵

A few months earlier, while the Weber company was still at Weberville near Coloma, another individual, later prominent in Calaveras County mining history, arrived at Weber’s Creek. James H. Carson, a Virginian who had come west with Stevenson’s regiment, had initially settled in Monterey after the regiment mustered out. When the first news of the Marshall discovery reached town Carson remained skeptical, but early in May, after meeting up with an old army acquaintance with a sack of gold, Carson caught the fever and headed east. He found Weber’s camp flourishing, with Indians giving handsful of gold for a cotton handkerchief or a shirt. Apparently, this was gold both from Weber’s Creek and from the Stanislaus country, for Carson noted that the Natives were coming in with news of outlying discoveries.¹⁶

In August 1848 Carson joined the rush to Stanislaus but split off from the main party when they reached what soon became known as Angels Creek. Aided by Native guides, he and a small group found likely placer deposits farther upstream, along a creek, later called Carson, which circled the base of a hill rising some nineteen hundred feet above the north bank of the Stanislaus River. He remembered averaging 180 ounces per man in ten days of digging. Had Carson worked up the hill to the quartz outcrops he would have discovered the source of this golden bounty, which contained some of the most productive veins on the Mother Lode. But he knew nothing about quartz, and moved on. Others located Carson Hill’s best treasures two years later.¹⁷

Carson explored the area until October, returning to Monterey with some good specimens but eager to find more. The next spring he came back with a party of ninety-two men, including John W. Robinson, a coleader of the expedition. They explored the southern Sierra foothills near Mariposa, then worked their way north as far as Columbia with respectable results. But Carson had seen better diggings, and in May 1849 he returned to Carson Creek, along with Robinson and Stephen Mead. The latter two constructed a ferry across the Stanislaus at the mouth of the creek and set up a trading post.¹⁸

Carson’s enthusiasm for prospecting waned with the onset of rheumatism, a common complaint among miners who often worked days on end in frigid water or wet clothes. In 1850 he left the diggings and formed a partnership to haul supplies between Stockton and Mariposa, but soon his partner defaulted and left Carson heavily in debt. He remained a prominent regional figure, however, telling his tale to the newspapers, publishing a book, and running successfully for the state legislature from Calaveras County in 1853. It turned out to be his last victory, for illness soon took his life.¹⁹

Another pair of prospectors from Stevenson’s regiment were two brothers, Henry P. and George Angel. Natives of Rhode Island, they were at Weber’s Creek when Carson arrived in August. In the southern exodus that followed the camp’s abandonment, Carson and the Angel brothers traveled south together until they reached the Stanislaus watershed. Learning from Weber’s experience, the Angels stopped where a minor tributary later called Dry Creek intersected a stream named for the two brothers. There they prospected and set up a primitive trading post to exchange Native goods for gold. Whether they worked for themselves or for Weber is not clear, but Angels Camp soon had more white prospectors than Indians. By the spring of 1849, the camp numbered about three hundred.²⁰

The exodus from Weber’s Creek also brought the Murphy brothers to the Calaveras region. Working to the east of Angels Camp along what they named Coyote Creek, they prospected for a few weeks at a place later known as Murphy’s Old Diggings. Eventually, it was renamed Vallecito. Sometime in the fall of 1848, John and his brother Daniel moved from Coyote Creek northward to more likely gravels in a higher basin drained by the upper arm of Angels Creek (soon locally known as Murphys Creek), which had been prospected earlier. Who was actually first on the scene is uncertain.²¹ John M. Murphy, who had clerked for Weber both at San Jose and later at Weber’s Creek, brought enough supplies from Weber’s stock to set up a trading post at what was originally called Stoutenberg, then Murphy’s New Diggings, and ultimately Murphys Camp or simply Murphys.²² As the Murphy party dug down four feet or more to the concentrations of alluvial gold along the limestone bedrock, they opened a placer field of extraordinary richness.

News of the new diggings at Murphys spread quickly in the fall of 1848. To accommodate newcomers and spread the wealth, a miner’s meeting in 1849 drafted rules limiting each man to a single placer claim of eight feet per side.²³ Miners made money despite the restriction: The average take in 1849 was three thousand dollars per claim, with some claims yielding sixteen ounces to the pan in a day when one or two ounces was considered an acceptable yield. Some of the first comers became quite wealthy. John M. Murphy, it was alleged, took out between $1.5 and $2 million in gold dust after only two mining seasons. On his last pack trip out, he carried as much gold as six mules could haul from the camp. In October 1848, Walter Colton found Murphy’s tent stocked with trade goods that he exchanged with local Indians who gather gold for him, and perhaps also for his supplier, Captain Weber. The tent also contained refreshments that would have graced a scene less wild than this. Contemporaries claimed Murphy’s marriage of convenience to a local chief’s daughter provided him with plenty of Native labor to work his claims. But unlike less scrupulous traders, Murphy allowed no liquors in the camp to go to the Natives. White and Mexican miners, on the other hand, had no shortage of alcohol in Murphys.²⁴

Hard drinking matched the hard work confronting the Argonauts at Murphys. Placer operations on the gravelly flats were especially difficult and dangerous. To reach pay dirt, miners sunk coyote holes, vertical shafts to bedrock that varied from five to forty feet below the surface, trying to avoid falling debris and cave-ins while in the process. Shallow holes were generally untimbered, but sensible miners in deeper holes timbered the shaft before drifting outward in a radial pattern to locate the pay streak. Using buckets attached to horse- or hand-powered windlasses, they hoisted auriferous gravel from the bottom and washed it through sluices on the surface.²⁵

As they found out in the rainy season, the flat lacked good drainage. Jacob Bachman, who arrived in Murphys early in February 1850 with the John Woodhouse Audubon party, prospected the area but had very little success, the large flat being too wet to dig as far down as necessary to get at the gold. Audubon left in March, bitterly disappointed, but Bachman stayed on until August, still waiting for the water to recede. Heavy digging was safest in the dry months when caving was less likely. Yet, that time of year was also bad for placer pioneers because the surface water was insufficient for sluicing their gravel. I think we can very easily make 8 or 10 hundred dollars apiece, wrote one argonaut near San Andreas in November 1850. [W]e shall go to throwing up dirt soon as there is no water to wash with now in the ravines.²⁶

Altering nature for human benefit was an unalloyed good in nineteenth-century American thinking. At Murphys, miners demonstrated their cultural conventions as well as their engineering skills in the 1850s. To extend the season for sluice boxes, in 1852–1853 the Union Water Company completed a flume that brought water from the Stanislaus River, fifteen miles away. The groundwater problem took longer to solve, however. Some of the early miners, like Bachman, gave up and left in frustration. Others resorted to ingenuity and hard work to come up with a solution. As early as 1850, Murphys miners tried draining the flat by digging a three hundred-yard trench nearly eighteen feet deep. It took nearly ten years and several later reorganizations to complete what eventually became known as the Deep Cut, or Murphys’ Bedrock Flume. Ultimately reaching a depth of thirty-seven feet in some sections and a length of four thousand feet, the ditch opened in time for the 1860 mining season. Draining the basin gave miners a chance to rework their shallow claims and send the tailings downstream toward Angels Camp.²⁷

Despite the difficulties and the overcrowding, Murphy’s New Diggings prospered. As late as 1852, miners were reportedly averaging twenty to fifty dollars a day. By that time the population had mushroomed to five thousand.²⁸

Other Calaveras camps also boomed in this pioneer period. At Vallecito, which the Murphy brothers had briefly explored but abandoned, others found paying placer ground that in one week during the early 1850s produced sixteen hundred ounces of gold. At its height the camp population reached four thousand. Upstream from Vallecito, Douglas Flat spurted to life after another of the Stevenson’s regiment prospectors panned coarse gold there in the summer of 1848.²⁹ Wade’s Flat, Humbug Hill, and many other satellite camps opened in the wake of these pioneer discoveries.

On the Mokelumne River, surface placers attracted moderate attention after Weber’s spring discoveries, although real excitement did not develop until a former soldier from Stevenson’s regiment unearthed a twenty-five-pound nugget near Big Bar. This may have been the same lump of gold a dyspeptic Scotsman told Walter Colton about in Monterey on September 9: It was as big as his double fist.³⁰ A rush to the Mokelumne inaugurated a number of river camps, including Lancha Plana, Poverty Bar, Lower Rich Gulch, Middle Bar, Big Bar, and the bars along the upper Mokelumne River. By 1849 the Mokelumne was booming. Bayard Taylor, sent by Horace Greeley to describe the Gold Rush for New York Tribune readers, rode a mule in August from Stockton to a hill overlooking the river and saw before him a valley dotted with the tents of the gold-hunters, whom we could see burrowing along the water. The next day, touring the diggings at Lower Bar, he watched a company of ten men complete a diverting canal that exposed about twenty yards of riverbed. They proceeded to mine the claim with shovels, a rude cradle, and bateas. One man attacked a likely spot with his knife, "scraping up the sand from the bed . . . and throwing it into