The Gold Seekers: Gold, Ghosts and Legends from Carolina to California

By Nancy Roberts

A history of the earlier Southern gold rush and its legends that—for the first time—ties it to the well-known California gold rush of 1849.

Nancy Roberts tells how it all began in North Carolina, which supplied all the domestic gold coined at the US Mint between 1804 and 1828. She tells the story of the discovery of the gold in Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, and Alabama and later in California and Colorado, including how the Virginia, Carolina and Georgia gold miners abandoned their mines within weeks after news arrived of the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Creek. And, for a while, they were said to be the only experienced miners in the Western gold fields.

Ms. Roberts recreates with gusto and suspense the experiences of real people—the adventurers and entrepreneurs, family men and rascals, immigrants and bandits, entertainers and miners—and also includes several tales of the supernatural from the period.

There was North Carolina’s flamboyant Walter George Newman, who fleeced the wolves of Wall Street; “Fool Billy,” who South Carolinians discovered was not a fool at all; a romantic specter called Scarlett O’Hara of the Dorn Mine; Georgian Green Russell, with his beard braided like a pirate, who founded Denver; “Free Jim,” the only black man in Dahlonega to own his own gold mine only to leave it for San Francisco; the Grisly Ghost of Gold Hill; a general from North Carolina who became an influential Californian; the ghost bride of Vallecito; and California’s bandit, the enigmatic Black Bart.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 12, 2013
• ISBN: 9781611173604

Nancy Roberts

Nancy Roberts is a multi-award-winning freelance Arabic-to-English translator and editor. In addition to novels, she enjoys translating materials on political, economic and environmental issues, human rights, international development, Islamic thought and movements, and interreligious dialogue. Nancy lived across the Middle East for twenty-five years in Lebanon, Kuwait and Jordan, and is now based in the Chicago suburbs.

Book preview

Part I: Tales of the

Southeastern Gold Rushes

1.

The Discovery of Gold in North Carolina

America’s first gold rush began in North Carolina, not in California. It all started with John Reed and not John Sutter—by chance, each was a German immigrant. And when gold was found on their land, they both shared the same concern about their crops and were more interested in farming than mining. But here similarities end.

Sutter was born in 1803, one year after John Reed stood in Little Meadow Creek surveying a stream on his farm in which millions of dollars worth of gold lay glittering just below the water’s surface. The North Carolina gold rush was a small-scale version of what happened in California and fate had cast just as unlikely a man in the lead role.

John Reed was born in Darmstadt, Germany, in January of 1758. He had the misfortune of being conscripted into the army of Prince Frederick and loaned to the king of England to fight the American colonists. Reed arrived sometime during the winter of 1778 to 1779 and shortly afterwards left Long Island, New York, with British, Hessian, and Tory units to take part in the capture of Charleston, South Carolina. But he felt a deep sympathy with the colonists and resented being forced to fight for what he thought was an unjust cause.

Attempting to escape, he was caught by the British and given thirty-nine lashes as punishment. Apparently in a state of euphoria after the capture of Charleston, they dealt with this insubordinate deserter in a most unusual fashion. After his punishment they simply told Reed to go to the devil and they washed their hands of him. He went to Cabarrus County, North Carolina, where there were German settlers. John Reed spoke English poorly, so it was no wonder that he was attracted to a German-speaking settlement.

He was in a strange country but he had farmed as a boy and started farming once more; in fact, by the time Cornwallis had surrendered at Yorktown, John Reed was already saving his money toward the purchase of land. In 1799 the farm houses of Mecklenburg and the surrounding counties were far apart, the land sparsely settled and desolate.

A Cornishman in the piney woods of Davidson County wrote, I have been in dense tropical forests, on the silent plains of South America, on the equally silent steppes of Siberia, and in the deserts of Asia and Africa, but I know of no silence so awe-inspiring, even terrible as that of a great pine forest. Evidently land like this did not bother Reed at all.

Shortly before 1799 he was able to buy 330 acres from the state of North Carolina at a price of fifty shillings per hundred acres, the going price at that time. There was nothing distinguished or especially talented about this immigrant. Everything about John Reed indicated that he was born to plow the hard red clay of Piedmont Carolina until he died, but that was not to be the case.

On a Sunday morning in 1799 John Reed had no thoughts beyond his family and his crops in his mind when he and his wife climbed upon his only horse to ride double to church. The distance was too far for the three children to walk, so the older son, Conrad, was placed in charge of the younger ones until their parents returned from services.

Twelve-year-old Conrad Reed took them down to Little Meadow Creek, which ran through the Reed farm, to shoot fish with a bow and arrow. While watching for fish, he noticed a shiny yellow rock glinting in the sunlight and he waded in after it. It was far heavier to lift out than he had imagined; but he carried it back to the house and gave it to his father when he returned from church. It was about the shape of a small flatiron and just as heavy.

Twelve-year old Conrad Reed accidentally discovers a seventeen-pound gold nugget near Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1799.

(North Carolina Department of Archives and History Photo) Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 1857

Reed had never seen such an unusual looking rock and he was sufficiently curious to take it to William Atkinson, a silversmith in the nearby village of Concord. The man who worked with silver did not recognize a more precious metal when he saw it and returned the rock to Reed telling him he had no idea what it could be. Back to his farm went Reed and for three years he used the seventeen-pound rock as a doorstop.

His crops flourished and in 1802 he was able to make a trip to Fayetteville over a hundred miles away, a trading center to the east on the Cape Fear River. Conrad who was going too, thought they should take their doorstop and his father humored him.

When they showed the rock to a Fayetteville jeweler, the man knew it for what it was and he had melted it down and showed John Reed a bar of gold six to eight inches long. Asked what he would sell it for, Reed who had no idea of the real value of gold replied with what he thought was a big price.

I will sell it for $3.50, he said and the jeweler immediately paid him. Reed was so happy to receive such a pile of money for nothing that he thought of pleasing his wife by bringing her something she had heard of but never seen or tasted … coffee.

Sarah Kizer Reed was at first pleased with the coffee but soon became exasperated when the unground beans did not cook up well when mixed with meat! Several weeks later word reached Cabarrus County through someone who had been down trading in Fayetteville that a jeweler there had sold a small bar of gold for thousands of dollars. Reed saddled his horse and headed back to Fayetteville. There was a confrontation in the jewelry shop and John Reed returned home apparently bringing from one to four thousand dollars depending on which account is read. Possibly the jeweler parted with the money with the hope Reed would bring him more nuggets.

Reed had not thought of searching Little Meadow Creek for gold, but now he walked the creek and found that for a mile it was strewn with the precious metal.

For a time, farming was forgotten while each day the entire family went down to Little Meadow Creek to look for more rocks of gold. Some say the stream bed was covered with small golden nuggets shining beneath the surface and that Reed filled a quart jar with them. There was gold not only in the stream bed but in the gravel beside it where the Reeds found nuggets weighing up to twenty-eight pounds. John Reed was literally sitting on top of a gold mine for beneath the soil, the hills of his farm carried veins of milk white quartz and the precious metal.

It dawned on the former Hessian soldier that he was no longer in Europe where any gold discovered was automatically the property of the king but that the riches he was finding belonged solely to him. In Europe there had been no motivation for a gold rush for it must be turned over to the government. Here, a man had an opportunity to become rich overnight. Nearby farmers immediately began to dig on their own land. News of the Carolina gold rush was soon spreading throughout the southeast and the rest of the world!

John Reed expanded his operation taking in three farmer friends as partners and each summer after the crops were harvested, the partners supplied Reed with equipment and slaves to dig for gold in the creek bed and adjacent areas. The surface diggings near Little Meadow Creek were probably the richest in North Carolina. For the next twenty years, Reed and his partners continued seasonal mining operations along the creek and by 1824, their efforts had netted an estimated one hundred thousand dollars in gold.

In 1803 a nugget weighing twenty-eight pounds was found just under the surface of the ground by a gray-headed old slave named Peter and at the time, it was the largest nugget ever found in the United States. Thomas Hurley says in his book Famous Gold Nuggets of the World that this was the world’s richest mining claim as to number, value and quality of the nuggets.

The half-mile of stream where the first nugget had been found was richer than any claim California would have almost fifty years later.

Although John Reed never learned to read and write, he became a wealthy man hiring servants and building a larger house of logs and stone. Other than that, his simple frugal lifestyle continued much the same.

Sadly enough, only four years after underground mining began in 1831, a family argument resulted in a court injunction that closed the mine for ten years. John Reed never saw it reopened for he died in 1845, but despite the closing of the mine he was still wealthy. After his death the Reed Mine was sold at public auction. Through the years the mine changed hands many times and mining was halted entirely at the Reed as well as throughout the state during the Civil War. The last large nuggett was found at the Reed by a placer miner in 1896 and a total was recorded of over one hundred pounds in gold nuggets before the last underground mining ceased in 1912.

As word spread, similar mining enterprises sprang up on the small farms that dotted the Yadkin and Catawba river valleys, including Parker’s Mine in Montgomery County and Dunn’s mine in Mecklenburg County. These mines were like the Reed partnership, really nothing more than placer operations along creek beds. Only after the most obvious large nuggets were discovered did these farmerturned-miners began to use mechanical devices like the rocker.

In 1828 a tired traveler spent the night with a shoemaker and his family at Brindletown in Burke County and the next morning saw flecks of gold in the clay chinking between the logs of the house. He borrowed a dishpan from the man’s wife and panned more gold from the nearby stream than he had seen on all his travels in South America. Then he taught the shoemaker how to pan for gold and in return the shoemaker provided the land and the pair became partners. From that moment, the Burke County gold rush was on its way.

About forty-five miles above Raleigh, a man named Isaac Portis, who lived near two well traveled roads, took in lodgers for twenty-five cents a night. In 1838 he happened to take in a peddler bound from Raleigh to Halifax. As the peddler was leaving the next morning he became aware of the sun striking some glittering flecks in the freshly plowed red clay field. Filled with excitement, he hurried back to the house with a handful of earth. Samples of the earth sent to Raleigh and Richmond confirmed that Isaac Portis had been raising cotton in fields of gold. The northeast Carolina gold rush had begun.

Placer mining was replaced by vein mining in 1825 when it was discovered that underground veins of white quartz also bore gold. This lode gold as it was called required much more money, labor, and machinery. Fortune seekers from other countries were arriving and among them were skilled Cornishmen from England.

Entire families, even children from five or six years old up, worked in the mines. Gold mining at its peak employed more North Carolinians than any occupation other than farming but early census figures don’t show this. Many of the men mined for gold when the crops were in but since they owned the land before the excitement over the discovery of gold, they saw themselves as farmers and this was what they put down as their occupation. Thus, census figures reflect only those working as employees at the larger mines, they don’t count the scores of small one-or two-man claims nor do they count the farms where the owner and his slaves mined in the winter months.

HARD ROCK MINING BEGINS

The first recorded discovery of vein deposits of gold in the Carolina belt occurred in 1825 on the farm of Matthias Barringer. Like Reed, Barringer was a German farmer. He owned a few hundred acres of land in what is now Stanly County and he had panned for gold in the creeks on his farm for several years.

One day he noticed that beyond a certain point going up stream he could not find any gold. Just at the point where the gold seemed to stop, he saw a white quartz vein running into the hill and at right angles with the stream. He had often found pieces of the quartz with gold in it in the stream bed and he came to the conclusion that the gold scattered in the stream below this point must have come out of this particular quartz vein. He decided to pursue it into the hill.

He had followed it only a few feet when he struck a rich and beautiful deposit of the metal in a matrix of quartz. In following the vein for a distance of about thirty or forty feet and not more than fifteen or eighteen feet in depth, he found a succession of nests of gold from which he took out more than fifteen thousand pennyweights. There was great excitement in the area and within a few weeks fifty gold hunters had leased prospects from the old farmer.

What was most important to the North Carolina mining industry was that gold had been found in regular veins. Near Charlotte, several major mining properties developed including the Capp’s Hill, McComb, and Rudisill mines. Now Piedmont farmers were leaving the streams and striking out for the hills and high ground. Meantime four or five shafts with depths up to ninety feet had opened up at the Reed Mine.

Throughout the Piedmont the pattern of vein discovery by farmers followed a similar one to that of Matthias Barringer. Using the most primitive machinery, the farmer mined the gold himself on a seasonal basis or leased his land to gold hunters for a percentage of the profits. Information concerning mining spread haphazardly by word-of-mouth and farmer-miners were on their own with little to guide them but intuition, trial and error, and some assistance from scientific texts or journals.

Robert W. Hodson, a Quaker from Guilford County, was typical of many of these farmer-miners of the 1820s. When he and his brother, Jeremiah, heard of a discovery of gold on a nearby farm they decided to do some prospecting on Jeremiah’s land near Jamestown.

From some knowledge of the geological strata of the earth, wrote Hodson in his journal … we coursed the vein over the high land to the next branch, thence upon the hill some distance, where a ledge of quartz jutted out, not more than a foot thick, leading south-southwest to the general course of ledges of rocks in the section of the country. We found some particles of gold in quartz.

But now was the season to plant crops and the brothers postponed their explorations until after summer’s harvest, when they sank a pit about fifteen feet deep on the hill above the branch in search of gold. They found nothing. Robert Hodson was not dismayed by his failure and he spent the winter months absorbed in his studies of gold mining and milling.

I applied my mind closely to gain a knowledge of Geology, Mineralogy and Metallurgy from the best books, papers and men, in my reach—the manner of gathering and working metals in Peru and elsewhere. Then we commenced work with a little better understanding of the manner of gathering gold in other countries by following the vein of quartz, washing the ore, grinding it and then applying mercury. They were able to save the pure gold but lost much of it that was mixed with other metals.

When we succeeded in the work, Hodson wrote, it produced wonderful excitement.

Men came from far and near, went to work sinking shafts at random and getting no pay. The Hodson Mine eventually reached a depth of fifty feet uncovering some valuable pockets of ore. The mine owners later employed a crew of three regular workers to dig, wash, and haul the ore. Usually, the men’s wages varied from one dollar to thirty dollars a day.

In 1829 an unusual lady was touring the South making notes for a book on the region, as has been customary with northerners for years. Her name was Anne Newport Royal and one of the places she visited was the Hodson Brothers Mine. The mine was really a large open pit that had filled with water from rain and underground streams. They used no pumping equipment, only a primitive drain. Her description of mining which follows is very exact.

The ore is taken from the mine … in wheel barrows to a small creek where it is washed clean. It is then burnt and pulverized as it will not grind in its natural state. It is then removed into a wide box, made of plank, from two to three feet in length, about two feet wide. This box is open at the top to receive the ore and open at one end to let it run out.

The box is placed breast high from the ground, with the open end lower than the closed, while a trough like those which convey water to distilleries, passes immediately over the box. A hole through the trough lets the water fall upon the ore which is gradually washed into another trough. The water is raised into the trough overhead by a pump and this water issues in a small stream which nevertheless requires the aid of a hand to push the ore out into the next trough.

The second trough is of some length, perhaps ten or twelve feet. It also slopes more than the other. The water runs rapidly through this second box and spreads on the ground. This last box has notches cut in its bottom, perhaps an inch deep. Quicksilver is lodged in the notches and as the ore runs down over it, particles of gold stick to the quicksilver. The quicksilver is then taken out and laid on heated iron. It runs off leaving the gold which is then collected and run into bars in a furnace. This is the process!—simple enough.

The equipment and process resembled a combination of barrel rocker and long-tom that were used throughout the Piedmont. It was not a new procedure nor was it particularly complex. In fact it was used in Renaissance mines in Europe during the 1500s and in South America throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

North Carolina farmers mined in a scientific vacuum piecing together bits of information from a variety of early sources. Mrs. Royal was direct in her criticism of their methods saying that there was neither skill, machinery, capital, nor enterprise at the Hodson mine.

Although the ore is … very rich and abundant … about two-thirds, to say the least, is wasted. In the first place, it is wasted in bringing it from the mines, in the wheel barrows; then in the washing, and again in the burning, but most of all in the grinding. Instead of the furnaces, or kilns rather, it is thrown into common log-heaps, rain or shine, without shelter, and after it is burned, it is placed under a wheel which is pulled round … by a horse.

Prospectors arrived from all over the United States and Europe. Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 1857

But instead of a box for the wheel to run in, and keeping it from wasting, the ore was on a few boards and with every turn of the wheel some of it would fall off on the ground. Here it was tramped into the earth and carried off on the miners’ shoes. A great part of it too, is lost, from not being ground fine enough. In short, it is wasted throughout the whole process, and the whole of the machinery is without shelter or system.

The machinery looks as though it had been made by children with a penknife, said she, poorly constructed and thoughtlessly deployed along the stream bed in a random fashion.

Of the miners themselves, she wrote, It is laughable to see these tall, long-tail cotton-coat North Carolinians … poking about like snails, and picking up the quicksilver every now and then and eagerly squeezing it in their hands, to see how much gold is in it. They are so keen for the gold that they cannot wait till their day’s work is done, which, the way they manage it, averages about 75 cents.

By leasing out small tracts of land to poor people, who have neither skill nor capital to go on with the mining, and are averse to uniting with each other for their common benefit, the mine owners insure wasteful practices. Mrs. Royal’s critical remarks were not unusual. Most observers of North Carolina’s mining industry were struck by the poor training of the miners, the primitive nature of their equipment, and the wasteful methods used in milling the gold.

Dr. Richard Knapp of North Carolina’s Division of Archives and History comments on the similar way the Reed Mine in Cabarrus County was operated saying, For decades the Reeds ran their placer mine on an unscientific, inefficient basis primarily as a part-time family venture and this seeming lack of concern for increasing productivity typified much of the small but expanding Carolina mining industry.

In spite of their obvious shortcomings, men like John Reed, Matthias Barringer, and Robert Hodson laid the foundations of the North Carolina mining industry on their small family farms in the Piedmont in the 1820s and 1830s. It was crop rotation of a most unusual kind, the gold taking its turn at the proper season. Income from the gold also supplemented a farmer’s income in years when crop prices were low.

A hundred and fifty years ago in North Carolina, all eyes were focused on a new and exciting newspaper published in Charlotte. It was the year 1830 and the paper was the Miners and Farmers Journal because practically every farm in the North Carolina Piedmont had a gold mine on it or at least a prospect. The newspaper was filled with ads for gold mines that were mostly deposit or placer mines located beside streams in scores