by H. W. Brands
In many places, flumes complemented or replaced the diversionary ditches. Constructed of boards nailed together in U-shaped cross section, a flume received the water turned aside by a dam, carried it downstream parallel to the riverbed, and returned it to the channel below the claim of the company that built it—often dumping it right where the next set of claimants was building its own dam. Great effort and much duplication of expense went into the construction of the multiple systems. Magazine publisher James Hutchings calculated the cost of the ten dams along one stretch of the Feather River at $80,000, and noted that this amount bought insubstantial waterworks that lasted only a single season before being swept away in the following spring’s high water. “Should that sum be used,” Hutchings suggested, “to construct one permanent dam that should last not only for one, but for many seasons—besides the advantages it would offer to other claim owners by not backing the water upon them, as now— it would be a piece of economy that must commend itself to the thoughtful consideration of all persons interested in river mining.”
As the miners grew adept at building flumes, they realized that in addition to carrying water away from places where it wasn’t wanted, the wooden aqueducts might be employed to deliver water to places where it was wanted. This idea was no more than an extension of the principle behind the ditch Jean-Nicolas Perlot dug to wash his claim on the Mariposa, but it was an extension that opened up whole new areas to mining. In due course flumes five, ten, twenty miles long snaked beside canyon walls and crisscrossed gorges on trestles, carrying water intended to mitigate the miners’ ultimately unquenchable thirst for gold. A Yuba County flume fairly flew across one canyon, reaching a height of two hundred feet above the ground and resting on the tops of tall trees along the way.
As the flumes freed the miners from proximity to rivers—and as the placer deposits on those rivers dwindled—the gold-hunters discovered that entire ridges and hillsides consisted of gravels laid down by ancient streams, long since diverted by natural forces. Digging revealed that those gravels contained gold-bearing placers, and that—just as with the contemporary placers—the ancient placers were richest where the gravels touched bedrock. But where bedrock for the contemporary placers might be six inches or six feet below ground level, the ancient bedrock might be sixty feet or six hundred feet below ground.
Reaching the ancient placers required removing the gravel that entombed them. Some miners resorted to the straightforward expedient of shovels. They dug “coyote holes” down to pay dirt, which they hoisted to the surface and washed by regular methods. But any large-scale exploitation of the ancient placers required a new method—a method capable of moving mountains as none but geological forces had moved them till now.
Hydraulic mining—as the new method was called—entailed magnifying and focusing the erosive power of water. The germ of the idea came to a Frenchman named Chabot, who employed a piece of hose some forty feet long to direct a stream of water from behind his dam to the bottom of his diggings. The water from the hose washed away worthless overburden and allowed access to the richer material below.
Chabot’s idea inspired Edward Matteson (sometimes spelled Matter- son) to improve it the following season. Perhaps Matteson remembered fire hoses he had seen back home in Connecticut, for his innovation was to add a nozzle, much like the nozzle of a fire hose. This concentrated the energy of the water and allowed Matteson to aim the concentrated stream where he wished. To his delight he discovered that the blast of water tore into the earth, removing in minutes what would have taken days or weeks to dispose of with pick and shovel. Matteson’s neighbors appreciated the superiority of his technique and adopted it themselves.
Further improvements followed. Where a fall of several feet produced an impressive force, a fall of hundreds of feet produced an astonishing force. And the force was the more astonishing when the hoses exploded in the hands of their operators. Reinforcement—coils of rope, hoops of iron—remedied the situation. Iron pipe, although expensive and initially prone to splitting, permitted even greater pressures, and still more amazing results. Nozzles were replaced by “monitors”: swivel-mounted cannons that allowed the “hydraulickers” to bombard hillsides with barrages of water, creating flash floods that carried away eons of earth, sand, and gravel.
Supplying the artillery with ammunition was no small chore. The pressure at the nozzle was directly proportional to the “head” of water: the vertical distance from the nozzle to the reservoir that supplied it. A dam had to be built upstream and pipes laid to the claim. In steep country a single partnership might control enough land to keep the waterworks in-house, but more commonly the hydraulickers purchased water rights from others. The rights were often sold by the day; as a result, once the spigots were opened, the hoses generally roared from morning’s first light to evening’s last, and frequently by moonlight.
Reducing a hillside to rubble was straightforward, if violent; but capturing the gold the rubble contained required greater subtlety. Because the techniques employed in the placers would have been overwhelmed by the sheer volume of material brought down by the water cannons, new techniques of capture were needed. “Sluices” were scaled-up versions of the long-tom, and in fact had been introduced in the placers before being adopted and expanded further by the hydraulickers. A sluice box looked much like a flume, except that its bottom was perforated, split, riffled, cleated, or otherwise roughened to catch the heavy gold while letting the light sand and gravel wash by. In a hydraulic operation, sluice boxes might be arrayed in a continuous line several hundred feet long. In some operations, “ground sluicing” was employed. Here the sluice was simply a ground channel into which boulders had been strategically placed. As the slurry flowed through the channel, the gold lodged behind the boulders. From time to time—as with the long-toms and the sluice boxes—the flow of water was shut off and the gold collected.
Hydraulic operations were breathtaking in their capacity—and rapacity. A correspondent for a Sacramento paper visited a site before the novelty wore off.
A claim at Iowa hill had been worked into the hill by the application of hydraulic power, until it was one hundred and twenty feet from the top of the hill to the bedrock in the claim. With a perpendicular column of water 120 feet high, in a strong hose, of which they work two, ten men who own the claim are enabled to run off hundreds of tons of dirt daily. So great is the force employed that two men with the pipes, by directing streams of water against the base of the high bank, will cut it away to such an extent as to cause immense slides of earth, which often bring with them large trees and heavy boulders….After these immense masses of earth are undermined and brought down by the streams forced from the pipes, those same streams are turned upon the tons of fallen earth, and it melts away before them, and is carried through the sluices with almost as much rapidity as if it were a bank of snow. No such labor-saving power has ever been introduced to assist the miner in his operations.
Hydraulic mining certainly saved labor. A government report compared the various methods of gathering gold: “The man with the rocker might wash one cubic yard of earth in a day; with the tom he might average two yards; with the sluice four yards; and with the hydraulic and sluice together fifty or even a hundred yards.” An engineering estimate reckoned the savings slightly differently. Assuming wages in the goldfields averaged $4 per day (this was by now a fair estimate), the cost of processing a cubic yard of soil with a washpan was $20; with a rocker, $5; with a long tom, $1; with hydraulic methods, 20 cents.
But the savings in labor came at the cost of capital. The waterworks that supported hydraulic mining were very expensive, and the expense exerted its own form of tyranny. Interest rates in California were outrageous by American standards of the period, reaching 10 percent per month. Moreover, with water rights running up to $75 per day, time truly was money, and every day that could be saved might mean the difference between profit and loss. As a result, in some cases even the enormous wrecking power of the h
ydraulic cannons was deemed insufficient. Where the soil refused to melt like snow—where the ancient gravels had congealed into a natural form of concrete—the miners added blasting powder to their kit. The miners—sappers now—burrowed into the hillside that was to be reduced, and laid depth charges to soften the hard-pack. A government report described the system in operation in Yuba County:
The quantity of powder for the blast depends upon the depth of the bank and the surface area to be loosened. If the bank is 50 feet deep a tunnel four and a half feet high and two and a half wide may be run in 75 feet; a cross-drift 60 feet long is cut across the end at right angles, and another similar cross-drift of equal length 55 feet from the mouth of the tunnel. 300 kegs may be used in such a blast, all distributed along in the cross-drifts and in the tunnel beyond the first cross-drift. 20 kegs near the intersection are opened by taking out the heads; the others are left closed, with the certainty that they will all be opened by the explosion of the 20. From the intersection to within 10 feet of the mouth wooden troughs two inches wide and deep inside are laid, and a liberal supply of powder is poured in, leading to an open keg. The 10 feet next to the mouth are laid carefully with a fuse, and for that distance the tunnel is filled in with dirt. When the blast is fired a dull, heavy sound is heard, the earth rises slowly about 10 feet; it then settles down, leaving a dust behind it, and on examination an area about 120 feet square will be found all shattered.
The water-gunners then moved in, completing reduction of the ridge.
THE SPONSOR OF this mining report was the United States Treasury Department. The Treasury’s interest in California mining was to determine how much gold was coming out of California, and how much might continue to come out; for if time was money in the goldfields, gold was money in the rest of country. The Treasury—the keeper of the nation’s currency, the minter of its gold—needed to know what to expect. County by county, mine by mine, the report listed the money sunk into the mines and the gold extracted. It described the techniques of placer mining, river mining, and hydraulic mining; the size of sluices and the length of flumes; the number of men and quantity of powder at work tearing down the terrain, washing the dirt, and retrieving the gold. To eyewitness observations were added the opinions of practical and scientific authorities. The result was an impressive tome, an encyclopedia of California’s current mineral wealth and a guide to its golden future.
In the section on the southern mines, the report included an account of the tract belonging to John Frémont.
The Mariposa Estate, or Frémont Grant, as it is sometimes called, contains 44,380 acres, or about 70 square miles. It reaches 12 miles from east to west, and 121/2 miles from north to south. Its greatest length, from northwest to southeast, is about 17 miles, and its average width nearly 5 miles.
From the first days of the Gold Rush, the report explained, the Mariposa had yielded large quantities of gold to placer and river miners. More recently the hydraulic miners had been at work.
But the striking characteristic of the Mariposa was the existence of veins of quartz mixed with gold, veins that came to the surface in several places about the tract. Such veins had drawn attention from the time the first prospectors stumbled upon them, for they appeared to be the source of all the placer deposits, the parent formation from which the ancient and modern gravel deposits derived their riches. The report described the richest part of the primary vein on Frémont’s property:
Near the mill the vein forks, one prong running westward in the line of the main lode, and the other running north of west. At a distance of 300 yards from the forks, the two prongs are not more than 60 yards apart. Each fork is about 3 feet thick. The rock is a white ribbon quartz; the walls are a black talcose slate….East of the fork the gold is in fine particles, while west of the fork the gold is collected in rich pockets, which are separated from one another by large masses of very poor quartz…. One pocket paid $30,000, another $15,000, and numerous others sums varying from $100 to $1,000. The great richness of the vein is proved by the facts that the decomposed quartz at the surface was worked or washed for a distance of half a mile, the ravines immediately below the lode were famous for their richness, and drifts have been run a quarter of a mile underground. It is said before Frémont obtained possession, squatters took $200,000 from the mine.
On this last sentence hung a tale of which the report’s authors knew but the outline. Frémont’s troubles with pirate placermen like Jean-Nicolas Perlot were merely the beginning of a long fight for control of the Mariposa. Much of the fight involved the terms of the grant defining the tract. Frémont had acquired title from Governor Juan Alvarado, who had received from the Mexican government the right to select ten leagues from within a larger portion of the Sierra foothills. Alvarado had other matters more pressing, however (the war with the United States being one), and when Frémont bought the title, the selection remained unmade. In Alvarado’s time, and at the time Frémont took title, all parties assumed that the value of the grant, like the value of most land in California, lay in the pasturage it contained. Accordingly, Frémont initially instructed his surveyors to select land along the Mariposa River, where cattle might obtain water in an arid landscape.
The discovery of gold complicated matters, and the transfer of sovereignty from Mexico to the United States complicated them more. In principle, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo committed the United States government to honor contracts concluded and titles obtained under Mexican rule; in practice, American administrators insisted on close scrutiny of all such transactions and documents. Frémont, not having registered with the Mexican government the precise boundaries of his grant, found his claim scrutinized with special care.
Then there was the question of whether ownership of land entailed ownership of the minerals on and under the land. In the Mexican conception, based as it was on grazing and ranching, land titles didn’t normally convey mineral rights. Even if Frémont could defend his title under Mexican law, he might not win the gold. On the other hand, shortly after Marshall’s gold strike and the transfer of authority from Mexico to the United States, the new American regime abolished Mexican practices as they applied to mineral rights. Whether this made Frémont’s position better or worse wasn’t immediately apparent. The one thing certain was that the Frémont claim was a legal mess.
Meanwhile the squatters helped themselves to Frémont’s gold—or the gold he considered his. His Sonoran partners protected his interest while they remained, but their departure left him looking for new allies. In his hurry—Frémont was always in a hurry, but the thought of gold going off his property in other people’s pockets made him move even faster than usual— he confounded things still more. He authorized an agent to sell leases in England to companies desiring to dig California gold. At the same time he gave power of attorney to his father-in-law, Senator Benton, who also sold leases. Unfortunately, the various leases overlapped, and the leaseholders sued one another and Frémont.
To add a final twist to the knot, Frémont, belatedly realizing that the value of the Mariposa property lay in gold rather than grass, changed his mind about where his boundaries should run. Redrawing the map, he included several of the most valuable deposits within the portion he claimed for himself.
Frémont’s fight for the Mariposa would keep his lawyers busy for a decade, long after the best placers ran out. What gave the matter its staying power was the discovery of the veins of quartz and gold the government mining report described in such detail. Although the miners on the Mariposa didn’t understand the geological history of these formations—how they were formed in the heat and pressure that accompanied the creation of the Sierra batholith—the miners recognized that the quartz veins were the source of the placer deposits downhill and downstream. And as they discovered the extent of the system of veins, which ran north along the Sierra front from the Mariposa to Coloma, they christened it the “Mother Lode.”
The Mother Lode inspired awe in the gold-hunters. The mere th
ought of this huge body of ore lying beneath the foothills set the crustiest miner quivering. In some cases awe induces respect; in this case it elicited avarice, and the miners began to plot how to rip the gold from the womb of its mother.
QUARTZ MINING, as the techniques they devised were called, was more complicated than the other forms of mining. In placer mining, river mining, and hydraulic mining, nature had already separated the gold from the quartz; the miners needed only to effect the final sifting. In quartz mining, they had to do the separating themselves. The process involved several steps and required a working knowledge of physics and chemistry, not to mention geology and mechanical engineering.
Quartz mines varied from locale to locale, depending on the lay of the land and the veins beneath, and on the predilections of the miners. As part of his effort to educate the public about life in California, publisher James Hutchings sent a correspondent down a typical mine. The correspondent, noting that the principal vein at this mine entered the earth at an angle of more than forty degrees, explained that the workers had dug a vertical shaft from a point on the hillside well above the outcropping of the vein. The idea was to intersect the vein (alternatively called the lead or ledge) and attack it in two directions at once: back up toward the surface and down toward the nether regions. A horizontal tunnel was fitted with a miniature, miner-propelled railway for transporting the ore from the vein to the vertical shaft for hoisting to the surface.
With some trepidation—the hole was very dark, and appeared bottomless—the correspondent received permission to enter the miners’ lair.
