The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (14 page)

Sketch of a placer miner’s equipment: a rocker, a pan, and a boring tool. Drawn by an early miner. Reprinted from W. R. Ryan,
Personal Adventures in Upper and Lower California in 1848–9,
2 vols. (London, 1852).

Panning was hard work. The miner first shoveled pay dirt into a pan, preferably one that had a flat bottom and tapered sides, about three inches deep and eighteen inches in diameter. Then he submerged the pan into water, rocked it back and forth to get a whirlpool effect, and allowed the lighter dirt, sand, and gravel to wash over the lip until only the heavier gold was left. The process took some time to master, and fifty pans were considered a good day’s work. Collis P. Huntington, who later became a railroad tycoon, lasted just half a day. He decided that spending all day squatting with his hands in icy mountain water was not for him. Selling shovels was a much easier way to make a living.

Placer mining became the most celebrated, the one that still gets the most attention in picture books. But its heyday didn’t last long. In Nevada City and Grass Valley, entrepreneurs pooled their resources and formed seventeen mining corporations in 1851 and another sixteen in 1852. One outfit, the Manhattan Quartz Mining Company, listed none other than Horace Greeley, the editor of the
New-York Tribune,
as its secretary and treasurer. It was the proud owner of sixty-four mining claims and promised all investors “a golden harvest.” Four of its trustees were also trustees of a larger company, the Grass Valley Gold Mining Company, which was capitalized at $250,000. It held more than four hundred mining claims. Gone were the days of one claim per miner.
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Why the sudden change? Individual miners in both camps soon discovered that the number of gold seekers far exceeded the number of pound diggings and that pound diggings played out quickly. In Nevada City, that happened within a year. As the easy gold gave way, men spent more time looking for the source of placer gold. In doing so, they found veins of gold embedded in hard rock and in gravel ridges. In 1850, miners began sinking holes, which reminded some of coyote holes and came to be known as coyote diggings. One whole section of town soon got a new name, Coyoteville.

If the veins were near the surface, an individual miner could still handle it by himself. All he needed was a pick and shovel. But deep veins required more sophisticated and expensive equipment, more than one man could afford or handle. Open-pit mining, for example, necessitated steam shovels. More expensive yet was hard-rock mining. Perfected in Cornwall, England, and elsewhere, it necessitated digging shafts, drilling holes for blasting, blasting with black powder, mucking the loosened rock into ore cars that were transported by mules to the main shaft, then loading it into ore skips that were hoisted out of the mine, then crushing it at the stamp mill into sand-sized particles, and then chemically processing the particles.

To get at embedded gold, some miners got together with their neighbors, formed partnerships and joint-stock associations, and sometimes sought outside money. One such miner was Anthony Chabot. A thirty-six-year-old native of Quebec, he had a claim on Buckeye Hill, a ridge just above Nevada City, that he had staked out in 1849. On it he found gold impregnated in gravel. For nearly two years, he spent most of every day shoveling gravel into a sluice, cursing the hard work, and daydreaming of an easier way to get at the gold. In April 1852, he thought he had the answer. He fashioned a canvas hose to wash the gravel into his sluice. The next year Chabot joined forces with Edward Matteson and Eli Miller to construct a larger canvas hose. Then Miller, once a tinsmith by trade, made a tapered nozzle of sheet iron and attached it to the hose. Now the force of the water was sufficient to break up gravel banks. Chabot and his partners could now do in a matter of hours what previously took weeks to do with picks and shovels.
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Thus hydraulic mining sprang to life on the ridges above Nevada City. The new system immediately attracted attention. Could it be used elsewhere—on all the high gravel ridges above the American, the Bear, the Feather, and the Yuba rivers? Many thought so. To raise the needed capital, miners consolidated their claims and formed stock companies. The new companies quickly developed bigger and more powerful hoses, ones that dispatched huge jets of water that could kill a man two hundred feet away. Thousands of yards of gravel could now be easily removed. Hydraulicking ravaged the countryside. Soon every claim in Coyoteville belonged to one hydraulic company, and the entire village was literally washed away.

Hydraulic mining. Courtesy of The Bancroft Library.

Supplying water year-round for these powerful hoses, however, proved to be a problem. Water was plentiful in the spring, just after the snows melted, but by fall often little more than a trickle. Only in 1856 was there enough river water to keep the hoses working to maximum capacity all year long. To the rescue came bigger companies with more capital. They constructed mountain reservoirs and dug hundred-mile ditch systems. They, in turn, dictated terms to the hydraulickers. Most of the ditch companies overbuilt and fell prey to still bigger companies with more capital. Soon two giant water companies dominated the entire region. One, the South Yuba Water Company, was owned locally. The owners of the other, the Eureka Lake and Yuba Canal Company, lived in New York.
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By 1860, then, hydraulic mining was strictly big business, with a handful of owners and hundreds of wage laborers. The busiest region was between the middle and the south forks of the Yuba River. Over 684 million yards of gravel were mined in the Yuba watershed, 100 million along the upper Feather, 254 million on the Bear, and 257 million along the American. By 1860, everyone realized that hydraulic mining was destroying the landscape, but little was done to stop it. Twenty years later, it was banned. By then, it had yielded over $100 million in gold, or one-third of the total gold produced.
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Meanwhile, in Grass Valley a more capital-intensive form of mining developed. In June 1850, when the town consisted of no more than twenty cabins, several placer miners stumbled upon gold embedded in quartz veins in the hills above Wolf Creek. This find drew the attention of hundreds of prospectors, who with just pick and shovel dislodged some gold. Then, that October, George D. Roberts discovered on Ophir Hill, one mile southeast of Grass Valley, what proved to be an extremely rich vein. He established a claim, thirty by forty feet. In 1851 he sold it for $350 to Woodbury, Park and Company.

The new owners immediately recognized that to mine the quartz and then free the gold from the quartz was a complex, capital-intensive activity. It necessitated copying the methods that had been developed in the hard-rock mines of Cornwall. That meant digging shafts, hoisting rock out of the mine, then crushing it at a stamp mill into sand-sized particles, and then chemically processing the particles. Lacking the necessary capital, Woodbury, Park and Company joined forces with the owners of several nearby claims and formed the Ophir Hill Mine, constructed a six-stamp mill on Wolf Creek, and introduced the Cornish pump to remove water from the shafts.

Unfortunately, the new combination also lacked sufficient capital to cover all the start-up costs. Soon all the partners were in financial trouble, and in 1852 all their holdings were auctioned off. Half went to John P. Rush, half to ten local miners who called themselves the Empire Quartz Mining Company. In 1854, the latter group bought out Rush for $12,000 and formed the Empire Mining Company. By now the main shaft was down 102 feet, and the mine had yielded over $900,000. By the following year, the Empire Mine had forty employees, thirty-four working belowground.

So began the Empire Mine, one of the more profitable undertakings in the Sierras. With several more changes in ownership, the small thirty-by-forty-foot claim that George Roberts established in 1850 was mined until 1956, producing an estimated 5.8 million ounces of gold from 367 miles of underground tunnels.
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The Empire Mine was just one of the major quartz mines that developed in Grass Valley in the early 1850s. The town soon had seven or eight corporations digging deep shafts. Most encountered the same start-up problems as Woodbury, Park and Company. Only a few were major moneymakers from the outset.

Stamp press, Helvetia quartz mine, Grass Valley. Reprinted from
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine
20 (April 1860), 608. Used to crush quartz into small particles so that the gold could be removed, stamp presses made an incredible racket. The constant pounding of such presses could be heard miles away.

Especially lucky were several Irishmen. After spending two years working a placer on Wolf Creek three miles below town, they discovered a quartz lead. Realizing that they knew nothing about hard-rock mining, they tried to sell it for $1,000. They couldn’t find a buyer. So they hired a fellow countryman, Con Riley, to run the operation. He proved to be exceptionally able, and they got exceptionally rich. They called the mine Allison Ranch. It remained an Irish operation from top to bottom. The owners were Irish, the top managers were Irish, and nearly all the workers were Irish. Thanks largely to Allison Ranch, about 25 percent of all the miners in Grass Valley by 1860 were Irish.
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That did not, however, become the norm in Grass Valley. Most of the other hard-rock mines started looking to the tin, lead, and copper mines of Cornwall for their skilled labor force. Facing hard times at home, many Cornish miners were more than willing to leave England for California. The Cornish were also widely regarded as the most skillful hard-rock miners in the world. They knew how to construct deep shafts. They also knew how to set charges that were effective but didn’t endanger the entire mine. They had skills, in short, that few American miners had. As the mines became deeper and more complex, the need for their skills skyrocketed. Mine owners thus increasingly looked to Cornwall, and Cornishmen came, first by the hundreds, then by the thousands, and soon became the dominant ethnic group in Grass Valley, making up about 20 percent of the mine workers by 1860, over 60 percent by 1870. They came with few illusions, usually after higher wages, not dreams of quick fortunes.
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As the mines became the workplace of wage workers, mainly Cornish, Irish, and some Chinese, the profits increasingly went to absentee owners. Locals enriched by quartz left town, usually for San Francisco, sometimes New York, occasionally Paris, and soon only a few townsmen owned shares in the mines. On June 11, 1858, the
Sacramento Daily Union
proclaimed that in just ten years a “complete revolution” had taken place “in the methods and means applied to mining.” The old order of the independent miner was long dead, said the
Union.
No longer did mine owners mine for themselves. They were now all “men of means who…employed others to mine for them.”

The big mines also had a worldwide impact. Thanks mainly to their production, the world’s gold supply shot up by six or seven times. More gold was extracted between 1848 and 1858, mainly in California and Australia, than the world had produced in the previous 150 years. And because Californians imported nearly everything they needed and paid up to ten times East Coast prices, the gold made its way onto the world market. That, in turn, had enormous consequences for the world economy. It alone may have reversed the global deflation of the previous three decades. It certainly impacted the minting of coins, which also increased by six or seven times. It also allowed gold to replace silver as the standard metal for world currencies.
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William Shannon didn’t live long enough to see it happen. A month before the convention, he had been elected judge of the Criminal Court of First Instance. So on completing his work in Monterey, he returned to Coloma, sold his store, and moved to Sacramento to take over his judicial duties. There he also practiced law and was active in the formation of the Whig Party. On October 7, 1850, he was elected to the state senate. He never served. That fall, cholera swept through Sacramento, killing 448 people. Shannon tried to help. He tended the sick. On Sunday, November 3, at 9:00 a.m., he experienced cramps and vomiting. Twelve hours later, at 9:00 that night, he died. He died knowing, however, that the constitution he helped write was now the law of the land.
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