“Yes, there by that tree is the finest place to work that I know of.”
The prospector took a view of the ground, and, believing the old miner to be in earnest, commenced to work. It was deep; the ground was dry and hard, but, by perseverance and hard work, in about two days he found the bed rock eight or ten feet below the surface, and from the bottom of this hole he cradled out more gold in a week than the company of astonished miners who had fooled him had obtained in their whole season’s work. In this manner it was soon fully demonstrated that gold was universally scattered all over, in spots, in no one place in particular, but wherever you could find it.
A short time subsequent to this a colored man, in walking along the trail at the foot of a steep hill, picked up a small piece of gold. Its edges were sharp, and from all appearances it had never been in running water; but the question was, where did this come from, and there lay the mystery. Not from the ravine, and certainly not from the steep side hill; but at any rate the colored man, from curiosity, dug a hole upon the steep side hill. He found no gravel, but saw that the soil upon the bed rock was a deep crimson color, and that, scattered around among this blood red earth was to be found coarse gold. This had never been in contact with water, but had been deposited by heat or chemical action, and was the first discovery in this section of the rich, red hill gold deposits.
It was in the spring of ’50 that four sailors, who had deserted from their ship in San Francisco, took a cruise up among the mines, as they remarked:
“Jest to see how the land lay.”
They cruised about for several days, hardly knowing what to do or even how to do it, and during one of their daily excursions they found themselves near the head of a small ravine, and a very steep one, which emptied down into the big cañon. It was a pleasant spot, and one of them remarked:
“Well now, me lads, let’s drop anchor here; pipe all hands, pass the grog, and make the blarsted dirt fly.”
So one of them volunteered to commence operations by measuring off a spot about the size of the forehatch, and then commenced work with his pick and shovel to break out the cargo, until he struck bottom, as he remarked. A number of miners at work in the ravine below watched the operations of the Jack Tars, and were very much amused to see them sinking a hole away up at the top of a hill. The soil was not deep, and the tars, by taking a turn about at the helm, were soon down to the bed rock, upon which they found the dirt and gravel of a very pretty red color. Filling a pan they took it to the ravine below, where one of the old miners kindly offered to wash it for them, although he remarked that it was hardly necessary, for gold never could have got away up there at the top of the hill. But upon washing it, they found to their astonishment that there was gold “away up there on the hill,” and a considerable lot of it too, as the amount in the pan indicated, for it contained about $20. The jolly Tars procured cradles and the necessary tools, and started in to work, at which they continued some three months, during which time they extracted about $20,000, as was stated by Adams & Co.’s agent soon after they left. The ravine was afterwards known as the “Sailor Boy’s Ravine,” being about one and a half miles from Hangtown and near the trail to the American River.
It was late in the winter or fall of ’49, that the discovery by W. Salmon and his comrades that gold existed in the hills in the vicinity of Georgetown was made, and that many of them contained beds of gravel which were rich in gold, this fact being well demonstrated by the discovery in Forest Hill, a few months later.