Whereas now, every “digging� has its fixed rules and by-laws, and all disputes are submitted to a jury of the resident miners; excepting in those instances where twenty men or so are met by twenty men, and in these cases there is first a grand demonstration with fire-arms, and eventually an appeal to the district court. The by-laws of each district are recorded in the Recorder’s Office of the county, and these laws are stringent although self-constituted; ill-defined at first, and varying as they did, they were conflicting and troublesome, but though they have been jumbled as it were in a bag, they have come out like Mr. Crockett, “right side up.�
I have had my claim in the digging more than once, of ten feet square; if a man “jumped� it, and encroached on my boundaries, and I did’nt knock him on the head with a pickaxe, being a Christian, I appealed to the “crowd,� and my claim being carefully measured from my stake and found to be correct, the “jumper� would be ordered to confine himself to his own territory, which of course he would do with many oaths.
It is customary to leave your mining tools in your claim, to indicate to all new comers that it is occupied, and as this rule is recognised it saves a great deal of unnecessary explanation; but it has often struck me that if in the quiet and virtuous hamlet of Little Pedlington, a market-gardener were to leave his spade outside as a sign of occupancy, he would not detect that implement in the morning, spite of the vigilance of the one policeman, who guards that blissful retreat.
We descended the cliff by a short cut; the mineralogist took a shorter, for a ledge of earth gave way beneath his weight, and enabled him to reach the base about three minutes before us.
Gongs sounded at this moment, and the red clayey population flocked in to dine, looking disproportionately dirty in contrast with their white houses: I did not see a woman in the “camp.� But these things are being better ordered now, and I can foresee the day when the traveller from Murderer’s Bar shall speak of anxious mothers rushing from the white tents with soap-sud arms to rescue embryo miners from the gutter; and when flaxen-headed urchins shall gaze suspiciously at the approach of such as I, and running back to their parents, will exclaim, “Oh! daddy, here’s a Britisher!�
The gold is found here in coarse flakes, and the bank washings, from all accounts, average five or six dollars a day per man.
The days had passed when diggings were abandoned, so soon as they ceased to reward a day’s toil with less than an ounce or two of gold, and “chunks� and “big strikes�[13] were now exceptions to the rule; but the days had passed, also, when to obtain these prizes men laboured painfully under the influence of fever, produced by bad food and poisonous spirits, to die at last, perhaps, disgorging every hard-earned flake of gold to some attendant quack.
Much happier the miner, when, as at Murderer’s Bar, his toil is regularly rewarded with a smaller gain, for his health is no longer impaired by feverish excitement and drink, and the necessaries of life are placed within his reach, at prices that enable him to save his gold scales as well as his constitution, for the “rainy day,� that in one form or the other comes to all at last.
Leaving the village and passing some hills, the sides of which were overgrown with the white azalia, we reached another part of the river, where was a ferry-boat, and here we found our waggon. On the opposite side of the river the ascent was very steep, and would have been impracticable for waggons, had not the owner of the ferry excavated a portion of the mountain, and otherwise constructed a road.
For this outlay of capital the ferryman was reaping a rich harvest; having thus opened the only practicable trail at this time to the more northern mines, he had secured to himself the toll of every waggon passing to or from those regions, and these tolls amounted in one year to sixty thousand dollars (12,000l.). The original capital was, I understood, the result of successful digging; and I mention this circumstance as it proves two things, first, that fortunes in the mines are not dependent on the discovery of little nests of gold, as some suppose, but on the judicious application in a new country of the small capital which a little steady work with the pickaxe will ensure to any industrious and healthy man; and, secondly, that a large portion of the gold amassed in mining regions is expended upon the permanent improvement of the country; so that the export of the “dust� is no criterion of the yield.