The number of those who are now actually collecting gold by mining in California, may be computed at about one hundred and forty thousand men.
The obstacles that are alike presented by the extremes of the wet and dry seasons, will not admit, probably, of these miners working for more than two hundred days in the year, and the average daily sum amassed by each man, may be fairly quoted at three and a half dollars, or fifteen shillings.
This will give an annual yield of twenty-one millions sterling from California, and I have no reason to doubt that this sum is obtained, although it does not (for many reasons) appear in the reported exports of specie from the country.
Now, if this sum can be annually realised by the exertions of comparatively so small a body of men, who have even at the latest dates no better plan of securing the gold than by a rude system of washing, what may we expect when machinery is employed, and labour concentrated?
Those portions of the placer fields that would reward manual labour with less than one or two dollars a day, are as yet unmolested, for as yet the ruling rates of wages in the mines is higher, being guided by the average yield. Therefore it is difficult to place a limit on the amount of auriferous earth that now, rejected by the miner, will, by the proper application of machinery and the reduction of labour, eventually produce a vast return. There is scarcely a hill-side but gives evidence of the existence of gold, but although this soil will not at present repay manual labour, no one can suppose that the metal will be allowed to rest there undisturbed.
The distribution of gold in the soil is most eccentric, and this is attributable probably to three causes:[19] firstly, that for the most part it was disintegrated from the matrix during the stupendous volcanic action to which all the gold territory of California has been subjected; secondly, that it has been carried to and fro by vast masses of water, the result of heavy rains, or more probably of heavy falls of snow in the mountains, that have suddenly melted and carried all before them; finally, from the land-slips and accumulations of upper soil that must necessarily result where steep hills of gravel have been for ages subjected to the sudden transitions of wet and dry seasons.
I tread very carefully whenever I find myself on the geologist’s ground, bearing in mind my scientific friend at Murderer’s Bar, who reached the bottom so much quicker than he desired; therefore I can only suggest; and the two readers to whom this discourse is dedicated, whilst they deplore the ignorance which prevents me leading them through a labyrinth of formations and stratas, must place something to my credit on the score of modesty.
Wherever gold is discovered in California, particles of quartz are found adhering to it more or less; this quartz, even when found at great depths, is generally rounded by the action of water, for quartz, when detached by violent action, is naturally angular, and inclined to splinter, and from its hardness it must require ages to give it the form of a pebble, by the slow process of grinding it receives in a comparatively dry mountain gorge. This, taken in conjunction with the facts that the gold is found now on the surface, and now low down resting on the bed rock, here forced into clefts of granite, and again in clusters of small pear-shaped nuggets, as if the metal had been ejected by intense heat, and had dripped from the volcanic boulders that lie scattered around; tends to bear out the supposition that disintegrated gold has been cast into places that time and accident alone can reveal, and that the original opinion that the gold was on the surface only no longer holds good.
Tunnelling has already been applied to rich hills in the mines with great success, and this fact alone is of great importance, in so far that it leaves us powerless to place a limit on the amount of auriferous soil that is imbedded in the small round hillocks that extend over a space of nearly four hundred miles, north and south.
Where ingenuity aided by science is at fault, a very slight clue will often accidentally lead to the solution of a problem; thus much capital has already been devoted to the damming of those streams in California, of which the banks were found to be wealthy; but in few instances hitherto have the beds been found to be productive: yet they must be so at some point, unless we are to imagine, what is improbable, that gold has been carried by rain water to the verge of a swift stream, and then has been arrested there without any apparent obstacle.