[XII-22] 'An ancient skillet, made of lava, hard as iron, circular, with a spout and three legs, was washed out of a deep claim at Forest Hill, a few days since. It will be sent to the State Fair, as a specimen of crockery used in the mines several thousand years ago.' Grass Valley National, Sept. 1861, in San Francisco Evening Bulletin, Jan. 22, 1864. Same implement apparently found at Coloma in 1851, 15 feet below the surface, under an oak-tree not less than 1000 years old. Carpenter, in Hesperian, vol. v., p. 358.
[XII-23] 'J. E. Squire, informs me that a strange inscription is found on the rocks a short distance below Meadow Lake. The rocks appear to have been covered with a black coating, and the hieroglyphics or characters cut through the layer and into the rock. This inscription was, probably, not made by the present tribe inhabiting the lower part of Nevada County. It may have been done by Indians from the other side of the mountains, who came to the lake region near the summit to fish; or it may have still a stranger origin.' Directory Nevada, 1857. A human fore-arm bone with crystallized marrow, imbedded in a petrified cedar 63 feet deep, at Red Dog. Grass Valley National, in San Francisco Evening Bulletin, Jan. 22, 1864.
[XII-24] Two hand mills (mortars) taken from the bank of the Yuba River at a depth of 16 feet. 'They are all made from a peculiar kind of stone, which has the appearance of a combination of granite and burr-stone.' The pestles are usually of gneiss. Taylor, in Cal. Farmer, Dec. 14, 1860, May 9, 1862. At McGilvary's, Trinity Co., was discovered in 1856, 10 feet below the surface, 'an Indian skull encased in a sea shell, five by eight inches, inside of which were worked figures and representations, both singular and beautiful, inlaid with a material imperishable, resembling gold, which would not, in nice, ingenious workmanship, disgrace the sculptor's art of the present day.' San Francisco Evening Bulletin, Jan. 22, 1864, from Trinity Democrat, 1856. Slate tubes dug up near Oroville. Taylor, in Cal. Farmer, Nov. 2, 1860. A collar-bone taken from the gravel of the 'great blue lead' not less than 1000 feet below the forest-covered surface, in 1857. Hutchings' Cal. Mag., vol. ii., p. 417. Mammoth bones at Columbia, Stanislaus Co., 35 feet deep; and a hyena's tooth at Volcano, Amador Co., at a depth of 60 feet. Pioneer, vol. iii., p. 41. Some 30 different instances of the discovery of fossil remains by miners have been noted in the California papers since 1851. Cal. Farmer, May 23, 1862; also four well-known cases of giant human remains. Id., March 20, 1863. An immense block of porphyry whose sides and top are carved with rude mystic figures, in the Truckee Valley. 'I noticed one cluster of figures in a circle, having in its centre a rude representation of the sun, surrounded by about a dozen other figures, one of which exhibited a quite truthful representation of a crab, another like an anchor with a large ring, and still another representing an arrow passing through a ring.' Marysville Democrat, April, 1861, in Cal. Farmer, June 14, 1861.
[XII-25] Foster's Pre-Hist. Races, pp. 54-6.
[XII-26] In Cal. Farmer, March 6, 1863.
[XII-27] Capron's Hist. Cal., p. 75.
[XII-28] Martinez Contra Costa Gazette.
[XII-29] Smithsonian Rept., 1869, p. 36.
[XII-30] Foster's Pre-Hist. Races, pp. 163-4.
[XII-31] San Francisco Evening Bulletin, Oct. 19, 1869.