To any one not used to such roads or to such driving, an upset would have seemed inevitable. If there was safety in speed, however, we were safe enough, and all sense of danger was lost in admiration of the coolness and dexterity of the driver as he circumvented every obstacle, but without going one inch farther than necessary out of his way to save us from perdition. He went through extraordinary bodily contortions, which would have shocked an English coachman out of his propriety; but, at the same time, he performed such feats as no one would have dared to attempt who had never been used to anything worse than an English road. With his right foot he managed a brake, and, clawing at the reins with both hands, he swayed his body from side to side to preserve his equilibrium, as now on the right pair of wheels, now on the left, he cut the “outside edge” round a stump or a rock; and when coming to a spot where he was going to execute a difficult maneuver on a piece of road which slanted violently down to one side, he trimmed the wagon as one would a small boat in a squall, and made us all crowd up to the weather side to prevent a capsize.
When about ten miles from the plains, I first saw the actual reality of gold-digging. Four or five men were working in a ravine by the roadside, digging holes like so many grave-diggers. I then considered myself fairly in “the mines,” and experienced a disagreeable consciousness that we might be passing over huge masses of gold, only concealed from us by an inch or two of earth.
As we traveled onwards, we passed at intervals numerous parties of miners, and the country assumed a more inhabited appearance. Log-cabins and clapboard shanties were to be seen among the trees; and occasionally we found about a dozen of such houses grouped together by the roadside, and dignified with the name of a town.
For several miles again the country would seem to have been deserted. That it had once been a busy scene was evident from the uptorn earth in the ravines and hollows, and from the numbers of unoccupied cabins; but the cream of such diggings had already been taken, and they were not now sufficiently rich to suit the ambitious ideas of the miners.
After traveling about thirty miles over this mountainous region, ascending gradually all the while, we arrived at Hangtown in the afternoon, having accomplished the sixty miles from Sacramento city in about eight hours.
CHAPTER VI
LOOKING FOR GOLD
THE town of Placerville—or Hangtown, as it was commonly called—consisted of one long straggling street of clapboard houses and log cabins, built in a hollow at the side of a creek, and surrounded by high and steep hills.
The diggings here had been exceedingly rich—men used to pick the chunks of gold out of the crevices of the rocks in the ravines with no other tool than a bowie-knife; but these days had passed, and now the whole surface of the surrounding country showed the amount of real hard work which had been done. The beds of the numerous ravines which wrinkle the faces of the hills, the bed of the creek, and all the little flats alongside of it, were a confused mass of heaps of dirt and piles of stones lying around the innumerable holes, about six feet square and five or six feet deep, from which they had been thrown out. The original course of the creek was completely obliterated, its waters being distributed into numberless little ditches, and from them conducted into the “long toms” of the miners through canvas hoses, looking like immensely long slimy sea-serpents.
The number of bare stumps of what had once been gigantic pine trees, dotted over the naked hillsides surrounding the town, showed how freely the ax had been used, and to what purpose was apparent in the extent of the town itself, and in the numerous log-cabins scattered over the hills, in situations apparently chosen at the caprice of the owners, but in reality with a view to be near to their diggings, and at the same time to be within a convenient distance of water and firewood.
Along the whole length of the creek, as far as one could see, on the banks of the creek, in the ravines, in the middle of the principal and only street of the town, and even inside some of the houses, were parties of miners, numbering from three or four to a dozen, all hard at work, some laying into it with picks, some shoveling the dirt into the “long toms,” or with long-handled shovels washing the dirt thrown in, and throwing out the stones, while others were working pumps or baling water out of the holes with buckets. There was a continual noise and clatter, as mud, dirt, stones, and water were thrown about in all directions; and the men, dressed in ragged clothes and big boots, wielding picks and shovels, and rolling big rocks about, were all working as if for their lives, going into it with a will, and a degree of energy, not usually seen among laboring men. It was altogether a scene which conveyed the idea of hard work in the fullest sense of the words, and in comparison with which a gang of railway navvies would have seemed to be merely a party of gentlemen amateurs playing at working pour passer le temps.