The gold hunters

by John David Borthwick

These are the most primitive kind of contrivances for grinding quartz. They are circular places, ten or twelve feet in diameter, flagged with flat stones, and in these the quartz is crushed by two large heavy stones dragged round and round by a mule harnessed to a horizontal beam, to which they are also attached.

The quartz is already broken up into small pieces before being put into the “raster,” and a constant supply of water is necessary to facilitate the operation, the stuff, while being ground, having the appearance of a rich white mud. The Mexicans, who use this machine a great deal, have a way of ascertaining when the quartz is sufficiently ground, by feeling it between the finger and thumb of one hand, while with the other they feel the lower part of their ear; and when the quartz has the same soft velvety feel, it is considered fine enough, and the gold is then extracted by amalgamation with quicksilver.

A considerable amount of work had been done at this place. The quartz vein was several hundred yards above the “rasters,” and from it there was laid a double line of railway on the face of the mountain, for the purpose of bringing down the quartz. The loaded car was intended to bring up the empty one; but the railway was so steep that it looked as if a car, once started, would never stop till it reached the river, two or three miles below.

The vein was not being worked just now; and I only found one man at the place, who was employed in keeping the two mules at work in the “rasters.” He told me that the ascent from that point was so difficult that it would be dark before I could return, and persuaded me to pass the night with him, and start early the next morning.

The nights had been getting pretty chilly lately, and up here it was particularly so; but with the aid of a blazing fire we managed to make ourselves comfortable. I lay down before the fire, with the prospect of having a good sleep, but woke in the middle of the night, feeling it most bitterly cold. The fact is, the log cabin was merely a log cage, the chinks between the logs having never been filled up, and it had come on to blow a perfect hurricane. The spot where the cabin stood was very much exposed, and the gusts of wind blew against it and through it as if it would carry us all away.

This pleasant state of things lasted two days, during which time I remained a prisoner in the cabin, as the force of the wind was so great that one could scarcely stand outside, and the cold was so intense that the pools in the stream which ran past were covered with ice. The cabin was but poor protection, the wind having full play through it, even blowing the tin plates off the table while we were at dinner; and heavy gusts coming down the chimney filled the cabin with smoke, ashes, and burning wood. Two days of this was rather miserable work, but with the aid of my pencil and two or three old novels I managed to weather it out.

The third day the gale was over, and though still cold, the weather was beautifully bright and clear. On setting out on my expedition to the summit of the mountain, I had first to climb up the railway, which went as far as the top of the ridge, where the quartz cropped out in large masses. From this there was a gradual ascent to the summit, about four miles distant, over ground which was stony, like a newly macadamized road, and covered with wiry brushwood waist-high. This was rendered a still more pleasant place to travel over by being infested by grizzly bears, whose tracks I could see on every spot of ground capable of receiving the impression of their feet. At last I arrived at the foot of the immense masses of rock which formed the summit of the mountain, and the only means of continuing the ascent was by climbing up long slides of loose sharp-cornered stones of all sizes. Every step I took forward, I went about half a step backward, the stones giving way under my feet, and causing a general commotion from top to bottom. On reaching the top of this place, after suffering a good deal in my shins and shoe-leather, I found myself on a ledge of rock, with a similar one forty or fifty feet above me, to be gained by climbing another slide of loose stones; and having spent about an hour in working my passage up a succession of places of this sort, I arrived at the foot of the immense wall of solid rock which crowned the summit of the mountain. To reach the lowest point of the top of the perpendicular wall above me, I had some fifteen or twenty feet to climb the best way I could, and the prospect of any failure in the attempt was by no means encouraging, as, had I happened to fall, I should have been carried down to the regions below with an avalanche of loose rocks and stones. Even as I stood studying how I should make the ascent by means of the projecting ledges, and tracking out my course before I made the attempt, I felt the stones beginning to give way under my feet; and seeing there was no time to lose, I went at it, and after a pretty hard struggle I reached the top. This, however, was not the summit—I was only between the teeth of the saw; but I was enabled to gain the top of one of the peaks by means of a ledge, about a foot and a half wide, which slanted up the face of the rock. Here I sat down to enjoy the view, and certainly I felt amply repaid for all the labor of the ascent, by the vastness and grandeur of the panorama around me. I looked back for more than a hundred miles over the mountainous pine-clad region of the “Mines,” where, from the shapes of some of the mountains, I could distinguish many places which I had visited. Beyond this lay the wide plains of the Sacramento Valley, in which the course of the rivers could be traced by the trees which grew along their banks; and beyond the plains the coast range was distinctly seen.

On the other side, from which I had made the ascent, there was a sheer precipice of about two hundred feet, at the foot of which, in eternal shade, lay heaps of snow. The mountains in this direction were more rugged and barren, and beyond them appeared the white peaks of the Sierra Nevada. The atmosphere was intensely clear; it was as if there were no atmosphere at all, and the view of the most remote objects was so vivid and distinct that any one not used to such a clime would have been slow to believe that their distance was so great as it actually was. Monte Diablo, a peculiarly shaped mountain within a few miles of San Francisco, and upwards of three hundred miles[5] from where I stood, was plainly discernible, and with as much distinctness as on a clear day in England a mountain is seen at a distance of fifty or sixty miles.

The beauty of the view, which consisted chiefly in its vastness, was greatly enhanced by being seen from such a lofty pinnacle. It gave one the idea of being suspended in the air, and cut off from all communication with the world below. The perfect solitude of the place was quite oppressive, and was rendered still more awful by the occasional loud report of some piece of rock, which, becoming detached from the mass, went bounding down to seek a more humble resting-place, The gradual disruption seemed to be incessant, for no sooner had one fragment got out of hearing down below, than another started after it. There was a keen wind blowing, and it was so miserably cold, that when I had been up here for about an hour, I became quite benumbed and chilled. It was rather ticklish work coming down from my exalted position, and more perilous a good deal than it had been to climb up to it; but I managed it without accident, and reached the cabin of my quartz-grinding friend before dark.

Here I found there had arrived in the meantime three men from a ranch which they had taken up in a small valley, about thirty miles farther up in the mountains. There were no other white men in that direction, and this cabin was the nearest habitation to them. They had come in with six or seven mule-loads of hay for the use of the unfortunate animals who were kept in a state of constant revolution in the “rasters”.