The gold hunters

by John David Borthwick

I remained a few days at Moquelumne Hill in a holey old canvas hotel, which freely admitted both wind and water; but in this respect it was not much worse than its neighbors. A French physician resided on the opposite side of the street in a tent not much larger than a sentry-box, on the front of which appeared the following promiscuous announcement, in letters as large as the space admitted—

“Pharmacien de Paris.
Drugs and Medicines.
Botica.
Doctor—Dentiste.
Cold Cream.
Destruction to Rats.
Mort aux Souris.”

From Moquelumne I went to Volcano Diggings, a distance of eighteen miles, but which I lengthened to nearly thirty by losing my way in crossing an unfrequented part of the country where the trails were very indistinct.

The principal diggings at Volcano are in the banks of a gulch, called Soldiers’ Gulch, from its having been first worked by United States’ soldiers, and were of a peculiar nature, differing from any other diggings I had seen, inasmuch as, though they had been worked to a depth of forty or fifty feet from the surface, they had been equally rich from top to bottom, and as yet no bed-rock had been reached. It was seldom such a depth of pay-dirt was found. The gold was usually only found within a few feet of the bottom, but in this case the stiff clay soil may have retained the gold, and prevented its settling down so readily as through sand or gravel. The clay was so stiff that it was with difficulty it could be washed, and lately the miners had taken to boiling it in large boilers, which was found to dissolve it very quickly.

To mineralogists I should think that this is the most interesting spot in the mines, from the great variety of curious stones found in large quantities in the diggings. One kind is found, about the size of a man’s head, which when broken appears veined with successive brightly-colored layers round a beautifully-crystallized cavity in the center, the whole being enveloped in a rough outside crust an inch in thickness. The colors are more various and the veins closer together than those of a Scotch pebble, and the stone itself is more flinty and opaque. Quantities of lava were also found here, and masses of limestone rock appeared above the surface of the ground.

This place lay north of Moquelumne Hill, and might be called the most southern point of the northern mines.

Between the scenery of the northern mines and that of the south there is a very marked difference, both in the exterior formation of the country, and in the kind of trees with which it is wooded. In both the surface of the country is smooth—that is to say, there is an absence of ruggedness of detail—the mountains appear to have been smoothed down by the action of water; but, both north and south, the country as a whole is rough in the extreme, the mountain sides, as well as the table-lands, being covered with swellings, and deeply indented by ravines. An acre of level land is hardly to be found. The difference, however, exists in this, that in the north the mountains themselves, and every little swelling upon them, are of a conical form, while in the south they are all more circular. The mountains spread themselves out in hemispherical projections one beyond another; and in many parts of the country are found groups of eminences of the same form, and as symmetrical as if they had been shaped by artificial means.

There is just as much symmetry in the conical forms of the northern mines, but they appear more natural, and the pyramidal tops of the pine trees are quite in keeping with the outlines of the country which they cover; and it is remarkable that where the conical formation ceases, there also the pine ceases to be the principal tree of the country. There are pines, and plenty of them, in the southern mines, but the country is chiefly wooded with various kinds of oaks, and other trees of still more rounded shape, with only here and there a solitary pine towering above them to break the monotony of the curvilinear outline.

As might be expected from this circular formation, the rivers in the south do not follow such a sharp zigzag course as in the north; they take wider sweeps: the mountains are not so steep, and the country generally is not so rough. In fact, there is scarcely any camp in the southern mines which is not accessible by wheeled vehicles.

Besides this great change in the appearance of the country, one could not fail to observe also, in traveling south, the equally marked difference in the inhabitants. In the north, one saw occasionally some straggling Frenchmen and other European foreigners, here and there a party of Chinamen, and a few Mexicans engaged in driving mules, but the total number of foreigners was very small: the population was almost entirely composed of Americans, and of these the Missourians and other western men formed a large proportion.