March 26th.—I am again on the road, this time bound to Grass Valley. A clumsy railway with cars, or carriages, like the yellow caravans giants, dwarfs, and wise pigs travel in, bumps me out to Fulsome, about thirty miles off. Here I am hustled into a stage, without a chance of seeing anything but mud, in which the horses are standing kneedeep.
This stage is different from any I have seen; loops, straps, and other contrivances, clearly meant to hold on by, evidence an inequality of motion and tendency to upset that give rise to disagreeable forebodings. Constructed to hold nine inside, the centre seat swings like a bale dividing horses in a stable, and being somewhat rounded and padded, looks very like it. Five passengers seat themselves. I have hardly time to look at them, when a loud cracking of whips, several voices yelling ‘Hi! git up!’ ‘Hi! git along!’ and a sudden jerk sends me upon the bale—a general splash and scramble—and we are off!
We do the first ten miles with a bearable amount of jolting, and stop to change horses. The five insiders get out, and we take a nip at the roadside house, or what would be such if there were any roads. I observe four most perverse, obstinate, wild-looking horses being cautiously fastened to the stage; they are clearly uneducated—‘wild mustangs’ one of the insiders called them. They are held tightly. ‘All aboard, boys?’ says the driver (they call him Mose)—in we scramble—bang slams the door—and with an awful lurch away we go! Now I can understand the suspicious-looking machinery, designed, on the principle of life-buoys, for stage-tossed travellers to cling to. Holding on to these we swing along as hard as the beasts can gallop.
I am told by a fellow-passenger that unless the ‘mustangs start at a gallop, they either upset the stage, or kick themselves clear of the harness.’ On this journey they were agreeable enough to gallop off, so we escaped the two contingencies. Several times Mose shouted, ‘Get out, boys, and hang on awhile.’ I discover that this means that we are to cling to the side of the stage, that our united weight may prevent its capsizing, when going along the side of a slope like the slant of a housetop.
Near dark we are requested by ‘Mose’ to walk up the last hill. A tall sallow man, with a face hollow and sunken, closely shaven, except a tuft at the chin, steps along with me, and we reach the top of the hill a good time before the stage. We are standing amidst some scrubby timber. The long shadows of the trees are swallowed up in the gathering gloom, the music of the forest has died away, and, save the wind sighing through the leafy foliage, everything is still. My companion draws nearer. ‘Stranger,’ he began, in a voice that appeared to come from his boots, and get out at his nose, ‘jist war we are standin’, three weeks agone, a tarnation big grizzly come slick upon two men, jist waitin’ for the stage, as we are; chawed up one, and would a gone in for t’other, but he made tall travellin’ for the stage. When they came up Ephraim had skedaddled, and they never see him or old Buck-eye arter.’
This is refreshing! I hope if ‘old Ephraim’ does come, he may eat my tough companion. The stage came, but the bear did not. We reach our destination at 8 p.m.: how sore I am!
March 27th.—A good sleep has worked wonders. I find Grass Valley a romantic little mountain town, about 2,200 feet above the sea-level, on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada, owing its existence entirely to gold-mining. Visited Mr. A.’s mill—a magnificent quartz-crusher. Nine stamp-heads, each 900 lbs. in weight, are worked by one of Watts’ engines. The fine-dust gold is collected on blankets, or bullocks’ hides with the hair on, over which the water washes it, as it comes from the stamp-heads. Some of the most productive gold deposits in California were discovered in and about this quaint little place. I descend a shaft 240 feet deep. The gold is distributed through the mud and silt of what was clearly an ancient riverbed.
March 28th.—Ride on horseback to Nevada and Hunt’s Hill. Nevada is a clean pretty city, with gay shops, brightly-painted houses, and planked streets. Near it are the famed hydraulic washings. The gold is disseminated through terraces of shingle conglomerates, often three hundred feet in thickness. These terraces are actually washed entirely off the face of the country, by propelling jets of water against them, forced under great pressure through a nozzle. To accomplish this, the water is brought in canals, tunnels, and wooden aqueducts, often forty miles away from the drift. This supply of water the miners rent.
As we near the washing-spot, in every direction immense hose, made of galvanized iron, and canvas tubes six feet round, coil in all directions over the ground, like gigantic serpents, converging towards a gap, where they disappear. On reaching this gap, I look down into a basin, or dry lake, 300 feet below me. The hose hangs down this cliff of shingle, and following its course by a zigzag path, I reach a plateau of rock, from which the shingle has already been washed. A man stands at the end of each hose, that has for its head a brass nozzle. With the force of cannon-shot water issues, in a large jet, from this tube; and propelled against the shingle, guided by the men, washes it away, as easily as we could broom a molehill from off the grass.
The stream of water, bearing with it the materials washed from out the cliff, runs through wooden troughs called ‘flumes,’ floored with granite; these flumes extend six miles. Men are stationed at regular distances to fork out the heavy stones. Throughout its entire length transverse strips of wood dam back a tiny pond of mercury; these are called riffles—gold-traps, in other words—that seize on the fine-dust gold distributed throughout the shingle. The ‘flumes’ are cleaned about once a month, and the gold extracted from the mercury. Masses of wood occur, in every stage of change, from that of pure silica to soft asbestiform material, and pure carbon.