ent camps but a few miles apart bore many different valuations. The buyers could tell at a glance where it was dug. They told by certain indications in color and in the shape of the grains. River dust was flat and scaly: it was so worn, being ground between the rolling boulders on the bed of the stream for centuries. Gold from the higher flats and gulches of the dry diggings was coarser : the angularities of the grains were not entirely worn smooth. Dust from some camps would hold white sand, others black. Strange dust was like strange coin. A Tuolumne county retail provision-dealer might be as much puzzled to fix the proper valuation on Stanislaus county dust as on an ancient Hebrew shekel. Each camp dealt mainly with its own dust: miners seldom traded outside of certain boundaries.

The "Limestone Boulder" range produced large nuggets. One day in 1857 an idle miner, while sauntering about the outskirts of Columbia, sat down under the shade of an evergreen oak. He was out of luck, "broke," discouraged and disgusted. He sat there under that tree, and with his stick poked and pried at such stones as were lying within reach embedded in the red earth. A certain earth-stained piece of rock seemed much heavier than the rest: he could scarce pry it over. He rose and attempted to lift it. It was very heavy. His heart began beating very fast. Clearing one side of the earth, he caught sight of the dull yellow color of native gold. It was a ten-thousand-dollar lump. He was on the stage the next morning, bound for the East.

Nuggets and mixed gold and quartz in pieces weighing several hundred dollars were often lost by being "forked " out of sluice or tom and deposited with the pile of "headings" or refuse rock which remained after the earth was washed away. Many such a piece remains to-day in the long - deserted gulches.

"Old Alick," living at Jamestown, made the better part of his living for years by picking over these piles of stone. His intellect in quantity and

quality was exactly fitted for such occupation. There was only mind enough to dribble along in one narrow little channel, so that it could all be easily concentrated at once on a single stone. A richer and more active intellect might have been diverted from the necessary scrutiny of each and every pebble by other thoughts. "Old Alick" had none other hence he was lucky: seldom a week passed but he found a "chispa," or a ten or twenty dollar gold-and-rockmixed pebble. This saved him the necessity of further labor for several days. He was not an extravagant man: a dollar's worth of pork, a dollar's worth of flour and ten dollars' worth of whisky would last him a fortnight: then his dulled and rum-demented intellect once more, day after day, pored over the

stones.

The gold-bearing rivers had in some past age left channels and gravel deposits up on the mountain sides which formed their banks: they left them often forty or fifty feet above their present level. Such deposits often proved very rich. But they were very exasperating. These pay streaks would cease as suddenly as they commenced. The base of one mountain was a "gravel lead:" the base of the next, half a mile below, was but bare, barren granite. Always on the lookout for some manner of "indications," the miner became a rough sort of geologist. A smoothly-washed pebble or boulder in some unusual locality might excite him almost as much as the dull yellow nugget itself. Gravel was next door to gold.

There was the "Point Claim" at Indian Bar, Tuolumne River. A mountain had here stepped in the track of the stream, which flowed in a great semicircle around it. A spur at this mountain's base was composed of "river-washed gravel." From 1853 to 1858 the Point Mining Company there labored.

They washed the spur entirely away. Where were banks covered with evergreen oaks and blooming in the spring-time with the many blossoms of the California forest, there were left only a bare yellow ledge and immense heaps

of cobble-stones. The soil had been washed through the sluices into the river. It was deposited in thin yellowish streaks hundreds of miles below, on the low flat plains of the great San Joaquin Valley; so at last the Point was declared worked out: the company

broke up. Some went to Cariboo;

some to Arizona; some to their Eastern homes. Indian Bar declined, and finally lost its dignity as an electioneering precinct. A few men remained. They were neither industrious nor sober. They were content to grub on the gleanings left by the Point Company, making perhaps a dollar or two per day. That furnished them with flour, beef, and, what was of more consequence than all, whisky. More gold in California has been dug for an inferior article of corn whisky at two dollars per gallon than for any other article of food or drink. They lived in rude cabins with stone fireplaces and mud-plastered chimneys. They went clad the year round in dungaree pants, gray shirts and cowskin boots. The foot-hill climate makes no great demand on the clothing-store, although men so dressed live in sight of the eternal snow on the higher Sierras five or six thousand feet above them and a hundred miles away. One day a "Pointer," an old sailor from Boston, Jones by name, who had dug and drunk up three or four small fortunes, concluded to prospect a streak of gravel a few inches in thickness left at the base of the old Point Company's worked-out bank, which was twenty-five or thirty feet in height, and perhaps as far above the river. Jones dug a panful, washed it and found gold-about a "bit" prospect. He dug a little deeper and found more gold. He bored still a little deeper into the mountain's base, and discovered that the hard, blue granite ledge pitched downward, instead of rising up and barring his progress. He found the gravel-streak growing wider and richer as he advanced. In a week, Jones and his comrades knew they were once more rich men. They knew they had struck an old river-channel. From their "coyote hole" was taken out as

much as forty ounces per day. And what did they? Improve the opportunity which Fortune had once more flung them? No. They proceeded at once to celebrate the event. They bought whisky by the barrel, and drank it by the pint. In a year's time one had been drowned; another had perished of delirium tremens; another had killed his wife and fled the country. Eventually, a shrewd, patient individual, who had been there from the first of the "strike," bought of them their claims for sums ranging from two hundred to two thousand dollars. He went to work systematically, bored, tunneled, blasted, and in two years' time he had in his pocket two hundred thousand dollars, and another piece of the Indian Bar Mountain's base, an eighth of a mile in length, two hundred yards in width and from sixty to one hundred feet in height, had disappeared, run off in red mud— gone to fertilize the plains below.

For two or three years, I, while mining a mile or so above this claim, had worked hard and hopelessly for a couple of dollars per day, wondering if it would ever be my lot again to mingle with the world, and get out of this remote corner in which I was shut in by poverty. I had, on my way to and from the Indian Bar store, time and time again, walked over this piece of ground: I had more than once prospected it, thinking from certain washgravel indications that gold might be there. But it was not there deposited for me. So, when at last this deposit was found, and by somebody else, and the "boys" used to come to my cabin and talk by the hour of its richness, how in the dark tunnel the golden flakes could be seen glistening by the candle's light (a sight very rarely seen in the richest dirt, for gold is very chary in revealing itself to the eye), I used to become internally provoked and aggravated and disgusted. What was all this richness to me? None of it was mine. I had sought it too in that very spot, and mourned because I found it I would never visit the rich claim, to be further aggravated as John San

not.

born, the lucky owner, exhibited to the hungry crowd his iron pan with forty yellow ounces at the bottom, the result of a single day's work.

But old Jones, the Boston sailor, stayed there contentedly, "rocking" his dollar and dollar and a half per day from the bank after he had lost all title in the claim he had discovered. He excused his business injudiciousness in selling out, even while the gravel promised so richly, by saying it was too much money for him to have anything to do with. It certainly did ruin and destroy his three partners. Jones stayed and saw Indian Bar again worked out. He lives near there now. It costs Jones yearly about twenty dollars for clothing; one hundred will feed him: the balance which he wrests from the red soil helps the distilleries and the Internal Revenue tax on whisky and tobacco. Jones is one of the Curiosities of the Pay Streak.

One pay streak-one of former days and long since worked out-lay in the crevices of the bare, rocky river banks. The miners went forth provided with a sledge, a pick, a pan, a short crowbar, a piece of iron hoop bent at one end, a little broom made of twigs, and "creviced." They explored the ledge along the river banks, and wherever they saw a promising crack or seam in the rock, they pried it with bar, smote it with sledge, laid it open, drew forth the long-lodged dust of ages, spoonful by spoonful, hauled it out in pinches with the iron scraper bent at one end, and swept the surface clean with the little broom. To get at these crevices sometimes twisted a man's anatomy in all manner of shapes. I have lain half a day in the attitude assumed by Nebuchadnezzar when he became herbivorous, head downward on an inclined plane, my right arm reaching as far as possible down the crevice and bringing up little hauls of the dirt. There was always a little left at the bottom, just out of one's reach, a little richer in gold than the rest. An entire day of such bone-and-muscleaching labor might furnish but two or three pans. It might wash out four or

six dollars. We were gleaning the leavings of '49. Then they pried ounce nuggets out of these same crevices with their jack-knives.

"Crevicing" was hot, hard work. Gold in these seams was often found twenty-five or thirty feet above the level of the river. We worked in steep, rugged, narrow cañons, where it was difficult to obtain a foothold-where there might not even be a bit of rock sufficiently level on which to deposit the pan with its precious contents. Tom Scott was a tough little wiry man, of an impulsive disposition. Thomas, one long, hot California summer day, had so worked, scraped, pried, swept, dusted and accumulated a panful of dirt, which he felt would "pan out" richly. A miner often feels in his bones whether his luck will be good or not: Thomas felt this and a great deal more in his bones, for in order to get at this crevice he had been obliged all day to resolve himself into a deformity, and bone and sinew protested against it. Just as he was withdrawing his last spoonful of yellow mould he heard a metallic clattering over the rocks. He turned, he looked there was pan, dirt, day's work and all sliding down those steeply inclined banks into the river. The pan dived from the rocky edge into the deep, still waters of the cañon : it disappeared, and then all was still as before. All save Thomas Scott, who, starting, seized his crowbar and hurled it as near as possible into the ripples of the sinking pan, saying, "There! you may as well go and keep the pan company!" The setting sun lingered for a moment at the western mouth of the cañon with a broad grin on his countenance, and a disgusted man, less his accustomed implements for crevicing, clambered over the rocks and along the steep edges home to his lonely supper.

Full thirty miles through Tuolumne county runs an immense wall, its sides in many places perpendicular, in others slightly inclining. It has an average height of three hundred feet. You may walk on the long level top as on an immense rampart, over a floor seemingly

composed of iron and lava, rough and corrugated like metal too suddenly cooled. It sounds hollow and metallic under your tread, as if caverns were beneath · great air-bubbles perhaps, formed in cooling. From the eastern edge may be seen the smoke of a dozen decaying mining-camps nestled in the gulches, and still farther and over beyond the eye falls on the distant Sierras where they encircle the Yo-Semite Valley. Northward, there are seen the pine-clad slopes, looking almost black at this distance, which surround the basin wherein stand the great trees of Calaveras. Westward, glimpses are caught of the yellow, misty, river-flashing expanses of the great San Joaquin Valley. We stand on Table Mountain.

Under us, in the foundation of this mountain, is the channel of a dead river. The miner, piercing the underlying slate ledge for hundreds of feet, has bored into it, and is still busily engaged year after year in scooping out the auriferous gravel heart of the long, narrow mountain. It is rock at the bottom, rock on the sides, rock at the top and gravel within. Every carful of earth drawn out of this great iron-andstone coffer contains tree-trunks and branches-some petrified, some in their natural state. Human bones and stone implements are also unearthed. It holds a rich pay streak, in places, of a grayish or blue gravel, often so full of clay as to be difficult to wash. Sticky, round pellets, rolling down the sluices, lay hold of the golden grains already lodged in the riffles, and snatch them out. We now throw this tenacious earth into wet

hoppers, where it is torn to pieces by sets of revolving iron teeth.

This wall is pierced with miles of tunneling. From 1849 to 1853, Table Mountain's interior remained all untouched. Many thin pay streaks of gravel, mixed with black soil, were found at its base and on its more gently inclined sides. Stratas of gravel strangely cropping out between the upper and lower ledges were tunneled. Gold was found in them. But the heart of the mountain was wet: the dripping waters drowned the miner out. It was necessary in nearly every Table Mountain claim that the "rim-rock" be bored low enough to drain this "seepage." This cost many a miner years of hard labor, years of debt, years of coarse food and years of ragged garb. When first the existence of gold within the mountain was proved there was a rush for claims. It was taken up from end to end over thirty miles. Every fortunate holder at once set to work and attacked the hard foundation-rock. The months and the years rolled on : some became discouraged and quit; some penetrated the stony rind, reached the coveted gravel, and found it paying but two or three dollars per day where they expected two or three hundred: perhaps one company out of ten found a paying claim, and half of these wasted their profits in litigation. Some of the future generation, content to work for two dollars per day in natural, uncoined gold currency, will find employment in the gravel bowels of Table Mountain, one of the greatest Curiosities of the "Pay Streak in California. PRENTICE MULFORD.