MODERN GOLD RUSH

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 25, 30 January 1934, Page 9

MODERN GOLD RUSH

FORTY-NINBES OF '33.

HOPE AND A GRUBSTAKE.

GHOSTS AND HARD FACTS.

<By IDWAL JONES.) SONORA (Calif.), December 5. A lively small town, Sonora is the metropolis of the Sierra foothills, the plexus of the mining industry on the Mother Lode. With the uplift in the price of gold it may do something spectacular. Bourses may chalk quotations as high as they like, but Sonera refuses to get excited. The region about it has poured yellow dust to the value of £30,000,000, but little of it has stuck to the hands of its citizens. They know too much about the gamble of mining to be excited' over the future.

It Is a livelier town than Tonopah, livelier even than Cripple Creek. It has its great mines. But even a mining expert would be stumped if asked to name offhand any mine linked intimately to Sonora. Meantime, the town has doubled, or even tripled its population in the last few years.

Seven years ago the town was somnolent. There were elms on the street, cowboys and Mexican teamsters holding up the pillars of its leading saloon, famed for its exhibits A and B; a shelf of dusty mineral specimens and the rope —or one of the ropes —that hanged Joaquin Murietta.. And in a chair on the sidewalk, befcre his mortuary parlours, was enthroned the town's best known citizen, Harry Burden, with his boiled shirt and notable white beard.

The recrudescence of Sonora antedates by five years the boost in gold prices. It was no mine that performed the deed, but two dead writers and a. chamber of commerce that knows how to wring every penny weight of value from the local vestiges of Bret Harte and Mark Twain, who tarried a while on Jackass Hill, Parnassus of Tuolumne bounty.

Hollywood Influence. The present renown or Sonora is not metalliferous but touristic. It is rampantly modern, with tearooms, a dozen beauty parlours, restaurants with chefs in white caps and waitresses with plucked eyebrows and manners of extreme hanteur. Its bright youth is lashed to the wheels of Hollywood. It knows Mae West and hasn't heard of Miggles. It has admired Tom Mix's pony before the Victoria Hotel, »but doesn't know much about "The Jumping Frog." At the Lone Pine Book Shop not a copy of anything by Harte or j Twain is to be found.

"Where's the digging going on here?" I asked a garage man. '•Back there on Jackass Hill and around Shaw's Flat. Mostly by oldtimers gone out again to dig gopher holes."

"Any gold panning?" "None. The trouble with this boost in «old is that it came between rains. Wait till it rains, and you'll see plenty washing along the creek. But we wouldn't care to have a rush of people coming along with blankets and pans and hoping to get rich over night." Worshipers of Harte and Twain who go to the trouble of mounting the Sierras to look at the spots where these transients trod 70 years ago bring money with them. The gold panncrs bring only hope. Last winter a party of 15 wanderers —flivver Argonauts —camped on the banks of the Mokelumne —just back of Sonora—for a month. That constituted the much publicised "gold rush." Some ' of the more vigorous earned as high as

40 cents a day. Reports were that two of them panned ou a dollar and 50 cents, but this, I was assured, was a flight of fancy. The banks of every creek within slogging distance had been toothcombed fifty times over since Andrew Jackson was President.

Fifty Cents a Day. True, these Argonauts were amateurs. I discovered one old fellow down in Woods Creek who had lived in his hutch of burlap and planks for two years, and earned by his muscle and cunning 50 cents a day. He lived on a frijole-flap-jack diet, reinforced by tobacco and the powerful local whisky.

He hadn't heard that gold had gone up. He just stuck to it, panning a cubic yard of earth a day, squatting by the water, very content, with a cob pipe thrust into his beard. He hadn't much time to go gallivanting around, he said, except on Sunday nights, when he brushed up and went to the movies. He remarked: "There was a lot of gold here once. Right there my father took out 30oz in one day. Gold was sort of cheaper then. He got 10/ an ounce for it. But at that, it was a good day's haul." Then this, to tnrow in a ftavour of old times: "That tree over there, he helped them string up a man to it.''

"He shot somebody?" "Much worse than that. He was attempting to rob a sluice box." The surface of the entire county lias been thoroughly gone over. The placers are worked out. I am told the only spot uncombed is the Macomber orchard near Sonora. The Maeombers were famous for their apple champagne. The ground below St. Anne's Church, in Columbia, a little further off, is also believed to be of great value. The edifice is on a butte 40ft above the surrounding terrain, which has been so washed out that it is a wilderness of stone turrets, pillars and bedrock. The legend goes that the priests used to hire watchmen to sit there with muskets and discourage the advent of anyone with a shovel. Some years ago a sum was offered for the site. The sale would probably have been made if the would-be buyers hadn't investigated and found out that the ground was full of secret tunnels and that the church was actually resting on shorings.

Work and White Magic. Lack or water hinders the gopher miners not at all. On Jacka6s Hill, where seven years ago there were not two, there are to-day at least 30. Three things they require—muscle, hope and a grubstake. The whole country hereabouts is pockety, except far, far below, where the gold is evenly strewn in the quartz. The gopher miner hits upon a spot to dig in. He may find an outcrop that looks promising, or some oldtimer leads him to it, or he may work a white magic that will discover a pros-

pect. In old days hurros were always kicking over a "rock and discovering mines. The beasts are about as extinct as the diplodocus now, for the flivver stays where it is put. He may, if he has £2500, buy a geophysical instrument, which is said to locate gold ore as infallibly as a sow can find truffles. But this requires a college education to operate. And no prospector with that much money wants to work. He is at heart a dreamer, a

romantic. Anyway, lie digs in the hard rock, puts up a winze, chijie, digs and blasts, and hopes for. something to happen. The curious thing is that sometimes it does. Only the other week a gopher miner, who went down no further than his eyebrows, struck a pocket that enriched him with 3500 dollars. The only rule lie had is that gold is where you find

it. On Jackass Hill, besides gold, there are also humour and wisdom. Next to the Mark Twain Cabin—rebuilt seven years ago —is another shack with the legend above it, "Mark Time Cabin." — N.A.N.A.