FORTY-NINERS OF '33

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 56, 7 March 1934, Page 17

FORTY-NINERS OF '33

TWAIN-HARTE ECHOES.

WHERE "TRUTHFUL JAMES" LIVED. MSYTERIES OF THE PAST. (By LDWAL JONES.) (II.) TUTTLETOWN (Calif.), Doc. 6. A stone barn and a hotel store off the liill road on the way to Stanislaus — and that is Tuttletown. In common with most Tuolumne camps it has fig trees and some quite distinguished citizens who have been dead for quite a while. In this instance they are Steve Gillis, the duello-journalist of Virginia City, and his brother, Jim, better known as "Truthful James."

Bret Harte, who cast James into the amber of immortality by writing "The Heathen Chinee," is supposed to have clerked a while in this store. Everyone says so, but nobody is positive. The place hasn't changed very much. The samo Virginia creeper, rockers on the porch and the garnishing of a choice line of wash tubs. More tinned goods in stock than then, but no crinolines, no Pedro cut jtiyg, and no blocks of China matches.

Besides having been a clerk, Harte also taught school in Copperopolis, and mined heavily in this region. Legend so affirms. Every year the trail grows colder, and the legend takes on verisimilitude with age. About twelve years ago, a school superintendent in the foothills, hunted through all the school records back to 1850 and found data on no teacher named Francis Bret Harte.

This is the Bret Harte country, but how long Harte stayed and what he did while here are almost as great a mystery as "What song the sirens sang, and what name Achilles assumed when he hid among the women." Anyone who tries to make a jrold miner of Harte will be out of luck. He did not stay in the foothills long enough. Bill Gillis, brother of James, and who died recently, was custodian of the Mark Twain cabin on Jackass Hill. Bill said: —

"This Mr. Harte. sir, he just stayed here overnight. There wasn't rone of us cottoned to him, somehow. He hung around this country for two days. Wo was glad he went. Mr. Harte made a poker gambler out of Jim, who wasn't nothing of the kind, being just an occasional player like you or me. Now, Sam Clemens was different. It was a pity you didn't know Sam. You would of liked him." -Where Twain Dug. Gillis led me fifty yards or sonway into the chapparal, and pointed into a briar-grown hole, not four feet deep. "That's where Sam dug, right here on Jackass Hill. After working for a couple of hours, Sam didn't find any gold, and was so disgusted that he flung down his pick and gave up mining for ever." Harte, nevertheless, was- a miner for three times as long as Clemens. When he shook the dust of Jackass Hill off his feet, he went to Jamestown and there encountered William Sloniker, an Austrian, who had a claim on the slope of Table mountain. I recall Sloniker, a powerful, bearded figure in his middle seventies, a carpenter in Jamestown, telling me, in 1913, this: —

"Harte figured digging was an easy way to become rich, so he joined me. He wore gloss-leather shoes and a bowler hat. The rock was pretty hard and the sun was terrible hot. At sundown he quit, and he shook hands and was gone. Two days in this country was enough for him."

A couple of miles away from Jamestown is Quartz. Or it was, for the camp was so wholly destroyed by a brush fire three years ago that not one stone of it stands upon another. A bleaklooking flat below a knob of a mountain, and not a living thing in sight. Its two mines, the Dutch-Sweeney and the App, produced £2,000,000. A stranger would ba hard put to it to guess where the mines are, for their buildings arc burned off. A group of surveyors were there the otlier° day. Mines that produced that much gold when gold was a third less costly than to-day are worth salvaging. Carpet Washers. Quartz used to be a haven of "carpet washers." If you want to be a "carpel washer," this is what you have to do. Find a slope just below some mill tailings, set up an inclined table twenty feet long by fifteen feet high and cover it with old carpet of a high nap. Trundle the tailings to the top edge, then sluice them down with a hose. If there is loose gold, or mercury mixed with gold dust—properly, amalgam—you will recover it, if you have luck, and be able to sweep it up with a broom. The direct method of making a lot of money through mining, and the best, is to own a large and profitable mine. Sometimes a few obstacles stand in the way of this, in which case it must he pleasant to toil at the fringe by sweeping hopefully over a half-acre of carPG Or by setting up a. vanner in _ the gully, and feeding it with dry tailings. The table jerks sideways, separatee the stuff in sand and pyrites, and these pyrites you sack and dispatch to the smelter. At least twenty _ of _ these n-uerilla vanners are working in the county. If, instead of getting a. check from the smelter, you get a letter 01 complaint and a bill, it means the tailI in*s are worthless, and you'd better pull out and plant your vanner elsewhere. _ The biggest nugget ever found in Tuolumne County was dug up in Quartz almost 60 years ago. It weighed 801b, and was then reckoned to be worth £3200. Frank Countts unearthed it at twilight in his claim down by Woods creek" Looking about him to be surej that no one was in view, he lifted it into his iron pan, shouldered it, then marched slowly up to his cabin. jEvery few yards or so he turned about to see if he was followed. He saw liobodv. He set down the pan on his step, unlocked the door, looked for a liidin" place under the bunk, then returned" to fetch in the nugget The pan was empty. But he could find no human being in the vicinity. A mystery. He set it down to "sneerits," and for 40 years, until he was daft and senile, he collared strangers to tell them the story. A curious instance of what spook experts refer to as "teleportage." , Good Prospectors Old. On the side of Quartz Mountain are two one-man mines worked by,, young fellows under thirty. They had to fill their wooden buckets, climb up two fathoms, turn the winze, smash up and sort the rock in the grilling sun, then scramble down again. A job in winchj muscle is a desideratum. !

It was more agreeable to be a prospector than a hard-rock miner. Like wine, the older a prospector is, the better lie should be. The nos-e for gold and the dead eye for an auspicious outcrop comes only with age. All the good prospectors in Tuolumne are nearer 70 than 60. They have developed their sixth sense by standing motionless a long time and looking at the ground. They observe where igneous rock comes in contact with sedimentary rock. They are aware that a pocket is liable to be found where lime intrudes in slate. Where okoteya plant grows, slate or clay are below. Under quaking aspen is tuft' or breccia. It takes quite a while to learn all this, and some men endowed only with muscle never can learn the difference between breccia and conglomerate.

Who ever heard of a "young prospector"? Young "field workers," yes, but they never discover mines. That is a job for the ancients. "Old Pancake" Comstock, venerable Breyfogle, longbearded Charley White, "Old Ben" Subiett, Peg Leg Smith—they hadn't a tooth in their heads. Jim Butler, who discovered the Mizpah in Tonopah, was an exception, being a youth of 45. Uut it was his aged burrow that kicked loose the chunk of rock that led to the discovery.

However, muscle is not to be despised. At least 300 miners in Tuolumne find their deltoids and biceps and shouldergirdle muscles quite indispensable in sinking their way below grass roots to riches. The chief difference between today and the bonanza times is that today the miner is not on top, but down out of eight.

You may travel for leagues without casting your eye on water. Formerly it was the age of aqueducts and ditches, built and dug in a fury of liaste. The ditch at Columbia, carried high over the Stanislaus, was 40 miles long. That near Sonora was 70 miles long. These were astonishing improvisations, done with skill and costing a million in solid money, raised by the miners themselves. When you hear of this being done again, then you will know that the placer mining age has returned. But for such a colourful time you will have to wait until the next glacial period is over.—(N.A.N. A.)