I was growing impatient to be in the mines and trying my luck with the general multitude. The water had fallen enough for men to work in the river banks. I found kindly friends all along. And just as I had concluded to take the next steamer for Marysville, a friend informed me of a row boat going up and asked me to help row, and go free. (Note: The boat was a row boat for four oars and had a sail. Wind was light and the sail used when enough wind. As night approached the wind became too heavy for safety. Went ashore and waited a few hours. Wind went down and we went on.) Reached Marysville next day. Shouldered my pack, carpet sack and blankets, and, with a half dozen men, started on foot up the banks of Feather River.
We reached the mines on Feather River and looked around a few minutes. Engaged to work for a couple of men from New Jersey. Good men, ambitious, intelligent. The work was on the river bottom or flat and but two feet above the water. One of the men worked the rocker and the rest of us, three or four, dug and wheeled the dirt to the rocker while one worked the pump to wash the dirt. A spout carried the water about two rods to the rocker. When the day closed we went to supper. The two owners had built a shanty and kept a cook. We lived comfortably, each man receiving eight dollars a day and free board. The joke was, we received the pay of a congressman and paid out nothing for board and lodgings.
Here I stayed two or three weeks. Then the claim gave out. Did not pay expenses of working and the two owners gave up the work. I had over a hundred dollars in gold dust in my pocket and concluded to go to Sacramento City for letters from home. February and not a word from home since I left there in May.
So I started for Marysville....I reached Marysville. Learned that a man wanted hands to row a boat to Sacramento City. He proposed and I accepted. In all we were eight or ten men. Started in the morning. At noon landed at a wayside inn. All got dinner, paying a half dollar each, and went on. Reached Sacramento City in the evening. Dark and no wharf. Bank high. One crawled up, took the end of an oar, the men, one by one, took the other end and pulled themselves up. No lights save from the windows of the few shanties scattered along the streets. The city had been overflowed worse than Fremont and the only sidewalks were a few flat-bottom boats, bottoms up. Over these we picked our way and finally found a sort of hotel and put up for the night, every man sleeping in his own blanket, if he had one. The weather was that of May at home. In the morning I hunted up the post office the first thing. Found a letter from wife and read it eagerly. Learned that all were well at home and was tolerably satisfied....Later the man who owned the boat met me and offered free passage if I would help him up the river again. I declined, thought I would strike out for myself at some of the southern mines on the American or other river, as I learned much of these. Then rain commenced and I waited two days. It was a California rain, not so heavy as steady and continuous. The Sierra Nevadas were a long north and south line of white against the eastern sky. It was snow as always from November till May, and the valleys below green and everything growing as in summer in the eastern states, but, as yet, I had found nothing eatable growing except grapes and these only along the banks of the Sacramento in spots.
For a day or two it rained in Sacramento and I waited. Board was two dollars a day at a very ordinary hotel, board good and every man sleeping in his own blankets on the floor or on benches. At the leading hotels, board and lodgings were two ounces (of gold dust) a week and this was the case there and in San Francisco during the four years of my stay. Finally the rain ceased and, with a man from New York--Long Island--I started for Coloma where gold was first discovered. It was 60 miles distant. As night came we stopped at a big log still burning, left by previous campers, ate our supper of crackers, lay down in blankets and slept undisturbed.
Morning came and we breakfasted and went on. Stopped at the only house, a shanty, on the whole road from Sacramento to the mines, 60 miles. Going in, for we saw it was a house of entertainment, I was surprised to find the owners were the father and mother of the couple I had met under the big sycamore tree on first reaching Sacramento about the first of November. The two appeared to be between 50 and 60 years of age. The man looked somewhat cross and churlish as he did all along the route, and his wife hardly better. I asked her how she liked California. She gave me a vehement and decided "No," while the old man shook his head and looked savage. It was the third woman I had seen in California and I did not see more than two or three American women afterwards. It was a state of men--no women or children and no home life save [in] the miners' cabins scattered here and there for miles among the foothills of the Sierras.
On the second day we reached Coloma, put up at the only hotel in the place, two-story, kept by a big-hearted Missouri man who had left his wife behind and come for gold . At a little distance stood the skeleton of the Sutter Mill and below it the race in which Marshall discovered the gold that brought about the settlement of California. A flat spread out on one side, many acres. On this many men were working with pick, shovel and rocker. The Long Island man had brought, or bought, a sheet iron rocker, and the next day the landlord joined us and we three went to work on the flat. We made a few dollars a day, two or five. It was unsatisfactory, and after a week or so we agreed to go over to Placerville, originally called "Hangtown."
So one morning the Long Islander shouldered his rocker and I my baggage, and after a walk of a few miles we were in Placerville, a straggling village of log cabins....[He] and I stayed and for two or three weeks we worked with varying success, [making] from two or three to ten dollars. We were new to the business, and long toms and sluices had not come into use. Washing gold by the rocker was slow work. We boarded at the only hotel in the place at $18 a week and slept in our cabin. My companion was an intelligent and genial man. I grew tired of this slow success and concluded to go farther south to Sonora, in Tuolumne County, 60 miles east of Stockton....
I found Sonora a town of a few hundred miners, living in shanties along a single street and these mostly used as store buildings. A few log or slab shanties here and there, an adobe or two and a large brick dwelling, the residence of a doctor and his family. Two large gulches were being worked, with plenty of room for more men....While looking around among abandoned diggings on vacant ground, I picked up a lump of gold that the rain had uncovered, perhaps worth a dollar....This was encouraging and I set to work. Worked there and at points around for a year or more. Success was various. Sometimes five dollars a day. Sometimes ten. Occasionally twenty or more. Then sometimes nothing, much time being given to `stripping,' that is, uncovering the pay dirt and often wanting water to carry the work on. No rain from May to November.
At one time I and two partners, a Chilean and a Norwegian, dug down to the depth of twenty feet, pay dirt all the way. Hired a Frenchman who had a cart and mule to carry the dirt to a stream of water a half mile away and it paid very well. At another time I worked alone. Piled up dirt and hired the same man to haul it to water and found it profitable. This did not last. Thought I would try a place called `Yankee Hill,' where water was brought by a ditch several miles. Went in with a bank clerk from Providence, R. I., a briefless lawyer from Canada and a Frenchman. We worked for months together, paying the water company three dollars a day for use of water.
A year or so passed pleasantly and profitably, my only anxiety being about home. On first reaching Sonora, I asked the express agent to look for letters for me at the Sacramento post office. He replied, `The Sacramento postmaster is a poor fool and will deliver no letters save to the person addressed.' This would require some 150 miles travel and I concluded to wait till home letters came to Sonora. That postmaster was soon reformed out.
In Sonora, and the various localities around, I stayed about four years. At first I used the rocker, and as the rainy season came on the rocker was discarded for the "long tom" or the sluice as more expeditious in work. After my first year in California I had no more to do with rockers. After the first summer and winter here, men organized companies of a few each and dug ditches, miles in length, from the river up the mountains, and brought water to the many diggings below. For the use of this water each "long tom"--that is, the men working it--paid the water company three dollars a day.
In the summer or dry season the mines could be worked only where water was in streams or where water was brought through the ditches. Hence the dry season stopped work on many good claims, as they were called. For a large part of this four years, I worked near Sonora, in Sullivan's Gulch, and for a year or more at `Yankee Hill' some miles north of Sonora. Also at `Camp Seco' some two or three miles south of Sonora. The warm days of June melted the snow on the mountains and brought floods and inconveniences to the miners in the river beds.
Board at ordinary hotels in the mines was $13 and $9 per week and bunks furnished, or not, just as it happened, and every man bringing his own blankets. During my first summer, I lay down on the bare ground at night wrapped in my blanket.