At this point in time, Twain was still not doing
particularly well financially. The invitation of an old friend to go prospecting called to
him, and the old stirrings of hunting for gold and striking it rich moved Twain to again
try his hand at mining. He left San Francisco and headed out across the valley to the
Mother Lode country of California. He and his friend settled down in the old camp of a
ghost town. The goal of this effort was to locate small but very rich pockets of high
grade gold ore. Here is how Twain tells it in his own words:
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By and by, an old friend of mine, a miner, came down from one
of the decayed mining-camps of Tuolumne, California, and I went back with him. We lived in
a small cabin on a verdant hillside, and there were not five other cabins in view over the
wide expanse of hill and forest. Yet a flourishing city of two or three thousand
population had occupied this grassy dead solitude during the flush times of twelve or
fifteen years before, and where our cabin stood had once been the heart of the teeming
hive, the center of the city. When the mines gave out the town fell into decay, and in a
few years wholly disappeared - streets, dwellings, shops, everything - and left no sign.
The grassy slopes were as green and smooth and desolate of life as if they had never been
disturbed. The mere handful of miners still remaining had seen the town spring up, spread,
grow, and flourish in its pride; and they had seen it sicken and die, and pass away like a
dream. With it their hopes had died, and their zest of life. They had long ago resigned
themselves to their exile, and ceased to correspond with their distant friends or turn
longing eyes toward their early homes. They had accepted banishment, forgotten the world
and been forgotten of the world. They were far from telegraphs and railroads, and they
stood, as it were, in a living grave, dead to the events that stirred the globe's great
populations, dead to the common interests of men, isolated and outcast from brotherhood
with their kind. It was the most singular, and almost the most touching and melancholy,
exile that fancy can imagine. One of my associates in this locality, for two or three
months, was a man who had had a university education; but now for eighteen years he had
decayed there by inches, a bearded, rough-clad, clay-stained miner, and at times, among
his sighings and soliloquizings, he unconsciously interjected vaguely remembered Latin and
Greek sentences - dead and musty tongues, meet vehicles for the thoughts of one whose
dreams were all of the past, whose life was a failure; a tired man, burdened with the
present, and indifferent to the future; a man without ties, hopes, interests, waiting for
rest and the end.
In that one little corner of California is found a species of
mining which is seldom or never mentioned in print. It is called
"pocket-mining," and I am not aware that any of it is done outside of that
little corner. The gold is not evenly distributed through the surface dirt, as in ordinary
placer-mines, but is collected in little spots, and they are very wide apart and
exceedingly hard to find, but when you do find one you reap a rich and sudden harvest.
There are not now more than twenty pocket-miners in that entire little region. I think I
know every one of them personally. I have known one of them to hunt patiently about the
hillsides every day for eight months without finding gold enough to make a snuff-box - his
grocery bill running up relentlessly all the time - and then find a pocket and take out of
it two thousand dollars in two dips of his shovel. I have known him to take out three
thousand dollars in two hours, and go and pay up every cent of his indebtedness, then
enter on a dazzling spree that finished the last of his treasure before the night was
gone. And the next day he bought his groceries on credit as usual, and shouldered his pan
and shovel and went off to the hills hunting pockets again happy and content. This is the
most fascinating of all the different kinds of mining, and furnishes a very handsome
percentage of victims to the lunatic asylum.
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Pocket-hunting is an ingenious
process. You take a spadeful of earth from the hillside and put it in a large tin pan and
dissolve and wash it gradually away till nothing is left but a teaspoonful of fine
sediment. Whatever gold was in that earth has remained, because, being the heaviest, it
has sought the bottom. Among the sediment you will find half a dozen yellow particles no
larger than pinheads. You are delighted. You move off to one side and wash another pan. If
you find gold again, you move to one side further, and wash a third pan. If you find no
gold this time, you are delighted again, because you know you are on the right scent. You
lay an imaginary plan, shaped like a fan, with its handle up the hill - for just where the
end of the handle is, you argue that the rich deposit lies hidden, whose vagrant grains of
gold have escaped and been washed down the hill, spreading farther and farther apart as
they wandered. And so you proceed up the hill, washing the earth and narrowing your lines
every time the absence of gold in the pan shows that you are outside the spread of the
fan; and at last, twenty yards up the hill your lines have converged to a point - a single
foot from that point you cannot find any gold. Your breath comes short and quick, you are
feverish with excitement; the dinner-bell may ring its clapper off, you pay no attention;
friends may die, weddings transpire, houses burn down, they are nothing to you; you sweat
and dig and delve with a frantic interest - and all at once you strike it! Up comes a
spadeful of earth and quartz that is all lovely with soiled lumps and leaves and sprays of
gold. Sometimes that one spadeful is all - $500. Sometimes the nest contains $10,000, and
it takes you three or four days to get it all out. The pocket-miners tell of one nest that
yielded $60,000 and two men exhausted it in two weeks, and then sold the ground for
$10,000 to a party who never got $300 out of it afterward.
The hogs are good pocket-hunters. All the summer they root
around the bushes, and turn up a thousand little piles of dirt, and then the miners long
for the rains; for the rains beat upon these little piles and wash them down and expose
the gold, possibly right over a pocket. Two pockets were found in this way by the same man
in one day. One had $5,000 in it and the other $8,000. That man could appreciate it, for
he hadn't had a cent for about a year.
In Tuolumne lived two miners who used to go to the neighboring village in the afternoon
and return every night with household supplies. Part of the distance they traversed a
trail, and nearly always sat down to rest on a great boulder that lay beside the path. In
the course of thirteen years they had worn that boulder tolerably smooth, sitting on it.
By and by two vagrant Mexicans came along and occupied the seat. They began to amuse
themselves by chipping off flakes from the boulder with a sledgehammer. They examined one
of these flakes and found it rich with gold. That boulder paid them eight hundred dollars
afterward. But the aggravating circumstance was that these "Greasers" knew that
there must be more gold where that boulder came from, and so they went panning up the hill
and found what was probably the richest pocket that region has yet produced. It took three
months to exhaust it, and it yielded one hundred and twenty thousand dollars. The two
American miners who used to sit on the boulder are poor yet, and they take turn about in
getting up early in the morning to curse those Mexicans - and when it comes down to pure
ornamental cursing, the native American is gifted above the sons of men.
I have dwelt at some length upon this matter of pocket-mining because it is a subject that
is seldom referred to in print, and therefore I judged that it would have for the reader
that interest which naturally attaches to novelty.
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At the end of
two months we had never "struck" a pocket. We had panned up and down the
hillsides till they looked plowed like a field; we could have put in a crop of grain,
then, but there would have been no way to get it to market. We got many good
"prospects," but when the gold gave out in the pan and we dug down, hoping and
longing, we found only emptiness - the pocket that should have been there was as barren as
our own. At last we shouldered our pans and shovels and struck out over the hills to try
new localities. We prospected around Angel's Camp, in Calaveras County, during three
weeks, but had no success. Then we wandered on foot among the mountains, sleeping under
the trees at night, for the weather was mild, but still we remained as centless as the
last rose of summer. That is a poor joke, but it is in pathetic harmony with the
circumstances, since we were so poor ourselves. In accordance with the custom of the
country, our door had always stood open and our board welcome to tramping miners - they
drifted along nearly every day, dumped their paust shovels by the threshold and took
"pot-luck" with us - and now on our own tramp we never found cold hospitality.
Our wanderings were wide and in many directions; and now I
could give the reader a vivid description of the big trees and the marvels of the Yo
Semite - but what has this reader done to me that I should persecute him? I will deliver
him into the hands of less conscientious tourists and take his blessing. Let me be
charitable, though I fail in all virtues else.
Some of the phrases in the above are mining technicalities, purely, and may be a little
obscure to the general reader. In "placer-diggings" the gold is scattered all
through the surface dirt; in "pocket"-diggings it is concentrated in one little
spot; in "quartz" the gold is in a solid, continuous vein of rock, enclosed
between distinct walls of some other kind of stone - and this is the most laborious and
expensive of all the different kinds of mining. "Prospecting" is hunting for a
"placer"; "indications" are signs of its presence; "panning
out" refers to the washing process by which the grains of gold are separated from the
dirt; a "prospect" is what one finds in the first panful of dirt - and its value
determines whether it is a good or a bad prospect, and whether it is worth while to tarry
there or seek further.
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In this day and age, amateur prospectors
armed with metal detectors attempt the same sort of hunting for rich pockets of gold - and
in the very same parts of California. The process of scanning the ground with a metal
detector is much easier and more efficient than the old time method of taking samples and
panning them out in the nearest creek. In a matter of just a few minutes a modern
prospector with a metal detector can scan more dirt that an old time could process in an
entire day.
Mark Twain’s stories about his experiences prospecting in
the west, including many more humorous tales of his adventures can be found in his book: ROUGHING IT |
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