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Updated: June 28, 2025
The natives of this part of the country are called digger Indians, not with reference to gold-digging, but from the fact of their digging subterranean dwellings, in which they pass the winter, and also from the fact that they grub in the earth a good deal for roots, on which they partly subsist.
There is, of course, a good deal of excitement and anxiety about gold-digging. When men get into good gold-yielding ground, by steady work they contrive to make fair earnings, and sometimes a good deal of money; but they have usually to work pretty hard for it. Of course, the most successful men are working miners, men who understand the business; for gold-mining is a business, like any other.
Richard left us on Thursday morning, and with him went one of the other party, the house-painter and decorator, who also found gold-digging not so Pleasant as he had expected. We afterwards learnt that before reaching Kilmore they separated.
To him enter the essences of the real things and past and present events of the enormous diversity of temperature and agriculture and mines the tribes of red aborigines the weather-beaten vessels entering new ports or making landings on rocky coasts the first settlements north or south the rapid stature and muscle the haughty defiance of '76, and the war and peace and formation of the constitution ... the Union always surrounded by blatherers and always calm and impregnable the perpetual coming of immigrants the wharf-hem'd cities and superior marine the unsurveyed interior the loghouses and clearings and wild animals and hunters and trappers ... the free commerce the fisheries and whaling and gold-digging the endless gestation of new states the convening of Congress every December, the members duly coming up from all climates and the uttermost parts ... the noble character of the young mechanics and of all free American workmen and workwomen ... the general ardor and friendliness and enterprise the perfect equality of the female with the male ... the large amativeness the fluid movement of the population the factories and mercantile life and laborsaving machinery the Yankee swap the New York firemen and the target excursion the Southern plantation life the character of the northeast and of the northwest and southwest slavery and the tremulous spreading of hands to protect it, and the stern opposition to it which shall never cease till it ceases or the speaking of tongues and the moving of lips cease.
But all the stories which Australia offers of gold-digging romance are eclipsed by that of the Mount Morgan Mine. Near Rockhampton, and in the midst of that very district to which the diggers had rushed in 1858, but in which they had starved through being unable to find gold, a young squatter bought from the Government of Queensland a selection of 640 acres.
They gathered up their orange peel and buried it tidily, and then stepped out of the cool grove into the hot sunshine with some reluctance. But gold-digging is not mere play, as Hugh reminded them. If you want to find a large nugget you begin by looking for small ones, and the search undoubtedly entails some hard work. The new diggings were no more productive than the old.
Before commencing an account of our operations at the Eagle Hawk, it will be necessary to write a few words in description of our gold-digging party there; their Christian names will be sufficient distinction, and will leave their incognito undisturbed. This party, as I have said before, consisted of five gentlemen, including my brother.
From Alamo he seems to have gone directly to Tuolumne County, and it must have been late in 1856. His delightful sketch "How I Went to the Mines" is surely autobiographical. He says: "I had been two years in California before I ever thought of going to the mines, and my initiation into the vocation of gold-digging was partly compulsory."
It is not necessary, nor would it be pleasant to describe minutely the effect of the "bad news" on the other members of our gold-digging party. Captain Samson and Watty Wilkins took it well, but Polly and Simon O'Rook could not easily reconcile themselves to their fate. The former, it is true, sorrowed not for herself, but for her father.
The Herald, when quitted after an excellent and timely sale by its founder early in the gold times, was soon after shipwrecked in the storm of vicissitude that characterized some of the first years of gold-digging.
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