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A wretched remnant of a town on an abandoned goldfield. One street, each side of the dusty main road; three or four one-storey square brick cottages with hip roofs of galvanised iron that glared in the heat four rooms and a passage the police-station, bank-manager and schoolmaster's cottages, &c. Half-a-dozen tumble-down weather-board shanties the three pubs., the two stores, and the post-office.
He slapped the big pistol that he had borrowed from Wilhelmina and nodded impressively to the crowd; and the next morning early he was over at the hole, getting ready for the rush that was to come. For the news of the strike had gone out from Blackwater on the stage of the evening before, and the moment it reached the railroad it would be wired to Keno and to Tonopah and Goldfield beyond.
But the gold was gone from the gully, and the diggers were gone, too, after the manner of Timon's friends when his wealth deserted him. Golden Gully was a dreary place, dreary even for an abandoned goldfield.
Not long after the first convention in 1905, they made their presence known at Goldfield, Nevada. Then they struck simultaneously at Youngstown, Ohio, and Portland, Oregon. The first battle, however, to attract general notice was at McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania, in 1909.
A week later, there were a thousand persons at work on the creek near the formerly lonely gully. Rush to the Goldfield.# The excitement throughout the colony now became intense: workmen quitted their employment, shepherds deserted their flocks, shopkeepers closed their stores, and a great tide of fortune-seekers pressed onward, day by day, to the west.
But when I saw a regular stream of disappointed men with empty pockets offering their monthly licenses for five shillings each within sight of the goldfield, I had misgivings, and I bought a license that had three weeks to run from William Matthews. Ten other men bought licenses, but William Patterson, a canny Scotchman, said he would chance it.
It was only a few weeks ago that it dawned upon our executive committee that this particular kite without a tail offered us a ready-made jump of three hundred miles toward Tonopah and Goldfield. We began buying quietly for the control with the stock at nineteen. Naturally the Transcontinental people caught on, and in twenty-four hours we were at it, hammer and tongs." Lidgerwood nodded.
In many cases these "pockets," as they were called, were found to contain gold to the value of thousands of pounds, so that very soon all the claims were carried down a few feet further, and with such success that, before a month had passed, Ballarat took rank as the richest goldfield in the world.
The diggings have furnished the expressive phrase 'to make your pile. A 'nugget' pace Archbishop Trench was a Californian importation. When speaking of a goldfield a colonist says 'on. Thus you live 'on Bendigo, but 'in' or 'at' Sandhurst the latter being the new name for the old goldfield town. To 'shout' drinks has no connection with the neuter verb of dictionary English.
I suppose that's all right, Joe, he said. 'I I beg your pardon. I got thinking of the days when I was courting Mrs Black. Brighten's Sister-In-Law. Jim was born on Gulgong, New South Wales. We used to say 'on' Gulgong and old diggers still talked of being 'on th' Gulgong' though the goldfield there had been worked out for years, and the place was only a dusty little pastoral town in the scrubs.
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