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Updated: May 27, 2025
The long oval mound of red clay, overgrown with trees, and rising 295 feet above sea-level, is all auriferous; but there are placers richer than their neighbours. Tebribi was the favourite washing-ground of the Apinto Wásás; but the old shafts were all neglected after the Dutch left, and no deep sinking was known within the memory of man until the last twelve years.
As for the background, that changed not every day but every hour what with the shifts of wind, tide and mists. Now its tinge was a green-gold betraying pollution of those mountain placers which fed the San Joaquin and the mighty Sacramento.
I'm groping for light. When Miss Chester brought in the papers I got busy instanter. I clouded the title to the richest placers in the region, but I'm blamed if I quite see the use of it. We'd be thrown out of any court in the land if we took them to law. What's the game blackmail?" "Humph!" ejaculated McNamara. "What do you take me for?"
It is interesting to note the extremes possible in one and the same character: harshness and gentleness, manliness and childishness, apathy and fierce endeavor. Men who, twenty years ago, would not cease their shoveling to save their lives, now play in the streets with children. Their long, Micawber-like waiting after the exhaustion of the placers has brought on an exaggerated form of dotage.
The placer miners laughed at them and called their shafts "coyote holes"; but in time the placers failed, while nearly all of our gold to-day comes from veins of white quartz in the rocks. A vein of gold is the most capricious thing in the world. It may be so tiny that it can hardly be seen, then widen and grow rich in gold, then suddenly come to an end.
Shorty cried, holding out the pan. "Look at it! A nasty mess of gold. Two hundred right there if it's a cent. She runs rich from the top of the wash-gravel. I've churned around placers some, but I never got butter like what's in this pan." Smoke cast an incurious glance at the coarse gold, poured himself a cup of coffee at the fire, and sat down.
It is no wonder that people rushed from the east and west to the wonderful new mines, for it was plain that these new "diggings" were not mere placers, but rich veins that many years of working might not exhaust.
Now the role of confidential adviser to the boys was not a new one to the barkeeper, nor was anyone in the camp more familiar than he with their good qualities as well as their failings. Every morning before going to work in the placers it was their custom to stop in at The Polka for their first drink which was, generally, "on the house."
Far more important than one more library say in Denver, for instance would be a Denver Bureau of Investigation, to be appointed, of high-priced, spirited men, of expert humanists, to study difficulties, and devise methods and missions for putting all society in Denver through filters or placers, and finding out the rich human ore, finding out where everybody really belonged, and what all the clever misplaced people were really for.
In most places where explored the country is rich in gold, and I have little doubt that thorough prospecting would reveal many placers equaling the best of those in California. Very few exiles are now sent to Nerchinsk in comparison with the numbers formerly banished there.
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