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Updated: May 27, 2025
The opening up of this route was expected to bring much travel through Beaver, and a town site was staked and many cabins built. But "Chandalar quartz" remains an interesting prospect, and the Chandalar placers have not proved productive, and all but a few of the cabins at "Beaver City" are unoccupied. If "the Chandalar" should ever make good, "Beaver City" will be its river port.
Then natives and Kruboys will strike for increased wages till even diamond-mines would not pay. The Gold Coast contains rich placers in abundance: if they fail it will be for want of hands, or because the cost of labour will swallow up profits. The country-people, Fantis, Accra-men, Apollonians of Béin, and others, will work, and are well acquainted with gold-working.
Full of wonderful stories are these same hope-sustained prospectors tales that are bright with the glitter of silver and gold. Not a single one of them who has not discovered "leads" of wonderful richness or "placers" where the sands were yellow with gold; but by some mischance the prize always slipped out of his grasp, and left him poor in all but hope.
So we talked of other things: of gold, and the placers, and their unimpaired productiveness, of the prospects of the country, and of the character the mineral element must stamp upon its politics, its commerce, and its social system, of San Francisco, and all the enchantments of its sudden upspringing, of Alcaldes and town-councils, of hounds and gamblers, of real estate and projected improvements, of canvas houses, and iron houses, and fires, of sudden fortunes, and as sudden failures, of speculations and markets, and the prices of clothing, provisions, and labor, of intemperance, disease, and hospitals, of brawls, murder, and suicide, till we had exhausted all the Californian budget; and then I bade him good day.
There is a class of persons in Sonora, who follow no other business than searching for gold placers or silver mines, and whose only knowledge consists of a little practical acquaintance with metallurgy. These men are called gambusinos.
A man that knows men, in the street, at their work, human nature in its shirt-sleeves, who makes bargains with deacons, instead of talking over texts with them, a man who has found out that there are plenty of praying rogues and swearing saints in the world, above all, who has found out, by living into the pith and core of life, that all of thy Deity which can be folded up between the sheets of any human book is to the Deity of the firmament, of the strata, of the hot aortic flood of throbbing human life, of this infinite, instantaneous consciousness in which the soul's being consists, an incandescent point in the filament connecting the negative pole of a past eternity with the positive pole of an eternity that is to come, that all of the Deity which any human book can hold is to this larger Deity of the working battery of the universe only as the films in a book of gold-leaf are to the broad seams and curdled lumps of ore that lie in unsunned mines and virgin placers, Oh!
Meanwhile, McNamara hired every idle man he could lay hand upon, and ripped the placers open with double shifts. Every day a stream of yellow dust poured into the bank and was locked in his vaults, while those mine-owners who attempted to witness the clean-ups were ejected from their claims.
If they had only known what was under their feet, they would have taken their picks and shovels and begun to dig, instead of trying to get out of the region as soon as might be. Ten years later, the California placers were becoming exhausted, and miners began to go elsewhere in their search for gold.
At the time of my visit all these mines were placers and the operation was rather primitive. With modern machinery and enlarged white staffs will come a pretentious exploitation. The Government mines alone yield more than $2,000,000 worth of gold every year. Shortly before my arrival in the Congo what was heralded as the largest gold nugget ever discovered was found in the Kilo State Mine.
The diggings at Gold Creek and Bannack were now eclipsed by the sensational discoveries on the famous Alder Gulch, one of the phenomenal placers of the world, and the most productive ever known in America. The stampede was fast and furious to these new diggings.
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