I have estimated that barely one-third of the total area of unsubmerged
California is perfectly arable: but it would be a great mistake to
suppose the residue worthless. At least thirty millions of acres more
are covered by rugged hills and mountains, mainly timbered—much of the
timber being large and of the best quality. Yellow, pitch and
sugar-pine—the pitch-pine being scarcely akin to its stunted and scrubby
New England namesake, but a tall and valuable tree—the sugar being
nearly identical with our white-pine, save that its sap is
saccharine—white-cedar, red-wood, spruce, balsam-fir—all these averaging
at least twice the size of the trees in any forest I ever saw elsewhere,
while the balsam is just the most shapely and graceful tree on
earth—such are the forests which cover all but the snowy peaks of the
mountains of California. Trees six to eight feet in diameter, are as
common in the Sierra Nevada, and I hear in the coast range also, as
those three to four feet in diameter are (or were) in the pine forests
of New York and New England. Consider that these giants look down on the
gold mines wherein a very large proportion of the most active population
of this state must for ages be employed, while the agricultural
districts lie just below them, and even the seaboard cities are but a
day’s ride further, and the value of these forests becomes apparent. The
day is not distant—there are those living who will see it—when what is
now California will have a population of three to six millions; then
eligible timber-lands in the Sierra will be worth more per acre than
would now be paid for farms in the richest valleys near San Francisco.
The timber of the lower hills and plains is generally oak—short-bodied,
wide-spreading, and of poor quality, save for fuel, being brash (easily
broken, like a clay pipe-stem), and not durable. The more common variety
looks like the white-oak found in New England pastures, but resembles it
in looks only. Live-oak is next in abundance, and also a poor article.
It has a smooth, dark bark, a short, crooked trunk, a profusion of
good-for-nothing limbs, and small, deep green leaves, which defy the
frosts of winter. The trunk is often barked by vandals for tanning,
leaving the tree standing alive, but certain to die. Black and rock-oak
are found in some of the mountain valleys, and seem to be of fair
quality. Large cotton-wood and sycamore line some of the streams, but
very sparingly. Her evergreens are the pride of California.
The gold mines are generally found among the foot-hills of the Sierra,
or in the beds of the streams which traverse those hills. In many
instances, hills now tower where rivers once ran—how long since, who may
tell? Trees in a state of semi-petrifaction are dug out from under
hundreds of feet of solid earth, which seems to have lain undisturbed
for thousands of years. The beds of ancient lakes are covered by rugged
heights; and, these beds being often auriferous, it is one of the arts
of the miner to know just where to tunnel through the “rim rock” so as
to strike what was the bottom of the lake, and thus extract its gold as
cheaply as may be. Washing the beds of modern streams, which was the
earliest and most profitable field of mining adventure, is now nearly at
an end, or turned over to the Chinese, who are willing to work hard and
steadily for much less than will satisfy the aspirations of a Yankee.
There are still some creek-beds that will pay in winter, when water is
abundant, that remain to be washed out; but, in the main, river-mining
is at its last gasp. Very few dams are being or have recently been
constructed to turn rivers from their beds and permit those beds to be
sluiced out; and I doubt that this special department of mining ever
paid its aggregate cost. The expense is serious; the product often
moderate, and subject to many contingencies. Henceforth, dams will be
constructed mainly to feed the canals or “ditches” whereby water is
supplied to works that must otherwise be abandoned. Of these ditches,
_The State Register_ for 1859, has a list of several hundreds in number,
amounting in the aggregate to five thousand seven hundred and twenty-six
miles of artificial water-courses constructed wholly for mining
purposes, at a total cost of $13,575,400, or about twice that of the
original Erie Canal. The largest of these ditches is that of the Eureka
Canal Company, leading water from the north fork of the Cosumnes River
to Diamond Springs, two hundred and ninety miles, at a cost of eighty
thousand dollars; but there are many far more expensive and important,
being far larger and carried over a more difficult country. At the head
of these stand the Mokelumne-Hill Canal, in Calaveras County, only sixty
miles long, but costing six hundred thousand dollars, the Columbia and
Stanislaus, in Tuolumne County, eighty miles long, which also cost six
hundred thousand dollars, and the South Yuba Canal, in Nevada County,
costing five hundred thousand dollars. Many larger enterprises than even
these have been projected, but not yet carried out, because capitalists
cannot be found willing to supply the needful cash. Thus, in Mariposas
alone it has been estimated that an annual rental of ten millions of
dollars would be paid for water, could enough of it be had at living
rates. I merely guess that it could not be paid many years.
I do not suppose that the gold mines of California will ever be
thoroughly worked out—certainly not in the next thousand years; yet I do
not anticipate any considerable increase in their annual production,
because I deem fifty millions of dollars per annum as much as can be
taken out at a profit, under existing circumstances. The early miners of
California reaped what nature had been quietly sowing through countless
thousands of years. Through the action of frost and fire, growth and
decay, air and water, she had been slowly wearing down the primitive
rocks in which the gold was originally deposited, washing away the
lighter matter, and concentrating the gold thus gleaned from cubic miles
of stubborn quartz and granite into a few cubic feet of earth at the
bottom of her water-courses. Many a miner has thus taken out in a day
gold which could not in weeks have been extracted from the rock where it
first grew. Even the hills, in which it is now mainly found, can be
washed down at one dollar or less per cubic yard, by the best hydraulic
appliances. But when the miner is brought face to face with the rough
granite, which he must drill, and blast, and tunnel for all the gold he
gets, the case is bravely altered. He may make money here; he sometimes
does; but I am sure that, up to this hour, not one quartz-mining
enterprize in every four has paid its bare expenses; and, though there
will be brilliant exceptions, I am confident that quartz-mining, as a
whole, will not pay for many years to come. Either labor must be
cheaper, or the process of quartz-mining far more economical and
efficient, or the yield per ton much greater, before one undeniably
auriferous quartz vein in ten will pay the cost of working it. And,
while I presume improvements will, from time to time, be made, I hear
doubtingly the talk of sanguine inventors and operators of doubling the
product of gold by this or that new amalgamator, or other device. So
many of these contrivances have proved futile, or of little worth, that
I wait. Chemical tests indicate that a portion of the gold actually
contained in the vein-stone (especially if a sulphuret) is now obtained
by the crushing and washing process; but how soon, or by what process,
this proportion may be essentially increased, I do not know—who does?
And, until it shall be, I must consider quartz-mining, with labor at the
present rates, the poorest business now prosecuted in California. A few,
who have struck pockets rather than veins of peculiarly rich quartz, are
making a good thing of it, and their luck is in every one’s mouth; but
of the hundreds who drive up long adits through dead rock, or sink
costly shafts to strike a vein at the best point, and find it, after
all, too poor to pay for working, little is said or thought, till they
drop into the gulf of acknowledged bankruptcy, and pass away. I believe
fewer quartz-veins are being worked to-day than were some years ago; I
think fewer still will be worked a year hence, and thenceforward, until
cheaper labor, or more effective processes shall have rendered
quartz-mining a very different business. And, until such change is
effected, I apprehend that the annual gold product of California will
not be essentially augmented.