which is not yet supplanted; and that last king of Lydia—and richest
king of all time, according to the ancient myths—got his wealth from
placer mines in the river Pactolus, whose name has been as synonymous
with gold as Crœsus’s own. One of the strangest and wisest of the
folk-stories of ancient Greece tells how that little river in Asia Minor
first gained its golden sands. Some seven hundred years before Christ,
there was a king of Phrygia who had more gold than Crœsus ever dreamed
of—so much gold that it made him the poorest man in the world! It was
King Midas, son of Gordius, who earned this strange distinction. He had
done a favor to Dionysus, and the god said gratefully: “Wish one wish,
whatever thou wilt, and I will grant it.” Now Midas had already caught
the most dangerous of all “yellow fevers”—the fever for gold—and he
replied: “Then let it be that all things which I shall touch shall be
turned into gold.”
Dionysus promptly granted this foolish prayer; and Midas was very happy
for a little time. He picked up stones from the ground, and instantly
they changed to great lumps of gold. His staff was gold, and his very
clothing became yellow and so heavy that he could barely stagger under
its weight. This was very fine indeed! He touched the corner of his
palace—and lo! the whole building became a house of pure gold. Splendid!
He entered, and touched what took his fancy; and furniture, and clothing,
and all, underwent the same magic change. Better and better! “I’m the
luckiest king alive,” chuckled Midas, still looking about for something
new to transmute.
But even kings who have the golden touch must sometimes eat, and
presently Midas grew hungry with so much wealth-making. He clapped
his hands, and the servants spread the royal table. A touch of the
royal finger, and table and cloth and dishes were yellow gold. This
was something like! The exhilarated king sat down and broke a piece of
bread—but as he lifted it, it was strangely heavy, and he saw that it,
too, was of the precious metal! A doubt ran through his foolish head
whether even the golden touch might not have its drawbacks; but he was
very hungry, and did not wait to weigh the question. If his fingers
turned the bread to gold, he would take something from a spoon—and he
lifted a ladle of broth to his mouth. But the instant it touched his
lips, the broth turned to a great yellow button, which dropped ringing
back upon the golden board.
The disquieted king rose and walked out of the palace. At the door he met
his fair-faced little daughter, who held up a bright flower to him. Midas
laid his hand gently upon her head, for he loved the child, foolish as he
was. And lo! his daughter stood motionless before him—a pitiful little
statue of shining gold!
How much longer this accursed power tormented the miserable monarch the
myth does not tell us; but he was cured at last by bathing in the river
Pactolus, and the washing away of his magic power filled the sands of the
stream with golden grains.
The Midases are not dead yet—for the one of ancient fable there are
thousands to-day, at whose very touch all turns to gold. Their food does
not become metal between their lips—but often it might as well, for all
the joy they have of it. And the little Phrygian princess was not the
only child to be changed and hardened forever by the “Golden Touch.”
Gold figures largely through all the quaint history-fables of the
ancients; and history itself is full of tales hardly less remarkable.
The early history of America was _made_ by gold—or rather, by golden
hopes which achieved wonders for civilization, but very little for the
pockets of the most wonderful explorers the world has ever seen. Had it
not been for the presence of gold here—and the supposed presence of even
more than has yet been dug—the western hemisphere would be very much of
a wilderness still. It was the chase of the golden myths which led to
the astounding achievements that opened the New World; and since then,
almost to this day, civilization has followed with deliberate march only
in the hasty footprints of the gold seekers. No tale was too wild to find
credence with the early adventurers.
The fabled ransom of Montezuma is _all_ a fable; but it is a fact that
Atahualpa, the head Inca of Peru, did pay to that marvelous soldier
Pizarro a ransom of golden vessels sufficient to fill a room twenty-two
by seventeen feet to a height of nearly six feet above the floor! While
gold was not much in use in Mexico, there was a great deal of it employed
in Peru for sacred utensils and idols and for personal ornaments; and to
this day the “mummy miners” are taking it out there. The early Spanish
discoveries of gold in North America were unimportant, despite the gilded
myths which have surrounded them. In Columbus’s time the gold fields
of the known world were so “worked out” that their product was barely
enough to meet the “wear and tear” of the precious metal in use; so there
was crying need of new finds. But they came slowly.
By 1580 there were vague rumors of gold in what is now California. Loyola
Casallo, a visiting priest, saw placer gold there, and tells of it in his
book written in 1690. In the last century Antonio Alcedo speaks of lumps
of California gold, weighing from five to eight pounds. But though its
presence was known, and though the rocky ribs of the Golden State hid
far more millions than were dreamed of—and perhaps than are dreamed of
yet—there was little mining, and that little with scant success.
The first gold discovery in the American colonies was in Cabarrus
county, North Carolina, in 1799; and up to 1827 that state was the only
gold-producer in the Union. In 1824 Cabarrus county sent the first
American gold to the mint in Philadelphia. The Appalachian gold field,
which embraces part of Virginia, and stretches across North Carolina,
South Carolina and Georgia, touching also parts of Tennessee and Alabama,
was once looked to for great things; but it long ago dropped from all
importance.
In 1828 the New Placers were discovered in New Mexico, some fifty miles
south of Santa Fé, and for a great many years produced richly. Even
to this day they are far from unproductive. Gold had been found in New
Mexico many generations before, but never in quantities to come anywhere
near paying. A decade later, placer gold was discovered in Santa Barbara
county, California, in the vast rancho of that gallant old hidalgo whose
home was described by Mrs. Jackson as the home of “Ramona.” These placers
have been worked steadily though clumsily by Mexicans ever since; and I
have a waxy nugget which was washed out in Piru creek in 1838.
Within half a century the world’s supply of gold had long been
inadequate to the growing demand. Russia was the chief producer; and her
mines—discovered about 1745—kept the nations from a “famine” which would
be most disastrous. There were old mines in China, but little worked;
and though Japan’s gold output was large, it was but a drop in the
cosmopolitan bucket. Russia at present, by the way, produces an average
of twenty millions of gold a year.
The wonderful gold fields of Australia were discovered in 1839 by Count
Strzelcki; but the priceless find was concealed, for a curious reason.
Australia was already England’s out-door prison; and it was feared that
if the golden news were known the 45,000 desperate convicts there would
rise in rebellion and annihilate their keepers—as they could well have
done. So for a dozen years the mighty secret was jealously guarded; and
thousands walked unsuspecting over the dumb gravel that held a million
fortunes. In 1848 Rev. W. B. Clark again stumbled upon the dangerous
secret, but again the discovery was suppressed; and it was not until
California had set the whole world on fire with excitement which nothing
could bottle up, that Australia threw off her politic mask. In 1851 E. H.
Hargreaves, who had just come from the new mines of California, saw that
Australia was geologically a gold country; and his prospecting proved his
surmises correct. The news spread in spite of cautious officials; and the
wild epidemic of fortune seekers pitted the face of the island-continent,
and watered its thirsty sands with blood. Even yet, Australia is
producing over $45,000,000 gold a year.
The rich gold fields of New Zealand were first found in 1842, but were
not extensively worked until 1856, when the swarming gold hunters had
overrun the Australian fields, and the restless sought still easier
wealth.
As I have told you, gold was mined spasmodically in California much more
than two centuries ago, and steadily mined for more than a decade before
the “great discovery” which was to change the face of an empire and bring
about what was in many ways the most remarkable migration in the whole
history of the human race. But these early diggings of the precious metal
made little stir. The swarthy miners delved away quietly, exchanged their
glittering “dust” for rough food and other rude necessaries, and made no
noise. They were very much out of the world. The telegraph, the railroad
and the printing press were far from touch with them. There were a few
“Americans” in California, and even one or two newspapers, but neither
paid attention to the occasional rumors of gold, save to ridicule them.
But on the ninth day of February, 1848, a little girl held in her
unknowing hand the key of the West—the wee yellow seed which was
to spring into one of the most wondrous plants in history. On the
American fork of the Sacramento river, in what is now El Dorado county,
Cal., stood a shabby little mill, owned by an American named Sutter.
(Californians, by the way, pronounce the name “Soo´-ter.”) The mill race
became broken, and three men were hired to repair it. Two were Mormons,
and the third, the overseer, was named Marshall. As the men worked,
Marshall’s little daughter played about them—dreaming as little as did
her elders that she was to upset a continent.
A yellow pebble in an angle of the sluice caught her eye, and picking
the pretty trifle from the wet sand, she ran to her father with, “Papa!
see the pitty stone.” It was indeed a pretty stone, and Marshall at
once suspected its value. Tests proved that he was right, and gold was
_really_ found. The discovery made some little noise among the few
Americans in that lonely, far land, but nothing was known of it to the
world until Rev. C. S. Lyman, who saw some of the nuggets which further
search yielded, wrote a letter to the _American Journal of Science_,
in March, 1848. As soon as the news was in type, it spread swiftly to
the four ends of the earth, and already by August of the same year four
thousand excited men were tearing up the sands of the American Fork, and
coaxing them to yield their golden secrets. And well they succeeded,
for every day saw from $30,000 to $50,000 worth of gold washed out and
transferred to rude safes of bottles or buckskin sacks. How long and
high that gold fever raged; how it patted the fearful intervening desert
with the weary footprints of tens of thousands of modern Jasons; how
it brought around the Horn a thousand heavy ships for every one that
sailed before; how it overturned and created anew the money markets of
the world; how it turned a vast wilderness into the garden of the world,
and pulled the Union a thousand miles over to the West, and caused the
building of such enormous railway lines as mankind had never faintly
dreamed of, and did a thousand other wonders, you already know—for it has
made literature as well as history. Our national history is crowded with
great achievements, but its chief romance was—
“The days of old,
The days of gold,
The days of ’49.”
California produced $5,000,000 gold in 1848, and crazed the civilized
world. The output grew to $60,000,000 by 1852. To-day the state yields
between eleven and twelve million dollars’ worth of gold a year, and it
creates no excitement whatever; for its people are more occupied with
mining the safer gold of agriculture.
Of late years South Africa has entered the field as one of the great
gold countries. Its annual “crop” is over forty millions. There is a
possibility that hereafter Alaska will have to be added to the list.
This summer of 1897 between $3,000,000 and $4,000,000 in “dust” and
small nuggets came out of the region generally and loosely called “The
Klondike.” I saw in the San Francisco mint 152,000 ounces the returning
miners poured out from their buckskin bags. Over 3,000 people left
California under the excitement caused by the exhibition of these
treasures, in a “gold-rush” which recalled the old days, by its fever and
its follies; but the Klondike rush will probably be remembered, whatever
its results in gold, as the most disastrous in history. Instead of the
mild climates of California, Australia and South Africa (and thousands
lost health and life even there) the gold seekers upon the Klondike will
have to do with the cruel winters and inhospitable wildernesses of a land
almost under the Arctic Circle.
* * * * *
Of the various methods of liberating our Yellow Slave from the hard
clutches of the earth it would be too long to speak in detail here; but
they are broadly divided into two classes, according to the surroundings
of the gold itself. Free or “placer” gold—which was for centuries the
first known to mankind, and which was the sort that started the great
“fever” in California and Australia—is found in beds of sand and gravel,
generally the present or former bed of a stream. It is extracted—this
precious needle from an enormous and worthless haystack—by means of its
own weight; water being applied in various manners to give that weight a
chance to assert itself. The mixed gravel is given up to the mercies of
running water, which wets it through, and causes its heaviest parts to
sink to the bottom, where they are held by artificial obstacles, while
the lighter particles of sand are swept away by the natural or artificial
current. In this manner the vast mass of soil is water-sifted until but
little is left; and from that little it is easy to hunt out the coy
yellow grains.
The placer gold was not formed in the gravel banks where it is found, but
came there by the death of its mother rock. All gold began in “veins” in
the earth’s rocky ribs; but Time, with his patient hammers of wind and
rain and frost, has pounded vast areas of these rocks to sand; and the
gold, broken from great bands to lumps, has drifted with the bones of the
mountains into the later heaps of gravel.
The processes of mining gold which still remains in its original home in
the rocks are far more complicated. There is a vast amount of boring to
be done into the flinty hearts of the mountains, with diamond-pointed
drills and with blasting; and then the rock, which is dotted with the
precious yellow flakes, has to be crushed between the steel jaws of great
mills. Much of the gold that is mined, too, is so chemically changed
that it does not look like gold at all, and requires special chemical
processes to coax it out. In gold (and silver) mining mercury is one
of the most important factors. It is the mineral sheriff, and swift to
arrest any fugitive fleck of gold that may come in its way. The sluice
boxes in extensive placer mines, and the “sheets” in stamp mills are all
charged with quicksilver, which saves a vast amount of the finer gold
dust that would be otherwise swept away by the current of water—for water
is equally essential in both kinds of mining.
There is no such thing as pure gold, often as we hear the phrase.
Nature’s own “virgin gold” is always alloyed with silver; and the very
purest is but 98 or 97 per cent gold. California gold averages about the
fineness of our American coin—90 per cent pure. As a general rule, the
lighter the color the purer the gold. The beautiful red gold gets its
color from a large alloy of copper.
It is an odd fact that the sea is full of gold. No doubt at the bottom
of that stupendous basin which has received for all time the washings of
all the world, there is an incalculable wealth of golden dust; but the
strange ocean mine is not all so deep down as that. The sea water itself
carries gold in solution—a grain of gold to every ton of water, as a
famous chemist has shown.
Among the historical big nuggets found in various parts of the world,
there have been some wonderful yellow lumps. In Cabarrus county, N. C.,
one was found in 1810 which weighed thirty-seven pounds Troy. In 1842 the
gold fields of Zlatoust, in the Ural, gave a nugget of ninety-six pounds
Troy. The Victoria (Australia) nugget weighed one hundred and forty-six
pounds and three pennyweights, of which only six ounces was foreign
rock; and the Ballarat (Australia) nugget was thirty-nine pounds heavier
yet. The largest nugget ever found was also dug in Australia—the “Sarah
Sands,” named for a far-off loved one. It reached the astonishing weight
of two hundred and thirty-three pounds and four ounces Troy! I wonder
what Miner Sands felt when he stuck his pick into that fortune in one
lump!
The quality which makes gold commercially the most valuable of the metals
is its docility. The cunning hammer of the smith can “teach” it almost
anything. The more stubborn metals crumble after a certain point; but
gold can be hammered into a sheet so infinitely fine that 282,000 of
them, piled one upon the other, would be but an inch thick! And a flake
of gold tiny as a pin-head can be drawn out, a finer thread than ever man
spun, to a length of five hundred feet!
There is no end to the uses of gold. They broaden every day. In some one
of its many forms our Yellow Slave helps us in almost every art and walk
of life. It has become as indispensable as its red fellow-slave, fire—and
like fire can be as bad a master as it should be a good servant.
The Peak of Gold.
The Peak of Gold.
The most remarkable myths that appear in American history are those
which were so eagerly listened to by the early Spanish conquerors, who
overran two-thirds of the two Americas long before the Saxons so much as
attempted a foot-hold in the New World. There was the famous myth of El
Dorado in South America—a living man covered from head to foot with pure
gold dust and nuggets. In Mexico was the fable of Montezuma’s untold tons
of gold and bushels of precious stones, and many other impossible things.
Ponce de Leon, the gallant conqueror of Puerto Rico, paid with his life
for the credulity which led him to the first of our states ever entered
by a European, in quest of an alleged fountain of perpetual youth—a
butterfly which some of the world’s learned doctors are still chasing
under another form. And all across the arid Southwest the hot winds have
scattered the dust of brave but too-believing men who fell in the desert
through which they pursued some glittering shape of the American golden
fleece. When Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, the first American traveler,
walked across this continent from ocean to ocean, over three hundred and
fifty years ago, he heard from the Indians many gilded myths, and chief
of them were those concerning the famous Seven Cities of Cíbola. So
enormously abundant was gold said to be in these Indian cities, that it
was put to the meanest uses. When Vaca got to the Spanish settlements in
Mexico and told this wonderful report it made a great commotion, and soon
afterward that great explorer, Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, came to the
Seven Cities of Cíbola—which surrounded the site of the present Pueblo
Indian town of Zuñi in the extreme west of New Mexico. But instead of
the dazzling cities he expected, Coronado found only seven adobe towns,
without an ounce of gold (or any other metal, for that matter)—towns
which were wonderfully curious, but which sorely disheartened the brave
Spanish pioneers. A little later Coronado heard equally astounding tales
of a still more golden aboriginal city—the fabulous Gran Quivira—and
set out to find it. After a marvelous march which took him almost to
where Kansas City now is, he found the Quivira—but no gold, of course.
And it has been the same ever since. Coronado’s footsore men ran down
their fables in 1541. Certainly not a decade, and very likely not a
year, has passed since then in which some equally preposterous story
of incalculable treasures has not been born and found followers in the
Southwest.
I know of but one thing in the world more remarkable than that the
Spaniards should have believed such self-evident myths; and that one
thing is that so many, many Americans believe them to-day. Not long
ago I visited the most remote and inaccessible ruins in the Southwest,
and found there the work of these sanguine dupes, who had actually
dug through solid rock in search of buried treasure. And even while I
write a party is digging, a hundred miles to the west, for a treasure
as mythical, and as palpably so, as that at the end of the rainbow. The
stories of golden mountains, of buried millions and of mysterious “lost
mines”—far richer, of course, than those which any one can find—in New
Mexico alone would fill a volume.
I had once the good fortune to run across some old and fragmentary
Spanish manuscripts of the last century and the beginning of this,
which are extremely interesting. It is not often that we get so much
documentary evidence concerning the golden will-o’-the-wisps which
have lured so many to disappointment and death. The writings all bear
the stamp of implicit belief, and the old soldier, in particular, who
is the hero of the fragmentary story, is often unconsciously eloquent
and sometimes pathetic in his recital. I translate all the documents
literally.
The first manuscript is a certified copy (certified in the City of
Mexico, March 5, 1803), of the “relation” and petition of Bernardo de
Castro, a copy for which the Spanish governor of New Mexico had sent.
Bernardo’s story and appeal are as follows, rendering as closely as
possible the quaint language of the day:
“_Most Excellent Sir_: Bernardo de Castro, retired sergeant of the
company of San Carlos [St. Charles] of the government of the City of
Chihuahua, in the Provinces of the Interior, admitted to citizenship in
the City of Santa Fé, capital of the kingdom of New Mexico, and resident
of this capital, goes on and before Your Excellency says: That having
served our Royal Monarch for the space of nine years and eight months
as sergeant of the said company in the countless combats at which I
assisted against the nations of the ynfidels [Indians], I came out
with a lance-thrust in one leg, of the which it resulted that I was
placed in the Ynvalid corps by the Sir Commander Don Juan de Ugalde. But
considering that with time and medicines I recovered and gained strength
to seek my subsistence free from the hardships to which the frontier
troop is exposed from the Mecos [probably the Apaches], I gave up for
the benefit of the royal exchequer my pay as invalid sergeant, and have
followed working in the same kingdom of New Mexico. There I have suffered
various fights—as it befell in the past year of 1798, that while I was
conducting a multitude of large cattle and other effects, the whole
valued at more than $14,000, from New Mexico to El Paso del Norte, the
barbarous Mecos assailed me, and after a long battle, in which flowed
much human blood, they carried off all I had in the world. And we gave to
God thanks for having saved us even the life.
“This continual contact with the savages has contracted me a friendship
with the Cumanche nation, which is at peace with the Spaniards, and
understanding their idiom facilitates me in trading with them to gain my
livelihood.
“In the past year, 1798, I arrived in Santa Fé and presented myself to
the Sir Governor Don Fernando Chacon. His Lordship informed me that there
had come a Frenchman and had shown him a piece of metal of fine gold,
assuring him he knew the spot where it was produced, and that it was
a peak which the ynfidel nations called Peak of the Gold, where there
was such an abundant breeding-place of this precious metal that all the
peak and even its surroundings could with propriety be said to be pure
gold. That he offered to show the spot if his Lordship would guard him
with three hundred men of troops, and this he was bound to grant for the
benefit of our monarch. That the distance, he considered, would be a
matter of eight or nine days’ journey. The faithful love to our Sovereign
animated the Sir Governor, and he supplied the escort which had marched
two days before, and his said Lordship informed me that if he had found
me in the city he would have made me one of the commanders. This offer
inspired me, and I offered to follow after the expedition, and the love
with which I have always served my lord, the King, enabled me by the
utmost exertion to overtake the expedition, with which I incorporated
myself on the third day.