THE COPPER FEVER.
In 1862-63 a copper fever raged in California. A rich vein had been
found in Stanislaus County. A “city” sprung up around it and was called
Copperopolis. The city came and went inside of ten years. When first I
visited Copperopolis, it contained 3,000 people. When I last saw the
place, one hundred would cover its entire population.
But the copper fever raged in the beginning. Gold was temporarily thrown
in the shade. Miners became speedily learned in surface copper
indications. The talk far and wide was of copper “carbonates,” oxides,
“sulphurets,” “gosson.” Great was the demand for scientific works on
copper. From many a miner’s cabin was heard the clink of mortar and
pestle pounding copper rock, preparatory to testing it. The pulverized
rock placed in a solution of diluted nitric acid, a knife blade plunged
therein and coming out coated with a precipitation of copper was
exhibited triumphantly as a prognosticator of coming fortune from the
newly found lead. The fever flew from one remote camp to another. A
green verdigris stain on the rocks would set the neighborhood copper
crazy. On the strength of that one “surface indication” claims would be
staked out for miles, companies formed, shafts in flinty rock sunk and
cities planned. Nitric acid came in great demand. It was upset. It
yellowed our fingers, and burned holes in our clothes. But we loved it
for what it might prove to us. A swarm of men learned in copper soon
came from San Francisco. They told all about it, where the leads should
commence, in what direction they should run, how they should “dip,” what
would be the character of the ore, and what it would yield. We, common
miners, bowed to their superior knowledge. We worshipped them. We
followed them. We watched their faces as they surveyed the ground
wherein had been found a bit of sulphuret or a green stained ledge, to
get at the secret of their superior right under ground. It took many
months, even years for the knowledge slowly to filter through our brains
that of these men nine-tenths had no practical knowledge of copper or
any other mining. The normal calling of one of the most learned of them
all, I found out afterward to be that of a music teacher. Old S----, the
local geologist of Sonora, who had that peculiar universal genius for
tinkering at anything and everything from a broken wheelbarrow to a
clock and whose shop was a museum of stones, bones and minerals
collected from the vicinity, “classified,” and named, some correctly and
some possibly otherwise, took immediately on himself the mantle of a
copper prophet, and saw the whole land resting on a basis of rich copper
ore. He advised in season and out of season, in his shop and in the
street, that all men, and especially young men, betake themselves to
copper mining. It was, he said, a sure thing. It needed only pluck,
patience, and perseverance. “Sink,” he said, “sink for copper. Sink
shafts wherever indications are found. Sink deep. Don’t be discouraged
if the vein does not appear at twenty, thirty, sixty or an hundred
feet.”
And they did sink. For several years they sunk shafts all over our
county and in many another counties. In remote gulches and cañons they
sunk and blasted and lived on pork and beans week in and week out and
remained all day underground, till the darkness bleached their faces.
They sunk and sunk and saw seldom the faces of others of their kind, and
no womankind at all. They lived coarsely, dressed coarsely, and no
matter what they might have been, felt coarsely and in accordance, acted
coarsely. They sunk time and money and years and even health and
strength, and in nineteen cases out of twenty found nothing but barren
rock or rock bearing just enough mineral not to pay.
I took the copper fever with the rest. In a few weeks I became an
“expert” in copper. I found two veins on my former gold claim at Swett’s
Bar. I found veins everywhere. I really did imagine that I knew a great
deal about copper-mining, and being an honest enthusiast was all the
more dangerous. The banks of the Tuolumne became at last too limited as
my field for copper exploration and discovery. I left for the more
thickly populated portion of the county, where there being more people,
there was liable to be more copper, and where the Halsey Claim was
located. The “Halsey” was having its day then as the King claim of the
county. It had really produced a few sacks of ore, which was more than
any other Tuolumne copper claim had done, and on the strength of this,
its value was for a few months pushed far up into high and airy realms
of finance.
I told some of my acquaintances in Sonora that I could find the
“continuation” of the Halsey lead. They “staked” me with a few dollars,
in consideration of which I was to make them shareholders in whatever I
might find. Then I went forth into the chapparal to “prospect.” The
Halsey claim lay about a mile east of Table Mountain near Montezuma, a
mining camp then far in its decline. Table Mountain is one of the
geological curiosities, if not wonders of Tuolumne and California. As a
well-defined wall it is forty miles long. Through Tuolumne it is a
veritable wall, from 250 to 600 feet in height, flat as a floor on the
top. That top has an average width of 300 yards. The “table” is composed
of what we miners call “lava.” It is a honey-combed, metallic-looking
rock, which on being struck with a sledge emits a sulphurous smell. The
sides to the ungeological eye seem of a different kind of rock. But
parts of the sides are not of rock at all--they are of gravel. On the
eastern slope you may see from the old Sonora stage road two parallel
lines, perhaps 200 feet apart, running along the mountain side. Mile
after mile do these marks run, as level and exact as if laid there by
the surveyor. Climb up to them and you find these lines enlarged to a
sort of shelf or wave-washed and indented bank of hard cement, like
gravel. You may crawl under and sit in the shade of an overhanging roof
of gravel, apparently in some former age scooped out by the action of
waves. Not only on the Table Mountain sides do you find these lines, but
where Table Mountain merges into the plains about Knight’s Ferry will
you see these same water marks running around the many low conical
hills.
A geological supposition. That’s what water seems to have done outside
of Table Mountain. Were I a geologist I should say that here had been a
lake--maybe a great lake--which at some other time had suddenly from the
first mark been drained down to the level of the second, and from that
had drained off altogether. Perhaps there was a rise in the Sierra
Nevada, and everything rising with it, the lake went up too suddenly on
one side and so the waters went down on the other. Inside of Table
Mountain there is an old river bed, smoothly washed by the currents of
perhaps as many if not more centuries than any river now on earth has
seen, and this forms a layer or core of gold-bearing gravel. In some
places it has paid richly: in more places it has not paid at all.
I said to myself: “This Halsey lead, like all the leads of this section,
runs northeast and southwest.” (N. B.--Three years afterward we found
there were no leads at all in that section.) “The Halsey lead must run
under Table Mountain and come out somewhere on the other side.” So I
took the bearings of the Halsey lead, or what I then supposed were the
bearings, for there wasn’t any lead anyway, with a compass. I aimed my
compass at a point on the ledge of the flat summit of Table Mountain. I
hit it. Then I climbed up over the two water shelves or banks to that
point. This was on the honey-combed lava crags. From these crags one
could see afar north and south. South, over Tuolumne into Mariposa the
eye following the great white quartz outcrop of the Mother or Mariposa
lead. North was Bear Mountain, the Stanislaus River and Stanislaus
County. This view always reminded me of the place where one very great
and very bad historical personage of the past as well as the present
showed another still greater and much better Being all the kingdoms of
the earth. For the earth wasn’t all laid out, pre-empted and fenced in
those days, and its kingdoms were small. Then I ran my lines over the
flat top of Table Mountain, southeast and northwest. So they said ran
all the copper leads, commencing at Copperopolis. So then we believed,
while tossing with the copper fever. Certainly they ran somewhere, and
ran fast too, for we never caught any paying copper vein in Tuolumne
County, at least any that paid--except to sell.
I aimed my compass down the other side of the mountain. There, when the
perpendicular lava rock stopped pitching straight up and down, sometimes
fifty, sometimes two hundred feet, was a dense growth of chaparral--the
kind of chaparral we called “chemisal.” I got into the chemisal. Here
the compass was of no more use than would be a certificate of Copperhead
copper stock to pay a board bill. It was a furry, prickly, blinding,
bewildering, blundering, irritating growth, which sent a pang through a
man’s heart and a pricker into his skin at every step. At last, crawling
down it on all-fours, for I could not walk, dirty, dusty, thirsty, and
perspiring, I lit on a rock, an outcrop of ledge. It was gray and moss
grown. It hid and guarded faithfully the treasure it concealed. Like
Moses, I struck the rock with my little hatchet. The broken piece
revealed underneath a rotten, sandy-like, spongy formation of crumbling,
bluish, greenish hue. It was copper! I had struck it! I rained down more
blows! Red oxides, green carbonates, gray and blue sulphurets! I had
found the Copperhead lead! I was rich. I got upon that rock and danced!
Not a graceful, but an enthusiastic _pas seul_. I deemed my fortune
made. I was at last out of the wilderness! But I wasn’t.