Gold Rush Quotations

"We stand on the brink of the mine and try to fix the salient points in thought and memory before we descend into the great amphitheatre . . . . [The] water . . . comes out with not merely the force of so much gravity, but also with a wicked, vicious, unutterable indignation. The black pipe, . . ends in a jointed , elbow-like pipe, with a movable nozzle. . . . [R]ocks two feet in diameter fly like chaff when struck by the stream. . . . The stream of water is so powerful that no man could stand against it a moment. The water after leaving the tunnel is carried half a mile or so in a flume, so as to allow a chance for undercurrents to collect more of the gold . . . and then the thick muddy stream is allowed to find its own way down without hindrance." Newspaper Reporter, "A Great Gravel Mine," The Daily Transcript, Nevada City, CA, July 30, 1879.

"During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, farmers pouring into the valleys of California created an agrarian empire and set in motion years of controversy. . . . Of these clashes. . . none was more remarkable than the long controversy which raged in the Sacramento Valley over the fate of hydraulic gold mining in the northern Sierra Nevada." Robert Kelley, "The Mining Debris Controversy in the Sacramento Valley," Pacific Historical Review, 25 (November 1956): 331-346, see p. 331.

"This is a bill in equity to restrain the defendants, being several mining companies, engaged in hydraulic mining on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada mountains, from discharging their mining debris into the affluents of the Yuba River, and into the river itself, whence it is carried down by the current into the Feather and Sacramento Rivers, filling up their channels and injuring their navigation, and sometimes by overflowing and covering the neighboring lands with debris. . . ." Judge Lorenzo Sawyer, "Woodruff versus North Bloomfield Gravel and Mining Co.: The Sawyer Decision of 1884," The Federal Reporter, 18, no. 14 (1884), 753-818, see p. 756.

"The Indians in this portion of the State are wretchedly poor, having no horses, cattle, or other property. They formerly subsisted on game, fish, acorns, etc., but it is now impossible for them to make a living by hunting or fishing, for nearly all the game has been driven from the mining region. . . . The rivers or tributaries of the Sacramento formerly were clear as crystal and abounded with the finest salmon and other fish. But the miners have turned the streams from their beds and conveyed the water to the dry diggings and after being used until it is so thick with mud that it will scarcely run it returns to its natural channel ." E. A. Stevenson, Special Indian Agent, San Francisco, Ca. (1853), in Robert Heizer, ed., The Destruction of the California Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), pp. 15-16.

"As a rule, the geomorphic effects produced by placering proved the same as those produced by natural agencies. . . . Some landforms that resulted from mining are almost indistinguishable from ones produced by nature. . . . Today the artificial origin of some landscapes would be difficult to determine except for the existence of documentary evidence." Randall Rohe, "Man and the Land: Mining's Impact in the Far West," Arizona and the West, 28 (Winter 1986): 299-388, see p. 388.