Los Angeles daily herald., 1889-03-07
The New Mining Excitement.


The New Mining Excitement.
THE HERALD's accounts published yes
terday about the new placer discoveries
in Lower california created a fever OF ex
citemept here, and several parties were
organized to try their luck in the new
gold fields. Information from the mines
of reliable character is very meagre,
and there is nothing known now to a
certainty to justify people in making
sacrifices to reach them. Perhaps the
fact that many have gone and none re-
turned gives rise to the idea that the
mines are so good that those who have
reached them have found too profit
able thing to leave. The fever
has evidently reached San Francisco,
for it is announced that a special steamer
has been put on for Ensenada. In San
Diego nothing else than the new diggings
is talked about. An officer Of the Santa
Fe system informed us yesterday that the
employees of the company in San Diego
are wild, and he fears there will be gen.
eral desertion of the road. In the alb
sence of more and better information
than we now have, the part of wisdom is
not to be in too great hurry to rush to
the new Eldorado. We doubt that the
extent of rich placer territory is as great
as the sanguine ores assume, and a
serious disadvantage is in the fact that it
is located on foreign soil.
Even if there be extent and merit in
the new find, it will pay to wait until we
know more about it, and if the diggings
do not extend beyond the gulch heard
from, they will be taken up by those
who are already there. Nothing is
known as yet about them to justify
precipitste rush, and it is we'll to remem-
ber that, as a rule, it is not those who
first reach new gold fields who make the
greatest profits out of them.
California has been subjected to peri
odical excitements of this character from
the very beginning. When miners were
doing we'll on the bars and in the gulches
of our own State in 1S49-50 they were
carried away by will-'o-the-wisp stories
about better diggings farther away. We
remember several instances that turned
out disastrously. Parties who were
doing we'll on Calaveras river heard that
gold could be just shoveled up on Kings
river, four hundred miles away. They
rushed there to find they had been de-
ceived. All old Californians will recall
the great wild-goose chase hundreds of
people made in search OF Gold Lake
under the leadership of a man who
turned out to be crazy. Then came in
succession the Trinidad Bay excitement,
the Gold Bluff excitement, the rush for
Frazer river, the Reese river craze,
the White Pine fasco, and hundreds
of others all over the coast. Not
one adventurer in ten thousand ever re-
turned from these expeditions better off
than when he started. The rule has
been failure, discouragement, ruin.
Wrecks of fortunes and hopes lie stranded
all over California, Nevada, Oregon and
British Columbia. Out of the hundred
thousand adventures who went to White
Pine, and the millions of good money
sunk there and in getting there, not a
single hope was fulfilled nor single sue
cess left to represent the enormous
waste. Lives and fortunes alone paid
the penalty of rashness and credulity.
We all remember how, two or three
years ago, the report reached Guaymas
and Arizona that rich and extensive dig
gings had been discovered in the noun
tains on the Sea of Cortez side of Lower
California; and how hundreds of people
started for them, endured untold suffer
ings from fatigue and hunger and thirst,
and finally returned in wretched con-
dition to report that the mines were a
myth. Let US hope that the experience
of those who are now rushing to the same
country will not be repetition of the hard
experience OF those who vainly chased
fortune there two years ago. But this has
80 often been the fate and outcome of
new mining fields that we have learned
to become very conservative in our views
about them.