White Pine news weekly mining review. [volume] (East Ely, Nev.) 1910-1920, 1911-06-18

when Gold Was Found i'm California.
Contrast California as it was in
1S48 and in 1853. 1t had been dis
covered as far back as 1863, but in
spite OF its climate and its fruits, 1t
has remained a great lone land for
nearly two hundred years. Here and
there on the coast were sleepy Span
ish settlements. Small bands of lazy
hat-faced Indians loafed through the
easy seasons. There was no city in
lS4S, no railway, no commerce, ex-
eept a little fur-trading and swap
ping of cattle and sheep.
Then, one morning, Jim Marshall
picked up a little piece of yellowish
rock, and brought it as a sort of
curiosity to Mrs. Jennie Weimer,
with whom he was boarding.
ut might be gold, JIM" said Mrs.
Weimer, and threw it into a boiling
kettle of soap.
That night. when the soap was
poured off. there lay the shining peb-
bic, yellow as the sun.
1T is gold" cried Mrs. Weimer.
Cold repeated Jim Marshall.
"Gold!' shouted California.
Cold" shouted the United States
and the whole round world.
There was practically no path to
California at that time, but four hun
dred thousand men sprang up and
rushed blindly and desperately in its
direction. The line OF wreckage
around the Cape marked how they
vent by sea and the abandoned KNAPP
sacks and whitened bones marked
their trail by land.
And they got there-three-fourths
OF them, at least. They ripped up
the hillside and pushed aside the
rivers. and built towns as magically
as though they had dug Aladdin's
lamp out of the %affluent earth. In a
few years they had made California
n of the richest of American states;
and before the slow-moving east had
planned a railroad across the inter-
yening desert, the strenuous gold
finders had built a line back from the
Pacific to st. Louis.
In Australia and Colorado.
Three years after Jim Marshall
had found his nugget, the gold cry
came from Australia. The very
name of Australia was a strange, new
world. A vague impression prevailed
that it was an island Siberia of Great
Britain, where conyiets were sen to
put them out of the world. There
We're some sheep herders there, and
one of them, so the story ran. had
found a hundred pounds of gold upon
a river bank.
IL was this hundred pound nugget
that put Australia upon the map.
Three hundred thousand miners were
soon swarming around Ballarat and
Bendigo. The conyiets tore down the
prisons and the sheep herders des-
erted their sheep. Such was their
wild energy, in fact, they raised a
flag of their own and made war upon
the British Empire. They lost, of
course. The battle of the Stockade
went against them, and their revolt
was only an episode in Australian
history.
Ten years after the great trek of
the "Forty-niners' the gold cry came
from Colorado. Some wanderer in
the mountains came back to the little
settlement of Pueblo with a pocket
full of glinting soil. Colorado was a
desolate and tragic country at that
time. There was little else but the
barren mesa, with the red crags Of
the Rockies towering beyond 1t In
huge, jagged ranges. But there was
gold hidden in those crags, and
myriads of red-shirted argonauts
climbed up and took possession of
the treasure.
That was less than fifty years ago.
Today the traveller who journeys to-
wards Pixies Peak is amazed to find
a civilization that Is isolated but COM
plete. Here are railway towns-a
score of them. one or two miles above
the level of the sea. Here are hotels
equaling in size and magifieance those
of London and Berlin. Here are the
busy cities of Denver and Pueblo, en-
circled by farms hat have been made
almost miraculously fertile by irriga-
ton; and from Colorado City to Grip
pie Creek, the trail of the p%rospector
has been replaced by a railroad that