Year: 1870

POCKET - MINING.


In one little corner of California is found
species of mining which is seldom or never men
toned in print. 1t is called pocket mining"
and am not aware that any of it is done out
side of that little corner. The gold is not evenly
distributed through the surface dirt, MS in ordi-
nary placer mines, but is collected in little spots
and they are very wide apart and exceedingly
hard to find, but when you do find one you reap
n rich and sudden harvest. There are not now
more than twenty pocket miners in that entire
little region. think know every one of them
personally. ! have known one of them to hunt
patiently about the hill sides every day for
eight months without finding gold enough to
make a snuff box-his grocery bill running up
relentlessly all the time-and then have seen
him find pocket and take out of it n thousand
dollars in two dips of his shovel. | have seen
him take out So 900 in two hours, and go and
pay up every cent of his Indebtedness, then en-
ter on a dazzling spree that finished the last of
his treasure before the night was gone. And
the next day he bought his groceries credit
as usual, and shouldered his pan and shovel
and went off to the hills hunting pockets again
happy and content. This is perhaps the most
facinating of all the different kinds of mining,
and furnishes handsome percentage of victims
to the lunatic asylum. Honest toll and mod
crate gains in shops and on farms have their
virtues and their advantages. When man
consents to seek for sudden riches he does it at
his peril. No charged


Pocket hunting is an ingenious process. You
take spadeful of earth from the hill side and
put it in a large pan and dissolve and wash 1t
gradually away till nothing is left but a tea
spoonful of fine sediment. Whatever gold was
in the earth has remained, because, being the
heaviest, it has sought the bottom. Among
the sediment you will find half dozen shining
particles no larger than pin heads. You are
delighted. You move off to one side and wash
another pan. If you find gold again, you move
to one side further, and wash a third pan. IF
you find no gold this time, you are delgted
again, because you know you on the right
scent. You lay an imaginary plan, shaped like
fan, with its handles up the hill-for just
where the end of the handle is, you argue that
the rich deposit lies hidden, whose vagrant
grains of gold have escaped ana been washed
down the hiIl spreading farther and farther
apart as they wandered. And so you proceed
up the hill, washing the earth and narrowing
your lines every time the absence Of gold in the
pan shows that you outside the spread of
the fan and at last, twenty yards up the hill
your lines have converged to n point-a single
foot from that point you cannot find any gold.
Your breath comes short and quick, you are
feverish with excitement the dinner bell may
ring its clapper Off you pay no attention friends
may die, weddings transpire houses burn down,
they nothing to you you sweat and dig and
deve with frantic interest-and all Mt once
you strike it Up comes n spadeful of earth
and quartz that is all lovely with solid Jumps
and leaves and sprays Of gold. Sometimes that
one spadeful is all-$500. Sometimes The nest
contains 81 900, and it takes You three or four
days to get it all out. The pocket minera tell
of one nest that yielded 500, 900, and two men
exhausted 1t in two weeks, and then sold the
ground for $4,000 to n party who never got
$500 ont of it afterward.


The hogs are good pocket hunters. All the
summer they root around the bushes, and turn
up a thousand little piles of dirt, and then the
miners long for rain, for the rains beat upon
these little piles and wash them down, and ex-
pose the gold, possibly right over a pocket.
Two pockets were found in this way by the
same man in one day. One had $4,000 in IT,,
and the other S., 900. That man could appre-
cate it, for he hadn't had cent for about a
year.


In Tt olumne lived two miners, who used to go
to the neighboring village in the afternoon and
return every night with household supplies.
Part of the distance they traversed n trail, and
nearly always sat down on great bowlder that
lay beside the path In the course of thirteen
years they had worn that bowlder toerably
smooth sitting on it. By and by two vagrant
Mexicans came along and occupied the seat.
They began to amuse themselves by chipping
off flakes from the bowlder with sledge ham
mer. They examined one of these fakes and
found it rich with gold. That bowlder paid
them $500 afterward. But the aggravating cir
cumstance was that these " Greasers" know
that there must be more gold where that bowl
der came from, and so they went panning up the
hill and found what was probably the richest
pocket that region has yet produced. It took
three months to exhaust it, and it yielded Sl2O,-
600. The two American miners who used to
sit on the bowlder are poor yet, and they take
turn about getting up early in the morning to
curse those Mexicans-and when it comes down
to pure ornamental cursing, the native Amer
ican miner IS gifted above the sons of men.
have dwelt at some length upon this mat
ter of pocket mining because it is subject that
is seldom referred to in print, and therefore /
Judged it would have for the reader that inter-