Maybe the fever runs in the blood. Or maybe I caught it as a wistful adolescent dreaming my way through the Great Depression, enthralled by tales of my grandfather.
Grandfather was a forty-niner who had lived in a cabin somewhere in the Sierra and prospected for gold. He persevered for several years without success and eventually went into the mule business, buying them in Southern California and driving them to Sacramento. He was not successful at mule-skinning either, but that is another story.
My gold fever struck in November 1931, the year before I started at Stanford. A 17-year-old sophomore at Sacramento Junior College, I was telling my best friend, Harry Penn, about Grandfather's failed career as a prospector, when a venturesome thought entered my mind. "Harry," I said, "let's get ourselves a couple of miner's pans and try our luck."
Like me, Harry was dreamy and not very practical, interested in literature and music and yearning for new experiences. "Okay," he said without hesitation. "But you'll have to show me how."
"Easiest thing in the world," I assured him. I had never done any panning, either. But I'd heard about men who'd turned to prospecting when times got hard, and I was sure I could pick it up as well as anyone once I had a pan in my hands and a gravelly brook to wash it in.
The following Saturday was breezy and bright, inviting the two of us to adventure. We made a quick trip to the hardware store to get some pans and drove off toward Auburn in my creaky Studebaker coupe. An hour later, we were squatting on the bank of a small Sierra stream.
Gold panning takes little skill, and indeed we mastered it in a few minutes. We submerged our gravel-filled pans in the water, tipping them slightly away from us, and swished in a circular motion. After our pans were rid of all the large- and medium-sized gravel, we swirled more slowly until nothing remained but fine black sand, an oxide of iron that was denser than the rest. Finally we leveled our pans and gave them one last swish. We hoped to see a bright trail of gold dust, even nuggets, at the edge of the film of black sand--since gold, being eight times as dense as sand or gravel, would settle to the bottom. But our efforts had not panned out.
Harry and I went up the creek, looking for crevices where gold might be hidden. Again, no success. An hour of work had yielded nothing but aching backs.
Still, the conviction that there was gold in the Sierra, waiting for me to discover it, persisted into the spring. That's when I looked up Mr. Vickery, my freshman geology instructor. He was not very encouraging.
"Yes, there's plenty of gold up there, more than has ever been taken out," he said. "The trouble is, all the easy stuff is gone. What's left is in cracks that are devilish hard to get at." He did offer one tip. "Go up to the state library and look at the U.S. Geological Survey maps from about 60 years ago," he said. "On the North Fork of the Feather River, just above Oroville, there's a place called Big Bend. It was hydraulic-mined in the 1880s, but they couldn't hose out all the gold-bearing gravel before the hydraulicking stopped in '84. All that's left now is a bunch of big boulders. They're sitting on a bed of auriferous gravel that could yield a small fortune if someone could dig it out and run it through a sluice."
I thanked Mr. Vickery and went straight to the library. There were the old maps, carefully detailed and color-coded, with intriguing yellow patches signifying the presence of gold on the lower reaches of the North Fork. My fever rising, I hurried back to enlist Harry on an exploratory visit--camping out, of course.
Harry was unenthusiastic. "Doesn't sound like my idea of a good time," he said, "and besides, I've got my asthma." So I tried John Kennedy, a classmate whose father taught psychology at the college. A charismatic and jocular fellow a few years older than me, John thought gold hunting would be a goshdarn good way to spend a vacation. He in turn, sold the idea to three of his friends: Merle Fischer, a future engineer whose father was a police captain; happy-go-lucky Fred Page, who was planning to join the Navy; and Emory Wilson, a nuts-and-bolts type whose dad was a building contractor. When the five us met in the college cafeteria to discuss the venture, we discovered that we all had forty-niner grandfathers. The thought of carrying on a family tradition added to the thrill of our treasure hunt.
Over Easter break, John, Merle and Emory drove to Big Bend to look it over. They brought back a glowing report: wonderful place for a camp, with a pretty lake to swim in and plenty of giant boulders to dig under. We decided to launch a six-week expedition as soon as school ended in June.
Meanwhile, I picked up another recruit. Gordon Taylor, the oldest of the group at 26, was tall, wiry, redheaded, serious and shy. He and his widowed mother lived on a small pension from his father, a veteran of World War I. Gordon had little hope of finding a job in those Depression days, and when I invited him to join us, he jumped at the chance.
The day after we graduated from the two-year college, John, Gordon and I loaded up the old Studebaker and headed for Big Bend. We arrived to find Fred, Emory and Merle offloading gear from a truck loaned by Emory's father. We had borrowed copiously from the camping supplies our families had accumulated over the years. Everything was there--tents, cots, collapsible tables, Primus stove, Coleman lantern, cooking utensils, picks, shovels, crowbars. There were hammers, nails, saws, planks and some carpet scraps for a miner's sluice. Everyone brought his own bedding and a few books to read.
We set up camp along the north bank at a shady spot overlooking a natural basin. The river meandered into the basin through a pair of cliffs and emptied into a lake formed by a boulder-covered bar, which forced the water into a narrow stretch of rapids. On the opposite bank stood a line of white alder and cottonwood trees at the foot of a red rock cliff.
The Western Pacific Railroad had been cut into this rock, and a half-dozen times a day we were treated to a moving show: an enormous locomotive pulling a hundred or so freight cars through the Sierra Nevada. The cars came from all over: the Frisco Line, the Vermont and Maine Central, the Florida East Coast, the Baltimore and Ohio, the Canadian Pacific, the Denver, the Rio Grande, and the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western. They were decorated with pictures of mountain goats, cotton bolls and Indian chiefs. Whenever they passed, I stopped and watched them rattle by, caught up in fantasies of faraway places.
A mile downstream was the Las Plumas power station. About two dozen people lived at the settlement there, mainly PG&E workers and their families. John and Merle hiked over on a scouting expedition and discovered some pretty girls. Gordon and I never met the young ladies--I was too awkward and young, he too shy and old--but the other four in our group visited Las Plumas at least twice a week, returning with lively accounts of picnics, swimming parties and parlor games.
Gordon and I listened without envy. We liked to read in the evening and turn in at a reasonable hour. Besides, we had come for gold.
Operations at camp ran smoothly. My mother had taught me the rudiments of cooking, so I was in charge of food preparation. We took turns tidying the site and washing dishes, using the nearby brook as a water source. It was a charming little stream, bubbling its way over a bed of coarse, immaculately white sand, which we used as an abrasive to scrub pots.
We worked hard and slept well, but we did have a health problem. The stomach cramps started in the middle of our first week, and the fact that they affected all of us suggested a common cause. We tried changing our diet from pork and beans to hamburgers and then back, with no results.
Then, one night, John and Emory recounted a visit they'd made that afternoon to a mine a half-mile above us. Four men were working a sizable vein of gold-bearing quartz by breaking the quartz into chunks and feeding it into a small stamp mill, which pounded the rock into coarse white sand.
"How do they get the gold out of the sand? Do they use a pan?" I asked.
"No," said John. "They extract it with cyanide." We all fell silent, thinking the same thing.
Having discovered the truth about our charming little brook, we no longer washed anything there. Dirty dishes, pots and clothes were hauled some 200 yards down to a little beach at the edge of the lake, and drinking water came up from the lake to be boiled. Everyone got well.
That first week, we found plenty of gravel in the crevices and potholes along the river. But when we gave it the classic gold-pan treatment, the only glitter was fool's gold--iron pyrite. What next? We discussed the problem one evening after supper.
"Shouldn't we dig into the gravel under the boulders?" I asked.
"How you gonna get it out?" responded Fred.
Merle jumped in. "Before we dig out any gravel, we've got to be able to process it. I think we should start by building a sluice."
And so we agreed that our first task was to build the sluice. Emory, who'd worked in construction with his father, sketched out some plans, and the next morning we started in earnest. We nailed together planks to make a u-shaped trough, then covered the bottom with carpeting. At intervals across the carpet, we nailed cleats to act as riffles. We tested our sluice by dumping gravel into a wire tray at the high end of the trough, then pouring buckets of water over the tray while shaking it. The water washed the sand and pebbles down the sluice and over the cleated carpeting, sending most of it tumbling out the end. Any gold in the mix would presumably lodge in the carpet and behind the cleats.
After a long, sweaty day of running gravel through the sluice, we scooped the fine black sand from behind the riffles and the six of us squatted with our pans at river's edge, eagerly anticipating the results. All we got was a little "color"--tiny flakes of gold totaling less than a dollar's worth. It was very discouraging.
"I'll bet we ran half a ton of gravel through that thing," John groused.
"As gold miners, we're a bunch of bums," observed Merle.
Then Gordon spoke up, in his slow and thoughtful way. "We wanted to see if the thing worked, and it does. Problem is, we've been shoveling in gravel that's been worked by everybody who ever walked up this river with a pan. We need richer gravel."
His analysis was right on. We had come here to mine the gravel left under the boulders, not the picked-through odds and ends from along the banks. But our sluice was 200 yards from those boulders--a long way to carry 60-pound buckets of gravel. Again, the solution came from Emory. He diagrammed an ingenious conveyor system and showed us his plan. We would send buckets sliding down a heavy-gauge wire stretched between the boulder and the sluice, supported along the way by poles lashed into xs. Spirits renewed, we drove to the lumberyard in Oroville the next day to buy what was required.
Building the contraption took us nearly a week. Our first trials fizzled: the wire was too loose, and the bucket would slide down to a point between the xs, where it stopped, swinging lazily. The last day was the worst. We worked eight hours straight, with no lunch, trying one improvement after another. A blazing sun added to our irritation. (Later we learned that the temperature in Las Plumas had hit 123 in the shade.) Collapsing on our cots that night, we vowed never to work such a long stretch again. Everyone took the next day off: Gordon and I read and talked about the meaning of life, while the others organized a swimming party in Las Plumas.
After breakfast the following morning, we went down to inspect our refined delivery apparatus. We sent a trial bucket down the wire, and it arrived at the sluice without mishap.
Now it was time to get serious about gold mining. All we had to do was wriggle under those boulders, dig out the gravel, put it in the bucket and slide it down the wire.
But there was another complication we hadn't foreseen. Over the eons, the gravel had set like concrete under the weight of the massive boulders. Our trowels and chisels made no impression.
We talked it over at lunch, and Emory, again, got that visionary look in his eyes. "What we need is a stump puller to move the rocks off their base and lay the gravel bare," he proposed. "Then we'll go at it with picks and crowbars and sledgehammers."
Emory and Merle went to town for a stump puller, but returned empty-handed. No one would rent them one, and buying the thing would have cost $200, more than double our collective budget for the six-week trip. Everyone was quiet for a while. Then John declared: "I'm not gonna bust my back breaking rocks for gold that ain't there. The welcome mat is out down at Las Plumas, and that's where I'll be every day for the next week."
Merle and Fred brightened. "Wanna come along?" Merle asked me teasingly. "Ginny has a couple of cousins. They've got lots of records, and we can all dance."
"I don't dance," I said shortly.
"Aw, come on," he said. "Lucy'll teach ya."
But I knew I would never go. I hated dancing and I hated being taught. Besides, I was terrified by the thought of putting my arms around a girl.
I noticed that no one had asked Gordon along, and I decided to stick with him. It was strange: I was the youngest, he the oldest, but being the two odd ones seemed to draw us together.
Gordon and I walked down to the river the next morning after the others went to Las Plumas. As we approached our sluice, we saw a man looking it over. He was an Indian wearing a faded slouch hat, braid running down his back. He had no left arm.
"What do you think of our apparatus?" I called out.
"Pretty good," the Indian said. "Now you need some good gravel."
"That's the problem," I agreed. "Any idea where we're going to find any?"
"Can't say," said the Indian. "If I did know, I wouldn't be telling you. I gotta make a living, too."
"Can you really make a living panning gold on this river?" I asked, surprised.
"Sure can. Most days I pan till I get an ounce and then go home."
I could hardly believe what he was saying. An ounce was worth $20, and you could get it in a day. Why, lots of people would love to get $20 in a week!
Seeing my reaction, the Indian grinned. "Plenty of gravel under those big rocks," he said in a bantering way, waving his hand toward our boulders.
"Can't get at it unless we buy a stump puller, and we don't have money for that," Gordon said.
"Looks as though you're up a creek, then," he said, chuckling, as he waded off across the rapids.
We were down to our final week. Every day, when the others left camp, Gordon and I worked our way along the river, scaling the lower canyon walls, filling our pans with whatever we could glean. And every time we swirled it out, there was nothing but black sand. Time and again, we explored the rocky flanks to see if there was any approach, any strategy we had not tried. I began an intense study of the perpendicular face of the gray-black rock that ran along the north bank. There was something familiar about it, something I had encountered elsewhere.
Then it came to me. On a field trip with Mr. Vickery, we had studied metamorphosed rocks--rocks subjected to such intense pressure and heat that they developed distinct layering, like slate. Mica schist was a common example. Its layers were so well defined that you could easily split it into sheets and slabs. Furthermore, when mica schist started to weather and break down, it developed cracks at right angles, straight through the layers.
The rock face before me had to be mica schist. And, if so, I should be able to split it into sections of flat pieces. Tentatively I inserted a crowbar into a crack and pried. A wedge popped off the rock face and thudded to the ground, revealing an inch-deep space covered by a thin layer of sand, which I carefully scraped into my pan. I continued to pop off slabs and scrape out the residue. Some of the cracks were big enough to hold small rocks pounded in over millions of years by the rushing of water and gravel.
My pickings seemed meager, but after two hours of splitting and scraping I had a panful of sand and small gravel. Down to the river I went to wash out the gleanings. I worked my load down to a narrow crescent of black sand, then leveled the pan and swirled.
Eureka! Gleaming from the blackness were two pea-sized nuggets and a string of gold dust--not flaky "color" but substantial grains. Gordon was off somewhere poking around, but he came running at my yell. When I showed him the glistening evidence, he let out a holler, and we did a crazy dance on the shore.
That evening, when the others returned from Las Plumas, we gleefully announced our discovery. To our bafflement, they showed little interest. The search for gold had lost its luster for them: all they could think about was winding up their summer romances and returning to the real world.
Gordon and I happily spent those last two days splitting schist slabs from the rock face, cleaning out the crevices and panning the gold. All told, we garnered about four ounces. After picking out the largest nuggets to give to our mothers, we took the smaller pieces and the dust to a Chinese gold buyer in Oroville, who paid us $70--the equivalent of about $1,400 today.
John figured the expenses on the last morning. The six weeks cost each person about $20. The gold money covered Gordon's and my shares and left us both some pocket money besides.
Thus ended our golden summer. Gordon and I were pleased with our moderate gleanings, and the others were pleased with the fun they'd had. We drove home eager for the next adventure: Emory and Gordon were going to Cal; John, Merle and I to Stanford; and Fred to his hitch in the Navy.
A year or so later, I ran into Gordon and he told me an interesting piece of news. Some Indians, he said, had arrived at Big Bend, armed with a stump puller, just after we departed. They moved the boulders, hacked out the gravel, sent it down to the water's edge with our delivery system and used our sluice to extract the gold. If Mr. Vickery's hunch was correct, they must have picked up a small fortune.
But no one, to my knowledge, ever hit upon the strategy of splitting mica schist slabs from the bedrock and panning the gravel trapped in the seams.
I used to think, now and then, of returning to split a few more slabs. For some reason I never got around to it, and it's too late now. The state built a dam at Oroville in the '60s. The boulders of Big Bend--along with our campsite, the little lake we swam in, the railroad tracks and the settlement at Las Plumas--now lie submerged under hundreds of feet of water.
Henry Clay Lindgren, '34, MA '35, PhD '42, is an emeritus professor of psychology at San Francisco State University.
