By
and
by,
an
old
friend
of
mine, a miner, came
down
from
one
of
the
decayed mining
camps
of
Tuolumne, California,
and
I went
back
with
him.
We
lived
in
a small
cabin
on
a
verdant
hillside,
and
there
were
not
five
other
cabins
in
view
over
the
wide
expanse
of
hill
and
forest.
Yet
a flourishing
city
of
two
or
three
thousand
population
had occupied
this
grassy
dead
solitude
during
the
flush times
of
twelve
or
fifteen
years
before,
and
where
our
cabin
stood had
once
been
the
heart
of
the
teeming hive,
the
centre
of
the
city.
When
the
mines
gave
out
the
town
fell
into
decay,
and
in
a
few
years
wholly
disappeared—streets, dwellings, shops, everything—and left
no
sign.
The
grassy slopes
were
as
green
and
smooth
and
desolate
of
life
as
if
they
had
never
been disturbed.
The
mere
handful
of
miners
still
remaining, had
seen
the
town
spring
up
spread, grow
and
flourish
in
its
pride;
and
they
had
seen
it
sicken
and
die,
and
pass
away
like
a dream.
With
it
their
hopes
had died,
and
their
zest
of
life.
They
had
long
ago
resigned
themselves
to
their
exile,
and
ceased
to
correspond
with
their
distant
friends
or
turn
longing
eyes
toward
their
early
homes.
They
had
accepted
banishment, forgotten
the
world
and
been forgotten
of
the
world.
They
were
far
from
telegraphs
and
railroads,
and
they
stood,
as
it
were,
in
a
living
grave,
dead
to
the
events
that
stirred
the
globe's
great
populations,
dead
to
the
common
interests
of
men,
isolated
and
outcast
from
brotherhood
with
their
kind.
It
was
the
most
singular,
and
almost
the
most
touching
and
melancholy
exile
that
fancy
can
imagine.—One
of
my associates
in
this
locality,
for
two
or
three
months,
was
a
man
who
had had a
university
education;
but
now
for
eighteen
years
he
had decayed
there
by
inches, a bearded, rough- clad, clay-stained miner,
and
at
times,
among
his
sighings
and
soliloquizings,
he
unconsciously
interjected
vaguely
remembered
Latin
and
Greek
sentences—dead
and
musty tongues, meet
vehicles
for
the
thoughts
of
one
whose
dreams
were
all
of
the
past,
whose
life
was
a failure; a tired man,
burdened
with
the
present,
and
indifferent
to
the
future; a
man
without
ties, hopes, interests,
waiting
for
rest
and
the
end.
In
that
one
little
corner
of
California
is
found a
species
of
mining
which
is
seldom
or
never
mentioned
in
print.
It
is
called
"pocket mining"
and
I
am
not
aware
that
any
of
it
is
done
outside
of
that
little
corner.
The
gold
is
not
evenly
distributed
through
the
surface dirt,
as
in
ordinary
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
a
rich
and
sudden
harvest.
There
are
not
now
more
than
twenty
pocket
miners
in
that
entire
little
region. I
think
I
know
every
one
of
them
personally. I
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
find a
pocket
and
take
out
of
it
two
thousand
dollars
in
two
dips
of
his
shovel. I
have
known
him
to
take
out
three
thousand
dollars
in
two
hours,
and
go
and
pay
up
every
cent
of
his
indebtedness,
then
enter
on
a
dazzling
spree
that
finished
the
last
of
his
treasure
before
the
night
was
gone.
And
the
next
day
he
bought
his
groceries
on
credit
as
usual,
and
shouldered
his
pan
and
shovel
and
went
off
to
the
hills
hunting
pockets
again
happy
and
content.
This
is
the
most
fascinating
of
all
the
different
kinds
of
mining,
and
furnishes
a
very
handsome percentage
of
victims
to
the
lunatic asylum.
Pocket
hunting
is
an
ingenious
process.
You
take
a spadeful
of
earth
from
the
hill-side
and
put
it
in
a
large
tin
pan
and
dissolve
and
wash
it
gradually
away
till
nothing
is
left
but
a teaspoonful
of
fine
sediment. Whatever
gold
was
in
that
earth
has remained, because, being
the
heaviest,
it
has
sought
the
bottom.
Among
the
sediment
you
will
find
half
a
dozen
yellow
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
delighted
again,
because
you
know
you
are
on
the
right
scent.
You
lay
an
imaginary
plan,
shaped
like
a fan,
with
its
handle
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
and
been
washed
down
the
hill,
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
are
outside
the
spread
of
the
fan;
and
at
last,
twenty
yards
up
the
hill
your
lines
have
converged
to
a 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
are
nothing
to
you;
you
sweat
and
dig
and
delve
with
a
frantic
interest—and
all
at
once
you
strike it!
Up
comes
a spadeful
of
earth
and
quartz
that
is
all
lovely
with
soiled
lumps
and
leaves
and
sprays
of
gold. Sometimes
that
one
spadeful
is
all—$500. Sometimes
the
nest
contains
$10,000,
and
it
takes
you
three
or
four
days
to
get
it
all
out.
The
pocket-miners
tell
of
one
nest
that
yielded
$60,000
and
two
men exhausted
it
in
two
weeks,
and
then
sold
the
ground
for
$10,000
to
a
party
who
never
got $300
out
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
the
rains;
for
the
rains
beat
upon
these
little
piles
and
wash
them
down
and
expose
the
gold, possibly
right
over
a pocket.
Two
pockets
were
found
in
this
way
by
the
same
man
in
one
day.
One
had $5,000
in
it
and
the
other
$8,000.
That
man
could
appreciate
it,
for
he
hadn't had a
cent
for
about
a year.
In
Tuolumne
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
a trail,
and
nearly
always
sat
down
to
rest
on
a
great
boulder
that
lay
beside
the
path.
In
the
course
of
thirteen
years
they
had
worn
that
boulder
tolerably 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
boulder
with
a sledge- hammer.
They
examined
one
of
these
flakes
and
found
it
rich
with
gold.
That
boulder
paid
them
$800 afterward.
But
the
aggravating
circumstance
was
that
these
"Greasers"
knew
that
there
must
be
more
gold
where
that
boulder
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
$120,000.
The
two
American
miners
who
used
to
sit
on
the
boulder
are
poor
yet,
and
they
take
turn
about
in
getting
up
early
in
the
morning
to
curse
those
Mexicans—and
when
it
comes
down
to
pure
ornamental
cursing,
the
native
American
is
gifted
above
the
sons
of
men. I
have
dwelt
at
some
length
upon
this
matter
of
pocket
mining
because
it
is
a
subject
that
is
seldom
referred
to
in
print,
and
therefore
I
judged
that
it
would
have
for
the
reader
that
interest
which
naturally
attaches
to
novelty.