CHAPTER XVII.

MISSISSIPPI BAR--A CHINESE CAMP--CHINESE MINERS: THEIR MECHANICAL CONTRIVANCES--THE CHINESE IN CALIFORNIA--THE RAINY SEASON--A FLOOD IN THE RIVER--NEVADA CITY--SNOW-STORM--STARVED OUT--“THROWN-UP” DIRT.

While at this camp, I went down the river two or three miles to see a place called Mississippi Bar, where a company of Chinamen were at work. After an hour’s climbing along the rocky banks, and having crossed and recrossed the river some half-dozen times on pine logs, I at last got down among the Celestials.

There were about a hundred and fifty of them here, living in a perfect village of small tents, all clustered together on the rocks. They had a claim in the bed of the river, which they were working by means of a wing dam. A “wing dam,” I may here mention, is one which first runs half-way across the river, then down the river, and back again to the same side, thus damming off a portion of its bed without the necessity of the more expensive operation of lifting up the whole river bodily in a “flume.”

The Chinamen’s dam was two or three hundred yards in length, and was built of large pine-trees laid one on the top of the other. They must have had great difficulty in handling such immense logs in such a place; but they are exceedingly ingenious in applying mechanical power, particularly in concentrating the force of a large number of men upon one point.

There were Chinamen of the better class among them, who no doubt directed the work, and paid the common men very poor wages--poor at least for California. A Chinaman could be hired for two, or at most three dollars a-day by any one who thought their labour worth so much; but those at work here were most likely paid at a still lower rate, for it was well known that whole shiploads of Chinamen came to the country under a species of bondage to some of their wealthy countrymen in San Francisco, who, immediately on their arrival, shipped them off to the mines under charge of an agent, keeping them completely under control by some mysterious celestial influence, quite independent of the laws of the country.

They sent up to the mines for their use supplies of Chinese provisions and clothing, and thus all the gold taken out by them remained in Chinese hands, and benefited the rest of the community but little by passing through the ordinary channels of trade.

In fact, the Chinese formed a distinct class, which enriched itself at the expense of the country, abstracting a large portion of its latent wealth without contributing, in a degree commensurate with their numbers, to the prosperity of the community of which they formed a part.

The individuals of any community must exist by supplying the wants of others; and when a man neither does this, nor has any wants of his own but those which he provides for himself, he is of no use to his neighbours; but when, in addition to this, he also diminishes the productiveness of the country, he is a positive disadvantage in proportion to the amount of public wealth which he engrosses, and becomes a public nuisance.

What is true of an individual is true also of a class; and the Chinese, though they were no doubt, as far as China was concerned, both productive and consumptive, were considered by a very large party in California to be merely destructive as far as that country was interested.

They were, of course, not altogether so, for such a numerous body as they were could not possibly be so isolated as to be entirely independent of others; but any advantage which the country derived from their presence was too dearly paid for by the quantity of gold which they took from it; and the propriety of expelling all the Chinese from the State was long discussed, both by the press and in the Legislature; but the principles of the American constitution prevailed; the country was open to all the world, and the Chinese enjoyed equal rights with the most favoured nation. In some parts of the mines, however, the miners had their own ideas on the subject,

[Illustration:

J. D. BORTHWICK DEL^{T.} M & N HANHART, LITH.

CHINESE CAMP IN THE MINES]

and would not allow the Chinamen to come among them; but generally they were not interfered with, for they contented themselves with working such poor diggings as it was not thought worth while to take from them.

This claim on the Yuba was the greatest undertaking I ever saw attempted by them.

They expended a vast deal of unnecessary labour in their method of working, and their individual labour, in effect, was as nothing compared with that of other miners. A company of fifteen or twenty white men would have wing-dammed this claim, and worked it out in two or three months, while here were about a hundred and fifty Chinamen humbugging round it all the season, and still had not worked one half the ground.

Their mechanical contrivances were not in the usual rough straightforward style of the mines; they were curious, and very elaborately got up, but extremely wasteful of labour, and, moreover, very ineffective.

The pumps which they had at work here were an instance of this. They were on the principle of a chain-pump, the chain being formed of pieces of wood about six inches long, hingeing on each other, with cross-pieces in the middle for buckets, having about six square inches of surface. The hinges fitted exactly to the spokes of a small wheel, which was turned by a Chinaman at each side of it working a miniature treadmill of four spokes on the same axle. As specimens of joiner-work they were very pretty, but as pumps they were ridiculous; they threw a mere driblet of water: the chain was not even encased in a box--it merely lay in a slanting trough, so that more than one half the capacity of the buckets was lost. An American miner, at the expenditure of one-tenth part of the labour of making such toys, would have set a water-wheel in the river to work an elevating pump, which would have thrown more water in half an hour than four-and-twenty Chinamen could throw in a day with a dozen of these gimcrack contrivances. Their camp was wonderfully clean: when I passed through it, I found a great many of them at their toilet, getting their heads shaved, or plaiting each other’s pigtails; but most of them were at dinner, squatted on the rocks in groups of eight or ten round a number of curious little black pots and dishes, from which they helped themselves with their chopsticks. In the centre was a large bowl of rice. This is their staple article, and they devour it most voraciously. Throwing back their heads, they hold a large cupful to their wide-open mouths, and, with a quick motion of the chopsticks in the other hand, they cause the rice to flow down their throats in a continuous stream.

I received several invitations to dinner, but declined the pleasure, preferring to be a spectator. The rice looked well enough, and the rest of their dishes were no doubt very clean, but they had a very dubious appearance, and were far from suggesting the idea of being good to eat. In the store I found the storekeeper lying asleep on a mat. He was a sleek dirty-looking object, like a fat pig with the hair scalded off, his head being all close shaved excepting the pigtail. His opium-pipe lay in his hand, and the lamp still burned beside him, so I supposed he was already in the seventh heavens. The store was like other stores in the mines, inasmuch as it contained a higgledy-piggledy collection of provisions and clothing, but everything was Chinese excepting the boots. These are the only articles of barbarian costume which the Chinaman adopts, and he always wears them of an enormous size, on a scale commensurate with the ample capacity of his other garments.

The next place I visited was Wamba’s Bar, some miles lower down the river; and from here I intended returning to Nevada, as the season was far advanced, and fine weather could no longer be depended upon.

The very day, however, on which I was to start, the rain commenced, and came down in such torrents that I postponed my departure. It continued to rain heavily for several days, and I had no choice but to remain where I was, as the river rose rapidly to such a height as to be perfectly impassable. It was now about eighty yards wide, and rushed past in a raging torrent, the waves rolling several feet high. Some of the miners up above, trusting to a longer continuance of the dry season, had not removed their flumes from the river, and these it was now carrying down, all broken up into fragments, along with logs and whole pine-trees, which occasionally, as they got foul of other objects, reared straight up out of the water. It was a grand sight; the river seemed as if it had suddenly arisen to assert its independence, and take vengeance for all the restraints which had been placed upon it, by demolishing flumes, dams, and bridges, and carrying off everything within its reach.

The house I was staying in was the only one in the neighbourhood, and was a sort of half store, half boarding-house. Several miners lived in it, and there were, besides, two or three storm-stayed travellers like myself. It was a small clapboard house, built on a rock immediately over the river, but still so far above it that we anticipated no danger from the flood. We were close to the mouth of a creek, however, which we one night fully expected would send the house on a voyage of discovery down the river. Some drift-logs up above had got jammed, and so altered the course of the stream as to bring it sweeping past the corner of the house, which merely rested on a number of posts. The waters rose to within an inch or two of the floor; and as they carried logs and rocks along with them, we feared that the posts would be carried away, when the whole fabric would immediately slip off the rocks into the angry river a few feet below. There was a small window at one end through which we might have escaped, and this was taken out that no time might be lost when the moment for clearing out should arrive, while axes also were kept in readiness, to smash through the back of the house, which rested on _terra firma_. It was an exceedingly dark night, very cold, and raining cats and dogs, so that the prospect of having to jump out of the window and sit on the rocks till morning was by no means pleasant to contemplate; but the idea of being washed into the river was still less agreeable, and no one ventured to sleep, as the water was already almost up to the floor, and a very slight rise would have smashed up the whole concern so quickly, that it was best to be on the alert. The house fortunately stood it out bravely till daylight, when some of the party put an end to the danger by going up the creek, and removing the accumulation of logs which had turned the water from its proper channel.

After the rain ceased, we had to wait for two days till the river fell sufficiently to allow of its being crossed with any degree of safety; but on the third day, along with another man who was going to Nevada, I made the passage in a small skiff--not without considerable difficulty, however, for the river was still much swollen, and covered with logs and drift-wood. On landing on the other side, we struck straight up the face of the mountain, and soon gained the high land, where we found a few inches of snow fast disappearing before the still powerful rays of the sun.

We arrived at Nevada after a day and a half of very muddy travelling, but the weather was bright and clear, and seemed to be a renewal of the dry season. It did not last long, however, for a heavy snow-storm soon set in, and it continued snowing, raining, and freezing for about three weeks,--the snow lying on the ground all the time, to the depth of three or four feet. The continuance of such weather rendered the roads so impracticable as to cut off all supplies from Marysville or Sacramento, and accordingly prices of provisions of all kinds rose enormously. The miners could not work with so much snow on the ground, and altogether there was a prospect of hard times. Flour was exceedingly high even in San Francisco, several capitalists having entered into a flour-monopoly speculation, buying up every cargo as it arrived, and so keeping up the price. In Nevada it was sold at a dollar a-pound, and in other places farther up in the mountains it was doled out, as long as the stock lasted, at three or four times that price. In many parts the people were reduced to the utmost distress from the scarcity of food, and the impossibility of obtaining any fresh supplies. At Downieville, the few men who had remained there were living on barley, a small stock of which was fortunately kept there as mule-feed. Several men perished in the snow in trying to make their escape from distant camps in the mountains; two or three lost their lives near the ranch of my friend the Italian hurdy-gurdy player, while carrying flour down to their camps on the river; and in some places people saved themselves from starvation by eating dogs and mules.

Men kept pouring into Nevada from all quarters, starved out of their own camps, and all bearing the same tale of starvation and distress, and glad to get to a place where food was to be had. The town, being a sort of harbour of refuge for miners in remote diggings, became very full; and as no work could be done in such weather, the population had nothing to do but to amuse themselves the best way they could. A theatrical company were performing nightly to crowded houses; the gambling saloons were kept in full blast; and in fact, every day was like a Sunday, from the number of men one saw idling about, playing cards, and gambling.

Although the severity of the weather interrupted mining operations for the time, it was nevertheless a subject of rejoicing to the miners generally, for many localities could only be worked when plenty of water was running in the ravines, and it was not unusual for men to employ themselves in the dry season in “throwing up” heaps of dirt, in anticipation of having plenty of water in winter to wash it. This was commonly done in flats and ravines where water could only be had immediately after heavy rains. It was easy to distinguish a heap of thrown-up dirt from a pile of “tailings,” or dirt already washed, and property of this sort was quite sacred, the gold being not less safe there--perhaps safer--than if already in the pocket of the owner. In whatever place a man threw up a pile of dirt, he might leave it without any concern for its safety, and remove to another part of the country, being sure to find it intact when he returned to wash it, no matter how long he might be absent.