THE BILLION DOLLAR ANSWER
George McKnight rubbed the stubble on his cheek and stared at the waters of Wolf Creek, a narrow stream curling and skipping through the heart of Boston Ravine, a rude settlement of dirty tens and red-flanneled miners.
It looks pretty rough here, too, he thought to himself. He lifted his eyes so he could see down the stream and took in a staggered line of sluice panners on the shore; some bent over the stream, others resting on rocks.
A year before, in 1849, when there were just a few fellows around, a man could make a living, might even get ahead some. But the miners had come on fast, swarming over the stream banks so thick, that you could send a message from one camp to another having it relayed don the line, man to man, without any having to holler.
He had tried the diggings a Rough and Ready, then Newtown, and had even put in a lick at Coyote Creek. They had all been good, until the crowds moved in. Now he was down to Wolf Creek, and that was being played out fast.
It was a strange country, the Sierra Nevada Mountains, McKnight thought. An army without banners had marched upon the hills from every corner of the earth, it seemed. And for what? For the little bit of gold that rested in the placer streams and pretty soon that bit would be just about gone.
A few men had seen their dreams realized but most had not. Yet, on the hopes of striking it rich, camps and towns were rising. Some of the men were already saying that Grass Valley, a mile north, would some day be as big as most of the camps in the Mother Lode down south, but McKnight didn’t know. He shook his head. On what would it grow? With the gold gone from the placer streams, what else was there to build towns or, except farming, and the land was too hilly for farming.
McKnight rubbed his arms with his hands and realized the afternoon had turned chilly. It was October; the night would be crisp. He turned to George Crandel, a slender 17-year-old boy, just then peering into his sluice pan. "Well, I’m going, home, McKnight told him. "I’ve got to pick up some pitch pine for my fire."
Crandel nodded. "This is my last pan. I’ll be up the hill right after you."
"Don’t get too rich," McKnight called with a laugh.
"Not around here," Crandel replied disgustedly.
McKnight climbed up a pine-covered hump east of Boston Ravine and filled his arms with pitch pine. Then he turned toward his cabin on the Wolf Creek miners optimistically, and with customary exaggeration, called Gold Hill.
As McKnight plodded toward his small, rough cabin he stubbed his toe against a ledge of rock hidden by a thick layer of pine needles, and kicked loose a chunk of odd-looking stone. Being an excitable man of orderly habits, he set his load down in a neat pile before he picked up the stone and rolled it in his hands. In the heart of the crystalline rock were thick yellow clumps. The stuff looked like gold but who ever heard of gold imbedded in quartz? This was something new.
A few of the miners resting in front of their cabins came up and looked. McKnight handed the mineral around. The miners shook their heads and shrugged their shoulders. Maybe it’s just a freak of nature, they said. No use getting upset about it. The real gold comes so you can wash it free. This stuff will never dissolve.
But one person there knew history in the making when he saw it.
George Crandel, attracted by the goings on of the older men, took one glimpse of the shining yellow and went tearing back down the slope to Boston Ravine, shouting "Gold Gold!"
The men in the camp did not stop to ask questions. Grabbing their picks and shovels, they ran in the direction Crandel pointed. By nightfall Gold Hill was a swarm with miners. Claims of 30 by 40 feet were staked off, and the frenzied prospecting began.
The first results were almost unbievable. As deep as the men dug, the gold quarts were still visible.
One man paused long enough to throw his arms around Mcknight and yell: "Why this is a bigger discovery than Jim Marshall made at Sutter’s Mill!"
But some of the miners begain to worry. "There’s so much of it," they complained "it won’t be worth any more then iron."
This fear was overwhelmed by the excitement that spread up and down the state an over the land. Within a few days every manjack in the whole Mother Lode was seeking a rich vein of his own. Not hammer nor an anvil, for 20 miles around Grass Valley, was used for anything but pounding the quartz to dust so as to remove the gold. There was a run on the drug stores for mortars and pestles.
Soon rich lode findings were reported along the whole length of the Mother Lode. Every day brought word of a new strike. Each hump of earth was explored by probing fingers, every suggestion of a vein was resolutely followed to its source.
To the hills of Grass Valley came a surge of placer miners, abandoning their long toms and rockers. This was big stuff. Not a creek bed that could be worked out in a few days or weeks, but gold that ran deep in the earth and grew richer with each foot of digging. Within a six mile radius of Grass Valley a hundred mines were dug.
Overnight, mining camps throughout the northern diggings sprang up like weeds. One day there was nothing but a man and his claim; the next day a community was being built. Within a year dozens of settlements had skyrocketed into existence.
Grass Valley mushroomed. In the spring of 1851, the 15 or 20 dwellings had grown to 150 buildings, several stores, a hotel, a number of saloons, and a dozen shops. In 1852 Nevada County could boast of 22,000 people, including 30,226 Indians and 03,886 Chinese.
As in placer diggings, few men made it rich at lode mining. There were a hundred heartaches for every success. Nature played coy tricks on the miners, exposing a small vein of gold and then abruptly breaking off the gold quartz and turning the ledge barren. Sometimes months and years would be required to trace the "lost" veins. And there were fierce struggles or claims, some ending in pitched battles where men were killed or wounded.
No sooner had lode mining begun than a problem arose—how to get the gold out of the quartz so that wealth could be realized. The primitive methods used by the first miners were time-consuming and unprofitable. A better way had to be found. Mexican arrestras, run by mule power, were used to grind the quartz, but this operation was also too slow. Quartz-reduction mills, employing giant stamps, were built , and after costly experimentation were developed to perfection.
When the mills were still in their infancy, a novel idea for freeing the gold from the rock was suggested by a "Dr. Rodgers," a worldly gentleman who rode into Nevada City from points unannounced. His proposal was the establishment of a smelting company—with himself as president, of course, since the secret formula was his.
In no time the good citizens of the area had put $80,000 into the shrewd doctor’s enterprise. When all the money available had been gathered, a furnace was built, gold quartz put into the oven, and a fire started. From miles around the miners came to watch. Most of them camped by the smelter for the two days the fires burned, not daring to stroll off lest they miss the great moment.
At the end of the two days the fire had burned itself out ant the stack cooled. To the accompaniment of whistling, shouting and banging of revolvers, Dr. Rodgers unlatched the iron flume door and surveyed his scientific achievement. Not a speck of gold was present—everything had been reduced to ashes!
"There must have been a slight error in my calculations," explained the doctor hastily. "I must go to my hotel to check my figures." He was never again seen in those parts. Whatever other unorthodox formulae he knew, the state doctor adhered staunchly to the old standby that fly-by-nighters had been following since the first sucker was fleeced: get out while the chumps are still scratching their heads.
Long after the placer diggings were played out, the great mines of the Mother Lode were still booming. Of the $87 million taken from Columbia alone, the greatest part came from quartz. From Jackson to Plymouth, gold worth $160 million was dug from the ground. The richest takes, however, were from the mines near the site of Gold Hill. The Empire-Star mines yielded $120 million, the Idaho-Maryland more than$64 million. Gold Center, just a few blocks from Grass Valley’s business district, was food for $2.5 million. In nearby Nevada City gold and silver worth $12 million was hauled out of the Lava Cap.
A month after McKnight stumbled onto gold quartz, some of the miners thought they had reached down as far as they could ever go; they had burrowed into the earth to the depth of 75 feet. The Empire Mine operations later reached a mile beneath the surface and the Kennedy, near Jackson, went even deeper. More than 75 miles of channels were cut inside the Empire alone.
McKnight’s discovery led to a revolutionary change in the gold-mining industry. The pick gave way to the shaft, the sluice pan to the stamp. Small claims were combined into giant holdings. As the placer camps gave up, the lode-mining towns grew and stabilized themselves. The predominantly male settlements were replaced by family communities. The primitive techniques of individual production yielded to the more profitable methods of large-scale production. And the social organization of the mining towns, however simple and placid it appeared on the surface, grew as complex as the intricate mining machinery.
From the very first, Grass Valley was the cradle and laboratory of the industry. Here new ideas were born and tested; here equipment was tried and judged; here specialists received their practical training. A minor who could say he was once in Grass Valley-though to himself admitting he had spent only a night there—was sure of a job in any gold mine in the world. To have directed the operations in a Grass Valley mine was the highest distinction a mining engineer could receive. It was worth more in honor and prospects than the highest degree granted any university.
One hundred and twelve years have come and gone since that October rush to Gold Hill. And what of McKnight, the forgotten man who started it all? Few books mention him. Only in the yellowing pages of obscure long-forgotten pioneer family histories are found the stands of evidence to weave a tale of what happened that October day. There is no record of how McKnight looked; net even a tiny portrait of him has ever been found. A plaque on Gold Hill is the only public reminder of him that exists. And—to show how little attention has been paid—his name on the plaque is misspelled, the "Mc" being omitted.
Gold Hill is a seldom visited mass of rubble now, and Boston Ravine is only a filling station and a one-man garage.
But Wolf Creek still flows, and all around Gold Hill there are small, simple cabins, some of them looking like the miner’s shacks of sluice pan days. With a little imagination one can see McKnight in this setting, stubbing his toe, picking up the stone, curiously examining it, and wondering if it had any value.
A billion dollars worth of gold is history’s answer.
SOURCE
The West Magazine July 1965, By Ralph Friedman