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.