ning out the
gold. Sinking shaft to reach bed-rock. Drifting coyote-holes in search
of crevices. Water-ditches and water companies. Washing out in
long-tom. Waste-ditches. Tailings. Fluming companies. Rockers.
Gold-mining is nature's great lottery scheme. Thousands taken out in a
few hours. Six ounces in six months. "Almost all seem to have lost".
Jumped claims. Caving in of excavations. Abandonment of expensive
paying shafts. Miner making "big strike" almost sure prey of
professional gamblers. As spring opens, gamblers flock in like birds of
prey. After stay of only four days, gambler leaves Bar with over a
thousand dollars of miners' gold. As many foreigners as Americans on
the river. Foreigners generally extremely ignorant and degraded. Some
Spaniards of the highest eduction and accomplishment. Majority of
Americans mechanics of better class. Sailors and farmers next in
number. A few merchants and steamboat-clerks. A few physicians. One
lawyer. Ranchero of distinguished appearance an accomplished
monte-dealer and horse-jockey. Said to have been a preacher in the
States. Such not uncommon for California.

Letter _the_ Fifteenth

MINING METHODS--MINERS, GAMBLERS, ETC.

_From our Log Cabin_, INDIAN BAR,

_April_ 10, 1852.

I have been haunted all day, my dear M., with an intense ambition to
write you a letter which shall be dreadfully commonplace and severely
utilitarian in its style and contents. Not but that my epistles are
_always_ commonplace enough (spirits of Montague and Sevigne, forgive
me!), but hitherto I have not really _tried_ to make them so. Now,
however, I _intend_ to be stupidly prosy, with malice aforethought, and
without one mitigating circumstance, except, perchance, it be the
temptations of that above-mentioned ambitious little devil to palliate
my crime.

You would certainly wonder, were you seated where I now am, how any one
with a quarter of a soul _could_ manufacture herself into a bore amid
such surroundings as these. The air is as balmy as that of a
midsummer's day in the sunniest valleys of New England. It is four
o'clock in the evening, and I am sitting on a cigar-box outside of our
cabin. From this spot not a person is to be seen, except a man who is
building a new wing to the Humboldt. Not a human sound, but a slight
noise made by the aforesaid individual in tacking on a roof of blue
drilling to the room which he is finishing, disturbs the stillness
which fills this purest