r expulsion by the Mexican government.

CHAPTER XVI.

OFFICIAL REPORT ON THE GOLD MINES.

The following is an official account of a visit paid to the gold region
in July by Colonel Mason, who had been appointed to the military
command in California, and made his report to the authorities at
Washington. It is dated from head-quarters at Monterey, August 17,
1848.

"Sir,--I have the honour to inform you that, accompanied by Lieut. W.T.
Sherman, 3rd Artillery, A.A.A. General, I started on the 12th of June
last to make a tour through the northern part of California. We reached
San Francisco on the 20th, and found that all, or nearly all, its male
inhabitants had gone to the mines. The town, which a few months before
was so busy and thriving, was then almost deserted. Along the whole
route mills were lying idle, fields of wheat were open to cattle and
horses, houses vacant, and farms going to waste.

"On the 5th we arrived in the neighbourhood of the mines, and proceeded
twenty-five miles up the American Fork, to a point on it now known as
the Lower Mines, or Mormon Diggings. The hill sides were thickly strewn
with canvas tents and bush-harbours; a store was erected, and several
boarding shanties in operation. The day was intensely hot, yet about
200 men were at work in the full glare of the sun, washing for
gold--some with tin pans, some with close woven Indian baskets, but the
greater part had a rude machine known as the cradle. This is on
rockers, six or eight feet long, open at the foot, and its head had a
coarse grate, or sieve; the bottom is rounded, with small cleets nailed
across. Four men are required to work this machine; one digs the ground
in the bank close by the stream; another carries it to the cradle, and
empties it on the grate; a third gives a violent rocking motion to the
machine, whilst a fourth dashes on water from the stream itself. The
sieve keeps the coarse stones from entering the cradle, the current of
water washes off the earthy matter, and the gravel is gradually carried
out at the foot of the machine, leaving the gold mixed with a heavy
fine black sand above the first cleets. The sand and gold mixed
together are then drawn off through auger holes into a pan below, are
dried in the sun, and afterwards separated by blowing off the sand. A
party of four men, thus employed at the Lower Mines, average 100
dollars a-day. The Indians, and those who have nothing but pans or
willow baskets,