After the snow went off three German sailors came up and took a river
claim a short distance above us on a north fork of the north fork of the
stream, where one side of the canon was perpendicular and the other
sloped back only slightly. Here they put logs across the river, laid
stringers on these, and covered the bottom with fir boughs. Then they
put stakes at the sides and rigged a canvas flume over their bridge
through which they turned the whole current of the river, leaving a
nearly dry bed beneath. This we called pretty good engineering and
management on the part of the sailor boys, for no lumber was to be had,
and they had made themselves masters of the situation with the material
on hand.

They went to work under their log aqueduct, and found the claim very
rich in coarse gold. They went to town every Saturday night with good
big bags of dust, and as they were open-hearted fellows, believing that
a sailor always has the best of luck, they played cards freely, always
betting on the Jack and Queen, and spent their money more easily than
they earned it. They were quite partial to the ladies, and patronizing
the bar and card tables as liberally as they did, usually returned to
camp on Monday or Tuesday with a mule load of grub and whiskey as all
the visible proceeds of a week's successful mining; but when Saturday
night came around again we were pretty sure to see the jolly sailors
going past with heavy bags of gold. They left one nearly pure piece of
gold at Langdon's Express office that weighed five pounds, and another
as large as a man's hand, of the shape of a prickly pear leaf.

They worked their claim with good success until the snow water came down
and forced them out. I went one day to see them, and they took a pan of
dirt from behind a big rock and washed it out, getting as much as two
teacupfuls of nuggets, worth perhaps a thousand dollars. When they went
away they said they would go to Germany to see their poor relatives and
friends, and one of them really went home, but the other two had spent
all their money before they were ready to leave San Francisco. These men
were, without doubt, the inventors of the canvas flume which was
afterward used so successfully in various places.

While I was still here the now famous Downieville Butte quartz mine was
discovered, but there was no way then of working quartz successfully,
and just at that time very little was done with it, but afterward, when
it was lear