Western Mining History : Reliving the Industrial Revolution of the West

Excerpt from "The Gold Rush" by Frank W. Lewis

Nathaniel had continued leading his trading party north on the trail along the edge of the mountains. They traded cows and supplies as they went. Everywhere they went, men wanted meat and other supplies. Caleb was beginning to understand the full nature of the gold fields. Nathaniel had convinced Caleb they should charge ten ounces of gold per steer. Caleb had been against it at first, thinking it was too much, but everywhere they traveled, they sold cows and other food at prices beyond what seemed reasonable to charge, just as Lu had predicted. Gold seemed plentiful to some of the hardworking placer miners. Other groups would go together and pool their resources in order to get supplies and then split them up.

"Your friend Perce is just around the bend ahead of us," Nathaniel told Caleb. "I have the receipt you gave me for his gold from my last trip up here. Your receipt verifies the one I gave him. He's making money hand over fist with very primitive methods. He has the best placer diggings of anything I've seen in my wanderings around the gold fields. He manages to keep thirty or so men working most of the time, mostly down-and-out prospectors. Every time news of a new strike is rumored, many of his men take their pay and run off to the new diggings, but they're soon replaced by others who have found little or no gold and need to eat.

"The placer diggings I want us to try to get control of are just above him a mile or so. It's not nearly as rich as his is, but the volume of material is a hundred times greater. The gravel beds there are several hundred feet thick, all containing a small amount of gold. There are a number of miners barely eking out an existence, more like a starvation diet. What I'd like to do is buy them all out and expand the ground position, go up above it, build a dam in the river up above and bring the water down in a wooden flume or ditches to where it can go into iron piping and finally be used to blast the alluvial down through the piping and nozzles. We can set up long nozzles and blast the water and placer gravels down and over riffles. We should gain many pounds of gold for every working man once I have ordered all the machinery, steam engines, and the water system I've got planned. I've only preliminarily plans so far. I want to get some engineers hired and a surveyor once we have the land secured. A few trusted men and I will clean the gold up out of the riffles daily. We can't afford to have everyone with their hands in the cleanup of the nuggets. I'll set up guards too. I've already made up my mind on that."

Von Braun had wanted to keep his assaying and smelting business separate from his association of mining with Caleb. It was agreed and written up by Caleb's lawyer that their only association was to be in a possible lode gold claim that Nathaniel had found. Caleb would continue his trading business with those who had already purchased an interest in his business and Von Braun could keep his assaying and smelting business for his own account. The placer ground that Nathaniel was looking at would not be involved with Von Braun.

"We'll have the lode mine that the Von Brauns are working down south and this placer. No one person or company of individuals can acquire it all. This gold field is so big it staggers the imagination. Every river coming down out of the mountains has some gold in it as far as I can tell. The major ones are the Stanislaus, Mokelumne, American, Yuba, and Feather. Many of the small ones that feed into them are the same. They're all carrying gold. The general strike of the belt seems to be over a hundred miles long. What this means is that the lode that produced it is traveling generally north to south or a little north to east and is over a hundred miles long. As far as my limited knowledge is concerned, this is the greatest gold discovery the world has ever known.



Bio of author Frank W. Lewis

As I think back on my life, it was great fun spending over 50 years searching for treasure--gold and silver mines, along with other minerals. I found enough bounty to live comfortably, raise four kids and help them develop into educated and useful citizens.

When I sold my company, I had significant property holdings in all but two Nevada counties, plus large holdings in San Juan County, Colorado.

Starting out, I had a number of very small sales of mining lands and leases. My first significant sale was in 1968 when a Nevada State Mine Inspector who I knew just well enough to have a cup of coffee with, phoned me in my office in Van Nuys, California and asked me for a 30 day free option on a largely unexplored group of mining claims I owned in the Fairview Mining District of Churchill County, Nevada. Normally I would never give anyone a free option, but this man was intimately involved with every mining company in the state. He was offering an end price that was big enough to make my prospector’s mouth salivate. I gave him half a sheet of paper for thirty days on a bunch of property not then earning me a dime and in fact on which I was spending money exploring, sampling and assaying. I had hired two geology students from San Diego State to stake claims, map and sample, building up my project around my patented land holdings which amounted as I recall to about 400 acres of patented deeded lands and maybe double that of located claims. The properties had not produced a cent since 1906.

To my surprise my half page option was assigned from my acquaintance, the Nevada State Mine Inspector, to another company with a name something like Basic Industries, Inc. and was then sold to Hughes Tool Company which exercised my option and offered the full cash price, a virtual fortune in 1968. There was a kicker, as it turned out, when I insisted that there be an escrow stating how much money I was getting and how much money everyone else was getting. I told my lawyer at the time, Edward C. Reed, Jr., that I thought something was wrong with this as the option I gave was only a couple of weeks old, but he told me I had to go ahead with the deal, and if I didn't, would be subject to being sued for damages.

Although I never met Howard Hughes, I wonder if anyone did after that. I think he was bottled up in drugs or dementia or something and this was just a way of draining cash out of his company, but that is merely an opinion of mine.

Regardless of my desire not to complete the deal, I got enough cash to go to Reno and buy an old 1939 estate that was for sale on the Washoe County Golf Course, consisting of an acre of lawn, six garages, a shop, tool sheds, a 6,000 square foot house, and a lower back yard as large as the lawns. In 1968, this included a private gate onto the golf course.

Since retiring, I have published five novels and written several more manuscripts, soon to emerge.