IN THE SIEBBA FOOT-HILLS 327 



fact that many claims were profitably worked in 

 them by sinking shafts to a depth of 200 feet or 

 more, and hoisting the dirt by a windlass. Should 

 the dip of this ancient channel be such as to make 

 the Stanislaus Canon available as a dump, then 

 the grand deposit might be worked by the hy 

 draulic method, and although a long, expensive 

 tunnel would be required, the scheme might still 

 prove profitable, for there is " millions in it." 



The importance of these ancient gravels as gold 

 fountains is well known to miners. Even the su 

 perficial placers of the present streams have de 

 rived much of their gold from them. According 

 to all accounts, the Murphy placers have been very 

 rich " terrific rich," as they say here. The hills 

 have been cut and scalped, and every gorge and 

 gulch and valley torn to pieces and disemboweled, 

 expressing a fierce and desperate energy hard to 

 understand. Still, any kind of effort-making is 

 better than inaction, and there is something sub 

 lime in seeing men working in dead earnest at any 

 thing, pursuing an object with glacier-like energy 

 and persistence. Many a brave fellow has recorded 

 a most eventful chapter of life on these Calaveras 

 rocks. But most of the pioneer miners are sleep 

 ing now, their wild day done, while the few survi 

 vors linger languidly in the washed-out gulches or 

 sleepy village like harried bees around the ruins of 

 their hive. " We have no industry left now," they 

 told me, " and no men ; everybody and everything 

 hereabouts has gone to decay. We are only bum 

 mers out of the game, a thin scatterin' of poor, 

 dilapidated cusses, compared with what we used 



