208 EAST PRUSSIA TO THE GOLDEN GATE 



tlier below on the rock— the ''bedrock"— and to reach 

 that, the miner has often to dig down a hundred feet and 

 even more; it is, however, by no means certain that he 

 will find gold there, or in sufficient quantity to pay him 

 for the hard labor and the time spent in getting there. 

 Often 3 or 4 men will work for a whole month on such a 

 hole, and when they reach the bedrock they find perhaps 

 30 or 40 Dollars, which means that they have thrown 

 away hard labor, time and money. The sinking of these 

 shafts in the valleys and ravines is a lottery; but it offers 

 the only chance here in California to become wealthy 

 with one stroke; because out of such a shaft (they gener- 

 ally are 6 or 8 feet square), have been often taken forty 

 or fifty thousand dollars. Gold at the bottom of such a 

 hole, on the bedrock, is always found in coarse pieces of 

 from one dollar to five or six hundred dollars each, and 

 it lays there in the crevices and on the rock, so that all 

 you have to do is to scrape it together with a knife. 



It is this prospect which, during the summer, draws 

 every one up to the mountains; and so— should I succeed 

 during that time in saving a few hundred dollars either 

 on this or on any other bar— I, too, shall go up to the Dry 

 Diggings and try my luck there. It is possible that I 

 may work for several months for nothing; yea, I may 

 work — and it is hard work I assure you — and lose my 

 money besides, but it might just be that I may return 

 with several thousand Dollars. Being a miner now, I 

 shall try all my chances to make money. 



One kind of Dry Diggings are the quartz mines. You 

 know that often quartz is found containing free gold. 

 To get that out the rock is reduced to powder in the so- 

 called quartz mill, and out of that powder the gold is 

 afterwards extracted. You can imagine that such a 

 quartz mill is expensive; the outlay for a small one is 

 about twenty thousand dollars. They can only be estab- 

 lished where the quartz is rich. Quartz which pays less 

 than 5 cents per pound will not pay for crushing. 



The connecting link between the Diy Diggings and 

 the Wet Diggings are the Ravine Diggings. The ravines 



