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THE AUEIFEEOUS GEAVELS OF THE SIEEEA NEVADA. 























which have, in most cases, not been carefully inquired into, partly for want of time and partly 

 because the mass of evidence already accumulated seemed to be so large already. The principal 

 localities seem to have been : the neighborhood of Oroville, Bidwell's Bar, Junction Bar, Saw-mill 

 Bavine, and, in general, the whole region of the foot-hills described in the preceding pages as 

 being covered by deep gravels overlain with heavy deposits of volcanic materials. 



Mr. Amos Bowman, for a time one of the assistants on the Geological Survey, collected con- 

 siderable information in regard to the occurrence of implements at Cherokee, a few miles north of 

 Oroville, in a locality briefly described in the preceding pages.* The facts reported by Mr. Bowman 

 will be found in the Overland Monthly (Vol. XV. p. 34, 1875). As this now defunct periodical 

 will probably be accessible to but few of those who have occasion to consult the present volume, 

 a portion of Mr. Bowman's statements (omitting the accompanying fanciful and somewhat absurd 

 speculations) may here be quoted : — 



" I presented the California Academy .... along with a stone mortar .... which I obtained 



recently at Cherokee, Butte County The mortar is from the hydraulic mines, where from 



half a dozen to a dozen or two have been found, — enough to establish the presence of a large 

 population in the vicinity, taken in connection with all the surrounding facts and circumstances. 

 Several of these mortars I was able to trace through the finders to the particular spot where they 



were found One of the mortars, found by Mr. E. C. Pulham, of the Spring Valley Mining 



Company, was taken out of a shaft which he dug himself in 1853, and was found, according to 

 his testimony, twelve feet underneath undisturbed strata, the character of which is still visible in 

 the bank adjacent. He is certain that the mortar was placed there before the overlying gravel. 



" This mortar was found standing upright, and the pestle was in it, in its proper place, appar- 

 ently just as it had been left by the owner. The material around and above it was fine quartz 

 gravel intermixed with a large proportion of sand ; in short, just the material of an ordinary sea- 

 beach. This was forty or fifty feet above the bed-rock, and about thirty feet above the blue gravel. 



"About 300 feet east of this shaft Mr. Frederic Eaholtz took out in 1853 a similar mortar at a 

 greater depth. I visited both places with Mr. Pulham, and found several mortars still lying 

 around on the top of the blue-gravel bench which is not yet mined away. The locality is about 

 seventy yards cast of Charles Waldeyer's house. Mr. Eaholtz was sent for, and he told me fur- 

 ther that, in 1858, while engaged with Wilson and Abbott in mining in the southwesterly part of 

 the Sugar Loaf, he found in place, forty feet under the surface, a mortar of the same sort in 

 unbroken blue gravel. This blue gravel nowhere comes to the surface, and it extends with the 

 before-mentioned white and yellow gravel, under the Sugar Loaf, and under the Oroville volcanic 

 mesa. It appeared only on the bottom of this claim. He was picking the blue gravel to pieces 

 with a pick, when he found the mortar, which was a portion of the mass of cemented boulders 

 and sand. He picked it out with his own hands. Both these witnesses are trustworthy men, 

 widely acquainted in the county, and they are willing to appear before a notary to certify to the 

 above. 



" The fossils are from two different gravel beds immediately underlying the auriferous gravel 

 formation and the volcanic outflows, at a distance of about one and a half and two and a half 

 miles from Cherokee, in a southwesterly and northwesterly direction respectively. The latter is 

 only about thirty feet underneath the volcanic capping of the Dogtown and Mesilla Valley table- 

 land, in a ravine immediately back of Van Ness's house on Dry Creek." 



Cases similar to the above-cited are reported from a number of localities 

 in both Siskiyou and Trinity Counties. It would be tedious to enumerate all 

 the instances in these counties in which mastodon and other bones of extinct 

 animals are said to have been found in connection with human implements. 





* See ante, pp. 207, 208. 



