‘if THE AURIFEROUS GRAVELS OF THE SIERRA NEVADA. 
_ 
tude, on the main ridge as well as on spurs of them, and even on isolated 
peaks.” * 
The current opinion of the Californian miners in regard to the origin of 
the high gravels, at the time of the beginning of the State Geological Survey 
under the direction of the writer, is probably very well stated by Mr. Hittell 
himself, and reads as follows: “The alluvial placers may be divided into 
ancient and modern. The ancient are those formed by streams which no 
longer exist, or have found new channels. Two very remarkable examples 
of the ancient stream placers are found in California; one called the Blue 
Lead of Sierra County, the other Table Mountain in Tuolumne County. It 
is supposed that the Blue Lead was once the bed of a large river, about fifty 
miles eastward of the present position of Sacramento River and parallel with 
its course. Table Mountain is a pile of basalt, standing on what was, in the 
remote past, the bed of a river nearly parallel with the Stanislaus. These 
ancient and deserted channels are not rare, and are found from a very small 
to a very large size. They are usually buried at a considerable depth be- 
neath dirt and gravel. Sometimes they are found high above the level of 
the present streams running near them.”+ This statement of Mr. Hittell 
is much nearer the truth, as now made out from a long series of careful 
examinations by the Geological Survey, than anything which had been pre- 
viously published, and contrasts in a marked degree with the crudities con- 
tained in the official report of a French mining engineer. 
The essential fact that the high gravels of the western slope of the Sierra 
Nevada have to do with an ancient river system having been so clearly recog- 
nized by many of the miners, it is not difficult, from the stand-point of our 
present knowledge of the conditions in which they occur, to understand why 
this view did not meet with universal acceptance. It was always hampered 
with the idea that there was one great river running parallel with the crest 
of the Sierra, as we see in the quotation just given from Mr. Hittell’s book. 
As long as this determination to change the whole present condition of the 
drainage system of the Sierra was persisted in, without accounting in any 
way for such a change; as long as a river forty miles in breadth had to be 
imagined, in order to embrace all the deposits in question, and regardless of 
the fact that one of its banks would have to be some thousands of feet higher 
than the other, so long of ccurse the ancient river theory would continue to 
* Quoted in Hittell’s Mining in the Pacific States, pp. 74, 75. 
+ l.c. p. 63. 
