THE CHANNELS: SIERRA COUNTY. 211 
Nebraska and American Hill, both of which have proved its richness, and finally on toward Eureka 
south, in Nevada County, where it is extensively opened and worked with great success and profit 
by many mining companies. Here the celebrated North Bloomfield Company (at an expenditure 
said to have been, for some time past, $60,000 per month for labor and material alone) is now 
opening this channel with a bed-rock tunnel one and a half miles long,* in order to work out the 
lower rich strata of the company’s extensive mining ground, located on the above-described grand 
gravel-channel or dead river. ‘This channel is, in Sierra County, about twenty-five miles in length, 
and averages one mile in width. 
“The channel lying next west enters Sierra County near its northeast corner, on the dividing 
ridge of the heads of Hopkins and Nelson creeks, in Plumas County, and Cafion Creek, in Sierra 
County ; runs a southerly course, and is covered to a great depth by heavy layers of lava and vol- 
canic sand (conglomerate), or ‘mountain cement,’ as it is generally termed by the miners. The 
main channel has been tested by partial working in the following rich places through which it 
passes, namely : Cafion Creek, Poker Flat, Deadwood, Sebastopol, Excelsior, Fir Cap, Monte Cristo, 
City of Six, Rock Creek, Forest City, West Ravine, Alleghany, Chip’s Flat, and Minnesota, all in 
Sierra County ; and Orleans and Moore’s Flat, &c., in Nevada County on the south. In all these 
places, with the exception of the four last named, the deposit has been worked by means of shafts 
or tunnels, by drilling, and in most instances the front of it only has been hydraulicked, where 
water could be obtained, with a satisfactory result. The four last-named places are still worked 
with great success by hydraulic process. All these mining camps paid richly in early days, pro- 
ducing many millions ; and this channel has of late proved as rich as formerly wherever followed 
and opened low enough into the centre of the overlying hills. This has been demonstrated at the 
mining ground of the Bald Mountain Company, at Forest City, and the Highland and Masonic 
Company, situated between West Ravine and Alleghany. 
“This channel has several branches, which have proved equally rich in several places, as, for 
instance, the celebrated ‘ blue lead’ or ‘ blue banks’ near Downieville, situated on the left bank of 
the North Fork of the North Yuba River, which is apparently a different gold-bearing channel 
from that of the ancient-river beds before described. Without its branches the above-mentioned 
channel is over twenty miles long in Sierra County, and more than one mile wide, containing an 
area of over twenty square miles, having a grade of seventy feet per mile in average. 
“ Farther west comes the celebrated and more extensively developed so-called ‘Slate Creek 
Basin,’ on each side of which is a well-proved and very rich auriferous gravel range or dead-river 
channel. These run nearly parallel with each other in a southwesterly course from the northeast, 
uniting, however, again near Bald Mountain, in the neighborhood of Scales Diggings and Poverty 
Hill. The eastern of these two, lying between Cafion Creek on the east and Slate Creek on the 
west, apparently enter Sierra County in its northwest corner, under Pilot Peak. This isolated 
mountain is over 7,000 feet high,t of volcanic origin, its northeastern slope heaved up and walled 
with basaltic columns, while its lofty summit, commanding a sublime panoramic view of the Sierra 
Nevada mountains for hundreds of miles distance, Sacramento Valley, and the Coast Range, is 
capped with a bed of lava 600 to 700 feet thick. This channel has an average fall from the base 
of Pilot Peak (where it is worked by the North American Mining Company) down to Scales Dig- 
gings, near the junction of the western channels, of eighty-four feet per mile, reckoning these two 
points as twelve miles apart, as they are in an air-line.” 
This channel on the eastern side of Slate Creek is most extensively worked 
all along between Pilot Peak and Scales, passing through Howland Flat, Pine 
Grove, Chandlerville, Saint Louis, to Portwine, where numerous companies 
* See ante, p. 203. 
+ The elevation of Pilot Peak is 7,605 feet. above the sea, and 1,216 above Onion Valley at its base, 
according to the Geological Survey measurements. See Geol. I. p. 306. 
