278 THE AURIFEROUS GRAVELS OF THE SIERRA 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 
Ravine, 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 : — 
“T 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. R. 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 east 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. 
