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GEOLOGIC GUIDEBOOK ALONG HIGHWAY 49 



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verged on the gold fields. Mexicans came early and South Americans 

 followed. Chinese and Australians crossed the Pacific. Argonauts hastened 

 westward from England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland. Cornishmen and 

 Frenchmen jostled Germans and Italians in the rush for the diggings. 

 Each of these nationalities left some mark, large or small, on the Mother 

 Lode Country, chiefly in the way of names given to camps, and river bars 

 as well as larger geographical features. Indeed the very name Mother 

 Lode is a heritage from the Mexican miners who were among the earliest 

 comers. Their native province in Mexico was Sonora, a rich mining 

 district with veins of gold-bearing quartz similar to the great dominant 

 veins that extend for about seventy miles in a fairly straight line from 

 Mariposa north to Plymouth. The Sonorian vein was known as the Veto 

 Madre and the Mexicans applied the name to what they believed to be 

 the source of the rich placers in the new field. These Sonorians were 

 inspired miners. Their uncanny sense of where to look for gold and 

 their skill and experience in unearthing it were responsible for the 

 location of some of the best placers and quartz mines of the early days. 



It is strange that these Mexicans left so few traces in the Mother 

 Lode Country. A few vestiges of their buildings, a few place names 

 remain notably Sonora, originally Sonoran Camp, one of their first 

 diggings but the mark they made is largely obliterated. Easy-going 

 people, they vanished before the more vigorous, aggressive and infinitely 

 more numerous Americans, Europeans and Chinese who soon overran 

 the country. But they left as witness of their brief sojourn the name 

 they gave the dominant vein a name that soon came to designate 

 the whole region of the southern mines, and then to embrace the entire 

 gold belt from Mariposa to Downieville. 



The romantic tradition of the gold country was of course enormously 

 augmented by the literary activities of the two popular writers, Bret 

 Harte and Mark Twain. As a matter of fact, neither of these builders 

 of the tradition spent a great deal of time at the mines, and Bret Harte, 

 at least, leaned very heavily on the chronicles of others, but they both 

 possessed in large measure the gift of painting vivid word pictures and 

 creating convincing and appealing characters. Consequently Mark 

 Twain's Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Bret Harte 's Outcasts 

 of Poker Flat, Tennessee's Pardner, and dozens of others are known 

 all over the world. As surely as England has its Hardy country, Cali- 

 fornia has its well defined, if somewhat mythical, Mark Twain-Bret Harte 

 country. Literary pilgrimages are made to the Mark Twain Cabin on 

 Jackass Hill near Angels Camp. This is a replica of the original cabin, 

 destroyed by fire except for the still usable chimneyplace, in which 

 Mark Twain spent some five months with the Gillis brothers and prob- 

 ably wrote part at least of The Jumping Frog. And the pilgrimage goes 

 on to Second Garotte, a village near Groveland on Highway 20, to 



another small frame house which Tennessee and his Pardner are said 

 to have inhabited before Bret Harte immortalized them. 



The foothill gold belt, however, was not in want of any amplifica- 

 tion of its charm. It is so bountifully endowed with natural beauty and 

 with pleasantness of climate as to be one of the most fortunate regions 

 of California. The whole effect of the country is comfortable and pleas- 

 ing. It is none the less interesting for the fact that throughout its two- 

 hundred-mile length it is repeatedly scarred as a result of all the diverse 

 methods of gold mining ever devised naked rocks exposed by surface 

 placers, miles of gravel hills left behind by dredges, mountains of tailings 

 from the quartz mines, and the monstrous cavities gouged out by the 

 giant force of hydraulic mining. 



A century ago this virgin western slope of the Sierra must have 

 appeared a paradise to the exhausted travelers who had braved the 

 hazards of the journey overland. The long gentle decline from the crest 

 to the level floor of the wide valley below promised easy progress com- 

 pared with the perilous eastern front they had surmounted. And though 

 the promise was not always fulfilled and the descent was obstructed 

 with terrific difficulties lakes, cliffs, granite domes and cruelly deep 

 canyons the pine forests with their carpets of needles, the sheltered 

 coves and flowery meadows must have seemed, as they do today, unequaled 

 places in which to find rest. 



Evidences that many of the pioneers did settle into homes in this 

 favored region remain in the numerous dwellings which date back to 

 the earliest days. Many of them are in ruins, but a surprising number 

 are actually still in use. Here and there an old house stands in an old- 

 fashioned garden, overhung by ancient rosebushes grown, perhaps, from 

 slips brought from distant eastern homes to grace the new dwelling. 

 These decrepit homesteads with their enormous old fruit trees create 

 an appearance of settled human occupation, adding notably to the charm 

 of the mining region which in so many places is marked by melancholy 

 evidences of a life that was born, flourished and declined in a few brief 

 decades. 



Fur trappers who had been working through the Rocky Mountains 

 were the first Americans to look westward toward the desert and moun- 

 tain barriers that shut California away from the eastern United States. 

 They blazed all the trails across the continent which were later followed 

 by explorers, settlers, and forty-niners and later by railroad builders 

 and even the makers of modern highways. 



Jedediah Strong Smith, greatest of the pathfinders, was the first 

 American to discover the beauties of the western slope of the Sierra. 

 This was in 1827, and it is a curious fact that the first epochmaking 

 crossing of the range, which revealed the beauties as well as the desperate 

 perils involved in the undertaking, was from west to east. 



