ancl there is a very general degire to have 
the whole question thoroughly aired. 
“Independently of the question of human I 
origin and development thus associated ' 
with the history of the Siera Nevada there 
is not a more fascinating chapter in 
the whole history of world building 
than that furnished by the orographic 
transformations, now so closely made out j 
by our geologists. The story may be told ; 
in a few words, and so simply as to convey j 
an understanding of the methods of deter- i 
mining age and a realization of the vast ! 
time involved, 
“The richest finds of gold made by the 
forty-niners were in the great valleys that 
cut their way down through mountains, 
plateaus and foot hills from the high 
ranges to the Sacramento valley. The 
gravel of the present river beds yielded 
much of the. precious metal, but the richer 
deposits were in beds of gravel that out- 
cropped in the sides of the valleys from \ 
one to two thousand feet above the river 
beds. These bodies of gravel were found 
to extend in attenuated bands far into the 
Prof. W. .Hi Holmes. 
mountains, and the rocky slopes were 
pierced by a thousand tunnels. The sum- 
i mils of the wildest mountains were honey- 
! combed in the eager search for other leads. 
; . “When the geologists finally appeared 
upon the scene the strange fact was devel- 
oped that these deposits of . gravels were of 
river formation, and that they really rep- 
resented fossil rivers, the grandfathers and 
great grandfathers of the present rivers, 
which, in early tertiary times, had been j 
clogged with gold-bearing gravel and then 
! filled to the brim with volcanic materials. 
Lindgren and Turner have studied these 
remnants of past river systems, and have 
determined the course, declivity and age of 
the streams, and the miners have, in sev- 
eral cases, followed the sinuous courses of 
the channels, entirely through the . ranges, 
washing out the gold and leaving the gravel 
still in the tunneled channels, as a wood- : 
worm pierces the oak, leaving only slight 
traUBS of his wonderful accomplishment. But 
what a remarkable succession of events 
.ties implies; what a vast time is involved 
and what an age is. given to the races that 
pounded seeds or acorns in their mortars 
,• along the banks of those far-away ances- 
tors of our modern rivers. 
Work «j£ Rivers. 
The. story they tell is about as follows: 
The tertiary rivers ran out across the high 
land pretty much as the streams of today 
find their way to the sea. They had strong 
I currents, and scored down their slaty or 
granite wails and the gold-bearing quartz 
seams intersecting them, and filled their 
beds with the debris. The freed gold sank 
to the bottoms and the coarse water-worn 
materials accumulated to the thickness of 
hundreds of feet.' : b„... 
“It is upon the banks of these rivers that 
the race must have lived that left its bones 
and its tools _ and utensils imbedded along 
with the bodies of the giant mammals of 
their time. Then came a change over these 
scenes— a profound and wonderful change; 
a period of great volcanic activity fol- 
lowed, and lavas flowed and streams of 
mud descended, until the valleys were filled 
up and new channels, system after system, 
were formed. At the close of a vast period 
of these activities the deepest valleys were 
fihed up to overflowing, and when the flows 
of basalt, the Anal products, ceased the 
waters of the Sierra had to begin anew the 
cutting of thoroughfares to the Pacific. 
This volcanic period continued through a 
large part of the tertiary age— a period not 
to be estimated in thousands, but in hun- 
dreds of thousands of years. 
“But behold the changes that have since 
taken place! These streams— the JYLarced 
the Tuolumne, the Stanislaus, the American 
river, the Yuba and others— have cut their 
way by the slew processes of erosion down 
o.eep into the bowels of the earth, and now 
run their courses in valleys 2,000 feet deep 
and many miles in width, so profound pre- 
cipitous and inaccessible that it is a day’s 
journey to cross them, where indeed they 
ca ,?J 3e crjssed at all by human feet. 
the traveler who descends into one of 
these g’xe&t chitons and painfully works his 
way up the opposite side to the crests 
where the miners arc tunneling the river 
beds of former periods, finds himself solil- 
oquizing in the following vein : ’Is it pos- 
sible that man can have dwelt in this wild | 
land so long as this, while these mountains 
were carved out and the vast valleys 
formed . by the tedious , sculpture of the 
mountain streams? It, indeed, surpasses 
belief, and unless the most weighty evi- 
dence is forthcoming, the whole' story of 
auriferous gravel man must fall.’ 
“But this is not all the geologist has to 
tell of the flight of time. When the val- 
leys had been deepened nearly to their 
present beds the glacial period came on, 
and the ice reshaped them and modeled the 
, marvelous contours of -which Yosemite is a 
tins type. From the point of view of the 
man of the old river systems the glacial 
period is recent time, but this is the period 
of the paleolithic man of New Jersey and 
Ohio, if such there was, and the glacial 
man of Europe had not, even at this late 
date, reached the status of culture attained 
by his California precursor a million years 
before, if such a precursor there ever was. 
Table Mountain. 
“This panoramic sketch is not well cal- 
culated to give an idea of the magnitude . 
of the geographical features with which we 
have to deal, but it may serve to show- 
something of the geological relations. Table 
mountain, A is a. long narrow table land ex- 
tending outward toward the west between 
tw r o valleys from 1,500 to 2,000 feet deep. 
The summit of the mountain is sinuous as 
a serpent, for it is the stream of lava that 
flowed into the bed of the ancient x-lver 
whose gravely, gold-bearing bed is seen. in 
the section at B. The streams cut their 
channels at the sides because the lava, was 
harder than the neighboring formations, 
and what was originally the valley is now 
the mountain crest. The dotted lines in 
the section show how the tunnels pierce the 
sides of the mountain and reach the main 
channel of the old stream in the heart of 
the mountain, and It is from these deep 
diggings under Table mountain that many 
of the human relics are said to have been 
brought forth. At C we have the undis- 
turbed formations of the mountain. At B 
is Tuttletown, where still lives ‘Truthful 
James J To the left is the profound Valley 
of the Stanislaus, and beyond this, and 
twenty miles away, at C, is Bald mountain, 
where, in a deep tunnel in formations cor- 
responding to those of Table mountain, the 
Calaveras skull was found. 
“Stranger than all are somg of the facts 
— - ' f 
