Nevada County
As soon as the cry of 'Gold!' began to rise in 1848 settlers in Oregon heard it and some responded, moving south from their place of vantage. Three of them, discovering a small cup of a valley in the middle foothills, panned the streams and creviced the banks with good success, but were forced out and down into the central valley by the approaching winter.
Other 'boomers' tried their luck in the valley the next year but without spectacular success -- most moved on. The philosophy in those early days was '`There's not enough for everyone; so get to the rich places first.' Claims originally struggled for seemed less desirable as rumors spread like wildfire of new finds, of 'pound diggings,' places where a man could pan out twelve ounces of gold during the usual workday, daylight to dark. Newcomers moved on toward the higher hills, to new and hopefully richer discoveries. That fall recent immigrants following some stray cattle found them, in a little valley, knee-high in lush grass and pea vines. They named the place Grass Valley, and the name stuck.
By the fall of 1850 claims taken with high hopes in Grass Valley were going for as little as fifty dollars, and men who held their claims worked them but had run out of brag. That was when one of them, a miner named McKnight, struggled up a hill on the valley's edge t o gather pitch pine for his cooking fire. Perhaps it was some whim of the goddess of all miners, Lady Luck, inspiring the awkwardness that caused him to stumble, his foot kicking into an exposed ledge of whitish-grey rock. It might have been the same source that stirred his curiosity, prompting McKnight to pick up and examine the chunk of rock his boot had broken off.
The freshly broken surface showed white as milk, it's glassy surface -- crypto-crystalline quartz, to a geologist -- strewn with clots and stringers of rich yellow! Wood-gathering forgotten McKnight fled, stumbling and skidding, down the slope to his cabin, where he pounded the chunk of rock to a coarse powder in an iron kettle. He panned out what resulted, the white powder swirling in the pan, washing over the edge to leave behind -- pure gold!
See McKnight, now, as he charges back up the slope, wild-eyed, pick in hand. Arrived at the ledge he sinks his pick into it and paces off a thirty-foot square with the ledge in its middle ; thirty feet is the claim size adopted by miners' meetings at Rough and Ready and at Deer Creek Dry Diggings -- later to be known as Nevada City -- the two nearest camps west and east, respectively, from the valley.
You can bet McKnight was thereafter busy as a skunk in a cabbage patch, hauling sacked rock down off the ridge, pounding it in his kettle and panning out the result. And you can bet, too, it wasn't long before his neighbors wormed out of him what he was doing -- and his results. A string of claims was soon lined up in both directions along the ledge of McKnight's discovery. Gold Hill, as it was promptly dubbed.
Word spreads. Nowhere did it ever spread faster than in the gold fields, among men half mad with the search for gold, half desperate for news of any fresh discovery, any previously unknown location where pickings might be richer than what they had.
So began a new page in the annals of the Mother Lode. At first, arguments waged hot and heavy over how the gold got into the rock in the first place. But the arguments were academic; what everyone wanted to know was how to get the gold out of the rock. The learning was slow and laborious, hit-or-miss, by guess and by golly. But they learned, and soon arrastras, a gift from the knowledge of Mexican miners, began to go into use, and then stamp mills
to crush the rock and begin the process of releasing the gold from the quartz that held it.
And as the years passed the trickle of lode gold grew to a stream and then a flood, one that would continue until the War Emergency Orders of World War II shut down all the mines, at least temporarily. Some opened following the war's end; some never did.
And what about McKnight? Did he become rich? Did his name go down in the history books as the originator, the patron saint of Grass Valley gold? Hardly. He'd had his fifteen minutes of fame, and faded back into obscurity with whatever gold he'd managed to accumulate. With at least enough, it is hoped, to sustain him into a comfortable old age.
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