"Hydraulic Mining at French Corral," illustration for California for Health, Pleasure, and Residence, 1882. Larger.
California's rugged terrain posed substantial challenges to the miners drawn here by the Gold Rush. When placer mining played out, innovative miners used high-pressure streams of water to reach the gold hidden deep within the earth.
In his 1872 book California for Health, Pleasure, and Residence, journalist Charles Nordhoff didn't only encourage emigration to California, he also described some of the unfortunate effects of unfettered industry, like the hydraulic mining techniques developed here.
If you want to know how a part of the surface of our planet looked some thousands of years ago, here is a good opportunity; for what two or three men with torrents of water wash away into the Yuba River in a few weeks must have taken many centuries to accumulate; and below, you see a mass of water-washed stone, rounded boulders, and large gravel, twenty or fifty or even a hundred feet deep, which was so plainly the bed of a torrent or rapidly rushing river once that even children recognize it.
Of course the acres washed away must go somewhere, and they are filling up the Yuba River. This was once, I am told by old residents, a swift and clear mountain torrent; it is now a turbid and not rapid stream, whose bed has been raised by the washings of the miners not less than fifty feet above its level in 1849. It once contained trout, but now I imagine a catfish would die in it.
Because of the damage caused to watersheds and to farm and ranch land, hydraulic mining was halted in 1884 thanks to an injunction issued by former forty-ninerJudge Lorenzo Sawyer.
"Charles Nordhoff," photographed by Watkins, date unknown. Larger.
Nineteenth century California had more than its share of highway robbers, so much so that boarding a stage coach here sometimes meant risking your life.
One particularly nasty bandit was John Mason, who preyed on Central Valley travelers and stylized himself a Confederate guerrilla. But even John Mason had his limits.
They have a story here. . . of a courageous woman in this county, who was alone in a stage which Mason and one of his gang stopped. The driver threw down the treasure-box when the two robbers stopped his horses, and Mason thereupon opened the stage door, and, leaning into the stage, ordered the woman to give up her money and rings, pointing a cocked pistol at her at the same time.
The woman looked at him coolly, and said: "Look here, don't you see that you're pointing that pistol directly at me, and it's cocked? You seem to be a little nervous, for your hand trembles; I wish you'd point it away from me; it might go off and hurt me."
Mason was so much struck by the woman's coolness, that with an oath he slammed the stage door, and told her to keep her valuables.
"Wood Chopper," illustration for California for Health, Pleasure, and Residence, 1873. Larger.
In our own time, harvesting old-growth redwoods is a matter for public and private concern. In the nineteenth century, however, felling a redwood was a matter of tempering industry with awe.
To chop down a redwood tree, the chopper does not stand on the ground, but upon a stage sometimes twelve feet above the ground. . . .
At last the tree visibly totters, and slowly goes over; and as it goes, the chopper gets off his stage and runs a few feet to one side. Then you hear and see one of the grandest and most majestic incidents of forest life. There is a sharp crack, a crash, and then a prolonged thunderous crash, which, when you hear it from a little distance, is startlingly like and actual and severe thunder peal. To see a tree six feet in diameter, and one hundred and seventy-five feet high, thus go down, is a very great sight, not soon forgotten.
Charles Nordhoff was a leading travel writer and journalist; he wrote for the New YorkEvening Post and the New York Herald.
The Tourist in California
From California: for health, pleasure, and residence. A book for travellers and settlers, 1873.
In 1872, journalist Charles Nordhoff traveled from New York to California in order to write about the Golden State's celebrated climate and its agriculture. His travel log took an unexpected turn, however, after he observed some of San Francisco's most rowdy locals.
. . . If you have any fancy yourself in wild beasts, you will be both amazed and amused at the huge strange creatures which cover the rocks two hundred yards from you, and look, with their pointed heads and shiny bodies, like monstrous maggots crawling and squirming; who lie like dead things upon the rocks; whose howls and hoarse, discordant roars cross to you and make a strange music for your meal. A seal in Barnum's Museum was a strange beast—but these monstrous misshapen creatures, furious, wild, free, yawning in your face, pushing each other aside, quarreling, suckling their young, rolling off the precipitous rocks into the sea, make the strangest sight my eyes ever beheld.
A notable guidebook of tourists and settlers, California: for health, pleasure, and residence was published in 1873.
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