mselves by the name of the place from whence
the majority of the members have emigrated; as, for example, the
Illinois, Bunker Hill, Bay State, etc., companies. In many places the
surface soil, or in mining phrase, the top dirt, pays when worked in a
long-tom. This machine (I have never been able to discover the
derivation of its name) is a trough, generally about twenty feet in
length and eight inches in depth, formed of wood, with the exception of
six feet at one end, called the "riddle" (query, why "riddle"?), which
is made of sheet-iron perforated with holes about the size of a large
marble. Underneath this colander-like portion of the long-tom is placed
another trough, about ten feet long, the sides six inches, perhaps, in
height, which, divided through the middle by a slender slat, is called
the riffle-box. It takes several persons to manage properly a long-tom.
Three or four men station themselves with spades at the head of the
machine, while at the foot of it stands an individual armed "wid de
shovel an' de hoe." The spadesmen throw in large quantities of the
precious dirt, which is washed down to the riddle by a stream of water
leading into the long-tom through wooden gutters or sluices. When the
soil reaches the riddle, it is kept constantly in motion by the man
with the hoe. Of course, by this means, all the dirt and gold escapes
through the perforations into the riffle-box below, one compartment of
which is placed just beyond the riddle. Most of the dirt washes over
the sides of the riffle-box, but the gold, being so astonishingly
heavy, remains safely at the bottom of it. When the machine gets too
full of stones to be worked easily, the man whose business it is to
attend to them throws them out with his shovel, looking carefully among
them as he does so for any pieces of gold which may have been too large
to pass through the holes of the riddle. I am sorry to say that he
generally loses his labor. At night they pan out the gold which has
been collected in the riffle-box during the day. Many of the miners
decline washing the top dirt at all, but try to reach as quickly as
possible the bed-rock, where are found the richest deposits of gold.
The river is supposed to have formerly flowed over this bed-rock, in
the crevices of which it left, as it passed away, the largest portions
of the so eagerly sought for ore. The group of mountains amidst which
we are living is a spur of the Sierra Nevada, and the bed-rock, w