es. I took a seat aside of the
driver. I got in conversation with the driver. I asked him what pay he
received? He said, only $450 per month and his board. I asked him if he
had driven stages before? He said, yes, out of Boston. I said, at what
wages? He said, $14 a month. I said that there was a big difference
between that and $450. He said, yes, but that this was his last trip. He
took a party of three up only a few weeks ago, and he brought them down
yesterday, and they had between $3,000 and $4,000 apiece, and he was not
going to waste his time driving for $450 a month. He was going to the
mines the next day. It was quite probable that the party referred to had
made an unusual lucky strike, for I had met parties that had done the
same thing. I had had in my hands at one time, in San Francisco, a piece
of solid gold metal, something in the shape of the cover of a sugar
loaf, that was worth $4,500, found by a couple of green Irishmen. They
inquired of some miners in the interior where was a good place to dig.
The miners said in fun, dig there in that sand bank behind you. The
Irishmen took them up in earnest and went to digging. In a short time
they found that chunk of gold, where no experienced miner would think of
digging.

I have dug gold in the cellar of the brewery in San Francisco. I think
most all the soil of that part of California is impregnated with gold.
But the point is to find it in sufficient quantities to pay to dig it.
As an illustration, if you knew that in a certain piece of ground there
was $5,000 worth of gold, and it cost you $10,000 to wash all the ground
to get it, of course that land would have no gold value. I found at
Coloma that my friends had left the Dutch bar and gone to the middle
fork of the American river, some distance from there. I got directions
how to get there and started on foot. Toward night I met a young man who
had just came overland and had separated that day from his party to get
work in the mining camp. I told him where I was going, and that he had
better go with me, and that he could get from $10 to $16 per day to work
for other parties, or to join two others and work a claim for himself,
which he did. So as it was getting toward night, we camped under a tree
and slept until morning, and took a fresh start. That day we found the
middle fork of the American river and my friends. The river was sunk
way down in the earth. It seemed almost a mile down to the water where
they w