Lumber cost a dollar and a half a foot, but carpenters would not build
houses when they could make fifty dollars a day by mining. As there
was no lumber for the cabin floors, the ground was beaten hard and
really made a good floor. In Placerville the houses were built along
the bed of a ravine, and in sweeping these earthen floors some one saw
gold-dust glittering, and found that rich diggings were under foot.
Thereupon many of the miners dug up their cabin floors, and one man
took about twenty thousand dollars in nuggets and gold-dust from the
small space his cabin covered.

Very few women and children came to the mines in early days, and the
first white woman to arrive in a camp had all sorts of attentions.
Sometimes the town was named for the woman first in the place as
Sarahsville and Marietta. If a lady visited a mining-camp, the men far
and near would drop work and come in just to look at the visitor. One
lady, who sang for the miners on her arrival in their town, was given
about five hundred dollars' worth of gold-dust.

A child was a great curiosity, and any pretty little girl was sure to
have a collection of nuggets or a quantity of gold-dust presented to
her. The theatre and circus companies who visited mining-camps soon
found out that a little child who could sing or dance was a great
attraction. The miners used to throw a shower of money or nuggets at
the feet of such little favorites as we throw flowers now.

As there were no women living here for some time, the men having left
their families at home in the Eastern states, miners had to wash
and cook and make bread for themselves. Men who had been lawyers
or ministers at home, when there was no one else to do such things,
washed their dishes or their red flannel shirts. On Sunday no one
worked at mining, and the men baked bread and cleaned house, and
Sunday afternoons they dried, patched, and mended their clothes. If a
minister was in town, he held services on a hillside, or in the dining
room of some shanty called a hotel, and all the camp came to hear him
speak, or sang the hymns with him.

So the miners lived and worked and wandered along rivers and rough
mountain trails on the west side of the Sierras, gathering up gold
washed down by mountain streams. These Argonauts, or gold-seekers of
fifty years ago, are almost all dead now, but the treasures they found
made California known throughout the world. Their golden harvest has
made the state richer