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 were to work.  It was quite a large mining place.  The excitement there every day was when the “dummy” went into the river.  It was a diving armor that had been used in the gulf of Lower California to go down in the deep waters to hunt for pearls, and had been bought by a party of five, each putting in $800, making $4,000, expecting to make their fortunes by getting into the deep water of the gold rivers. (As I have shown before, the torrents and force of the currents had prevented any gold from ever lodging there.) Every day at such an hour, it was announced that the “dummy” was a going in the river.  The other miners quit their work to see it, and the proprietors of the “dummy” always treated the crowd in the most lavish manner.  Its credit