by Bill Wilson, Auburn Sentinel, March 31, 1995 (excerpts)
J. F. Talbott and his partner, Dan Farley, sauntered into a log house on the Foresthill Divide in the early 1850's and “bought a dollar’s worth of bear meat, saleratus, bread, flapjacks, and pork and beans.”
. . .Saleratus, a bicarbonate, was ordered from the log house proprietor and was apparently taken with them to be used later in cooking.
. . .following a rumor about great gold discovery sites in Placer Co.,
miners had worked their way from El Dorado Co. across the Middle Fork of the American River to the divide. . .
“Well up on the divide in a dense forest, we run up against a log house that we named the “Forest House, he said. “The proprietor didn’t weigh the grub, but he weighed out of our sacks one-sixteenth of an ounce of (gold) dust. The custom was a pinch of gold dust for a drink, and the one-sixteenth of an ounce for a meal. We didn’t kick, and we went our way, rejoicing” said
Talbott.
The two itinerant miners went on to Illinoistown, a known trading post across the North Fork of the American River, where they said they saw a great movement of emigrant wagons, according to reports left by Talbott. . . .he said, miners were traveling en masse from Sacramento and stopped there “to buy duds—gum boots and a crow bar to help pry the stage out of mud holes while on their way to the mines. Illinoistown was the head of wagon navigation” he said.
. . .Talbott, accepting the fact that he had to find gold to survive, eventually ended up in the booming community of Elizabethtown, located about a mine south of Iowa Hill. The site was named for Elizabeth Brown, who operated the only hotel there and was the only woman for miles around.
Elizabethtown did not survive long, like many of the other towns on the divide, and when there were large discoveries of gold at Yankee Jims on Georgia Hill, the miners grabbed their picks, shovels and pans and headed there.
. . .”I was caught in the boom at Iowa Hill and carried across the North Fork on the American River and struck riches at Indiana Hill”, Talbott stated. “Later in 1853, I put up and operated the first hydraulic rig ever worked in these mines. It was a small affair, 40-foot pressure, six-inch hose, with a two-inch discharge nozzle.
. . .it was a starter in what a few years later became the famous hydraulic mines of Gold Run and Dutch Flat”.
. . . “So little was known about gold mining and no thought was given to the source of the gold or the method of deposits. Some of the old one-idea miners contended the gold on Georgia Hill was “hove up there from Devil’s Canyon”, he said. Devil’s Canyon was where a man named Yankee Jim in the summer of 1849 stumbled into a ravine and close to the surface found rich gold deposits. The gold mining community became the political center of Placer Co, and some of the state’s leading lawyers began their practices there.
. . .the recovery of gold opened a new and wide field for study and exploration.
It gave the observing and hard-thinking miner new and correct ideas in regard to the source and method of gold deposits, and then the finding of gold presented surface indications to guide the prospector in search for the precious metal.
Talbott said the new conditions that were learned after most all of the surface gold was found required new appliances for mining, which he said the inventive genius of the California miner soon supplied. It opened up other branches of industry required to meet the new conditions. The new conditions called for the expenditure of millions of dollars in the building of reservoirs, construction of ditches and the fitting up of the mines for work. “It nearly doubled the output of gold” Talbott said about placer and gravel mines.
“The discovery of gold on Georgia Hill at the times was considered only as a matter of local interest”he said, “but it caused the revival of mining all over the county. It also put new life into all kinds of business to such an extent that the Upper Placer Mines are entitled to rank second to the original discovery. . .
. . .the old ghost towns of Elizabethtown, Ground Hog’s Glory, Hell’s Delight, Hell’s Half Acre, Bogus Thunder, Damascus, Deadwood, Sunny South, Bullion, Westville, Last Chance, are left to history.
. . . Whether Talbott or Farley ever found any of the riches they searched for most of their lives, is not known. Talbott did write a letter to an Auburn newspaper in 1901, stating that he was living in Shady Run, another town whose history is a part of the clouded past when men gave their all in the search for gold.