(they spent it all in one place–Auburn)
excerpts from Auburn Sentinel - Friday, January 7, 1994 by Bill Wilson
The Millertown mining district was one of the greatest surface gold producers
in Placer, yet few Argonauts ever left there with any great wealth.
The miners came, they found, and they let the nuggets slip through their fingers
as if there were an inexhaustible end to the gold. It was a fabulously rich and
heavenly discovery, with some idly thinking that there was enough gold there for
them to become wealthy and go on mining forever.
Stretching over a three-square mile area from the upper regions of Millerton
ravine to near Ophir, miners made claims and set up their operations in the
Millertown, North, Kanaka and Broken-Shovel ravines and found pockets of gold
beyond their dreams. The three-fourth-mile long Kanaka ravine was said to be the
richest of them all.
With water from the Bear River Co., miners were finding large amounts of gold in
January 1853 that was described as “solid and pure and of a very bright color”.
Only a few inexperienced and carefree gold-seekers were not making money.
Miners poured into the ravines en masse in early 1853. It was one of the nearest
major discovery sites to where gold was found in Auburn some five years earlier
and it was a welcome latecomer to the big quartz ledges and pockets of nuggets
in the streambeds found elsewhere. With the gold rush still on in the county all
a gold seeker had to do was to arrive in Auburn and walk or ride a few miles to
the gold fields in Millertown Ravine. . .
But being too close to Auburn was the miner’s downfall. The temptation to gamble
and drink was too much for most of the men during the time when gold was easier
to possess that U. S. currency. “After all it said about the great amount of
gold taken out, I do not remember of but two miners who went back east to their
families with money”, said B. F. Gwynn, who operated a store in the Millertown
area in a community known as Lauraville. “And they were the men who shunned the
gambling tables and saloons in Auburn”. . .
Gwynn said no matter how good a claim each owned, or how much money they made,
each Saturday night the men would strike out for Auburn. On the following Monday
morning they would return to their cabins without a dollar in their pockets.
When the mines played out, he said, most of the men were broke and “were not as
good morally or physically as when they first engaged in mining.”
. . .Gwynn reported he watched miners take the gold from the ravines, and was
present when they did their daily clean-ups from the riffles of their rockers
and sluice boxes. He said J. B. Warner and two partners were making about $150
apiece each day during the summer of 1853 working in Kanaka Ravine.
R S. Earthman, a miner with a small claim along Millertown ravine hit a rich
quartz ledge in April of 1853. He showed up in Auburn with two pounds and 10
ounces of rock that he took $135 from by extracting the gold with a mortar and
pestle. He also filled two barrels of the gold-bearing rock that earned him
$3,000 a barrel. There was another report of a transient miner, who took over a
claim thought to have been mined out only to be worked again ad produced more
that $6,000 in a week.
. . .During the height of mining in the Millertown area, there were about 500
miners at work, all of whom were reported to have good paying claims along the
four connecting ravines. Some of the miners were to later become Auburn’s
leading professional men. Among them were Hon. T. B. McFarland, Hon. James F.
Hale, Hon. J. H. Neff, John C. Boggs and a number of others who later became
prominent Placer County citizens.
McFarland left Millertown when the surface gold all but disappeared . . . and
moved to Nevada City where he took up his profession as a lawyer and then was
elected to the State Supreme Court bench. Hale, a lawyer when he came to Placer
County in 1852, gave up mining and opened a law office in Auburn and later was
elected county judge and a state senator. Jacob Neff, later elected as a county
sheriff, state senator and lieutenant governor of California, started out
driving an ox team hauling logs for the Miller and Day sawmill in Millertown
Valley.
Boggs, who later was to be recognized as a legendary sheriff of the county did
not stay long in Millertown and moved to Auburn in the fall of 1853. Although he
published the Auburn weekly newspaper, the Starts and Stripes, for a short
period of time, he never seriously returned to mining and spent the rest of his
life as a law enforcement officer.
Much like most surface mining and areas, as soon as the gold along the streams
and the hillsides was scooped up, the miners hauled out their light equipment
and headed for more profitable gravel and quartz. Many of the cabins of the pick
and shovel men disappeared overnight and soon most of the Millertown area
returned to the peace and quiet that existed there before gold was discovered.