CORPORATE MINING CAMP

You live well for months. Throughout the winter you take steam baths, drink fine wine from Italy, and have steak for dinner nearly every night while courting a young woman who will become your wife.

When you return to the hillside in the spring, it’s a whole new world. Any gold that remains is being mined by a corporation, the Rialto Mining Company, which has managed to secure a claim to the entire area. Whatever gold is left belongs to them.

Just ten weeks earlier, the hillside was dotted with miners and a camp was just starting. Now, the cave looks like the entrance to a lodge.

“I think I should be compelled to nominate the stage-drivers, as being on the whole the most lofty, arrogant, reserved and superior class of being on the coast — that class that has inspired me with the most terror and reverence.”

-Henry W. Bellows, 1864

At the cavern of your discovery, you witness an absurd tableau: giant plumes of water being shot at high pressure into cracks and hollows of the hillside.

Hydraulic mining — invented in California in late 1849 — has replaced your crude pickaxe.

You quickly realize you need to find a new line of work.

The next three years are a series of odd jobs all around California.  You work briefly for Rialto, laying planks in the mines.  You clerk at a dry goods store in Sacramento; you pay your rent as a stable hand and a stevedore.  You apprentice as a barber and as a physician.

During a short stint as a bartender in Aptos, CA, you serve a one-eyed stagecoach driver named Charley Parkhurst, who tells you about life as a “knight of the lash” — the thrill of driving a stagecoach across the American West.

Inspired, you apply for work as a driver.  First, you ride as a shotgun messenger for Wells Fargo, protecting gold bound for the East.  By early 1855, you’re a hired whip; within a year, you’ve become your own boss, driving a stage between Sacramento and Lassen’s Cutoff in the western Utah desert.

You churn out a good living, savoring your time outdoors and delighting visitors with stories of the time you hit it big as a 49er. As time passes and the quest for gold fades, settlers keep coming from the East for hundreds of different reasons.

Unlike many young men who headed west seeking fortune and glory, you were able to find lasting, profitable employment into old age.

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