Note 110 — REMINISCENCES OF VILLAGE LIFE AND OF PANAMA AND CALIFORNIA. 1840-1850. (continued 2)

Of the exact location, Dr. Halsey, in a letter to his wife written from “Big Bar on the Middle Fork of the American River” on August 5th, 1849, says: “We were about fifteen miles (in a straight line; thirty by the road) north of Sutter’s Mill where gold was first found.” Bancroft refers to the richness of diggings in that locality and mentions the Big Bar as one place of note. He says the Middle Fork was esteemed the richest river for a regular yield in California with more bars of gold than any other, several of which were said to have produced from $1,000,000 to $3,000,000 each. In the summer of 1848, “one Hudson obtained some $20,000 in six weeks from a canyon between Coloma and the American Middle Fork, while a boy named Davenport found in the same place seventy-seven ounces of pure gold one day and ninety ounces the next.” John Sinclair, at the junction of the North and Middle branches, “displayed fourteen pounds of gold as the result of one week’s work with fifty Indians, using closely woven willow baskets.” He secured $16,000 in five weeks. One bar alone on the Middle Fork yielded over $1,000,000, and yet in spite of these figures “the unfortunate far outnumbered the successful.”