(TFT) Gold

["Jay Carlisle" <Jay_Carlisle@charter.net>]

Anyone still bothering to read my crap after... ???!!!, should be aware of 
my rants about games pulling unlimited resources outta thin-air.
Gold is possably the worst offender... although the whole exp. pt. system 
makes blood a MUCH worse offender IMHO.
...
Anyhoo, here's a lil' gold research.
To reach California from the East, pioneer emigrants had to get their wagons 
over the Sierra. In 1844, the Stephens-Townsend-Murphy Party followed the 
Truckee River up into the mountains. At the head of what is now called 
Donner Lake, they found a low notch in the mountains and thus became the 
first overland emigrants to use the pass.
Wagon trains that followed (the Donner Party in noteable exception) 
struggled over the pass (see Heinleins discription in Time Enough For Love) 
and made their way down the rough western slope of the Sierra to find 
Greenhorn Creek a likely place to camp and rest before the last brusing leg 
of the journey into the Sacramento Valley.
When the cattle wandered from this campsite in search of better feed, the 
emigrants often found them several miles away grazing peacefully in a meadow 
that came to be known simply as the grassy valley.
In an intresting example of place nameing, a group of settelers decided to 
linger in 1849, with the contingent from Boston sucessfully panning for gold 
along Wolf Creek in the lower end of the valley (Sutter's Mill having been 
discovered the previous year).
A store was opened and settelment began, with an attempt to call the area 
Boston Ravine.
By this time the first hordes of gold seekers were coming over the passes 
and abandoning ships in San Francisco and other ports to reach the area and 
many were directed to "Grass Valley" instead of Boston Ravine.
As the area developed into a true town an attempt was made to call it 
Centerville but again outlieing communities failed to catch the change and 
shortly the town bowed to the inevatable and became Grass Valley.
At this time, the emigrants believed that gold originated in streambeds; 
logical owing to Marshall's American River discovery and their own lack of 
knowledge.
Little did they know the heart of California's gold lay beneath the solid 
rock of this region.

In late 1850 a ledge of gold-bearing quartz (occuring between hanging and 
foot walls) was discovered on Gold Hill.
Gold here was so plentiful that claims were limited to 100 square feet to 
try and prevent demonetization with over two million dollars taken out 
within a few feet of the surface.
As deeper veins came to light several water-driven stamp mills were in 
operation by 1852, but the majority of claims proved disastrous failures for 
want of knowledge of both geological conditions and proper recovery methods.
Below the surface the fractured and twisted lodes were easily lost, meaning 
no mine produced continually.
A tragic example is that of Michael Brennan, a man of education and refined 
sensibilities sent from New York to superentend operations of the Mount Hope 
Mining Co, on Massachusetts Hill.
At first quite sucessful, a series of setbacks lead the man to poision his 
imeadeant familly in his home with Prussic acid and to leave a suacide note 
expressing regret that he couldn't take his mother and sister (still in 
europe) along with him.
Litigation colsed the mine but almost imeadeatly after reopening a wide vein 
was struck mear feet from where Brennan had given up.
On the other side of the ridgeland in the Deer Creek watershed over the fall 
of 1849, the wash of ages was plundered, and it was a poor miner who could 
not pull a pound of gold per days work with a pocket knife, but by early 
1850 the surface gold was all gone.
(See aluvial diamond fields and their assoication with volcanic calderas)
...
MUCH more but Jay's starting to get a touch of a beer-buzz and I'll have to 
pick this up later however, if you care about this kind of thing google 
"miners candel stick" and tell me why THAT tool wasn't in somebodys 
equipment list. 
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