the only metal in the world that is yellow is the most precious of them all—gold. brass is not a metal, but an alloy, a compound. and the color which gold shares with the sun has a great deal to do with its value. i do not suppose it would be possible that we should ever have come to love and admire any metal so much as to choose it for our highest currency and our ornaments, no matter how rare or ductile it might be, if it were of a dark, dull, gloomy color. the human eye never gets too old to be pleased with very much the same things which pleased it in childhood; and no eye is insensible to that precious yellow.
i like sometimes to think back to the first man of all men that ever held that rock of the sun in his savage hand, and to imagine how he found it, and how it made his sharp eyes twinkle, and how he wondered at its weight, and pounded it with one smooth rock upon another and found he could flatten[142] it. all these things come by accident, and gold was an accident that befell when the world was very young. no doubt there had been a great rain, that washed the heavy lump from its nest in some gravelly stream bank, and the prehistoric man, in his tunic of skins, chanced that way and found it. mayhap it was the very rain of the flood itself, and the poor barbarian who picked up the yellow nugget sank with it still in his swarthy fist.
we do not even know the name of the man who first discovered gold, nor where he lived, nor when. but it was very, very long ago. before the time of joseph and the coat of many colors, gold had already become not only a discovered fact, but a part of the world. the early egyptians got their gold from nubia, so very likely the discovery was first made in africa. at all events, it dates back to the very childhood of the race; and before cadmus had found those more important nuggets of the alphabet, mankind had achieved the prettiest plaything it ever found.
in the very first chapter of the first and noblest of poems, homer tells of the priest who came with a golden ransom to the camp of the greeks before troy, to buy his daughter free; and the sunny metal figures[143] everywhere in the oldest mythology we know. you have all read—and i hope in hawthorne’s “tanglewood tales,” where the story is more beautifully told than it was ever elsewhere—of jason and the argonauts and of how they sailed to find the golden fleece. that was a fabulous ram-skin, whose locks were of pure gold. no wonder the deadly dragon in the dark groves of the colchian king guarded it so jealously. of course the myth is only a poetic form—as stories generally assume in the folk-lore of an undeveloped race—of saying that jason and his bold fellow-sailors of the argo sailed to the gold fields of asia, and found them. the mines whose fabled richness tempted them to that adventurous voyage in their overgrown row-boat of fifty oars, were in the caucasus mountains, and produced a great deal of the gold which was used by the ancients. they were doubtless among the first gold mines in the world, and their product gilded the splendor of many of the first great monarchs of history. as late as 1875 an attempt was made by europeans to work these mines, but nothing came of it.
“rich as cr?sus” has been for more than two thousand years a proverb which is not yet supplanted; and that last king of lydia—and[144] richest king of all time, according to the ancient myths—got his wealth from placer mines in the river pactolus, whose name has been as synonymous with gold as cr?sus’s own. one of the strangest and wisest of the folk-stories of ancient greece tells how that little river in asia minor first gained its golden sands. some seven hundred years before christ, there was a king of phrygia who had more gold than cr?sus ever dreamed of—so much gold that it made him the poorest man in the world! it was king midas, son of gordius, who earned this strange distinction. he had done a favor to dionysus, and the god said gratefully: “wish one wish, whatever thou wilt, and i will grant it.” now midas had already caught the most dangerous of all “yellow fevers”—the fever for gold—and he replied: “then let it be that all things which i shall touch shall be turned into gold.”
dionysus promptly granted this foolish prayer; and midas was very happy for a little time. he picked up stones from the ground, and instantly they changed to great lumps of gold. his staff was gold, and his very clothing became yellow and so heavy that he could barely stagger under its weight. this was very fine indeed! he touched the[145] corner of his palace—and lo! the whole building became a house of pure gold. splendid! he entered, and touched what took his fancy; and furniture, and clothing, and all, underwent the same magic change. better and better! “i’m the luckiest king alive,” chuckled midas, still looking about for something new to transmute.
but even kings who have the golden touch must sometimes eat, and presently midas grew hungry with so much wealth-making. he clapped his hands, and the servants spread the royal table. a touch of the royal finger, and table and cloth and dishes were yellow gold. this was something like! the exhilarated king sat down and broke a piece of bread—but as he lifted it, it was strangely heavy, and he saw that it, too, was of the precious metal! a doubt ran through his foolish head whether even the golden touch might not have its drawbacks; but he was very hungry, and did not wait to weigh the question. if his fingers turned the bread to gold, he would take something from a spoon—and he lifted a ladle of broth to his mouth. but the instant it touched his lips, the broth turned to a great yellow button, which dropped ringing back upon the golden board.
[146]
the disquieted king rose and walked out of the palace. at the door he met his fair-faced little daughter, who held up a bright flower to him. midas laid his hand gently upon her head, for he loved the child, foolish as he was. and lo! his daughter stood motionless before him—a pitiful little statue of shining gold!
how much longer this accursed power tormented the miserable monarch the myth does not tell us; but he was cured at last by bathing in the river pactolus, and the washing away of his magic power filled the sands of the stream with golden grains.
the midases are not dead yet—for the one of ancient fable there are thousands to-day, at whose very touch all turns to gold. their food does not become metal between their lips—but often it might as well, for all the joy they have of it. and the little phrygian princess was not the only child to be changed and hardened forever by the “golden touch.”
gold figures largely through all the quaint history-fables of the ancients; and history itself is full of tales hardly less remarkable. the early history of america was made by gold—or rather, by golden hopes which achieved wonders for civilization, but very little for the pockets of the most wonderful[147] explorers the world has ever seen. had it not been for the presence of gold here—and the supposed presence of even more than has yet been dug—the western hemisphere would be very much of a wilderness still. it was the chase of the golden myths which led to the astounding achievements that opened the new world; and since then, almost to this day, civilization has followed with deliberate march only in the hasty footprints of the gold seekers. no tale was too wild to find credence with the early adventurers.
the fabled ransom of montezuma is all a fable; but it is a fact that atahualpa, the head inca of peru, did pay to that marvelous soldier pizarro a ransom of golden vessels sufficient to fill a room twenty-two by seventeen feet to a height of nearly six feet above the floor! while gold was not much in use in mexico, there was a great deal of it employed in peru for sacred utensils and idols and for personal ornaments; and to this day the “mummy miners” are taking it out there. the early spanish discoveries of gold in north america were unimportant, despite the gilded myths which have surrounded them. in columbus’s time the gold fields of the known world were so “worked out” that[148] their product was barely enough to meet the “wear and tear” of the precious metal in use; so there was crying need of new finds. but they came slowly.
by 1580 there were vague rumors of gold in what is now california. loyola casallo, a visiting priest, saw placer gold there, and tells of it in his book written in 1690. in the last century antonio alcedo speaks of lumps of california gold, weighing from five to eight pounds. but though its presence was known, and though the rocky ribs of the golden state hid far more millions than were dreamed of—and perhaps than are dreamed of yet—there was little mining, and that little with scant success.
the first gold discovery in the american colonies was in cabarrus county, north carolina, in 1799; and up to 1827 that state was the only gold-producer in the union. in 1824 cabarrus county sent the first american gold to the mint in philadelphia. the appalachian gold field, which embraces part of virginia, and stretches across north carolina, south carolina and georgia, touching also parts of tennessee and alabama, was once looked to for great things; but it long ago dropped from all importance.
in 1828 the new placers were discovered in new mexico, some fifty miles south of[149] santa fé, and for a great many years produced richly. even to this day they are far from unproductive. gold had been found in new mexico many generations before, but never in quantities to come anywhere near paying. a decade later, placer gold was discovered in santa barbara county, california, in the vast rancho of that gallant old hidalgo whose home was described by mrs. jackson as the home of “ramona.” these placers have been worked steadily though clumsily by mexicans ever since; and i have a waxy nugget which was washed out in piru creek in 1838.
within half a century the world’s supply of gold had long been inadequate to the growing demand. russia was the chief producer; and her mines—discovered about 1745—kept the nations from a “famine” which would be most disastrous. there were old mines in china, but little worked; and though japan’s gold output was large, it was but a drop in the cosmopolitan bucket. russia at present, by the way, produces an average of twenty millions of gold a year.
the wonderful gold fields of australia were discovered in 1839 by count strzelcki; but the priceless find was concealed, for a curious reason. australia was already[150] england’s out-door prison; and it was feared that if the golden news were known the 45,000 desperate convicts there would rise in rebellion and annihilate their keepers—as they could well have done. so for a dozen years the mighty secret was jealously guarded; and thousands walked unsuspecting over the dumb gravel that held a million fortunes. in 1848 rev. w. b. clark again stumbled upon the dangerous secret, but again the discovery was suppressed; and it was not until california had set the whole world on fire with excitement which nothing could bottle up, that australia threw off her politic mask. in 1851 e. h. hargreaves, who had just come from the new mines of california, saw that australia was geologically a gold country; and his prospecting proved his surmises correct. the news spread in spite of cautious officials; and the wild epidemic of fortune seekers pitted the face of the island-continent, and watered its thirsty sands with blood. even yet, australia is producing over $45,000,000 gold a year.
the rich gold fields of new zealand were first found in 1842, but were not extensively worked until 1856, when the swarming gold hunters had overrun the australian fields, and the restless sought still easier wealth.
[151]
as i have told you, gold was mined spasmodically in california much more than two centuries ago, and steadily mined for more than a decade before the “great discovery” which was to change the face of an empire and bring about what was in many ways the most remarkable migration in the whole history of the human race. but these early diggings of the precious metal made little stir. the swarthy miners delved away quietly, exchanged their glittering “dust” for rough food and other rude necessaries, and made no noise. they were very much out of the world. the telegraph, the railroad and the printing press were far from touch with them. there were a few “americans” in california, and even one or two newspapers, but neither paid attention to the occasional rumors of gold, save to ridicule them.
but on the ninth day of february, 1848, a little girl held in her unknowing hand the key of the west—the wee yellow seed which was to spring into one of the most wondrous plants in history. on the american fork of the sacramento river, in what is now el dorado county, cal., stood a shabby little mill, owned by an american named sutter. (californians, by the way, pronounce the name “soo′-ter.”) the mill race[152] became broken, and three men were hired to repair it. two were mormons, and the third, the overseer, was named marshall. as the men worked, marshall’s little daughter played about them—dreaming as little as did her elders that she was to upset a continent.
a yellow pebble in an angle of the sluice caught her eye, and picking the pretty trifle from the wet sand, she ran to her father with, “papa! see the pitty stone.” it was indeed a pretty stone, and marshall at once suspected its value. tests proved that he was right, and gold was really found. the discovery made some little noise among the few americans in that lonely, far land, but nothing was known of it to the world until rev. c. s. lyman, who saw some of the nuggets which further search yielded, wrote a letter to the american journal of science, in march, 1848. as soon as the news was in type, it spread swiftly to the four ends of the earth, and already by august of the same year four thousand excited men were tearing up the sands of the american fork, and coaxing them to yield their golden secrets. and well they succeeded, for every day saw from $30,000 to $50,000 worth of gold washed out and transferred to rude safes of bottles or buckskin sacks.[153] how long and high that gold fever raged; how it patted the fearful intervening desert with the weary footprints of tens of thousands of modern jasons; how it brought around the horn a thousand heavy ships for every one that sailed before; how it overturned and created anew the money markets of the world; how it turned a vast wilderness into the garden of the world, and pulled the union a thousand miles over to the west, and caused the building of such enormous railway lines as mankind had never faintly dreamed of, and did a thousand other wonders, you already know—for it has made literature as well as history. our national history is crowded with great achievements, but its chief romance was—
“the days of old,
the days of gold,
the days of ’49.”
california produced $5,000,000 gold in 1848, and crazed the civilized world. the output grew to $60,000,000 by 1852. to-day the state yields between eleven and twelve million dollars’ worth of gold a year, and it creates no excitement whatever; for its people are more occupied with mining the safer gold of agriculture.
of late years south africa has entered the field as one of the great gold countries.[154] its annual “crop” is over forty millions. there is a possibility that hereafter alaska will have to be added to the list. this summer of 1897 between $3,000,000 and $4,000,000 in “dust” and small nuggets came out of the region generally and loosely called “the klondike.” i saw in the san francisco mint 152,000 ounces the returning miners poured out from their buckskin bags. over 3,000 people left california under the excitement caused by the exhibition of these treasures, in a “gold-rush” which recalled the old days, by its fever and its follies; but the klondike rush will probably be remembered, whatever its results in gold, as the most disastrous in history. instead of the mild climates of california, australia and south africa (and thousands lost health and life even there) the gold seekers upon the klondike will have to do with the cruel winters and inhospitable wildernesses of a land almost under the arctic circle.
of the various methods of liberating our yellow slave from the hard clutches of the earth it would be too long to speak in detail here; but they are broadly divided into two classes, according to the surroundings of the gold itself. free or “placer” gold—which[155] was for centuries the first known to mankind, and which was the sort that started the great “fever” in california and australia—is found in beds of sand and gravel, generally the present or former bed of a stream. it is extracted—this precious needle from an enormous and worthless haystack—by means of its own weight; water being applied in various manners to give that weight a chance to assert itself. the mixed gravel is given up to the mercies of running water, which wets it through, and causes its heaviest parts to sink to the bottom, where they are held by artificial obstacles, while the lighter particles of sand are swept away by the natural or artificial current. in this manner the vast mass of soil is water-sifted until but little is left; and from that little it is easy to hunt out the coy yellow grains.
the placer gold was not formed in the gravel banks where it is found, but came there by the death of its mother rock. all gold began in “veins” in the earth’s rocky ribs; but time, with his patient hammers of wind and rain and frost, has pounded vast areas of these rocks to sand; and the gold, broken from great bands to lumps, has drifted with the bones of the mountains into the later heaps of gravel.
[156]
the processes of mining gold which still remains in its original home in the rocks are far more complicated. there is a vast amount of boring to be done into the flinty hearts of the mountains, with diamond-pointed drills and with blasting; and then the rock, which is dotted with the precious yellow flakes, has to be crushed between the steel jaws of great mills. much of the gold that is mined, too, is so chemically changed that it does not look like gold at all, and requires special chemical processes to coax it out. in gold (and silver) mining mercury is one of the most important factors. it is the mineral sheriff, and swift to arrest any fugitive fleck of gold that may come in its way. the sluice boxes in extensive placer mines, and the “sheets” in stamp mills are all charged with quicksilver, which saves a vast amount of the finer gold dust that would be otherwise swept away by the current of water—for water is equally essential in both kinds of mining.
there is no such thing as pure gold, often as we hear the phrase. nature’s own “virgin gold” is always alloyed with silver; and the very purest is but 98 or 97 per cent gold. california gold averages about the fineness of our american coin—90 per cent pure. as a general rule, the lighter the[157] color the purer the gold. the beautiful red gold gets its color from a large alloy of copper.
it is an odd fact that the sea is full of gold. no doubt at the bottom of that stupendous basin which has received for all time the washings of all the world, there is an incalculable wealth of golden dust; but the strange ocean mine is not all so deep down as that. the sea water itself carries gold in solution—a grain of gold to every ton of water, as a famous chemist has shown.
among the historical big nuggets found in various parts of the world, there have been some wonderful yellow lumps. in cabarrus county, n. c., one was found in 1810 which weighed thirty-seven pounds troy. in 1842 the gold fields of zlatoust, in the ural, gave a nugget of ninety-six pounds troy. the victoria (australia) nugget weighed one hundred and forty-six pounds and three pennyweights, of which only six ounces was foreign rock; and the ballarat (australia) nugget was thirty-nine pounds heavier yet. the largest nugget ever found was also dug in australia—the “sarah sands,” named for a far-off loved one. it reached the astonishing weight of two hundred and thirty-three pounds and[158] four ounces troy! i wonder what miner sands felt when he stuck his pick into that fortune in one lump!
the quality which makes gold commercially the most valuable of the metals is its docility. the cunning hammer of the smith can “teach” it almost anything. the more stubborn metals crumble after a certain point; but gold can be hammered into a sheet so infinitely fine that 282,000 of them, piled one upon the other, would be but an inch thick! and a flake of gold tiny as a pin-head can be drawn out, a finer thread than ever man spun, to a length of five hundred feet!
there is no end to the uses of gold. they broaden every day. in some one of its many forms our yellow slave helps us in almost every art and walk of life. it has become as indispensable as its red fellow-slave, fire—and like fire can be as bad a master as it should be a good servant.
