The flat at the mouth of the Gulch was a busy scene, every foot was
good paying stuff, for in the eddy, where the torrents in winter
rushed down into the Yuba, the gold had settled down and lay thick
among the gravel. But most of the parties were sinking, and it was
a long way down to the bedrock; for the hills on both sides sloped
steeply, and the Yuba must here at one time have rushed through a
narrow gorge, until, in some wild freak, it brought down millions
of tons of gravel, and resumed its course seventy feet above its
former level.
A quarter of a mile higher up a ledge of rock ran across the
valley, and over it in the old time the Yuba had poured in a cascade
seventy feet deep into the ravine. But the rock now was level with
the gravel, only showing its jagged points here and there above
it. This ledge had been invaluable to the diggers: without it they
could only have sunk their shafts with the greatest difficulty,
for the gravel would have been full of water, and even with the
greatest pains in puddling and timber work the pumps would scarcely
have sufficed to keep it down as it rose in the bottom of the
shafts. But the miners had made common cause together, and giving
each so many ounces of gold or so many days' work had erected a
dam thirty feet high along the ledge of rock, and had cut a channel
for the Yuba along the lower slopes of the valley.
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