Continuing with futher "easy pickins": Frank ANDERSON, a young man mining on Goodyear Bar, took a stroll up the Yuba River on September 14, 1849, and went as far as the forks where Downieville was afterwards built. He found the gold so plentiful that he could separate it from the sand washing it in his hands. It was probably as rich a placer as was ever found in the State. The next day he and three others panned out thirty pounds of gold in three hours, amounting to over $6000. A company of miners called the Jerseymen took out thirty pounds a day for forty days and would have had a ton of gold, if the flood had not driven them out of the river bed. That the ground upon which the town was built was good placer diggings goes without saying. A number of miners out of work in September, 1859, took a contract to dig out a large cellar under Givin's corner on Main and Commercial Streets, Downieville, for $250 and the dirt they took out. It took them twenty days to do the digging and they made about $2 a day apiece from the job, but the dirt was a rich paying proposition. They washed over an ounce a day to the man and made about as much out of the cellar dirt as the lot and its building were considered worth. In Mokelumne Hill on a Sunday morning in November, 1858, after a heavy rain storm, a lady on her way to church, picked up a nugget weighing about four ounces. It was found near the church door. Actuated by a religious impulse she dropped it into the contribution plate, which caused the minister to rise to the occasion and remark that it was not sinful to look for gold on the Lord's Day, provided what was found was given to the service of the Lord. He also reminded his congregation that after a heavy rainstorm nuggets like mushrooms, were more plentiful than at any other time. In January, 1859, a miner out of curiosity, prospected the dirt on Montgomery Street in the town of Oroville and found it showing thirty cents to a pan. This is the principal street in the town and an excitement followed with the locating of claims and preparations to work them that threatened to tear the street out by its roots. At Placerville, in 1851, a man named Pile had a blacksmith shop with a small space of ground in the rear on the bank of Hangtown Creek. His little daughter, with a wash basin, amused herself after school hours washing dirt from the bank and inside of two months had accumulated over two pounds of gold dust worth over $400. Chickens were persistent gatherers of small nuggets in these mining towns and their gizzards were regularly searched by the cooks who prepared them for the oven!!! At Diamond Springs in 1856 one was killed for a Sunday dinner whose gizzard panned out $12.80. The "Pickers" was a generic name applied, as early as 1850, to a number of men who developed into a class too lazy to work a placer; who loafed around the mining camps, a sort of tinhorn sporting men, until a heavy rainstorm came along. Then, with a pan and sheath knife they searched the crevices and rocks the rushing streams, pouring down the hillsides in and about these placer mining towns washed clean, picking out the nuggets, little and big, to be found there. One Sunday in November, 1851, a gold buyer in Mokelumne Hill purchased over $500 worth of gold dust from these "Pickers." In February, 1852, a "Picker" in Sonora found in two days one nugget weighing five and one-half, one, four and one-half and three weighing one-half pounds each and received over $2400 for his easy labor. One day in November, 1852, the "Pickers" in Sonora found in the gulleys of that town a three and one-half pound nugget and two others that were one-half pound in weight. At Columbia on the same day a "Picker" found an eight-pound nugget. In January, 1852, one found a two and one-half pound nugget on Broadway, Columbia, and in November, 1854, a "Picker" found in a street of Sonora a quartz boulder weighing seventeen pounds that contained eight pounds of gold, worth $1700. As late as March, 1857, a nugget weighing one and one-half pounds was found by a lady in Sonora in the street in front of her home after a heavy rainfall.