Abbie... MOTHER LODE The Story of Californias Gold Rush by Louis J. Stellman written 1934. Blackmer "In 1850 there were enough huts and tents to justify a name, a christening. Many were proposed at a citizens' meeting, but it was O.O. Blackmer's suggestion that won. "Why not Nevada?" he cried, pointing to the snow capped peaks. It proved a popular suggestion, for Nevada means a snowy mountain in loosely translated Spanish. Boyd Volcano got its name from a belief that the country thereabouts was the crater of an extinct fire-spitting mountain. Bulwer Lytton was small fry for the colony of intellectuals which once graced Volcano. They met to discuss Spencer, Huxley, Tyndall, et al. One of them was Alex Hayes, a West Point graduate, who later became a brigadier general and was killed in the Battle of the Wilderness. Another was General Sompronius Boyd, who fought with the Union army and was afterward a member of Congress. Drake already sent on another post. Dr. Phelps isn't where index says he is. D.O. Mills "Plymouth, located at the northern border of Amador County, was a small and unimportant camp until Alvinza Hayward and D.O. Mills invested in mines there and built large mills to reduce the ore. Hayward's history, worthy of a novel in itself, reads like the "Book of Job." It is one of abiding and dauntless faith. His religion was gold reduction, his deity the Hayward claim. He achieved throughout the Mother Lode a repute for being "cracked". But Hayward was far from cracked. He went on developing his mine. He borrowed and borrowed and borrowed. He went broke a dozen times. Again & again his unpaid shifts quit him with threats and denunciations. Only two of his helpers stuck by him. With them, hungry, ragged, but undaunted, Hayward worked on. There came a day when, exhausted, long without food, weakness compelled them to stop. He started up again & pleaded with his helpers to come with him. They followed him into the shaft, staggering, scarcely knowing what they did. That day they found pay dirt, "picture rock." They were too feeble to cheer. They laid down their told and "slept the clock around." Very soon Hayward's income was $50,000 a month, and the reward of his two faithful workers was a generous competence for life. Hayward went to San Francisco and invested in real estate. A.N. Coleman, a storekeeper at Amador, who had trusted Hayward in his extremity when all others refused him credit, was another beneficiary of the find in the Hayward (now Eureka) mine. Mills, who was a partner of Hayward's in subsequent mining investments, was also a business genius. He made money on gold and in banking on the Mother Lode. Later he joined William C. Ralston, San Francisco's tremendously popular but ill fated financial genius, in the Bank of California. (I kind of got caught up in the story & gave you more of Hayward but I thought it was neat.) John Shannon On April 9, 1854, Auburn celebrated with enthusiasm which was almost violent the birth of its first newspaper, The Placer Democrat. John Shannon, who was to become a stormy and tragic petrel in California's bucolic journalism, was the owner of the new paper and Philip Lynch was its editor. When Mrs.. John Shannon, wife of the owner, died in childbirth, it became known that she was "Eulalia", the writer of couplets. Her death had two unfortunate results. It delayed for a time Auburn's literary progress and it sent John Shannon, lonely and restless, wandering down a path that led to violent death a few years later. Shannon's finally settled in Visalia, the new capital of Tulare County, and started a newspaper whereby he made a rival and an enemy of Editor Morris, already established in the printing and publishing business there. The men belabored each other with printed words and finally with shouted epithets. Shannon, the larger of the two, threatened publicly to take it out of his enemy's hide. Morris loaded a pistol and stood or rather sat pat in his office, keeping a close watch on all who entered his door. When, one afternoon, not long thereafter, he perceived Shannon's silhouetted figure on his threshold, he did not even wait to cry a warning. He fired. And Shannon, shot through the heart, fell dead. He was buried, unmourned and unepitaphed. But over the grave of Mary Fee Shannon stands a marble headstone simply lettered: EULALIA. Jackie in California [email protected]