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North Bloomfield, |
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Malakoff Diggins |
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After 17 miles of riding up Tyler-Foote Rd and strolling through the town of North Bloomfield, you're finally ready to see the diggins, right? Right. Maybe you're first impression was like mine of geez, what did we do? This is really just a big scar carved out of the earth. And well over 100 years later, little has changed. Standing at the rim and looking down on the Diggins just got me thinking. Just wow. This is really something. We sat on the bench above and watched the world go by undisturbed by any person. This hole in the earth is 7,000 feet long- over a mile- 3,000 feet wide and as much as 600 feet deep at its peak. The Diggins isn't like a quarry that resembles a massive hole in the ground, instead the Diggins is a mountain washed away. And it took only a few years to create this devastation. Now 135 years later, vegetation has barely reclaimed the scar. |
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Gold was discovered in nearby creeks during 1851 by three miners escaping
the congestion of Nevada City. When their supplies ran low, a member of their party
headed down into Nevada City. After picking up supplies, he then
visited his favorite saloon but paid for a round of drinks
with bits of gold, thus piquing interest of the saloon's patrons. The man refused to reveal
the gold's source and no amount of prying worked the secret from
him. So he was
secretly followed back to the discovery, now present day North Bloomfield. The area was soon overrun and any trace of gold evaporated. The prospectors muttered the word 'humbug', and left- in turn naming the stream Humbug Creek. For several years the area was quiet but farmers settling the area continued to find flakes of gold. Soon new claims were staked, and by 1857 the town of Humbug sprang up and soon grew to 1700 residents including an ample Chinese population. The town became the center of all area mines, including the nearby Malakoff Mine which was producing a steady stream of gold. Not feeling Humbug was a fitting title, the name of the town was changed to the more pleasant sounding North Bloomfield. |
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The gold in Humbug Creek dried up again and many of the miners left
selling their claims to one man, Julius Poquillon, who's land grew to some
1500 acres by 1865. Yet there was a great deal of gold left.
But unlike Coloma, it couldn't be simply
plucked from the ground. Nor was it held in quartz where it could be
hard rock mined like the nearby Empire Mine.
It
was stuck in layers of sediment in the form of a low-grade fine dust.
The gold here in the San Juan Ridge was buried in "deep gravels"
that were once ancient riverbeds.
Julius struck a deal with some investors in San Francisco and created the Malakoff Diggins Mining and Gravel Company. The name originated from French miners to commemorate the capture of the Russian Fort Malakoff, near Sebastopol, in Europe's Crimean War. Julius employed a new form of mining discovered in 1852 called Hydraulic Mining credited to Antoine Chabot who had used a simple hose to wash loose gravel from his claim at Buckeye Hill. The method was soon refined and by 1876, the operation was in full swing employing the entire town to support the mining. Seven massive monitors washed away the hillside day and night. The monitors resembled a long cannon or modern-day fire hose nozzle. |
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These seven monitors needed large amounts of water and army of 300 Chinese laborers worked on a grand scale to create reservoirs, ditches, channels, diverting streams and rivers from all over higher elevations. The water would be pulled by gravity down the mountain through these channels at ever increasing speed. As it flowed, the channel gradually became smaller and the pressure increased. The water was fed through penstocks or hoses and shot out of massive monitors, some as long as 10 feet in length. The monitors articulated and could be directed at the hillsides as powerful streams of water simply washed the hillside away. The force of water was so great, it was said a 50 pound weight dropped into the stream would be thrown hundreds of feet. It was recorded that animals and people, struck by the force of the stream were killed even at a distance of 200 feet away from the monitor. |
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The water and sediments were all collected into sluices. A sort of
man-made wooden channel. In the sluice, the gold particles were
heavier than the sludge and separated from the sediments. The waste product was simply dumped into
Humbug Creek. The creek however, soon couldn't handle the volume. Hamilton Smith engineered one the most impressive mining feats of the day- a drainage tunnel to reach the South Yuba River. The tunnel was carved from solid bedrock and was 8000 feet long. After 30 months of men working day and night to complete the tunnel, water flowed through it into the South Yuba River in later 1874. The tunnel enabled a feverish pace to reach more gold. At its peak, the mine operated 24 hours a day, 7 days a week producing 50,000 tons of gravel- per day. |
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The result though was tailings. The volume of the tailings grew into millions of tons of cubic yards of dirt, mud, and fine silt. This silt settled into river bottoms and created massive floods as the mining continued. The silting raised the bottom of the Feather River and then on to Verona where it joined the Sacramento River. In Marysville on the Central Valley floor, the city flooded after the river bottom rose higher than the town. The city of Sacramento flooded while the silt traveled down the Yuba River to Marysville all the way to San Francisco Bay bungling shipping in the Carquinez Straight. All this in less than ten years. Numerous legal challenges ensued as both sides went head to head. Unlike most other area mines, Malakoff Diggins didn't come to a close because the gold ran out, instead in 1884 the constant legal battle ended when a federal judge granted a permanent injunction against this practice of depositing the tailings into the Yuba River. In effect, this method of hydraulic mining became illegal. By 1884, over four million dollars in gold was pulled from forty-one million yards of earth. By the turn of the century, hydraulic mining wasn't profitable and the mine closed up shop. Malakoff Diggins was the richest and largest hydraulic mining operation in the known world at that time. Yet as far as anyone can tell, there's still tons of gold left at Malakoff Diggins. |
| If you like to hike, you can even walk into the Hiller
Tunnel. At 556 feet long, it was used to channel water to the
monitors during the mining. Trails run along the rim and
through the Diggins. Keep an eye out for items simply left
there when the operation ended. Later, while scouting
campsites, we discovered the best view of the diggins', just below
several of the campsites. It was a sheer drop off. And no you
adrenaline-junkie, no base jumping allowed.
Nearby Motorcycle Roads: Be sure and ride Yuba Pass - Highway 49. If you are headed due north, you can connect up with Oregon Hill Road to La Porte Road which is the latest motorcycle mecca with fresh brand new pavement on up to Quincy. The longest single span covered bridge is nearby in Bridgeport via Pleasant Valley Road. In Grass Valley is the Empire Mine. Southward outside of Auburn is Foresthill Road which runs up to Mosquito Ridge. |
