The Gold Seekers
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The Gold Seekers

Gold, Ghosts and Legends from Carolina to California

Nancy Roberts

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eBook - ePub

The Gold Seekers

Gold, Ghosts and Legends from Carolina to California

Nancy Roberts

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About This Book

A history of the earlier Southern gold rush and its legends thatā€”for the first timeā€”ties it to the well-known California gold rush of 1849. Nancy Roberts tells how it all began in North Carolina, which supplied all the domestic gold coined at the US Mint between 1804 and 1828. She tells the story of the discovery of the gold in Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, and Alabama and later in California and Colorado, including how the Virginia, Carolina and Georgia gold miners abandoned their mines within weeks after news arrived of the discovery of gold at Sutter's Creek. And, for a while, they were said to be the only experienced miners in the Western gold fields. Ms. Roberts recreates with gusto and suspense the experiences of real peopleā€”the adventurers and entrepreneurs, family men and rascals, immigrants and bandits, entertainers and minersā€”and also includes several tales of the supernatural from the period. There was North Carolina's flamboyant Walter George Newman, who fleeced the wolves of Wall Street; "Fool Billy, " who South Carolinians discovered was not a fool at all; a romantic specter called Scarlett O'Hara of the Dorn Mine; Georgian Green Russell, with his beard braided like a pirate, who founded Denver; "Free Jim, " the only black man in Dahlonega to own his own gold mine only to leave it for San Francisco; the Grisly Ghost of Gold Hill; a general from North Carolina who became an influential Californian; the ghost bride of Vallecito; and California's bandit, the enigmatic Black Bart.

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Part I: Tales of the
Southeastern Gold Rushes

1.

The Discovery of Gold in North Carolina

Americaā€™s first gold rush began in North Carolina, not in California. It all started with John Reed and not John Sutterā€”by chance, each was a German immigrant. And when gold was found on their land, they both shared the same concern about their crops and were more interested in farming than mining. But here similarities end.
Sutter was born in 1803, one year after John Reed stood in Little Meadow Creek surveying a stream on his farm in which millions of dollars worth of gold lay glittering just below the waterā€™s surface. The North Carolina gold rush was a small-scale version of what happened in California and fate had cast just as unlikely a man in the lead role.
John Reed was born in Darmstadt, Germany, in January of 1758. He had the misfortune of being conscripted into the army of Prince Frederick and loaned to the king of England to fight the American colonists. Reed arrived sometime during the winter of 1778 to 1779 and shortly afterwards left Long Island, New York, with British, Hessian, and Tory units to take part in the capture of Charleston, South Carolina. But he felt a deep sympathy with the colonists and resented being forced to fight for what he thought was an unjust cause.
Attempting to escape, he was caught by the British and given thirty-nine lashes as punishment. Apparently in a state of euphoria after the capture of Charleston, they dealt with this insubordinate deserter in a most unusual fashion. After his punishment they simply told Reed to ā€œgo to the devilā€ and they washed their hands of him. He went to Cabarrus County, North Carolina, where there were German settlers. John Reed spoke English poorly, so it was no wonder that he was attracted to a German-speaking settlement.
He was in a strange country but he had farmed as a boy and started farming once more; in fact, by the time Cornwallis had surrendered at Yorktown, John Reed was already saving his money toward the purchase of land. In 1799 the farm houses of Mecklenburg and the surrounding counties were far apart, the land sparsely settled and desolate.
A Cornishman in the piney woods of Davidson County wrote, ā€œI have been in dense tropical forests, on the silent plains of South America, on the equally silent steppes of Siberia, and in the deserts of Asia and Africa, but I know of no silence so awe-inspiring, even terrible as that of a great pine forest.ā€ Evidently land like this did not bother Reed at all.
Shortly before 1799 he was able to buy 330 acres from the state of North Carolina at a price of fifty shillings per hundred acres, the going price at that time. There was nothing distinguished or especially talented about this immigrant. Everything about John Reed indicated that he was born to plow the hard red clay of Piedmont Carolina until he died, but that was not to be the case.
On a Sunday morning in 1799 John Reed had no thoughts beyond his family and his crops in his mind when he and his wife climbed upon his only horse to ride double to church. The distance was too far for the three children to walk, so the older son, Conrad, was placed in charge of the younger ones until their parents returned from services.
Twelve-year-old Conrad Reed took them down to Little Meadow Creek, which ran through the Reed farm, to shoot fish with a bow and arrow. While watching for fish, he noticed a shiny yellow rock glinting in the sunlight and he waded in after it. It was far heavier to lift out than he had imagined; but he carried it back to the house and gave it to his father when he returned from church. It was about the shape of a small flatiron and just as heavy.
Image
Twelve-year old Conrad Reed accidentally discovers a seventeen-pound gold nugget near Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1799.
(North Carolina Department of Archives and History Photo) Harperā€™s New Monthly Magazine, 1857
Reed had never seen such an unusual looking rock and he was sufficiently curious to take it to William Atkinson, a silversmith in the nearby village of Concord. The man who worked with silver did not recognize a more precious metal when he saw it and returned the rock to Reed telling him he had no idea what it could be. Back to his farm went Reed and for three years he used the seventeen-pound rock as a doorstop.
His crops flourished and in 1802 he was able to make a trip to Fayetteville over a hundred miles away, a trading center to the east on the Cape Fear River. Conrad who was going too, thought they should take their doorstop and his father humored him.
When they showed the rock to a Fayetteville jeweler, the man knew it for what it was and he had melted it down and showed John Reed a bar of gold six to eight inches long. Asked what he would sell it for, Reed who had no idea of the real value of gold replied with what he thought was a ā€œbig price.ā€
ā€œI will sell it for $3.50,ā€ he said and the jeweler immediately paid him. Reed was so happy to receive such a pile of money for ā€œnothingā€ that he thought of pleasing his wife by bringing her something she had heard of but never seen or tasted ā€¦ coffee.
Sarah Kizer Reed was at first pleased with the coffee but soon became exasperated when the unground beans did not cook up well when mixed with meat! Several weeks later word reached Cabarrus County through someone who had been down trading in Fayetteville that a jeweler there had sold a small bar of gold for ā€œthousands of dollars.ā€ Reed saddled his horse and headed back to Fayetteville. There was a confrontation in the jewelry shop and John Reed returned home apparently bringing from one to four thousand dollars depending on which account is read. Possibly the jeweler parted with the money with the hope Reed would bring him more nuggets.
Reed had not thought of searching Little Meadow Creek for gold, but now he walked the creek and found that for a mile it was strewn with the precious metal.
For a time, farming was forgotten while each day the entire family went down to Little Meadow Creek to look for more rocks of gold. Some say the stream bed was covered with small golden nuggets shining beneath the surface and that Reed filled a quart jar with them. There was gold not only in the stream bed but in the gravel beside it where the Reeds found nuggets weighing up to twenty-eight pounds. John Reed was literally sitting on top of a gold mine for beneath the soil, the hills of his farm carried veins of milk white quartz and the precious metal.
It dawned on the former Hessian soldier that he was no longer in Europe where any gold discovered was automatically the property of the king but that the riches he was finding belonged solely to him. In Europe there had been no motivation for a gold rush for it must be turned over to the government. Here, a man had an opportunity to become rich overnight. Nearby farmers immediately began to dig on their own land. News of the Carolina gold rush was soon spreading throughout the southeast and the rest of the world!
John Reed expanded his operation taking in three farmer friends as partners and each summer after the crops were harvested, the partners supplied Reed with equipment and slaves to dig for gold in the creek bed and adjacent areas. The surface diggings near Little Meadow Creek were probably the richest in North Carolina. For the next twenty years, Reed and his partners continued seasonal mining operations along the creek and by 1824, their efforts had netted an estimated one hundred thousand dollars in gold.
In 1803 a nugget weighing twenty-eight pounds was found just under the surface of the ground by a gray-headed old slave named Peter and at the time, it was the largest nugget ever found in the United States. Thomas Hurley says in his book Famous Gold Nuggets of the World that this was the worldā€™s richest mining claim as to number, value and quality of the nuggets.
The half-mile of stream where the first nugget had been found was richer than any claim California would have almost fifty years later.
Although John Reed never learned to read and write, he became a wealthy man hiring servants and building a larger house of logs and stone. Other than that, his simple frugal lifestyle continued much the same.
Sadly enough, only four years after underground mining began in 1831, a family argument resulted in a court injunction that closed the mine for ten years. John Reed never saw it reopened for he died in 1845, but despite the closing of the mine he was still wealthy. After his death the Reed Mine was sold at public auction. Through the years the mine changed hands many times and mining was halted entirely at the Reed as well as throughout the state during the Civil War. The last large nuggett was found at the Reed by a placer miner in 1896 and a total was recorded of over one hundred pounds in gold nuggets before the last underground mining ceased in 1912.
As word spread, similar mining enterprises sprang up on the small farms that dotted the Yadkin and Catawba river valleys, including Parkerā€™s Mine in Montgomery County and Dunnā€™s mine in Mecklenburg County. These ā€œminesā€ were like the Reed partnership, really nothing more than placer operations along creek beds. Only after the most obvious large nuggets were discovered did these farmerturned-miners began to use mechanical devices like the ā€œrocker.ā€
In 1828 a tired traveler spent the night with a shoemaker and his family at Brindletown in Burke County and the next morning saw flecks of gold in the clay chinking between the logs of the house. He borrowed a dishpan from the manā€™s wife and panned more gold from the nearby stream than he had seen on all his travels in South America. Then he taught the shoemaker how to pan for gold and in return the shoemaker provided the land and the pair became partners. From that moment, the Burke County gold rush was on its way.
About forty-five miles above Raleigh, a man named Isaac Portis, who lived near two well traveled roads, took in lodgers for twenty-five cents a night. In 1838 he happened to take in a peddler bound from Raleigh to Halifax. As the peddler was leaving the next morning he became aware of the sun striking some glittering flecks in the freshly plowed red clay field. Filled with excitement, he hurried back to the house with a handful of earth. Samples of the earth sent to Raleigh and Richmond confirmed that Isaac Portis had been raising cotton in fields of gold. The northeast Carolina gold rush had begun.
Placer mining was replaced by vein mining in 1825 when it was discovered that underground veins of white quartz also bore gold. This ā€œlodeā€ gold as it was called required much more money, labor, and machinery. Fortune seekers from other countries were arriving and among them were skilled Cornishmen from England.
Entire families, even children from five or six years old up, worked in the mines. Gold mining at its peak employed more North Carolinians than any occupation other than farming but early census figures donā€™t show this. Many of the men mined for gold when the crops were in but since they owned the land before the excitement over the discovery of gold, they saw themselves as ā€œfarmersā€ and this was what they put down as their occupation. Thus, census figures reflect only those working as employees at the larger mines, they donā€™t count the scores of small one-or two-man claims nor do they count the farms where the owner and his slaves mined in the winter months.

HARD ROCK MINING BEGINS

The first recorded discovery of vein deposits of gold in the Carolina belt occurred in 1825 on the farm of Matthias Barringer. Like Reed, Barringer was a German farmer. He owned a few hundred acres of land in what is now Stanly County and he had panned for gold in the creeks on his farm for several years.
One day he noticed that beyond a certain point going up stream he could not find any gold. Just at the point where the gold seemed to stop, he saw a white quartz vein running into the hill and at right angles with the stream. He had often found pieces of the quartz with gold in it in the stream bed and he came to the conclusion that the gold scattered in the stream below this point must have come out of this particular quartz vein. He decided to pursue it into the hill.
He had followed it only a few feet when he struck a rich and beautiful deposit of the metal in a matrix of quartz. In following the vein for a distance of about thirty or forty feet and not more than fifteen or eighteen feet in depth, he found a succession of nests of gold from which he took out more than fifteen thousand pennyweights. There was great excitement in the area and within a few weeks fifty gold hunters had leased prospects from the old farmer.
What was most important to the North Carolina mining industry was that gold had been found in ā€œregular veins.ā€ Near Charlotte, several major mining properties developed including the Cappā€™s Hill, McComb, and Rudisill mines. Now Piedmont farmers were leaving the streams and striking out for the hills and high ground. Meantime four or five shafts with depths up to ninety feet had opened up at the Reed Mine.
Throughout the Piedmont the pattern of vein discovery by farmers followed a similar one to that of Matthias Barringer. Using the most primitive machinery, the farmer mined the gold himself on a seasonal basis or leased his land to ā€œgold huntersā€ for a percentage of the profits. Information concerning mining spread haphazardly by word-of-mouth and farmer-miners were on their own with little to guide them but intuition, trial and error, and some assistance from scientific texts or journals.
Robert W. Hodson, a Quaker from Guilford County, was typical of many of these farmer-miners of the 1820s. When he and his brother, Jeremiah, heard of a discovery of gold on a nearby farm they decided to do some prospecting on Jeremiahā€™s land near Jamestown.
ā€œFrom some knowledge of the geological strata of the earth,ā€ wrote Hodson in his journal ā€¦ ā€œwe coursed the vein over the high land to the next branch, thence upon the hill some distance, where a ledge of quartz jutted out, not more than a foot thick, leading south-southwest to the general course of ledges of rocks in the section of the country. We found some particles of gold in quartz.ā€
But no...

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