We Were Then Two Miles From Truckee, And At An Elevation
Of Nearly 6,000 Feet.
After a long delay we got away and ran into
Truckee.
The scenery on this day was also of a truly grand character:
precipices, declivities, chasms; and in one very romantic spot, of weird
and wild mountain sides, graduating to narrow gullies, with pine and
other trees, some perfect, others broken by the wind was one great
wreck of a forest monster - a tree rudely snapped asunder by wind or
lightning, about 40 feet from the ground, and stripped of every branch,
so that it looked like a broken column; on its top sat a great vulture
in the well-known attitude of its kind, as motionless as rock, and
apparently meditating on the incongruity of a noisy, vulgar bit of
machinery, with its train of cars, invading such a nook of Nature's
solitudes.
As we proceeded we came upon the succession of Placer gold diggings,
known as the hydraulic mines, which were then for the most part
abandoned, and these brought to my remembrance many similar spots I had
seen in Australia. The debris of the mines had stopped up, or
diverted, or otherwise interfered with the Sacramento River, the Bear
River, and other rivers, to the great detriment of agriculture,
horticulture, stock rearing, etc., whereupon the State Legislature of
California passed an Act to prohibit all interference with the water,
for without water the miners could not wash their dirt, and so had to
abandon the diggings.
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