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Well it rained in California (can I get an amen?!) and now this is my backyard. The seasonally mighty Agua Fria. When I moved here, literally everyone in town told me ‘you’ve got to read this book’. The book is Bacon & Beans From a Gold Pan by Jesse Coffey and it’s all about he and his wife camping around where my house is and mining for gold while everyone else was flinging themselves out of skyscraper windows in the Great Depression. Widely acknowledged as the Ur-text of the motherlode gold country, it gives not just the historical flavor of the place, but a good primer on what you may encounter even today.
“Braving the icy water, Red Whiskers had fashioned himself a sort of homemade snorkel, a piece of rubber hose which he gripped in his mouth while the other end extended to the surface, attached to a float. With crevicing tools and scrapers Red Whiskers worked below the surface of the water, cleaning the cracks in the bedrock. Using weights to hold his body down, this great shaggy Finlander would remain submerged for unbelievable lengths of time in that cold water. He usually worked stark naked, winter and summer. When he surfaced, shaking his great shaggy head and red matted beard, blasting air from his oxygen-starved lungs, he looked and sounded like some prehistoric sea monster.But not all of the snipers who came to the Agua Fria and other streams in hopes of eking out a living by mining gold were rewarded with success. True, some were lazy, some were simply drunks, but most were people fleeing from the city where there was no employment, who hoped to find enough gold to keep them going until something better came along. “ Jesse Coffey & George Hoeper - Bacon & Beans from a Gold Pan
Got a nice pan of shine from the high water too, thanks Aqua Fria, keep on rolling.
Xander has probably banned gold for everyone but bankers and declared the price to be $35 an oz by dictatorial fiat thereby devaluing the dollar, complete with seizure of all privately owned gold & gold certificates, punishable with up to 10 years in prison & send out the Secret Service to do entrapment sting operations to enforce it and declaring anyone who resisted an Enemy of the State. But that might be a little too unbelievably draconian even for him.

Description

Well it rained in California (can I get an amen?!) and now this is my backyard. The seasonally mighty Agua Fria. When I moved here, literally everyone in town told me ‘you’ve got to read this book’. The book is Bacon & Beans From a Gold Pan by Jesse Coffey and it’s all about he and his wife camping around where my house is and mining for gold while everyone else was flinging themselves out of skyscraper windows in the Great Depression. Widely acknowledged as the Ur-text of the motherlode gold country, it gives not just the historical flavor of the place, but a good primer on what you may encounter even today.
“Braving the icy water, Red Whiskers had fashioned himself a sort of homemade snorkel, a piece of rubber hose which he gripped in his mouth while the other end extended to the surface, attached to a float. With crevicing tools and scrapers Red Whiskers worked below the surface of the water, cleaning the cracks in the bedrock. Using weights to hold his body down, this great shaggy Finlander would remain submerged for unbelievable lengths of time in that cold water. He usually worked stark naked, winter and summer. When he surfaced, shaking his great shaggy head and red matted beard, blasting air from his oxygen-starved lungs, he looked and sounded like some prehistoric sea monster.But not all of the snipers who came to the Agua Fria and other streams in hopes of eking out a living by mining gold were rewarded with success. True, some were lazy, some were simply drunks, but most were people fleeing from the city where there was no employment, who hoped to find enough gold to keep them going until something better came along. “ Jesse Coffey & George Hoeper - Bacon & Beans from a Gold Pan
Got a nice pan of shine from the high water too, thanks Aqua Fria, keep on rolling.
Xander has probably banned gold for everyone but bankers and declared the price to be $35 an oz by dictatorial fiat thereby devaluing the dollar, complete with seizure of all privately owned gold & gold certificates, punishable with up to 10 years in prison & send out the Secret Service to do entrapment sting operations to enforce it and declaring anyone who resisted an Enemy of the State. But that might be a little too unbelievably draconian even for him.