Gold

NBA was on...now the news...SI swimsuits too...sigh...some guys have all the luck...

Anyway...I posed a question yesterday at break, "Why didn't gold prospectors discover the Valley instead of the Mariposa Battalion?"...and searched it out last night...

After the Mariposa Battalion's adventure..which ended with the Indians subdued and dispersed and the Valley discovered by Europeans..though Snowshoe Walker almost certainly saw it from the north rim...the following year...1852...eight gold prospectors made it to the Valley..and three were killed by the Indians..and the rest escaped to return with forty more miners bent on revenge..but the Indians had left...so a frontier army patrol was sent...and they captured a few...and killed a few with the miner's clothes on...and the remaining Indians escaped to the East side where they stayed with the Mono Indians awhile..then the Indians left the Mono Lake area...stealing some of the Mono's horses...once back at the Valley they were set upon by the Monos who had followed...and nearly exterminated.

Now..after all these sad doings, the Valley was undisturbed for three years until Hutching's with his party, including the artist Ayers, came to the Valley..and gave a report of the Valley which was the beginning really, of the Valley's modern story.

There's two kinds of "gold" at work here...one is the element, the metal, which is valued as money, money being a kindof Philosopher's Stone, as with it things are made...and "gold" as of our imaginations...the Valley startled everyone except the hardened mountain men with it's beauty...and it is our imaginations that create...and I suppose need the other "gold" for that purpose...and our imaginations are a "Philosphers Stone" too!!

Fortunately the Valley has no metal gold...it's lower down at such places as the "rock farm"...an area of hydraulic mining...on the Merced.

But it is full of golden imaginings!!

Now, as to Sports...the Olympics has those three medals..of three metals...gold, silver, bronze...and since it is all derived from the old Greeks...it ties in with gold, silver, and bronze Ages of Man. The Ages are in one sense a sequential genesis story, and in another, a display of humanity's nature...and it's relation to Nature! And that's for tomorrow...

quote

No one tracked the cost in environmental damage State is still paying for miners' heedless ravaging of landscape
By Chris BowmanBee Staff WriterPublished Jan. 18, 1998

http://www.calgoldrush.com/part4/04environment.html

unquote

Pic from wikipedia...hydraulic gold mining...lots of sites...on vacation as a kid, a visit to Stockton and the ranch of my Uncle and Aunt...my Dad and Uncle and I visitied one of these devastated areas...the memory is beside the scenes of the lumbered hills where the Redwoods once grew along the coast...Prarie Creek.

DavidDavid

Tree in the Door