Rich Bar

California Gold Rush Camps

The Book Club of California 1998 Keepsake

Saturday Night
Saturday night they weigh their dust--
All anxious faces there,
While waiting for the truthful scales,
To give to each his share.

HIGH UP IN THE NORTHERN SIERRA NEVADA, the icy Feather River carves a rugged course through a remote, spectacular canyon. Steep walls, forested in pine, fir, and madrone, rise majestically to several thousand feet. Along this serpentine channel of the Feather River's East Branch lie the stark remains of Rich Bar, a lucrative mining settlement among the early California gold camps.

Roaming the up-country, seeing the mythical Gold Lake, the first prospectors ventured into the Feather River canyon in the bright summer days of 1850. The miner Greenwood, his first name unknown, plucked $3,000 in gold chunks from two pans of earth at the river's edge. Jubilant at his find, he gave the narrow spot its name.

Soon after, a German mining party easily extracted ten times that amount, 2,250 ounces, in four days, working three claims along the water. All summer, more miners descended into Rich Bar, bought claims, and thrust their shovels into the earth, eager for wealth.

Remarkable gold strikes came regularly, and Rich Bar grew to a population of one thousand by summer's end. A dozen smaller camps also sprang up along the nearby bends. In its first year, the value of Rich Bar's gold was estimated between two to four million dollars, valued at $16 per ounce. Over its lifespan, until about 1890, the figure reached $9 million. Attesting to the region's rich deposits, the smaller mines along the river yielded a value between $14 to $23 million. Such figures placed the camp high in gold production per district.

Industrious Rich Barians culled the conifer slopes to build sturdy cabins, while others threw up makeshift quarters of planks and canvas. By the spring of 1851, Rich Bar's Indiana Boarding House opened, and the Empire Hotel and smaller stores followed. Mary Stanfield, who, with her father, ran the Indiana House, was the first woman to live in the camp. She was joined by others, such as Nancy Bailey and Lonise Bancroft, who, with her husband, purchased the Empire. In September 1851, Dr. Fayette Clappe arrived to practice medicine. With him came his now-legendary wife, Louise.

Although the Clappes settled on nearby Indian Bar, Rich Bar was the nucleus of the river's activities, and Louise spent much time there. She knew the camp intimately, exploring its paths and shops, its riverbanks and hills, and stopping to interview miners or study the vistas before her. As "Dame Shirley," she wrote her observations to her sister in the East, and these became a treasured pioneer work of life in the mines. A gifted writer, she recreated Rich Bar's duels, murders, surgeries, and celebrations, revealing gold-rush life in all its aspects; she rendered the name "Rich Bar" synonymous with the Gold Rush.

Lithographers Joseph Britton, a Gold Rush miner himself, and Jacques Joseph Rey captured two prospectors in the wilds of the Feather River - looking like those who first panned at Rich Bar on East Branch of the North Fork. The result? "If a man strikes any thing rich in a new place," a miner observed in 1851, "the ground will be staked off in 24 hours a mile around it." The Clappes came to one such instant settlement. Rising from the river too, are those high, dark hills, where Dame Shirley liked "to sit in the shadow of the pines and listen to the plaintive wail of the wind." [Courtesy The Bancroft Library]

The natural beauty of the Feather River Canyon time and again filled Lonise Clappe with wonder and joy. Language, she confessed, left her powerless to "convey...an idea of the wild grandeur and awful magnificence of the scenery." She knew contentment among those "green watching hills...amid a solitude so grand and lofty."

By mid-1853, Rich Bar had peaked. The hotels and shops were abandoned, most of the miners and women, including the Clappes, had left. A few patient, steadfast prospectors returned that spring to work the bedrock, but most miners went elsewhere, to other work, or on to hydraulic or hardrock operations that stripped gold from hillsides or blasted it from underground ores.

A century and a half later, only a handful of residents remain. The bar's original structures have vanished, collapsed by weather, burned by forest fire, or razed by newcomers. A railroad and highway now wind through the canyon. What survives of the gold-rush community is its dark, overgrown cemetery, now difficult even to find. Ironically, as Louise Clappe stood there one day in 1851, she pondered the "lonely hills" of Rich Bar, which "in a few years most return to their primeval solitude, perchance never to be awakened by the voice of humanity." Indeed, once again the river flows quietly through the pristine canyon, yet the lore of Rich Bar survives.

MARLENE SMITH-BARANZINI

MARLENE SMITH-BARANZINI is the associate editor of the quarterly California History, the journal of the California Historical Society. She is co-author of the children's history series US Kids History, and has written a new introduction for Lonise Clappe's classic volume, The Shirley Letters from the California Mines, 1851-1852, published by Heyday Books, 1998.