Big Oak Flat

California Gold Rush Camps

The Book Club of California 1998 Keepsake

Letters From Home
Letters from home -- there's nought can give
The miner joy like this;
Good news from loved ones far away,
Is ecstasy and bliss.

THIS 1858 LITHOGRAPH OF BIG OAK FLAT depicts the town in the heyday of its life, when it was said to be the liveliest community in the Southern Mines.

It was originally known as Savage Diggings, after early pioneer James Savage, who came to California with John C. FrŽmont in the summer of 1846. Savage, a man familiar with Indians and their cultures from his boyhood days - he spoke five Indian languages fluently- went off to prospect on a tributary of the Tuolumne River shortly after Marshall's discovery. In the summer of 1849, he struck out for the hills on his own and made camp on a large isolated flat covered with ancient oaks, where he discovered rich gold deposits. He worked those placers with the help of local Miwok Indians he befriended, while keeping a side-business of cattle rustling and setting up a makeshift trading post. Savage was reported to earn a thousand dollars a day from his various activities, and to have once lost $35,000 on one card of three-card monte.

The energetic frontiersman might have remained at the rich flat had it not been for the tensions which soon arose between freshly arrived miners and his Indian wives. He was said to have had as many as thirty-thrce of them, all between the ages of ten and twenty-two. Savage later led the Mariposa Battalion organized to crush belligerent Indians of the Yosemite Valley. He was killed in a fight with a ranger he had accused of attacking peaceable Indians in 1852.

By the time Savage left, in the fall of 1850, scores of gold diggers wore heading toward the flat in spite of its isolation. The gold-bearing gravel bed there was from two to twenty fect deep and the claims so rich that they were first limited to ten square feet by local miners' law. A camp of tents, brush huts, and shanties quickly sprouted, and the diggings wore renamed Big Oak Flat, after a giant ancient oak tree on the flat which cast a shade over a hundred yards wide, so the old timers said.

An 1858 lithograph shows Big Oak Flat in its heyday. "A dozen stores, 3 or 4 hotels, 7 or 8 eating houses & every other House a whiskey shop," was one resident's description of his California home. "The country for a mile or two from town is quickly dotted with Miners Cabins," he added. In one of those, he walked a dirt floor, kept food in a tin salt cellar, and "the only sawed lumber in the house is 72 feet, of which we made a table and chairs."[Courtesy The Bancroft Library]

Six thousand miners were working their cradles on Rattlesnake Creek by the mid-50s. l he settlement grew to a town with enough permanent residents to become incorporated and to foster desires to be county seat of a new Yosemite County. By 1860, 200 buildings, many made of local slate rock, crowded the crooked main street: hotels, stores, saloons, smithies, livery stables, a Wells Fargo office, and even a theater with 800 seats. A Chinatown grew at the outskirts. The treacherous Grizzly Gulch Wagon road, now called Old Priest grade, reached all the way up to the flat; man, mule, or stagecoach had to climb 1,575 feet in a matter of two miles.

An incredible ditch brought water into town. "Yesterday, I walked across the 'high Flume,"' Dudley Cornell, who regulated the water sold to miners, informed his parents on February 12, 1860. "It is 264 feet high, 2,300 feet long. There are wooden towers every 200 fact, and across the tops of the towers, there are two wire cables stretched, from which the flume itself is suspended. The space to walk on is 26 inches wide, & no railing to hold on by." Available water prolonged placer mining and made quartz mines possible: The smoke stacks in the engraving are those of the town's quartz mills. One lucky miner found a piece of quartz worth five hundred dollars [about twenty-five ounces of pure gold].

Then came 1863, the driest year in the history of the state. Big Oak Flat was a tinder box by the end of the summer. A fire all but wiped out the town in October of that year; the glow of the flames could be seen as far as Sonora. The town namesake, that venerable oak, was charred to its core.

This deadly fire marked the beginning of a long, steady decline. Big Oak Flat was disincorporated in August of 1864, and because of its isolation, the high cost of upkeep of the ditch system, and the decline of quartz mining, the town never recovered.

Today's Big Oak Flat has a population of zoo souls. Because of the miners' picks, Rattlesnake Creek no longer runs straight, and the once-flat valley depicted in this engraving is now a gully, sloping off toward the creek. There are many more trees and far fewer buildings; only two still front Main Street with any authority, both built in the 1850s of slate rock. As for the Big Oak, its charred, diminutive remnants are enclosed in a rock shrine behind an iron fence, its fortune and that of the town forever entwined.

MARY GRACE PAQUETTE

DR. MARY GRACE PAQUETTE was the author of several books on the French in California, most notably her latest, Then Came the French: The History of the French in Tuolumne County, California (1996). She passed away on JULY 31, 1997,and CLAUDINE CHALMERS finished her contribution in grateful tribute.