APPENDIX,
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was more life and business. Launches were discharging their cargoes at the river, and carts were hauling goods to the fort, where already were established several stores, a hotel, &c. Captain Sutter had only two mechanics in his employ, (a wagon-maker and a blacksmith,) whom he was then paying $]0a day. Merchants pay him a monthly rent of $100 per room, and whilst I was there, a two-story house in the fort was rented as a hotel for $500 a month.
At the urgent solicitation of many gentlemen, I delayed there, to participate in the first public celebration of our national anniversary at that fort, but on the 5th resumed the journey, and proceeded twenty-five miles up the American fork to a point on it now known as the Lower Mines, or Mormon Diggings. The hill-sides were thickly strewn with canvas tents and bush arbors; a store was erected, and several boarding shanties in operation. The day was intensely hot, yet about two hundred men were at work in the full glare of the sun, washing for gold—some with tin-pans, some with close-woven Indian baskets, but the greater part had a rude machine., known-as the cradle. This is on rockers, six or eight feet long, open at the foot, and at its head has a coarse grate, or sieve ; the bottom is rounded, with small cleats nailed across. Four men are required to work this machine ; one digs the ground in the bank close by the stream, another carries it to the cradle and empties it on the grate; a third gives a violent rocking motion to the machine ; whilst a fourth dashes on water from the stream itself. The sieve keeps the coarse stones from entering the cradle, the current of water washes off the earthy matter, and the gravel is gradually carried out at the foot of the machine, leaving the gold mixed with a heavy fine black sand above the first cleats. The sand and gold mixed together are then drawn off through auger holes into a pan below, are dried in the sun, and afterwards separated by blowing off the sand. A party of four men thus employed at the lower mines average $100 a day. The Indians, and those who have nothing but pans or willow baskets, gradually wash out the earth and separate the gravel by hand, leaving nothing but the gold mixed with sand, which is separated in the manner before described. The gold in the lower mines is in fine bright scales, of which I send several specimens.
As we ascended the south branch of the American fork, the