Читать книгу Oregon, the Picturesque. A Book of Rambles in the Oregon Country and in the Wilds of Northern California онлайн

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Out of Sacramento we followed the new state highway, then almost completed to Placerville. On the way to Folsom we saw much of gold mining under modern conditions. Monstrous floating steam dredges were eating their way through the fields and for miles had thrown up great ridges of stones and gravel from which the gold had been extracted by a process of washing. Something less than two million dollars annually is produced in Sacramento County, mainly by this process, and the cobblestones, after being crushed by powerful machinery, serve the very useful purpose of road-building. Beyond Folsom the highway winds through uninteresting hills covered with short brown grass and diversified with occasional oak trees. We kept a pretty steady upward trend as we sped toward the blue hill ranges, but there were no grades worth mentioning west of Placerville. Before we reached the town we entered the splendid pine forest which continues all the way to Tahoe.

Placerville has little to recall its old-time sobriquet of Hangtown, the name by which it figures in Bret Harte’s stories. Here, indeed, was the very storm center of the early gold furor—but five miles to the north is Coloma, where Marshall picked up the nugget that turned the eyes of the world to California in ’49. Over the very road which we were to pursue out of the town poured the living tide of gold seekers which spread out through all the surrounding country. To-day, however, Placerville depends little on mining; its narrow, crooked main street and a few ancient buildings are the only reminders of its old-time rough-and-tumble existence. It is a prosperous town of three thousand people and handsome homes, with well-kept lawns, are not uncommon. We also noted a splendid new courthouse of Spanish colonial design wrought in white marble, a fine example of the public spirit that prevails in even the more retired California communities. The site of the town is its greatest drawback. Wedged as it is in the bottom of a vast canyon, there is little possibility of regularity in streets and much work has been necessary to prepare sites for homes and public buildings. A certain picturesqueness and delightful informality compensates for all this and the visitor is sure to be pleased with the Placerville of to-day aside from its romantic history. Two fairly comfortable hotels invite the traveler to stop and make more intimate acquaintance with the town, which a recent writer declares is noted for its charming women—an attraction which it lacked in its romantic mining days.