The Gleam Dream

Tom Payne looks the part of the miner with his white beard, faded blue jeans and that gleam in his eye when he talks of gold.

“It’s the only job I know where you can wake up the next day and be a millionaire,” says Payne, whose great-grandfather, Sigmund Simon, walked 275 miles from San Francisco to Scott Bar, once a booming Northern California mining town. He arrived in September 1850--one month before California became a state.

These days, the 61-year-old Payne has a few things his forefathers never had: a degree in electronics engineering, a souped-up metal detector and years of experience running his own businesses in Iran and Los Angeles.

“You gotta know the old-time stuff, but it sure helps to know your chemistry, physics and business--your mechanics too. That’s probably what put me ahead,” says Payne as he grinds up chunks of gold-laden rock that he and partner Raymond Ward, a heavy machinery operator, have gleaned from a secret claim in the Klamath Mountains.

Their success has made Payne one of a very few small-time Northern California miners who still make a living at mining.

“There’s no one like Tom,” says Harry Frey, a lands and minerals officer with the U.S. Forest Service based in nearby Yreka. “He’s very business smart as well as mining smart.”

Most people who mine for gold these days are retirees who drive their campers to Northern California for the summer, dredge for gold using the equivalent of waterproof vacuum cleaners and leave with maybe a few hundred dollars worth of gold in their pockets.

Most of the gold that’s left is tough to reach and the work is just plain dangerous, since miners face everything from mudslides to swift river currents.

Then there’s the matter of luck.

“I tell people, ‘You never know if you’re an inch away from a million dollars or a million inches away from a dollar,’ ” says Frey, who has worked with miners for many years in the Klamath National Forest. “I’m sure there were people who came here [in the 1800s] and worked their hearts out and went home broke.

“That’s still the case today.”

But, although Payne considers Frey an ally, the biggest gripe he and other serious miners have is over the amount of paperwork they’re required to file with federal, state and county agencies.

“It just hurts so bad to see what the government’s doing to everybody,” says Payne, who claims he has to deal with as many as 40 different federal, state and county agencies every time he digs a new hole.

A former executive officer for the Western Mining Council, Payne has watched the council’s ranks dwindle from a few thousand members to a few hundred in the last decade. The council, based in Los Angeles, has members in California, Oregon, Nevada, Colorado and several other Western states.

“We’re basically in a constant battle to keep this going. We just get one fire out and another one starts,” says Steve Cassidy, a former deep-sea diver from Spokane, Wash., who’s been mining full-time for gold in the Klamath River with a suction dredge since 1984. He and his wife live in Seiad Valley, just down the road from the Paynes.

“I’ll tell you one thing: My typing skills have increased exponentially,” Cassidy says.

The difficulties have kept Scott Bar a sleepy place made up of a few homes, an old one-room schoolhouse and a tiny post office/library. Gone are the dance halls and the brothels and characters like King Cole, who--as the story goes--sat on a box of dynamite and blew himself up to escape some sort of dreadful illness.

The only signs left of the old Scott Bar are root cellars, overgrown with blackberries and Chinese lotus trees, probably planted by the many Chinese immigrants brought in to work in the mines.

The estimated 3,000 people who once flocked here in search of the California dream have been replaced by five or six families, including the Paynes, who returned six years ago from Los Angeles to pick up where they left off.

“My next move’s to the cemetery,” Payne’s wife, Sandi, is fond of saying as she points across the field to the small graveyard that holds the Payne family plot. “I’m not going anywhere else.”

In its heyday, Scott Bar produced some of the largest amounts of gold and quartz in the state. In fact, on May 30, 1851, the Alta newspaper of San Francisco reported that “more gold was being taken out of this bar [Scott Bar] than any other mining district in California. The gold on this vein is very large but it requires a great deal of labor to obtain it.”

To hear Payne’s father, Earle, tell it, it wasn’t so great.

“There was just a little piece here and a little piece there,” says Earle Payne, now 85. “But, I’ll tell you, it gets monotonous.

“Sometimes I want to forget about it.”

After Franklin Roosevelt shut down gold mining during World War II, Earle Payne quit mining and began a 32-year career as a heavy equipment operator for the California Department of Transportation.

But not before he struck it big.

Earle Payne’s claim to fame came in 1941 in the form of a tunnel 410 feet long underneath, dug using a hammer and chisel and the occasional stick of dynamite to bore beneath the Klamath Mountains. In it, he and his father, Maitland Payne, hit a vein of gold worth $10,000 in those days, $400,000 today.

Asked if the big find makes his father his idol, Tom Payne grins and says: “I’m just trying to outdo him.”

But it appears that the family tradition will end with Tom Payne, since his 11-year-old son, John Scott, is more interested in becoming a car designer and getting Internet access for Christmas.

“Why take the risk?” John Scott says with a shrug--this from the boy who was named for the first person to find gold in this bend of the Scott River in July 1850.

His son’s lack of interest saddens Payne. “But you can’t blame him,” he says.

Even he says he’ll probably quit mining in a year because of the paperwork. But that seems hard to believe as he walks down to a stretch of riverbank that he’s been eyeing from his front porch for quite some time.

“Every miner has a dream,” he says, pointing along the bank. “My dream is to work this 200 yards of river.

“I think about it all the time.”