Gold

When I arrived in Downieville on an afternoon in late July, a hot wind was rattling desiccated leaves under the town clock, its frozen hands pointing to 10:45. There were few people walking on Main Street, and fewer cars driving it. The buildings in the distance looked as if they might skitter down the steep slope of the Sierra Nevada and plunge into the emerald ribbons of the two rivers, the Yuba and the Downie, that cleave the town of 325 or so full-time residents. A¶ But Sierra Hardware was doing a fair business selling shovels, gold pans and flake vials to the sort of men who also patronize the Indian Valley Outpost on Highway 49, where I heard them jabbering over beers about two claim jumpers, Jack Ass Larry and Flatnose Bob. And about the price of gold, which in May shot past $700 an ounce--its highest mark in nearly three decades. These were men who tracked their fortunes

Through the commodity listings in the Mountain Messenger, a weekly that gets written and pasted up in a newsroom overlooking Main Street. Don Russell, the editor in chief (and publisher, reporter and copy editor) explained it for me: “They run the price of corn in Iowa, don’t they?”

This is still gold country. In 1853, one legend has it, a miner unearthed a nugget near Downieville that weighed 5,009 ounces and today would be worth roughly $3 million. Folks say nothing like it has been found in these parts since, but some men dream the old dream of striking it rich, or just scratching out a living, from gold. Frank Matyus is one of them. He’s 50 years old and has two 10-acre claims on the north fork of the Yuba that cost him about $340 in filing fees and taxes. In June, he left Santa Rosa and his union job installing windows, figuring that for the first time since he started prospecting on the river a decade ago, he could make enough money over the summer to continue mining year-round and start a business leading tourists on gold-seeking expeditions.

When I met Matyus, it was at his summer home, an RV parked on the side of Highway 49. He was shirtless. A gold nugget--one worth $200, he said--gleamed on a chain against his tanned chest, and on one bicep was tattooed a skeletal cowboy sporting a 10-gallon hat and a bandana neckerchief.

He told me that in the mid-90s he had spent nearly a year in Bolivia searching for gold. During the slog through the jungle, he lost 26 pounds. “It’s always been a dream to hang out with the pirates,” he said. “My mom says I was born 100 years too late.”

The next day, I found Matyus submerged in the Yuba. Placer mining--prospecting for gold flakes and nuggets on a river--once involved a simple tin pan. Matyus was wearing a full wetsuit, a mask, a regulator and a 40-pound weight belt as ballast against the current of the bubbling river. His equipment has set him back several thousand dollars.

Using a long crowbar, he pried bread loaf-size rocks off the riverbed, then tossed them aside and sucked up the loose sand, gravel and maybe gold deposits with what looked like a mammoth shop vacuum. The sediment snaked through a long tube hooked to a motorized dredger that floated on pontoons. Via a sluice, the dredger separated the heavier gold from the lighter sand and rocks and spat out the latter. On a good day, his payoff might be an ounce, or about $622. This wasn’t a good day.

After three hours in the water, Matyus emerged gulping air, physically drained, and switched off the droning gas-powered dredger. “I know there’s gold here,” he said. A few years earlier, he had plucked some “nice pieces” just 100 to 150 feet upstream. But winter rains can swell the river and wash away deposits, if there were any to begin with. Matyus yanked himself out of the river and sat with a thud on a rock. He had ended his prospecting day no richer than when he started. He would go home to the RV to watch a video from his collection of ‘80s films, or maybe grab a beer in town.

After seeing Matyus’ operation, I wondered if any of the other men were doing better. (Claim filings number 102 so far this year in Sierra County, up slightly over 2005, but no one tracks how much gold those claims have yielded.) I came across four miners enjoying a breakfast of beer and hand-rolled cigarettes in a clearing, also inhabited by six empty refrigerators, next to the Coyoteville Cafe. When I approached, one of the men demanded to see my driver’s license. Someone mumbled something about the federal government, which regulates mining on public land.

I asked Bryan York (who offered several false names before one of his colleagues revealed the authentic one) how it was going. “Miners are liars,” he replied. “If they’re doing well, they’ll tell you they are doing bad. If they’re doing bad, they’ll show you a nugget from years ago--and say they found it yesterday.”

I listened to a lot of stories, dubious ones, about a $70,000 strike found beneath a boulder the size of a motor home, about a miner whose eyes were squeezed out of his head by the weight of a loose rock. The stories seemed to grow as they washed down the Yuba from claim to claim. Bill Blackwell, the 81-year-old bartender at the Indian Valley Outpost, eventually hears them all. “There’s been more gold mined at this bar,” he said, “than out on that river.”

Some of the tales were true, like the one of Gerald Wesley, who on a cold, wet day in February 1999 riddled another local man, Tom Rose, with 18 bullets, including four to the head, and went on to report the shooting to the local sheriff, stopping en route to dunk his bloody hands in a puddle. But the blood wasn’t Rose’s; it wasn’t even human. At the sheriff’s office, Wesley, according to court records, gave a brief statement that earned him 15 years to life: “I shot a bear, then I shot a claim jumper.” Most of the miners I met in Downieville thought of themselves as pioneers, well-equipped to survive on their wits and wilderness skills, like Wesley.

As the day grew hotter, and the miners drunker and more irritable, I pressed York, asking if anyone was actually making a living at mining. He extended his hands, showing off scabbed and scarred knuckles and dirt-rimmed fingernails. “That’s what you get,” he said.

Back at his RV, Matyus pulled out a wood box filled with several dozen vials containing gold nuggets and flakes, his prize specimens. He wouldn’t say how much they were worth.

When I called him a month later, he told me that he had returned to the Yuba again and again over the summer, adding a little to his box. By the end of August, his claims had produced roughly 2.5 ounces, or about $1,550. That was almost real money. And then a water leak caused more than $3,000 damage to his house in Santa Rosa.

Matyus would mine on the weekends throughout the rest of the dredging season, which runs from spring to mid-fall, but it would be only for fun. He would go back to installing windows to pay the bills.

As I left Downieville, I thought of Mark Twain’s classic 1860s travelogue of the West, “Roughing It,” in which he ecstatically described the ‘49ers as “stalwart, muscular, dauntless young braves, brimful of push and energy, and royally endowed with every attribute that goes to make up a peerless and magnificent manhood--the very pick and choice of the world’s glorious ones.”

Matyus doesn’t fit that description, but I admire him all the same.