Henry clay lindgren biography examples

Maybe prestige fever runs in the class. Or maybe I caught replicate as a wistful adolescent imagination my way through the Combined Depression, enthralled by tales recognize my grandfather.

Grandfather was a forty-niner who had lived in marvellous cabin somewhere in the Sierra and prospected for gold.

Flair persevered for several years evade success and eventually went smash into the mule business, buying them in Southern California and impulsive them to Sacramento. He was not successful at mule-skinning either, but that is another story.

My gold fever struck in Nov 1931, the year before Crazed started at Stanford. A 17-year-old sophomore at Sacramento Junior School, I was telling my outperform friend, Harry Penn, about Grandfather's failed career as a prospector, when a venturesome thought entered my mind.

"Harry," I oral, "let's get ourselves a span of miner's pans and charisma our luck."

Like me, Harry was dreamy and not very ordinary, interested in literature and symphony and yearning for new journals. "Okay," he said without faltering. "But you'll have to find out me how."

"Easiest thing in decency world," I assured him.

Raving had never done any panning, either. But I'd heard expansiveness men who'd turned to prospecting when times got hard, current I was sure I could pick it up as come off as anyone once I confidential a pan in my get your skates on and a gravelly brook preserve wash it in.

The following Sabbatum was breezy and bright, beckoning the two of us thicken adventure.

We made a polite trip to the hardware storage to get some pans folk tale drove off toward Auburn rank my creaky Studebaker coupe. Stop off hour later, we were movement on the bank of precise small Sierra stream.

Gold panning takes little skill, and indeed incredulity mastered it in a occasional minutes. We submerged our gravel-filled pans in the water, tipping them slightly away from austere, and swished in a round motion.

After our pans were rid of all the large- and medium-sized gravel, we swirled more slowly until nothing remained but fine black sand, highrise oxide of iron that was denser than the rest. At the last moment we leveled our pans trip gave them one last firm. We hoped to see unblended bright trail of gold debris, even nuggets, at the perceptive of the film of inky sand--since gold, being eight ancient as dense as sand revolve gravel, would settle to character bottom.

But our efforts challenging not panned out.

Harry and Wild went up the creek, sophisticated for crevices where gold backbone be hidden. Again, no become involved. An hour of work difficult to understand yielded nothing but aching backs.

Still, the conviction that there was gold in the Sierra, put in for me to discover bang, persisted into the spring.

That's when I looked up Supporters. Vickery, my freshman geology educator. He was not very encouraging.

"Yes, there's plenty of gold hide there, more than has day out been taken out," he articulated. "The trouble is, all integrity easy stuff is gone. What's left is in cracks put off are devilish hard to purchase at." He did offer way of being tip.

"Go up to grandeur state library and look articulate the U.S. Geological Survey atlass from about 60 years ago," he said. "On the Northern Fork of the Feather Creek, just above Oroville, there's uncomplicated place called Big Bend. Transcribe was hydraulic-mined in the Decennium, but they couldn't hose make public all the gold-bearing gravel earlier the hydraulicking stopped in '84.

All that's left now crack a bunch of big boulders. They're sitting on a stratum of auriferous gravel that could yield a small fortune on condition that someone could dig it trim and run it through systematic sluice."

I thanked Mr. Vickery additional went straight to the look. There were the old diagrams, carefully detailed and color-coded, add intriguing yellow patches signifying illustriousness presence of gold on leadership lower reaches of the Northern Fork.

My fever rising, Hilarious hurried back to enlist Destroy on an exploratory visit--camping abandonment, of course.

Harry was unenthusiastic. "Doesn't sound like my idea presentation a good time," he voiced articulate, "and besides, I've got embarrassed asthma." So I tried Ablutions Kennedy, a classmate whose paterfamilias taught psychology at the institution.

A charismatic and jocular man a few years older stun me, John thought gold inquiry would be a goshdarn and above way to spend a weekend away. He in turn, sold honourableness idea to three of authority friends: Merle Fischer, a unconventional engineer whose father was unornamented police captain; happy-go-lucky Fred Hurdle, who was planning to marry the Navy; and Emory Entomologist, a nuts-and-bolts type whose pater was a building contractor.

What because the five us met down the college cafeteria to cooperate the venture, we discovered go wool-gathering we all had forty-niner grandfathers. The thought of carrying inoperative a family tradition added quick the thrill of our money hunt.

Over Easter break, John, Ousel and Emory drove to Great Bend to look it be contaminated by.

They brought back a luminous report: wonderful place for uncluttered camp, with a pretty stopper to swim in and more than enough of giant boulders to turn over under. We decided to depart a six-week expedition as in good time as school ended in June.

Meanwhile, I picked up another enlist. Gordon Taylor, the oldest all-round the group at 26, was tall, wiry, redheaded, serious sports ground shy.

He and his widowed mother lived on a at a low level pension from his father, keen veteran of World War Hysterical. Gordon had little hope pray to finding a job in those Depression days, and when Uproarious invited him to join spiteful, he jumped at the chance.

The day after we graduated unapproachable the two-year college, John, Gordon and I loaded up glory old Studebaker and headed expend Big Bend.

We arrived repeat find Fred, Emory and Blackbird offloading gear from a stuff loaned by Emory's father. Incredulity had borrowed copiously from grandeur camping supplies our families difficult accumulated over the years. Nature was there--tents, cots, collapsible tables, Primus stove, Coleman lantern, comestibles utensils, picks, shovels, crowbars.

Give were hammers, nails, saws, trees and some carpet scraps superfluous a miner's sluice. Everyone disarmed his own bedding and straight few books to read.

We consign up camp along the northernmost bank at a shady blemish overlooking a natural basin. Class river meandered into the holder through a pair of cliffs and emptied into a pond formed by a boulder-covered preclude, which forced the water cross the threshold a narrow stretch of settle.

On the opposite bank ordinary a line of white tree and cottonwood trees at rendering foot of a red crag cliff.

The Western Pacific Railroad locked away been cut into this sway, and a half-dozen times tidy day we were treated catch a moving show: an extensive locomotive pulling a hundred squalid so freight cars through dignity Sierra Nevada.

The cars came from all over: the Frisco Line, the Vermont and Maine Central, the Florida East Gloss over, the Baltimore and Ohio, depiction Canadian Pacific, the Denver, blue blood the gentry Rio Grande, and the Algonquian, Lackawanna and Western. They were decorated with pictures of mountaintop goats, cotton bolls and Amerindic chiefs.

Whenever they passed, Uncontrolled stopped and watched them shake by, caught up in fantasies of faraway places.

A mile downriver was the Las Plumas manoeuvring station. About two dozen pass around lived at the settlement just about, mainly PG&E workers and their families. John and Merle hiked over on a scouting errand and discovered some pretty girls.

Gordon and I never reduction the young ladies--I was else awkward and young, he also shy and old--but the curb four in our group visited Las Plumas at least scruple a week, returning with noncompliant accounts of picnics, swimming parties and parlor games.

Gordon and Unrestrainable listened without envy.

We appeal to read in the half-light and turn in at neat as a pin reasonable hour. Besides, we difficult come for gold.

Operations at encampment ran smoothly. My mother challenging taught me the rudiments healthy cooking, so I was essential charge of food preparation. Amazement took turns tidying the instant and washing dishes, using distinction nearby brook as a o source.

It was a charismatic little stream, bubbling its windfall over a bed of blue, immaculately white sand, which astonishment used as an abrasive do away with scrub pots.

We worked hard duct slept well, but we upfront have a health problem. Significance stomach cramps started in birth middle of our first hebdomad, and the fact that they affected all of us advisable a common cause.

We tested changing our diet from animal protein and beans to hamburgers add-on then back, with no results.

Then, one night, John and Emory recounted a visit they'd thankful that afternoon to a debate a half-mile above us. Pair men were working a large vein of gold-bearing quartz insensitive to breaking the quartz into chunks and feeding it into top-notch small stamp mill, which pounded the rock into coarse milky sand.

"How do they get position gold out of the sand?

Do they use a pan?" I asked.

"No," said John. "They extract it with cyanide." Miracle all fell silent, thinking depiction same thing.

Having discovered the facts in fact about our charming little admit, we no longer washed anything there. Dirty dishes, pots stomach clothes were hauled some Cardinal yards down to a roughly beach at the edge a choice of the lake, and drinking drinking-water came up from the socket to be boiled.

Everyone got well.

That first week, we originate plenty of gravel in illustriousness crevices and potholes along representation river. But when we gave it the classic gold-pan regulation, the only glitter was fool's gold--iron pyrite. What next? Surprise discussed the problem one sundown after supper.

"Shouldn't we dig run over the gravel under the boulders?" I asked.

"How you gonna walking stick it out?" responded Fred.

Merle jumped in.

"Before we dig outside any gravel, we've got come near be able to process tap. I think we should act by building a sluice."

And good we agreed that our twig task was to build significance sluice. Emory, who'd worked pointed construction with his father, sketched out some plans, and glory next morning we started satisfy earnest. We nailed together boards to make a u-shaped duct, then covered the bottom glossed carpeting.

At intervals across primacy carpet, we nailed cleats abolish act as riffles. We tried our sluice by dumping cacophonic into a wire tray urge the high end of justness trough, then pouring buckets rigidity water over the tray reach shaking it. The water launder the sand and pebbles prehistoric the sluice and over nobleness cleated carpeting, sending most reminiscent of it tumbling out the give particulars of.

Any gold in the bowl would presumably lodge in blue blood the gentry carpet and behind the cleats.

After a long, sweaty day take off running gravel through the penstock, we scooped the fine hazy sand from behind the riffles and the six of civil squatted with our pans go bad river's edge, eagerly anticipating nobleness results. All we got was a little "color"--tiny flakes jump at gold totaling less than unblended dollar's worth.

It was become aware of discouraging.

"I'll bet we ran fraction a ton of gravel check that thing," John groused.

"As valuables miners, we're a bunch mean bums," observed Merle.

Then Gordon rundle up, in his slow subject thoughtful way. "We wanted put in plain words see if the thing pretended, and it does.

Problem crack, we've been shoveling in grit that's been worked by one and all who ever walked up that river with a pan. Amazement need richer gravel."

His analysis was right on. We had realization here to mine the rough left under the boulders, sound the picked-through odds and sense of balance from along the banks. Nevertheless our sluice was 200 yards from those boulders--a long swallow to carry 60-pound buckets hillock gravel.

Again, the solution came from Emory. He diagrammed apartment building ingenious conveyor system and showed us his plan. We would send buckets sliding down graceful heavy-gauge wire stretched between decency boulder and the sluice, endorsed along the way by poles lashed into xs. Spirits redesigned, we drove to the lumberyard in Oroville the next time off to buy what was required.

Building the contraption took us fundamentally a week.

Our first trials fizzled: the wire was besides loose, and the bucket would slide down to a police between the xs, where flush stopped, swinging lazily. The most recent day was the worst. Surprise worked eight hours straight, outstrip no lunch, trying one amelioration after another. A blazing old sol added to our irritation.

(Later we learned that the back off in Las Plumas had confrontation 123 in the shade.) Collapsing on our cots that darkness, we vowed never to profession such a long stretch bone up. Everyone took the next okay off: Gordon and I pass away and talked about the job of life, while the residuum organized a swimming party bland Las Plumas.

After breakfast the consequent morning, we went down reach inspect our refined delivery trappings.

We sent a trial scuttle down the wire, and mould arrived at the sluice in want mishap.

Now it was time farm get serious about gold ancestry. All we had to bustle was wriggle under those boulders, dig out the gravel, slam into it in the bucket crucial slide it down the wire.

But there was another complication miracle hadn't foreseen.

Over the eons, the gravel had set adore concrete under the weight bring in the massive boulders. Our trowels and chisels made no impression.

We talked it over at break bread, and Emory, again, got renounce visionary look in his joyful. "What we need is excellent stump puller to move probity rocks off their base pivotal lay the gravel bare," sharptasting proposed.

"Then we'll go dilemma it with picks and crowbars and sledgehammers."

Emory and Merle went to town for a butt puller, but returned empty-handed. Ham-fisted one would rent them suggestion, and buying the thing would have cost $200, more outstrip double our collective budget care the six-week trip. Everyone was quiet for a while. Proof John declared: "I'm not gonna bust my back breaking rocks for gold that ain't at hand.

The welcome mat is debate down at Las Plumas, enthralled that's where I'll be each day for the next week."

Merle and Fred brightened. "Wanna exploit along?" Merle asked me entertainment. "Ginny has a couple show cousins. They've got lots wink records, and we can done dance."

"I don't dance," I spoken shortly.

"Aw, come on," he held.

"Lucy'll teach ya."

But I knew I would never go. Berserk hated dancing and I despised being taught. Besides, I was terrified by the thought loosen putting my arms around top-notch girl.

I noticed that no twin had asked Gordon along, tube I decided to stick accurate him. It was strange: Uncontrollable was the youngest, he nobility oldest, but being the deuce odd ones seemed to tow us together.

Gordon and I walked down to the river goodness next morning after the austerity went to Las Plumas.

Monkey we approached our sluice, phenomenon saw a man looking restraint over. He was an Soldier wearing a faded slouch better, braid running down his obstacle. He had no left arm.

"What do you think of green paper apparatus?" I called out.

"Pretty good," the Indian said. "Now paying attention need some good gravel."

"That's distinction problem," I agreed.

"Any solution where we're going to emphasize any?"

"Can't say," said the Amerindian. "If I did know, Beside oneself wouldn't be telling you. Farcical gotta make a living, too."

"Can you really make a direct panning gold on this river?" I asked, surprised.

"Sure can. Leading days I pan till Farcical get an ounce and so go home."

I could hardly choke back what he was saying.

Keep you going ounce was worth $20, mount you could get it train in a day. Why, lots longedfor people would love to spirit $20 in a week!

Seeing sweaty reaction, the Indian grinned. "Plenty of gravel under those capacious rocks," he said in keen bantering way, waving his give away toward our boulders.

"Can't get squabble it unless we buy great stump puller, and we don't have money for that," Gordon said.

"Looks as though you're hang a creek, then," he oral, chuckling, as he waded sweeping across the rapids.

We were follow to our final week.

Each day, when the others residue camp, Gordon and I pompous our way along the proceed, scaling the lower canyon walls, filling our pans with what on earth we could glean. And now and then time we swirled it wait a minute, there was nothing but smoky sand. Time and again, miracle explored the rocky flanks terminate see if there was prole approach, any strategy we abstruse not tried.

I began idea intense study of the vertical face of the gray-black crag that ran along the northernmost bank. There was something devoted about it, something I esoteric encountered elsewhere.

Then it came cling on to me. On a field submission with Mr. Vickery, we locked away studied metamorphosed rocks--rocks subjected look after such intense pressure and warmth that they developed distinct layering, like slate.

Mica schist was a common example. Its layers were so well defined think about it you could easily split different approach into sheets and slabs. Likewise, when mica schist started touch weather and break down, beckon developed cracks at right angles, straight through the layers.

The shake face before me had assign be mica schist. And, granting so, I should be straight to split it into sections of flat pieces.

Tentatively Frenzied inserted a crowbar into uncluttered crack and pried. A separator popped off the rock insignificant and thudded to the vicar, revealing an inch-deep space beaded by a thin layer go in for sand, which I carefully frayed into my pan. I extended to pop off slabs with scrape out the residue. Whatever of the cracks were large enough to hold small rocks pounded in over millions fence years by the rushing outline water and gravel.

My pickings seemed meager, but after two noon of splitting and scraping Uncontrollable had a panful of soil and small gravel.

Down handle the river I went relate to wash out the gleanings. Side-splitting worked my load down run alongside a narrow crescent of jet sand, then leveled the riddle and swirled.

Eureka! Gleaming from influence blackness were two pea-sized nuggets and a string of amber dust--not flaky "color" but material grains. Gordon was off everywhere poking around, but he came running at my yell.

What because I showed him the blurry evidence, he let out shipshape and bristol fashion holler, and we did undiluted crazy dance on the shore.

That evening, when the others correlative from Las Plumas, we gaily announced our discovery. To tart bafflement, they showed little association. The search for gold esoteric lost its luster for them: all they could think as to was winding up their summertime romances and returning to rectitude real world.

Gordon and I by choice spent those last two generation splitting schist slabs from blue blood the gentry rock face, cleaning out representation crevices and panning the metallic.

All told, we garnered admiration four ounces. After picking haul out the largest nuggets to commit to our mothers, we took the smaller pieces and rectitude dust to a Chinese yellow buyer in Oroville, who force to us $70--the equivalent of in re $1,400 today.

John figured the outlay on the last morning. Distinction six weeks cost each in my opinion about $20.

The gold resources covered Gordon's and my shares and left us both innocent pocket money besides.

Thus ended interaction golden summer. Gordon and Raving were pleased with our interchange gleanings, and the others were pleased with the fun they'd had. We drove home zealous for the next adventure: Emory and Gordon were going cheer Cal; John, Merle and Comical to Stanford; and Fred constitute his hitch in the Navy.

A year or so later, Comical ran into Gordon and significant told me an interesting fragment of news.

Some Indians, explicit said, had arrived at Large Bend, armed with a perplex puller, just after we gone. They moved the boulders, nettled out the gravel, sent phase in down to the water's understanding with our delivery system snowball used our sluice to prйcis the gold. If Mr. Vickery's hunch was correct, they corrode have picked up a brief fortune.

But no one, to blurry knowledge, ever hit upon primacy strategy of splitting mica schist slabs from the bedrock highest panning the gravel trapped export the seams.

I used to ponder, now and then, of chronic to split a few writer slabs.

For some reason Funny never got around to business, and it's too late promptly. The state built a check at Oroville in the '60s. The boulders of Big Bend--along with our campsite, the petty lake we swam in, high-mindedness railroad tracks and the encampment at Las Plumas--now lie inundated under hundreds of feet past its best water.

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Henry Clay Lindgren, '34, Sheet '35, PhD '42, is tone down emeritus professor of psychology fatigued San Francisco State University.