Poc. 4
August following was returned with the accompany- ing certificate. "Before melting 18 34-100 oz. ; after melting 18 1-100 oz. ; fineness, 926-1,000; value $344.75; deduct expenses, sending to Philadelphia, and agency there, $4.02; net $340.73."
By December 1843, two thousand ounces of gold had been taken from the San Fernando mines, the greater portion of which was shipped to the United States; and from that time little is heard of the place till in 1845 Bidwell visited it, and found oaly thirty men at work whose gains did not exceed twenty-five cents a day.
E. E. Pickett states that in 1842 he met men in the Rocky Mountains who had been in California and who said that gold was there. "They were not the first to give such information since I had read the same when a boy." It is such statements as this that have so often deceived the public. Mr Pickett never read of gold in Alta California when a boy. "The first hide drogers and other traders who visited this coast, even as long ago as the last century, obtained small quantities of gold-dust washed from the earth in the southern part of the state." This assertion is likewise misleading if not absolutely untrue. I have elsewhere explained how small quantities of gold found their way to the coast.
In the Emigrant's Guide to Oregon and California, by L. W. Hastings, printed at Cincinnati in 1845, ap- pears the following: — "The information which I was able to acquire does not afford me sufficient data upon which to predicate any very accurate conclusions in reference to the mineral resources of California; but sufficient investigations have been made to deter- mine that many portions of the mountainous regions abound with several kinds of minerals, such as gold, silver, iron, lead, and coal, but to what extent, the extreme newness and unexplored state of the country, utterly preclude all accurate determination. It is, however, reported in the city of Mexico, that some
