Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 23.djvu/185

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with the chaos of other records there found. They contain Locations of Mining Property, 2 Water Rights, Tunnel Rights, Claims to River Bed, Bills of Sale, and Laws of Mining Camps. Here is a more informative record as to the population than the early census records give. Americans, French, Chinese, Hawaiians, 3 a cosmopolitan throng, individuals and companies, march through the pages of these books. The prices of property and the rise, decline and desertion of camps can be read there. The driving of the foreigners from the mines is an important social and economic change.

The first recorded bill of sale 4 is dated October 19, 1854. It is for mining property on Foot's Creek transferred from A. McNeil and Benjamin Armstrong to E.


2 The first regular entry of which there is any record is given on page 2, Mining Locations and Water Rights Records, No. 1, and must therefore be a copy from volume one of the original Mining Records which has disappeared. It is dated Oct. 29, 1857.

"We, the undersigned, claim six claims of one hundred yards each of the Ravine running up from the notice lying southwest from Fort Lane, half way between Haynes and Evans. We intend to work said claim as soon as water will permit."

P. BEEDLE, L. LOINE, H. MARBLE, T. SNYDER, T. BOLTER, W. STARCK.

This entry is important, for it indicates a gap of five years after the organization of the county and of six since the discovery of gold, for which there are no official records. What might be called a "freak entry" appears on the first page of Mining Conveyances and Bills of Sale Records No. 1; this is the Mag-ruder purchase of Oct. 19, 1854. The second entry is dated 1866 and is the first of an unbroken chronological series. It was a bill of sale from Poy, a Chinaman, to a fellow countryman, Hin Hang, for property on Jackson creek; price, $150.

3 Conveyances and Bills of Sale, Mining Record No. 1, page 29: Bill of Sale from Simon McCalester to Kanaka Jo.

Sterlingville, Oregon, Nov. 21, 1862.

"This is to certify that I have this day sold and received pay for rny six mining claims and my full interest in the water Ditch claims known as the Hendricks claims to Kanaka Jo for the sum of Thirty Dollars."

Same source, p. 27: To T. H. Gilson from owner of doubtful name, a claim "situated in Negroe Flat starting with diggings known as the Negroe Flat claim: Also the undivided one-half of the water ditch sold to the Kanakas by William and Simon McCalester in November, 1862." Dated Jacksonville, 1866.

In Mining Records (original), volume 2, Oct. 20, 1860: "300 yards of mining claims on Kanaka Flat adjoining the claim of Manuel (Portugee) on the lower side of his claim . . ."

Vol. 9, p. 19: "Notice is hereby given that the undersigned claims a mining claim situated on Kanaka Flat and about twenty yards from the house now occupied by us. Said claim being in a gulch and is about two hundred yards in length. Said claim is held by purchase. July 31st, 1866."

KELEIKIPI (KANAKA) AND CO.

4 The record of this transaction is found in a volume entitled "Mining Conveyances," Vol. 1. This first volume has on its first page the bill of sale mentioned in the text, dated 1854. On the second page the bill of sale there recorded is dated 1866, and from there on the record runs in unbroken chronological succession to 1881. Volume 2, being the same title, carries the record to 1893.

This one instance seems ^o indicate the peculiar things that often appear in these old documents.