Ten miles southeast of San Andreas and three or four miles from Carson Hill sat Angels Camp, named for Henry and George Angel who had accompanied James Carson south from Weber Creek. A lot of placer gold was found in Angels Creek and the gulches and flats around it. In 1852 two brothers named Winter washed nine thousand dollars in gold through a common sluice from a plot of two hundred square feet of surface earth. Below the dirt they came to a layer of limestone containing gold mixed with sulfur that, when crushed and worked like quartz, yielded as much as $200 per ton, but one specimen from this lead, when sent to London for assay, was said to be worth $3500 per ton.
Like so many other mining sites the placer gold played out early but when quartz leads were found the town continued to prosper for decades, producing over $20 million dollars in gold. And when the stamp mills finally stopped pounding many residents couldn’t sleep. The silence was too loud. The town has gained lasting fame from Mark Twain who first heard the famous story of ‘The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County’ in the Angels Hotel.
It soon became common practice around Angels Camp for miners to keep an old trunk filled with their best specimens of ore and gold bearing rock somewhere in their cabin so that they could pull out a particularly good sample on special occasions and declare it to be worth twenty or thirty thousand dollars a ton. They would apply a magnifying glass to the rock and dream of visits to European monarchs who would treat them as royalty, and for a time this dream would make them happier that any reality ever could.
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