Even the superficial placers of the present streams have derived much of their gold from them.

According to all accounts, the Murphy placers have been very rich--"terrific rich," as they say here.
The hills have been cut and scalped, and every gorge and gulch and valley torn to pieces and disemboweled, expressing a fierce and desperate energy hard to understand.

Still, any kind of effort-making is better than inaction, and there is something sublime in seeing men working in dead earnest at anything, pursuing an object with glacier-like energy and persistence.

Many a brave fellow has recorded a most eventful chapter of life on these Calaveras rocks.

But most of the pioneer miners are sleeping now, their wild day done, while the few survivors linger languidly in the washed-out gulches or sleepy village like harried bees around the ruins of their hive.