And then on the other hand...

... there's the maternal side of my family.

My mother was Scotch/Irish. The whole of the men were hard rock miners or had jobs which supported the mining community in and around Angels Camp, California. Well... the whole lot other than those that were ranchers like my great-great grandfather George Alexander Ross. 

The Rosses, Walshes, Osborns and Daveys (plus some additional surnames which I fail to recall) started collecting in Angels Camp, California in the mid-1800's. Angels Camp is said to be the heart of the Mother Lode of the California Gold Rush at least geographically if not financially.

"They were part of the California Gold Rush? They must have all been rich, right?!" 

Not a chance! The lot of them were hard rock miners or equipment operators or they worked in some support role like selling supplies or driving trucks. In fact, Angels Camp was originally Angel's Camp, named after Louis Angel who set up a 'camp' (it was a tent) to sell food, equipment and supplies to the placer miners. He would gather up needed supplies in Stockton or Sacramento and haul it to his camp to sell.

I am not a geologist nor am I informed about mining operations. What follows is information I picked up during conversations with residents in Angels Camp and during my time in Nevada around the areas of Reno, Virginia City and Carson City. So tread carefully with what you find here. With that disclaimer...

The placer miners were the do-it-yourselfers of gold mining. That usually meant working the streams and rivers where you might find gold that washed down from higher elevations (that's how the town of Placerville in the Sierras got its name). In a couple instances Angels was one of those 'higher elevations' as there were occasional finds on the surface. But generally speaking there was insufficient water for finding gold by 'panning' within the immediate area of Angels Camp. To find gold in Angels required back-breaking work, explosives like dynamite and heavy equipment to move the rock.

So mining in the Angels area meant digging tunnels by blasting with explosives and stumbling blindly on a gold vein. Yeah, a geologist might suggest where to start, but after that it was just hard work and luck. Once you found a vein the plan was to follow that trail of gold till it either petered out or (on rare occasions only!) you found a large pocket or maybe even a Mother Lode. 

Finding a Mother Lode was incredibly rare; most of the output of the mine was low grade ore that had to be processed to extract the precious metals. Processing involved crushing the rock then smelting it to liquefy the gold to extract it. Everything that was left was dumped on the nearest open ground and was called 'tailings'... essentially making the land unusable.

By the end of the 1800's and into the early 1900's, any new mines were owned by corporations. If you wanted to work at the mine and not swing a 3 lb hammer at a star drill to bore a hole in hard rock, you bought shares in the corporation which got you a job and provided a small share of the profits when the mine hit a vein. Most of the miners who were single blew through their income feeding themselves, renting a bed and drinking. In general there were no rich miners- only rich mine owners.

I know about this only because my mother's aunt Aggie (Agnes May Ross, my grand aunt) was married to a miner named Tom Davey. Aggie and Tom bought 500 shares in the Utica Mine somewhere around 1900. That got him a job operating the elevator and maintaining the engines used as part of the mining operation. He had a few years employment at that mine but as far as I know that mine never hit anything like what the area is famous for. 

Agnes Davey (Aggie) probably in the 1950's

Aggie and Tom bought a residence which was between Mark Twain Road & Love Street in Angels. It was very close to town- just up a very steep street called Hardscrabble from the main street. 'Steep' in this case was about a 100% grade; a 100% grade means 1 foot up for every foot forward. 

Initially they lived in what was nothing more than a miner's shack. That eventually grew into an 800 sq ft house with a walk-around porch. Aggie cooked on a wood stove (I remember receiving a box of chocolate chip cookies cooked on that stove while I was in boot camp in San Diego in late 1956). That stove continued service when my parents moved in after retirement in the early 1960s. Tom had built 2 small cabins on the property. There were actually 3 recorded lots but when he was thinking of selling the property my father wanted to modify the property description to be a single lot instead of three separate properties. He had already- demolished the 2 small cabins which were in terrible condition. 

At the time Aggie and Tom were still on the property, those 2 shacks served as rentals to miners. The shacks were perhaps 200-300 square feet each and pretty desperate (lots of air leaks- they would have gotten cold during the winter months!). But they offered the bare minimums for survival. After Tom died, those two shacks provided Aggie with much needed income.

1305 Mark Twain in Angels Camp, California

There must have been a good payoff from one of the mines in 1895. That was the year that Aggie's parents bought her a gold pocket watch and had it engraved. I took that watch to the Antiques Road Show when it came to Tucson, Arizona and had it evaluated. It was worth about $1,000; or I could have had it melted down and the gold would have been worth about $1,000. So much for heirlooms!

There's always fallout from risky ventures like gold mines. Angels Camp has many abandoned mines & shafts. More than one child has fallen into one of them when playing around the open spaces. The mines were supposed to be sealed when they were abandoned but there was never any record of where a small mining operation might have been carried out. 'Shit happens'  and the result is always some innocent pays the price.

A couple special stories came out of the whole gold rush thing. One of them was about my great grandfather Patrick Walsh. He had escaped Ireland during the time of the potato famine in the late-1840s. He arrived on the east coast and came to Angels Camp near the start of the Gold Rush. I have no clue how it came about but Patrick Walsh ended up postmaster of the Angels Camp Post Office. He was the only one of the Ross/Walsh/Osborn/Davey group who wasn't immediately connected to a mining operation though you could certainly claim that all mail to Angels was in some way mining related. 

I did find that Patrick spent an extended amount of time at the hospital in San Andreas which is about 15 miles from Angels. It stayed at an isolated building at that facility. It wasn't clear the reason but I can't help but wonder if it may have been related to the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918.

There is another interesting story as well. One of the Rosses had a ranch about midway between Angels and the nearby town of Murphy's, California- about 8.5 miles away. Murphy's was another of the mining centers in the area but with a lower yield. The ranch that the Ross relative owned had a good sized pond and a steady flow of water. Angles didn't have enough water for all the people coming there and for mining operations so he negotiated to cut a ditch thru dirt and rock to supply water to Angles. That pond became known as Ross Reservoir and is still in use today.

Ross Reservoir plus some of the mines in the area between Angels & Murphy's

Btw, I just noticed the map above not only identifies the location of Ross Reservoir but it also shows the location of the "Angels Deep Mine". That location appears to be very near where my mother's cousin Earl Walsh lived. That was the abandoned mine which some kids managed to get into- one of them became trapped for awhile. There was grumbling that it should have been sealed but it actually was- the kids had broken into the old entrance. I have a hunch it was a ventilation shaft as it was on level ground.