CAAMADOR-L Archives

From: "Arthur L Maroon Sr." <>
Subject: [CAAMADOR] Angles Camp
Date: Sun, 17 Oct 1999 10:14:02 -0700

Good Morning List,

I must say Carla has inspired me to get busy. I know this is the wrong
County, but it's a great article.

Surnames: Coachella, Dahlgren, Daily, Hayward, Hobart, Lane, Queirolo,
Vogliotti, Wood

THE MODESTO BEE
Sun., Mar. 13, 1977
Page, A-10

OLD-TIMER MINES A RICH VEIN OF MOTHER LODE LORE
By Emmett Corrigan, Bee staff writer

MURPHYS – He was repairing a fence along his property on the Sheep Ranch
Road, three miles out of Murphys. His name is Ernest Vogliotti, age 88.
The son of a miner, he has stories to tell about the old Utica Mine of
Angels Camp, where his father worked for 17 years, where 36 men perished in
cave-in and cable accidents.

Stories about the “Crystal Palace” vein that produced a $1 million gold
yield. Stories of the time he got “scared near to death,” this Angels Camp
gambler who took a fit at the racetrack, the night he carried the wine jugs
to the parish house, the natural spring that’s been running for 73 years,
the Austrians who sneaked gunpowder into their boots so they could shoot up
the town on “Little Christmas.”

Vogliotti lives with a sister, Josephine, and brother-in-law, Louis
Queirolo, in a neat, green-painted house nestled in a peaceful valley off
Sheep Ranch Road. The sheep are long gone. They used to pause here
overnight en route to pastures higher up in the mountains. Vogliotti
finishes his work on the fence posts, damaged by the underground cable work
the phone company’s been doing along the road.

In the living room of his home, he breaks out aged but clear photographs
of the Utica miners. He measures his words carefully: “This picture here,
I gave it to Coke (R. Coke Wood, California historian) and he fixed it up
and put it in his history book. That’s my father, second from the left on
top row. “Over there’s ‘Crooked Nose’ Joe Coachella. He had the saloon and
restaurant where the Moore house is now in Angels Camp, and the boarding
house. “And this is Tim Daily. He’s been grandfather to Babe Dahlgren, who
played ball for the New York Yankees. I went to school with his daughter,
Addie. “The rest, I can’t place ‘em. They must all have been killed,
because as I grew up I only knew these three.” Vogliotti’s father escaped
the mining disasters which claimed the lives of 19 men in a cave-in in 1889
and 17 others in 1890 when a cable broke. He was off shift both times.
The Utica Mine Co. was a consolidation including the Utica, Stickles,
Raspberry and six other claims, virtually all within the limits of the small
town of Angels Camp. There were other mines in Angels, but the only ones
that managed to survive were the Utica and the Gold Cliff. Their combined
total gold production was close to $20 million. The Utica passed from hand
to hand in its early days until it came into the possession of Charles D.
Lane. Lane would have given up on his property if it had not been for a
fortuneteller, who told him to hang on to it, and for the backing he
received from Alvinza Hayward, a mine investor, and Walter Scott Hobart, a
pioneer lumberman and mine owner. During the 1890s, the Utica was known as
one of the most productive mines in the nation. It had more than 500 men on
its payroll, paying them $3 a day for a 10-hour shift. The helpers,
shovelers and car men got $2.50. Vogliotti recalls the howl the mules would
put up when they were tied up and lowered into the mines. They were kept in
that world of darkness for one year, hauling ore cars, then returned to the
light of day before they went blind.

Fortunes began to change for the Utica in 1916. The Cross Shaft, which
had set records in shaft sinking, was closed down. The hope that the veins
of the Utica and Gold Cliff would intersect to form a veritable bonanza
proved unfounded. It was a sad Christmas in Angels Camp. On December 25,
1916, the remaining 100 men were paid off and the Utica mine ceased to
operate. Vogliotti said he never desired to work in the mines and he never
did. He had seen his father partially crippled by a falling timber. He
knew his father’s lungs were black from the dry dust his drilling bit had
burrowed into year after year. But, he was tempted when his father told him
about the bright side –the gold side- of mining. Vincenzio Vogliotti had
been drilling a 9 foot hole when his bit stuck. He examined it. It shone
like silver. He had been drilling pure gold. One million dollars in gold
came out of that kidney. The men called that area the “Crystal Palace.”

Vogliotti’s voice rises as he recalls the time he got scared. “It
happened coming out of Highway 4 at Angels, east up on the hill. They were
cutting wood for the big hoist of the Cross Shaft and I went up to the top
of the ridge. “I can see it yet. Here was this man –dead man- lying like
this. His skull was bare where the fire had gone through it. I can see the
pistol lying on his left side, his brown coat. “Come to find out that the
man tending chuck for my father was missing his father, and that was him I
found up there dead. He had shot himself. I can see that yet…”

He was at the half-mile racetrack at Angels Camp, where they now hold
the annual frog jump contest, when Vogliotti noticed a well-dressed gambler
standing by a table loaded with silver money which he planned to wager.
“Pretty soon, he started shaking and his legs went over the table and the
money every which way. I took out for home, thinking sure they were going
to blame me for killing him or something. “Come to find out, the gambler
used to take them fits, and that was one of them.”

A storekeeper once gave him two jugs of wine to take to the parish
house, just up from the Utica shaft. “He gave me two gallons – no, I don’t
think I could have packed two gallons at that age, must have been half
gallons. I got up to the porch and looked in the window. “There was one
fellow stretched out under the table and there was the priest stretched out
across the table, like this. I got so scared, I dropped the jugs and ran
into town. Never forgot that, either. “I thought the fellow on the floor
was dead and someone had killed him.” Vogliotti soon learned that both men
were only dead to the world, suffering from the effects of some wine that
had been given to them earlier.

The miners at the Utica stuck to a code of honesty, Vogliotti said. No
such thing as stuffing the pockets with gold when leaving for home. No one
searched the miners at Utica, but the miners at the Sheep Ranch Mine had to
change their clothes before heading home.

Vogliotti recalls that the Austrian miners used to walk off their shifts
with a little gunpowder stuffed in their boots. “When the Austrian
Christmas arrived, they’d rattle the whole town, oh my. Stuck their pistols
out the windows – bang, bang, bang! Sounded like a war around here.”

In 1907, Vogliotti’s father built a redwood barn on the Sheep Ranch Road
property. In those days, lumber cost $18 a thousand lineal feet, delivered.
The building was completed a year after the San Francisco earthquake, an
event locked in Vogliotti’s memory. “I’ll never forget it, I was in the old
house at the time and I could feel the mattress shaking. Fifteen minutes
after 5 o’clock the 18th of April, 1906. We felt it here.”
Vogliotti peers up the hill toward a water supply. “Don’t know if our water
’s going to hold out this year. We have a natural spring, been running 73
years last summer without ever drying. This year, we might have to put a
well down.”

He shakes his head when asked if gold can be found in these parts. “Not
here. Maybe over on Carson Hill (south of Angels). That’s glory hole work
there, where they used bulldozers. Then, there’s the Angels Mine between
Angels Camp and Altaville near where the Arco station is now. “They say it
could be running yet. It only went down to 800 feet, then the water got
bad. “When the Utica Mine was running – it was the furthest down the line –
it kept the water out and the mines above it could run. Guess it got to be
too expensive to keep the water out.”

These days, Vogliotti feeds a couple of steers, does some repair work
and a little gardening. He’s in good health. “I’ve never really been sick.
In 1943, I put in to the hospital for 12 days for a hernia. Last fall, the
nurse at the doctor’s office pulled out a chart and said I hadn’t been to
see the doctor for a year. “I said, “That’s right, and I’ve been getting
along without him.”

Two pictures with the article captioned (The Queirolo-Vogliotti mountain
ranch near Murphys.) and (Vogliotti tends to fence mending.)

I checked the SSDI
Ernest Vogliotti, b. Nov. 19, 1888, d. Sept. 9, 1991

My grandfather Charles Gilman Maroon was also born in Angles Camp on Aug. 8,
1893, I wonder if he knew Ernest?

Art Maroon
Bremerton, WA.

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• [CAAMADOR] Angles Camp by "Arthur L Maroon Sr." <>