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From: "Carolyn Feroben" <>
Subject: [CAMARIPO] BIG OAK FLAT- THEN CAME THE FRENCH---an excellent book-
Date: Sun, 4 Feb 2001 15:47:23 -0800

BIG OAK FLAT the town in the
heyday of its life, when it was said to be the liveliest community in the
Southern Mines.

It was originally known as Savage Diggings, after early pioneer James
Savage, who came to California with John C. FrŽmont in the summer of
1846. Savage, a man familiar with Indians and their cultures from his
boyhood days - he spoke five Indian languages fluently- went off to
prospect on a tributary of the Tuolumne River shortly after Marshall's
discovery. In the summer of 1849, he struck out for the hills on his own and
made camp on a large isolated flat covered with ancient oaks, where he
discovered rich gold deposits. He worked those placers with the help of
local Miwok Indians he befriended, while keeping a side-business of cattle
rustling and setting up a makeshift trading post. Savage was reported to
earn a thousand dollars a day from his various activities, and to have once
lost $35,000 on one card of three-card monte.

The energetic frontiersman might have remained at the rich flat had it not
been for the tensions which soon arose between freshly arrived miners
and his Indian wives. He was said to have had as many as thirty-thrce of
them, all between the ages of ten and twenty-two. Savage later led the
Mariposa Battalion organized to crush belligerent Indians of the Yosemite
Valley. He was killed in a fight with a ranger he had accused of attacking
peaceable Indians in 1852.

By the time Savage left, in the fall of 1850, scores of gold diggers wore
heading toward the flat in spite of its isolation. The gold-bearing gravel
bed
there was from two to twenty feet deep and the claims so rich that they
were first limited to ten square feet by local miners' law. A camp of tents,
brush huts, and shanties quickly sprouted, and the diggings wore renamed
Big Oak Flat, after a giant ancient oak tree on the flat which cast a shade
over a hundred yards wide, so the old timers said.

Six thousand miners were working
their cradles on Rattlesnake Creek by
the mid-50s. l he settlement grew to a
town with enough permanent
residents to become incorporated
and to foster desires to be county
seat of a new Yosemite County. By
1860, 200 buildings, many made of
local slate rock, crowded the crooked
main street: hotels, stores, saloons,
smithies, livery stables, a Wells Fargo
office, and even a theater with 800
seats. A Chinatown grew at the
outskirts. The treacherous Grizzly
Gulch Wagon road, now called Old
Priest grade, reached all the way up
to the flat; man, mule, or stagecoach
had to climb 1,575 feet in a matter of
two miles.

An incredible ditch brought water into
town. "Yesterday, I walked across the 'high Flume,"' Dudley Cornell, who
regulated the water sold to miners, informed his parents on February 12,
1860. "It is 264 feet high, 2,300 feet long. There are wooden towers every
200 fact, and across the tops of the towers, there are two wire cables
stretched, from which the flume itself is suspended. The space to walk on
is 26 inches wide, & no railing to hold on by." Available water prolonged
placer mining and made quartz mines possible: The smoke stacks in the
engraving are those of the town's quartz mills. One lucky miner found a
piece of quartz worth five hundred dollars [about twenty-five ounces of pure
gold].

Then came 1863, the driest year in the history of the state. Big Oak Flat
was a tinder box by the end of the summer. A fire all but wiped out the town
in October of that year; the glow of the flames could be seen as far as
Sonora. The town namesake, that venerable oak, was charred to its core.

This deadly fire marked the beginning of a long, steady decline. Big Oak
Flat was disincorporated in August of 1864, and because of its isolation,
the high cost of upkeep of the ditch system, and the decline of quartz
mining, the town never recovered.

Today's Big Oak Flat has a population of zero(?) souls. Because of the
miners' picks, Rattlesnake Creek no longer runs straight, and the once-flat
valley depicted in this engraving is now a gully, sloping off toward the
creek. There are many more trees and far fewer buildings; only two still
front Main Street with any authority, both built in the 1850s of slate rock.
As
for the Big Oak, its charred, diminutive remnants are enclosed in a rock
shrine behind an iron fence, its fortune and that of the town forever
entwined.

MARY GRACE PAQUETTE

DR. MARY GRACE PAQUETTE was the author of several books on the
French in California, most notably her latest, Then Came the French: The
History of the French in Tuolumne County, California (1996). She passed
away on JULY 31, 1997,and CLAUDINE CHALMERS finished her
contribution in grateful tribute.

Posted on 08.12.1998 by Christian Steimel.
(the website is no longer accessable- Carolyn)

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