BIRD:  This is called a miners’ lantern. And it consists of a candle in a can

Unknown: ??? … Rancher’s lantern too …

BIRD:  Rancher’s lantern. And it was pretty handy for going to the outhouse in the middle of the night. Believe me. And that was one of its main purposes. Well, think I’ve gone through the tools pretty well. Can you hear me in the back? If it were possible for me to relive my childhood, I think I would choose to go back to Melones. And live 15 years there. Because I had a rich experience in that town. I was one of six children. The youngest of six. Only my oldest brother and I survived. Melones was a pretty rough town. There was a lot of violence there and I saw it. There were five mining companies, active mining companies right in the town. And they produced 26 million dollars in gold at 20 dollars and 67 cents an ounce. Gold yesterday in London was 700 dollars an ounce. Now you multiply 26 million by 35, and you’ll come up with a pretty big figure*. I can’t believe it, so I just gave up. There were about 200 miners employed by the Melones Mining Company. The ethnic groups in Melones in my early childhood were Austrians, Italians, Mexicans – there were two Chinese, and of course what we termed Americans. Italians lived in a little community up the river, called Little Italy. The Austrian miners, I have a great admiration for these people – They came directly from the old country. We called them Austrians, but they came from Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Herzegovina, and other areas around the Adriatic. And they were bilingual, most of them spoke both Slovenian and Italian. I was hoping that Violet would be here tonight because I would like to engage in a little Austrian conversation with her. Because I had done this before, she attended some of the meetings, and she speaks Austrian fluently, and I did too, when I was a child. I played with these Austrian children and I could speak their language just as well, I think, as they could.

*Transcriber’s note: the figure comes to approximately 910 million

BIRD:  But of course now I have lost it, I remember a few of the swearwords of course. (Laughter) Some of the names I think are interesting. And I’ll just say a few of them. Violet’s name, her name was Voyovitch. And I think by pronouncing these names you’ll get a little idea of the type of language. Voyovitch, Voidage, Ilich, ??? ??? ??? ??? – all ending in “I-C-H”.

BIRD:  The young Austrian miners frequently arranged their marriages – they came from the old country, to Melones, as single men, and they arranged their marriages by an exchange of photographs. They would send their photograph back to the old country, and it’d be circulated among their friends, and some young beautiful bride would admire this handsome man. And that’s the way it happened. She would come to Melones, and they would be married. Now they had close- knit families and they had large families. The husband was dominant. Infidelity was treated by biting off her nose. This sounds pretty harsh. But I saw this when a very beautiful young bride came to my mother’s home one morning, who had suffered this. And her nose was bitten off. And it took a lot of plastic surgery to restore it. They celebrated Christmas on January 7^th, because they were Greek Orthodox. They followed the Greek calendar. So I had two Christmases. Believe me, that’s why – a kid, you know, that has two Christmases, he’d like to live that over again. So, they celebrated their Christmas in a different manner, however. We of course exchanged presents, mainly, on Chrismas. They each set up a smorgasbord in their home. They had an elaborate dinner prepared and usually the centerpiece was a smoked pig or a smoked goat. And everybody was invited to everyone else’s home. And so there was a lot of traveling around during the whole day and night and of course a lot of drinking wine. But this was a great occasion, and ??? kids and Americans were invited to their homes just as well as their own race or nationality. And it was really something wonderful.

BIRD:  Now these Austrians were good singers. They were operatic singers. And they sang accompanied by gousla. A gousla is like a large bass viol. But it has only one string on it, and it has a kind of a tin can in the middle of it. And they stroked it and my mother said it sounded like a Hawkin’s duck. But they liked it.

BIRD:  Now news of the discovery of gold at Colomes spread fast and Jim Carson heard about it, and he took a group from Monterey and headed for Carson Hill. They reached Carson Peak in what is now Calaveras County in 1848. (interrupted by rustling noise) Six days (noise) They took out about 45,000 dollars in gold – remember, this is priced 20 dollars and 67 cents an ounce. Now, as gold became scarcer, they began to wonder, too, “Where did this gold come from?” And went down in these gulches. They wandered up onto the Carson Hill. And they found where it was coming from and they started to dig. The hole that they started to dig eventually turned out to be about 4,000 feet deep. 1,100 feet from the top of Carson Hill, down to Melones, which is 800 feet above sea level. That’s 1,100 foot level, where the ore train came out of the tunnel to supply the ore to the mills. Now, I figured then that the bottom of the shaft of that mine is about 3,000 feet below sea level. Now, that’s a little bit hard to comprehend but that’s true. See Melones is 800 feet above sea level. And the shaft was down about 3,000 feet below Melones. A little more than that.

BIRD:  Well, while they were wandering around up on the hill, somebody found a nugget. It was a pretty good-sized nugget, weighed 195 pounds. It was the second largest nugget ever found in the world. The largest having been found in Australia. Now, I figured that that nugget today, at 700 dollars an ounce, would be worth almost 2 million dollars. 1,911,000. Now this hole up on Carson Hill is known as the Glory Hole and many of you are familiar with that and have seen it.

BIRD:  Now I have, I have so much to say that I hope somebody will stop me, you know, because I couldn’t possibly go on very much, too long because you’ll get tired of it. But the Melones Mining Company my father worked for was started in 1898 by a man called William (rustling noise), who was a millionaire. And he was quite a good friend of mine. He didn’t live in Melones all the time, but he lived there part of the time. So he decided to get married, and he married a socialite, I think, from New York. And they brought her, he brought her up to Melones. He had built this wonderful home with hardwood floors and he had leopardskin rugs on it. And he brought this beautiful bride in. Well, of course, anybody that got married in Melones had to have a shrivery. And she’d never heard of a shrivery. And we just marched into her house, these miners with their muddy boots on, and you know, tin cans, drinking beer, and Debra of course knew all about this – she was just all astounded. But I never knew what she thought about it. But anyway, Mr. Debra thought that he needed some recreation, too. And so he decided to have his miners come up there and he dug a tennis court right out of the side of the hill. And, you know, pick and shovel worked. He had two Japanese servants, and so he had to have someone to play with, but the Japanese servants didn’t know how to play tennis. Well, my brother Milo, my oldest brother, kept going to Stanford and he was a pretty accomplished tennis player, and he had taught me the game, and so Mr. Debra invited us to come up and play with his Japanese servants to teach them the game so he could play with the Japanese servants. Well, this leads up to a little story. This tennis court was just above the tunnel, the Melones Mine tunnel, and there was an awful stench that came out of that mine. They pumped air into the mine, and all this rotten tembers and – gee, just terrible smell. And this kind of crept up the hill across the tennis court. So I was playing with these Japanese one time up there, and so I struck up a conversation with them, you know I said “you smell-a mine?” and they said “We do detect a peculiar odor.” (Laughter)

BIRD:  Well, I’m going to tell you a little bit about the health services. The mine was a hazardous place. And believe me, I saw many a miner brought out of there gassed, electrocuted, blasted, drill stuck through him from a missed hole – and they would bring them out of the mine injured, sometimes they were dead and they would lay them on the floor there, you know it was kind of a warehouse. But when a person was injured, they blew the whistle. The mine whistle blew, because there was only maybe one or two phones in the whole town. So this was to announce that there was a serious accident. And believe me, everybody in town went up to see, you know, find out who, my father, my brother. And one time the whistle blew and I, of course, went up with everybody and it was my father. He was stringing an electric wire into the tunnel, they were converting from horse-drawn power to electrical power to haul the ore trains out. He had this coil of wire around his body, backing into the tunnel, stringing it, and somebody threw the switch. And there were 440 volts in that line, and nobody ever figured out how my father survived. But they gave him artificial respiration and finally they got him back to consciousness and he walked home. He walked home, about maybe 3 or 400 yards from the tunnel where our home was.

BIRD:  Now there were three doctors living in Angels Camp. Doctors Cooper, Warrick and Pash. And one or the other of these doctors would be the mine doctor. And so the – I’m going to tell you about the Melones Hospital. And I have quite a few pictures here, and I’m going to start passing them around pretty quick now. And the Melones Mine hospital consisted of a six-foot bench on the sidewalk in front of the saloon. And believe me, this is where the people received their treatment for injuries and illnesses. They would line up there – the doctor would put his towels along on this six-foot bench, and he sat down on a stool, and these people would line up and they’d get a boil lanced, they’d get slivers taken out, bones set, and fingers put back in joints and place. And this was quite an operation. I was fascinated by that, because I just saw everything. Now, there was one exception to this, and that is social diseases were not treated on the sidewalk. They had a room in the bunkhouse where people would go for examinations and treatment for this type of thing.

BIRD:  Sharon, am I talking too long?

MEROVICH: No, you’re doing fine.

BIRD:  Well, I, I don’t want to take too much time

MEROVICH: why don’t you go ??? ??? questions or something like that

Unknown: Did you have baseball teams over there?

BIRD:  OK. Recreational activities. Boy, we had everything going down there. Did we have a baseball team? We had a baseball team, we were part of the Mother Lode League! Sonora had a team, Jamestown, Standard, Tuolumne, Angels Camp, Soulsbyville – and this was a baseball league. And believe me, there was plenty of money changed hands on those games. You bet your life. Lots of money was bet on baseball games. Now, we had basketball, there were dances, we had a dance down there about once a month and people would come and start to dance about at nine o’clock, have dinner dance at twelve to one – they’d go over to the restaurant for dinner, and they danced clear on till morning. An orchestra from Stockton usually came up for those occasions on the Sierra Railway. And they would come up, play all night and get on the train the next morning.

Unknown 2: Captain Springer.

BIRD:  Captain Springer, right. You had to go to the dances, babe, didn’t you?

Unknown 2: ???

BIRD:  You’re not saying? Well, they had prizefights, they had a dance hall and they would support the professional prizefighters to come in, and we had a movie about once a week. And a man by the name of Robinson, from Jamestown, came down to Melones – he had one projector, and the screen would consist of several bedsheets sewn together, and he would show a cartoon and maybe four or five reels of you know, cowboy stuff, and cowboys and Indians ???...

BIRD:  And some of his – maybe some of his sons are in this room right now. Because some of them are still surviving. He had twelve children after he was married at the age of 40. I talked to his daughter-in-law just yesterday. And she told me this. I wanted to find out if any of the sons were surviving. And his daughter-in-law told me that some are living – well, let’s see. Ed is living in Sonora, Stanley’s living in Tuolumne – she doesn’t know where Ben is, and, well anyway. I don’t know whether I should include this under recreation, but it was – this is a real fact. The men were paid once a month. Now prostitution was illegal in Calaveras County and it was strictly enforced, believe me. There wasn’t much goin’ on in that line of work. But the girls from Jamestown – they had quite a house down here, right – I wasn’t too familiar with it at my age (Laughter.)

BIRD:  Anyway, they would come down to Melones on payday, and they would set up their tents on the Tuolumne side of the bridge. And the word would get down into the mine and Mexican – I hope I’m not offending anybody, but this is what went on the mine, is that Puta Rio, which meant that the prostitutes were on the river. And believe me, that bridge had to be pretty strong to hold that. (Laughter.) It finally did collapse, you know, that bridge – (More laughter)

BIRD:  Well, (rustling) Gypsy bands came to Melones occasionally, and they would camp on the side of the river there, right at the end of the bridge on the Melones side. And believe me, we were scared to death of those people because the word that went around was that they made their living by kidnapping kids. And believe me, that was one time that I was glad that I was tied to my mother’s apron strings. Scared to death of ‘em. And they would loot the town – they would go into the restaurants, they would take all the silverware off the tables, all the condiments, and just walk off with it. The people, the business people finally got the point when the Gypsies came to town, they simply locked the doors. There was no other way to do it. Well, the Columbia Park boys was another group that came to Melones. You remember them, babe, the Columbia Park boys that used to – they were a group of like Boy Scouts, they were trained, pretty athletic youngsters, and this was a way of camping. They would get out of town and, well, anyway.

BIRD:  We depended a great deal on other communities for their services. L. A. Greenlaw ran a laundry wagon out of Melones. We had a butcher wagon, came down from Angels Camp, and they would stop in front of a house, you know, and they had all these cuts of meat and the lady would come and pick it out, and I told you about the ice wagon and – But we depended a great deal upon the Sierra Railway, believe me. That came to Melones about four o’clock each day, and it would go on up to Angels Camp before night, and come back in the morning about seven o’clock on the return trip to Jamestown. Well, of course it brought in the mail. And this is a little story that I think you will appreciate – the only way you could get your mail was to go to the post office. And you’d have to queue up, you know, and stand in line and go to the window and say your name and the postmaster would give you your letters and so on. Well, the flu epidemic came along about 1917 – 1918, and we all had to wear flu masks. We had to wear them all day long, even in school all the kids had to wear flu masks. You know, we dumped them off and we went out to the playground, you know, and we didn’t know if we got the same mask when we went back in or not. Didn’t make any difference. But the postmaster said – he had a rule, you can’t get your mail unless you have a flu mask on. Well, one guy would step up to the window, you know, with his flu mask on, and he’d get his mail, and hand it back, and there was one mask between a hundred people. (Laughter).

BIRD:  Well. The Army Corps of Engineers asked me to tour the town with them – they wanted to know if I could identify any of the foundations down there. This is, oh, before the archaeologists came in. So a committee called on me and asked me if I would agree to go down and try to identify some, some of these places. So I did, I went down and toured the town with them, and identified every foundation. I told them who lived there, what business was there. And this is a map that I drew from memory, to show you what the town of Melones was. Consisted of a main street, the area near the bridge was a residential area, then in the middle of town we had two saloons, two grocery stores, a couple of restaurants, and then on beyond that was a cyanide plant and then another residential area, and on up to the Pandola ranch, which later became the Guillaveri ranch. And all the ranches provided us with all of our fruit and vegetables. Now the Sierra Railway, if you could see the red line on the map over to the left, up in the left-hand corner, that’s called Gee-Whiz Point. It was carrying a carload of dynamite to Angels Camp. The car jumped the track and exploded. Two cars disappeared completely, one brakeman was killed, and the sound of that and the smoke and vibrations were heard and felt as far away as Stockton.

(Rustles and static)

BIRD:  And just above the ??? ???Archie-Steveno Bridge, where the lookout is, up on the hill to the left, we kids found parts of those cars up there. Wheels, and, you know, all kinds of iron up on that hill. Well, believe it or not, the section house was not very far from the accident. From the point of the accident. The crew got over there in a hurry, they filled in the hole, repaired the track, and the train was two hours late getting to Angels.

BIRD:  I can’t possibly tell you everything, so I’m going to conclude so that – I’ve been talking too long. But I want to tell you something about the gold bricks. My brother was the assayer and I talked to him just the night before last to confirm what I recollected. It was his job to take the gold and melt it down into gold bricks to be shipped to Selby for final refining. They did not have the facilities there to refine it, because it was full of impurities. And you know what one of these impurities was? Silver. They couldn’t get the silver out of the gold. ??? ??? separate the silver from the gold. Well, these bricks weighed about – my brother said the other night, about twelve to fourteen pounds, depending on whether you’re talking troy or avoirdupois. So let’s say with fourteen pounds, and they ran from about three to four thousand dollars apiece. My father’s job was to take these bricks from the vault and put them on the express train in the morning. The Sierra Railway express train. And I used to feel pretty big, you know, helping him do this, because sometimes I had two bags of gold bricks, maybe two in each bag, and he had two or three bags. It was not unusual for us to have fifty, sixty thousand dollars in gold. And we walked up there many, many a time in the dark, to put these gold bricks on that express train to be shipped to Selby. And we were never – my father was never held up. I mentioned this to my brother night before last, by telephone. And I said, did you ever hear of anybody being held up? And he said, I was. He said I poured a gold brick one afternoon, the largest one I ever poured, it weighed fifty-five pounds. And by the time I got it ready and cooled off, a man walked in with a gun and held it up to my head. I not heard this story until the day before yesterday. And I said well Milo, what did you do about it? And he said the fellow looked at the size of the brick, and he said “Well, it’s just too big” and he walked out. (Laughter).

BIRD:  Well, maybe I’ll say one other thing. (static) Well, quite a few movie companies came to Melones – “The Covered Wagon” was made there, they built an entire town below the Melones bridge. And there they made “The Covered Wagon”. And they hired townspeople for extras. And they hired me. And my job was to sit on a rock in the middle of the river. A real important part.

BIRD:  Bill Hart came to Melones one time, with his pinto pony, and believe me there wasn’t much school going on when Bill Hart was in town. And I – the biggest thrill of my life was I got to hold his horse while he swam the –

END OF TAPE

General Information:

Interviewer:  n/a

Interviewee: Bird, Ted

Name of Tape: My Life in Old Melones (bird_t_1)

When: 1980

Transcriber: Alden (2/29/08)