Bottle(?) digging in the "High Lonesome"

[highsierra]

Last Friday, we made another trip up into the Sierra, but this time the elevation was only 5800' and the snow was all but gone. Our target was a miner's cabin site that we had discovered last fall. It is about a 1/2 mile walk down into the pines and firs and sits near a stream where they worked the gravels and surrounding quartz outcrops.

The cabin site is identified by nothing more than a few foundation stones and a nondescript pile of rocks that represents the collapsed fireplace.

Broken 1850s bottles littered the area around the cabin, but after detecting and digging everything not one whole bottles was found. All were shattered by either the freezing and thawing of the ensuing 150+ years since they were discarded or broken at the time. There were some super nice pieces of some very rare bottles. This, unfortunately, happens often when bottles lay on, or near, the surface. Nothing was deeper than 4", so survival depends on the position the bottle is laying in. Mouth up equals sure destruction, bottom up makes a better chance of remaining intact. We have another site to investigate this week, so remain hopeful that something good will turn up.

[drdave514]

That's pretty interesting. I'm not a bottle man myself but knowing the ins and outs of what goes on interests me. Thanks for posting about your search.

[DesertWalker]

Darn it Mike! But ya can't always find the good stuff. Did ya do any metal detecting? Looks like a great day out though!

[highsierra]

Didn't 'ya see the detector in the first pic? My diggin' partner's 14 yr old daughter went with us and moved dirt, too. We did find the miner's personal scales, though. A neat little set that fit in a oval box that resembles a glasses case. The brass counter weights were missing, though. I got a 1850s gold pan, some lengths of chain, and a handmade candle holder. They would cut pieces of a barrel hoop and wind it in a tight coil, then slice the end and bend it up to hold a candle. Pretty ingenious.

The bottles had to have been carried up into that country from Marysville, the hub of the Northern mines. It was where supplies were sent from San Francisco, up the Sacramento river and into the Feather River to M-ville, a distance of 120 miles. Then, the goods had another 60 miles to get to the top camps. It's hard to imagine the sheer volume of goods that went that route in the early 1850s. Gold fever made more storekeepers and suppliers rich than it did the miners themselves.

[DesertWalker]

Nope, don't see a detector... Got photos of the other stuff??

[highsierra]

In the photo where walking through the trees, you'll see Mike's Whites detector in his left hand. Look for the white coil. We both have Whites , his is an older one, mine is a MXT. My camera crapped out when we were half finished with the day's fun.