![]() My dad told him it was just a few miles down the hill from Placerville, in a small town called Coloma. The man asked him where the tree was when we first cut it up. Why brass, and how did it get into the tree? Dan BeadleĪn old man standing in the small crowd that had heard about my family’s supposed good fortune, volunteered, “I can tell you exactly what it is and how it got there.” My dad, showing respect for his elders, obliged the gentleman and asked him to explain. He had determined that our bar of gold was actually an alloy of brass. (Word got around our then-small-town pretty quick.) When the assayer came out, he had a sorrowful look on his face. A small crowd had assembled in the front office with my parents, all having heard about our newly found riches. The assayer took a knife shaving of the metal and went back into his office to ascertain its value. The next morning my parents drove downtown to visit the assayer’s office. When they saw the gold piece, still attached to one side of the log, they all joined us in our celebration. ![]() The rest of the family, all in the house, came running out thinking one of us must have cut off a leg with an axe. One, how did it get in there? And two, it was gold! There, just off center in that log, was about a 6-inch-long and two to three-inch square piece of gold! … in the center of the trunk of what was once a very large tree. My dad came over and pried apart the last strands of wood holding the log together. I took the wedge out and looked down into the center of the log and saw a gold colored piece of metal, embedded in the wood. I looked over at my dad to see an inquisitive look on his face. It was on one such day that we suddenly struck gold.Īs I brought down the hammer onto a wedge I had placed in the center of a log about two-foot-wide, I heard the inevitable clank of metal against metal … followed almost immediately by a second clank. ![]() We would drive out to any of dozens of nearby forests where it was legal to cut up fallen trees into firewood-length pieces.Įach Sunday, after church and lunch, my dad and I would begin the process of splitting up all the logs using a wedge and a sledgehammer. To keep warm during most winters, it took about four or five cords of firewood. When I was in high school, in the gold country around Placerville, my family would set out on most autumnal Saturdays to cut enough firewood to heat our two-story house for the winter.
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