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and there is a very general desire to have the whole question thoroughly aired.

"Independently of the question of human origin and development thus associated with the history of the Siera Nevada there is not a more fascinating chapter in the whole history of world building than that furnished by the orographic transformations now so closely made out by our geologists. The story may be told in a few words, and so simply as to convey an understanding of the methods of determining age and a realization of the vast time involved.

"The richest finds of gold made by the forty-niners were in the great valleys that cut their way down through mountains, plateaus and foot hills from the high ranges to the Sacramento valley. The gravel of the present river beds yielded much of the precious metal, but the richer deposits were in beds of gravel that out-cropped in the sides of the valleys from one to two thousand feet above the river beds. These bodies of gravel were found to extend in attenuated bands far into the 

[[image - black and white photograph of man in profile]]
[[caption]] Prof. W. H. Holmes [[/caption]]

mountains, and the rocky slopes were pierced by a thousand tunnels. The summits of the wildest mountains were honeycombed in the eager search for other leads.

"When the geologists finally appeared upon the scene the strange fact was developed that these deposits of gravels were of river formation, and that they really represented fossil rivers, the grandfathers and great grandfathers of the present rivers, which, in early tertiary times, had been clogged with gold-bearing gravel and then filled to the brim with volcanic materials. Lindgren and Turner have studied these remnants of past river systems, and have determined the course, declivity and age of the streams, and the miners have, in several cases, followed the sinuous courses of the channels entirely through the ranges, washing out the gold and leaving the gravel still in the tunneled channels, as a woodworm pierces the oak, leaving only slight traces of his wonderful accomplishment. But what a remarkable succession of events this implies; what a vast time is involved and what an age is given to the races that pounded seeds or acorns in the mortars along the banks of those far-away ancestors of our modern rivers.

Work of Rivers.

The story they tell is about as follows: The tertiary rivers ran out across the high land pretty much as the streams of today find their way to the sea. They had strong currents, and scored down their slaty or granite walls and the gold-bearing quartz seams intersecting them, and filled their beds with the debris. The freed gold sank to the bottoms and the coarse water-worn materials accumulated to the thickness of hundreds of feet.

"It is upon the banks of these rivers that the race must have lived that left its bones and its tools and utensils imbedded along with the bodies of the giant mammals of their time. Then came a change over these scenes - a profound and wonderful change; a period of great volcanic activity followed, and lavas flowed and streams of mud descended, until the valleys were filled up and new channels, system after system, were formed. At the close of a vast period of these activities the deepest valleys were filled up to overflowing, and when the flows of basalt, the final products, ceased the waters of the Sierra had to begin anew the cutting of thoroughfares to the Pacific. This volcanic period continued through a large part of the tertiary age - a period not to be estimated in thousands, but in hundreds of thousands of years.

"But behold the changes that have since taken place! These streams - the Marced, the Tuolumne, the Stanislaus, the American river, the Yuba and others - have cut their way by the slow processes of erosion down deep into the bowels of the earth, and now run their courses in valleys 2,000 feet deep and many miles in width, so profound, precipitous and inaccessible that it is a day's journey to cross them, where indeed they can be crossed at all by human feet.

"The traveler who descends into one of these great canons and painfully works his way up the opposite side to the crests, where the miners are tunneling the river beds of former periods, finds himself soliloquizing in the following vein: 'Is it possible that man can have dwelt in this wild land so long as this, while these mountains were carved out and the vast valleys formed by the tedious sculpture of the mountain streams? It, indeed, surpasses belief, and unless the most weighty evidence is forthcoming, the whole story of auriferous gravel man must fall.'

"But this is not all the geologist has to tell of the flight of time. When the valleys had been deepened nearly to their present beds the glacial period came on, and the ice reshaped them and modeled the marvelous contours of which Yosemite is a fine type. From the point of view of the man of the old river systems the glacial period is recent time, but this is the period of the paleolithic man of New Jersey and Ohio, if such there was, and the glacial man of Europe had not, even at this late date, reached the status of culture attained by his California precursor a million years before, if such a precursor there ever was.

Table Mountain.

"This panoramic sketch is not well calculated to give an idea of the magnitude of the geographical features with which we have to deal, but it may serve to show something of the geological relations. Table mountain, A is a long narrow table land extending outward toward the west between two valleys from 1,500 to 2,000 feet deep. The summit of the mountain is sinuous as a serpent, for it is the stream of lava that flowed into the bed of the ancient river whose gravely, gold-bearing bed is seen in the section at B. The streams cut their channels at the sides because the lava was harder than the neighboring formations, and what was originally the valley is now the mountain crest. The dotted lines in the section show how the tunnels pierce the sides of the mountain and reach the main channel of the old stream in the heart of the mountain, and it is from these deep diggings under Table mountain that many of the human relics are said to have been brought forth. At C we have the undisturbed formations of the mountain. At B is Tuttletown, where still lives 'Truthful James.' To the left is the profound Valley of the Stanislaus, and beyond this, and twenty miles away, at C, is Bald mountain, where, in a deep tunnel in formations corresponding to those of Table mountain, the Calaveras skull was found.

"Stranger than all are some of the facts

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