Originally created on 01/11/2013…Thought I’d take some time and begin recording a podcast for gold prospectors, whether metal detecting or gold panning. These first ones will be short readings from “The Diary of a Forty-Niner” detailing life in the gold fields of California during the gold rush. Learn what it was like in camp, what the diggings were like, and general information relevant to today’s gold prospector. Transcript Below… The diary of a forty-niner, edited by Canfield, Chauncey L., 1843-1909. Gold Prospecting Show #1 Transcript… THE HARDSHIPS OF A MINER’s LIFE–LETTERS FROM HOME–THE EXPRESS RIDER AND HIS WELCOME CALL–… {Begin page no. 3} MAY 19, 1850. –The pork I bought in town last night is the stinkenest salt junk ever brought around the Horn. It is a hardship that we can’t get better hog meat, as it’s more than half of our living. We fry it for breakfast and supper, boil it with our beans, and sop our bread in the grease. Lord knows we pay enough for it. When I first settled on the creek it was a dollar a pound and the storekeeper talks about it being cheap now at sixty cents. I believe that if it were not for the potatoes that are fairly plenty and the fact that the woods are full of game, we would all die of scurvy. There is plenty of beef, such as it is, brought up in droves from Southern California, but it’s a tough article and we have to boil it to get it tender enough to eat. There is a hunter who lives over on Round Mountain and makes a living killing deer and peddling the meat among the miners. He charges fifty cents a pound for venison steaks and he told me he made more money than the average miner. I paid seventy-five cents apiece in town yesterday for two apples and did not begrudge the money. I was told that they were grown in Oregon, which seemed strange, as I did not know that country had been settled long enough to raise fruit. Will sell no more dust to M–. He allowed {Begin page no. 4} only $17.00 an ounce and then blew out two dollars’ worth of fine gold; said it was not clean. Jerry Dix, who is only two claims above me on the creek, gets $18.50 for his at the store, but it always […]