Matthew Stokoe - Empty Mile

At the entrance a woman sitting behind a card table asked us to sign our names in an attendance register. The page she turned toward us bore what I assumed were the signatures and names of the members who had already arrived. The day’s date was stamped at the top of the page and beside it the words Magnetometers and their Role in Placer Gold Deposit Location were printed in red ink. The woman saw me reading and said helpfully, “Tonight’s lecture.”

Metal folding chairs had been set in five rows at the opposite end of the hall. A few were occupied, but we were early for the meeting and most of the ten or so people in the hall stood around in twos and threes chatting. I recognized a couple of them from the Society picnic.

As Marla led me toward an office door behind the chairs she whispered, “Chris Reynolds is the chairman. He knows as much as anybody. It’s good we’re early, we can talk to him and then get out before the meeting starts.”

“And miss the lecture?”

“Most of them don’t exactly live up to that description. Someone stands up and drones on about his or her pet subject for half an hour. Different one each meeting. This diggings, that diggings, the journey across the country to the gold fields, where’s the best place to look for gold now…”

“Not good?”

“Some of them are okay, but you come often enough and you start hearing the same thing again and again.”

The upper half of the office door was frosted glass set in dark oak. Marla tapped on it and a voice told her to come in.

We entered a small room that was paneled to waist height in more oak. An old wooden desk that had lost its varnish filled most of the space. Chris Reynolds sat behind it poring over some sort of financial ledger. He had a tired, weathered face and the skin around his eyes looked bruised. I hadn’t recognized the name, but I remembered the face. He owned a prospector supply store in town called the Nugget Shooter and we’d recently installed a couple of standing plants for him. Like anyone else who read the Oakridge paper he knew about my father’s disappearance.

We all said hi. Marla and I sat on chairs in front of his desk and she told him I was interested in the history of

Empty Mile. He looked happy to have the chance to hold forth on his area of expertise.

“Empty Mile. What do you want to know?”

“Anything you can tell me. My father bought some land there on the Swallow River and I’m trying to figure out why.”

“You’re here, so you must be thinking gold, one way or another.”

“It’s the only thing that stands out about the place.”

He laughed. “You could say that about almost anywhere around here. Look, the Swallow was thoroughly prospected during the Rush. There’s no gold left in that river, believe me. Not the sort you can take out with a pan. A lot of miners came this way. And a lot of miners means that all the gold got found. Even the name of the place bears it out. Empty Mile. Empty, nothing left. They came, they saw, they dug it all up. Did such a good job everyone who came later remarked on it. Started calling it…?” He raised his eyebrows.

“Empty Mile.”

“Exactly. And your father would have known that the same as any other member of the Society. It’s a nice thought, but I can’t see him thinking he’d bought himself an undiscovered strike. He must have had another reason.”

“That’s the origin of the name? That it was mined so thoroughly it became… notorious? It couldn’t have been that there just wasn’t any gold there to start with?”

“The Swallow was rich pretty much all the way up to where Oakridge is today. It doesn’t make sense that Empty Mile was barren. I know that stretch of river. The banks, the riverbed, slow water. There couldn’t not have been gold there. And there’s actually an account by a miner who passed through there complaining about the way it had been cleaned out. It’s a pretty strong indication that there had to be something there in the first place.”

He twisted in his chair and pulled open a drawer in a dented filing cabinet behind him. After a minute spent struggling with densely packed hanging folders he turned back to us and handed me a sheet of paper. It was a photocopy of a handwritten page. The creases where the original had been folded into eighths were visible in dark lines of toner.

“Copy of a letter sent back home by a miner to his wife. Part of a document collection they have at Berkeley. He mentions Empty Mile by name. Earliest reference to it anyone’s found.”

He nodded for me to read it.

The writing was rough, as though the man who’d written it had had only his knees to rest the paper against. It wasn’t flowery or poetic, and it wasn’t as carefully put together as Nathanial Bletcher’s journal, but it must have meant more than gold to the woman it was written for-news from a husband thousands of miles away, perhaps the only confirmation he was still alive. As I read through the endearments, the report on his health, his hopes that he and his wife would be together again before another year passed, I couldn’t help feeling how intensely lonely life must have been for so many of the men who went looking for gold.

I found the reference Reynolds had mentioned in the last third of the letter. Just a couple of lines at the end of a brief description of the man’s most recent journeying.

I am camped this day at a place the miners have learned to call Empty Mile, so well has it been dug. The men here mutter that Chinese must have been the first to come upon this spot.

The letter was dated May 29, 1849, almost two months after Nathaniel Bletcher had reached the same stretch of river.

Bletcher’s journal would be an important find for Chris Reynolds, I knew. But until I had either solved the mystery of Empty Mile or discounted the land as worthless I wasn’t about to share the one thing I’d discovered about its history with anyone. I handed him back the miner’s letter.

“Chinese?”

“The Chinese were known in those days for taking over claims that ostensibly had already been worked out and abandoned. Essentially, they reprocessed tailings. Tailings are what’s thrown away at the end of the panning or washing process-soil, gravel, sand, etcetera. Poor in gold. But the Chinese were able to make it pay. They tended to work in larger groups, so they could get through more dirt in a given time. But also they were content to settle for earning a living rather than chasing the idea of a golden jackpot.” Reynolds tapped the miner’s letter. “What this guy is saying is that if a group of Chinese had been the first to get to Empty Mile they would have worked it with the same kind of thoroughness they applied to working tailings. Consequently, the river would have been left far emptier of gold than if anyone else had worked it.”

“Do you think that’s what happened?”

“I don’t think it was more likely to be the Chinese than anyone else. The miners who got there too late were just pissed off.” He looked at his watch. “You know, Ray asked me about Empty Mile too. Maybe four, five months ago.”

“What did he want to know?”

“When it had first been prospected. He was really quite insistent about it, as though he absolutely had to tie down when the first miners got there. Came in here after a meeting one night with Gareth Rogers.”

“Really? With Gareth?”

“I know what you mean, bit of a strange combination. Your father had been coming for years but Gareth was a rather short-lived member. I think he joined about six months ago, came for a while, then stopped. I haven’t seen him here for about three months. Ray kept coming, though, until…” Chris looked embarrassed that he’d raised the issue of my father’s disappearance and continued quickly. “They seemed to share an interest in Empty Mile. The Swallow River is, after all, Oakridge’s claim to Gold Rush fame.”