The Copper Era

In 1855, at Spanish Dry Diggings, El Dorado county, California, some prospectors sank to bedrock, a distance of 3 and 4 feet, and found nothing. Three Missourians, who had just reached the state after a trip across the plains, came to the spot and dug six inches deeper and found rich diggings. During the summer they took out $60,000 apiece and two of them went back home rich men. The third gambled and drank his money away, thinking he could strike another place when he wanted to do so. He never did so, however, and is now in his old age eking out a scanty subsistence in a sheep herder's camp in Tulare county. M. & E. Review.