The Nevada Journal

Scarcity of Flour.

We have been waiting patiently for a termination to a dispute between the San Francisco papers as to the cause of the high price of flour. We have inclined to the belief that the agency of heartless monopolists had much to do with the matter, and our opinion is confirmed in reading the interminable arguments on the point. Meanwhile public opinion here has been gaining vast strength. Deprive a man of bread and you make him utterly desperate. We publish to-day—and ask for it, as its authors do, republication in San Francisco—the voice of a meeting of Miners at Kanaka Creek on the Yuba, who have been driven from their claims by nothing but the scarcity of provisions. They speak boldly and eloquently to the sentiment of the mass of miners in this county. It will not do to presume they will attempt to do nothing but speak. They state evils that must not only oppress them, but break down the prosperity of the State. In all seriousness what can merchants and traders and all classes do, if miners are compelled to suspend work? Who shall feed the tide of gold shipped semi-monthly to the Atlantic? If miners are stopped, must not all branches of business stop? The effect of this monopoly has been to drive miners from the unworked and rich outposts of mining, and centre them in nearly worn out localities, where work is hard to get, but provisions are more plenty. If the almost inaccessible (at this season) dry diggings had been supplied with flour a month ago, as they might have been if it had been cheap, the miners would have worked away in them, with the facility of water at hand, and poured their golden acquisitions into the lap of trade in the spring. Now, they are compelled to flee at the risk of their lives through the deep snows, to escape starvation. One hundred men left Kanaka Creek at the date of the address we publish, and came to this city. God help the starving miner, and blast the ill-gotten gains of the speculator in human misery!

Voice from Miners.
Chip's Flat, Kanaka Creek,
Dec. 26, 1852.

At a meeting of the starved-out miners, held the 26th of December, 1852, at Chip's Flat, amid 10 feet of snow, for the purpose of protecting their claims during the inclement season we are now experiencing, it was unanimously

Resolved, That we do hereby deprecate the whole system of business now carried on by the merchants of San Francisco, in the excessive monopoly of the article of Flour, whereby the energies of the country are prostrated and paralysed, and the miners have been driven from their homes and diggings at a season of the year when it is as much as a man's life is worth to attempt a journey from the mountains, to procure the common necessities of life.

The life of the miner in the mountains, is at all times one of hardship and privation, without being rendered ten times worse, through the extortions of a set of heartless speculators, who are lining their pockets with the hard earned toilings of the pioneers of the mountainous region. Owing to the excessive extortion in the prices of all articles of consumption, the store keepers have been prevented from laying in their stock of necessaries, required in this season. The winter has now set in with unusual severity, and we are driven from our homes and diggings to pamper the extortionate appetites of these heartless scoundrels, who are now fattening on their unholy gain.

And we do hereby publicly thus call upon the miners throughout the length and breadth of the land, to speak out plainly on the subject, and to let these land sharks know that there is a power slumbering, which, if once aroused, will express these opinions in a language not to be misunderstood.

It was Resolved, unanimously, That the above resolutions be printed in the Nevada Journal, with a request that other editors of newspapers will publish the above article.

Signed on behalf of the company by
T. H. PALMER, Pres.
WM. J. Niles, Vice Pres.