1) The abandoned water ditch I passed last year on my hike to Dix Mine and Mitchell Mine was the Breece and Wheeler Ditch. It took water from Indian Creek in the east branch of El Dorado Canyon to the Paragon Mine (Breece and Wheeler Mine) east of Bath near Foresthill. (From Historic Mining Ditches of Tahoe National Forest, by C.B. Meisenbach, Tahoe National Forest Cultural Resources, Report No. 28, 1989, pg. 32. This references Placer County Book K of Deeds, pg. 79.)
2) The Dix Mine (John Dix and Arkansas Consolidated Placer Mine) was owned by William Mitchell of the nearby Mitchell Mine. Dix Mine had an assessed value in 1872 of $50. By 1882 the value had increased to $750. (From Mining Claims of Foresthill Divide 1851 to 1902, by Amy Rebok, pg. 59.)
3) Hudson Bay Company fur trappers worked the North Fork of the American River as far up as Green Valley. Forty Niner Mahlon D. Fairchild found a fur trapper at work in Green Valley. The trapper had left Fort Vancouver (Washington) shortly after word reached there of Marshall's discovery of gold. (From Placer County's Own Mining Story, L.M. Davis, Roseville Historical Society, 1997, pg. 13.) Heretofore I had wondered if the trappers went beyond the confluence of the North and Middle Forks.
I made a contribution to the Archives, to be filed under business establishments, an August 1949 photograph of my grand-uncle at work in Halley's Barber Shop on Finley Street in Auburn. He had lived in Auburn but a few years. A search by an Archives staff member found no records of him in Placer County. Born in the Missouri Ozarks shortly after the turn of the century, he had come with his parents and several siblings to California from Oklahoma during the Depression. While he and his family never faced the hardships described in The Grapes of Wrath, they did move around California quite a bit as they sought better opportunities.
