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Californian Cornish Cousins
My relationship with 'Cousin Jenny' began with a chance encounter. It
started on a desolate railway platform in the historic, mountain town
of Truckee. The station serves one train daily - the California Zephyr
which traverses the US from Chicago to San Francisco. From the east,
it crosses vast prairie and grasslands ahead of the Colorado Rockies
and the Nevada desert before reaching the Sierra Nevada range, with Truckee
as the scheduled stop, between Reno and Sacramento. On this particular
day, the station was deserted- no passengers, no ticket collector and
definitely no train, which apparently, had been cancelled because of
a rock slide in the mountains.
We were on the last day of a holiday, running
short of dollars and patience in a 'one-train-town' on a cold, snowing
February day, marooned in a place resembling a Wild West film set. Downtown
Main Street was lined with bars, shops and a hotel that hasn't changed
too much in 140 years. The station building had an office operated by
the Chamber of Commerce to provide tourist information, here we found
a timetable for a bus that would take us as far as Sacramento later in
the day and shelves stacked with racks of leaflets and guides for accommodation,
hiking and ski-ing. One magazine caught my attention as the men on the
front cover looked as miserable as I felt; its title was, '"Nevada
County Gold", with a black and white photograph of dust-covered
men with drooping moustaches, crammed into the cage of a lift shaft;
men with tired eyes and haggard faces, some holding pick axes and candles.
Below, the caption read, "Cornish miners seeking their pot of gold
in Grass Valley". There was nothing I wanted more than to be back
home in Cornwall, but why were Cornish miners in California?
The day continued with the surreal vagaries
of a dream. The bus was a Greyhound and it began the descent through
Nevada County, travelling amongst spectacular mountain scenery into the
foothill towns of Auburn, Colfax and Placervllle . As we rode along Interstate
80, I saw a sign to Tallack's timber yard and another to a gourmet pasty
shop and by the time we reached Sacramento I had read the magazine from
cover to cover. I learnt that flakes of gold were being sifted from the
river gravel along the creeks snaking though the foothills and in 1850
a prospector struck a rich quartz ledge revealing a seam of exceptionally
rich ore which became known as the Ophir vein, this deposit became the
life-blood of the mines in Grass Valley and was destined to become one
of the richest lodes in California.
An essential component for mining gold was
skilled, hard rock miners. When the news reached Cornwall, it coincided
with a decline in the tin industry and thousands of Cornish men and women
left their homeland and sailed across the Atlantic from local ports of
Padstow, Charleston and Malpas. Unlike other nationalities that migrated
to the US, the Cornish were not simply economic migrants; their contribution
had a profound impact as their expertise was founded on centuries of
mining igneous rock and a knowledge of pumping water from deep pits.
Added to which they possessed an innate trust in each other, knowing
they could depend on brothers, uncles, wives and daughters - their 'Cousin
Jacks and Jennies'. The migrants arrived in droves, crossing plains,
rivers, mountains and deserts to reach the goldmines, gambling with their
lives against fragile odds. Many would die from disease, starvation and
cold, but the lure of striking it rich wouldn't stop the relentless flood
of humanity from grasping this unparalleled opportunity. The wealth created
by the gold deposited in bank vaults create the foundation on which greatness
would be built and helped shape the destiny of the American nation.
The departure of so many young people must have cast a
dark shadow of loss amongst rural communities, separating families who
may never see each other again and while many of the journeys were made
by single men, entire families compelled by the same pioneering spirit,
left to help settle the West. I can only imagine what life was like for
women in the mining camps and frontier towns with the teeth of winter
snapping and tearing through make-shift cabins and tents. The physical
effort to care for husbands and children is rooted in a special kind
of woman and there are plenty around to this day bred from the same gene
cache, with the courage to deal with what life throws at them. There
is something in their character that is resolute and resourceful; let's
face it, a DNA sample probably wouldn't show up anything different in
Cornish women to those born in the rest of the UK, maybe it's simply
being born into families who cope with the prevailing forces of nature;
earth, wind and sea bring their bounty when the balance is right, but
they can destroy when out of control. In the past, mines stopped producing,
crops failed and boats were lost at sea, whereas today it's more likely
that the EU or Tesco are making unreasonable demands on traditional jobs. READ
MORE - THE STORY & PICTURES CONTINUE
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