| OCR Text |
Show AT OROVTLLE. CALIFORNIA. If you ever journey over the Western Pacific to the coast, do not fail to see the dredges operating in and around Oroville, that beautiful beauti-ful little city at the mouth of Feather river, where orange groves mutely tell of a salubrious climate and a most fertile soil, and yet in seeming contradiction, where huge piles of cobblestones scar the surface of the earth, and record the struggle for mineral wealth, the presence of which in less favored regions invariably proclaims a soil forbidding in its barrencss. There are few places where Providence Provi-dence has been so liberal in bestowing gifts. The miner, plucking golden fruit from a tree, later decides to plow up the tree for the gold at its roots. Having uprooted his orchard and sifted the glittering glit-tering yellow particles from the sands and the stones, he levels the surface, replants his orange and fig and again asks Nature in all its prodigality to smile on him and restore that which he has destroyed. In any other place Nature would rebel and plag-ue the land with waste and want, but in Oroville, after the dredges have overturned, uprooted and upheaved, the fertility of the soil reasserts itself and the disfigurement is effaced by new orchards, " It is a rare combination of fruit growing and mining which proves most surprising to those who, crossing Nevada and observing that state's bleak hills and desert stretches, are led to believe that the treasures of the jurassic and triassic periods were placed where the earth's surface wa3 rent and seared and made unfit for human habitation except to the venturesome and the hardy delver willing to uffer privations in searching out the treasure troves. Along the Feather river at Oroville are 47 dredges, each costing cost-ing $110,000 or more. They are operated by electric power and at night, when aglow with numberless lights, present a striking picture. Out of the old river channels, these giants of modern inventive genius are poking their noses through the gravels, rooting after gold like a hog after the succulent plants in an alfalfa field. These dredges are found to be profitable in gravel which yields even less than 12 cents a cubic yard. The railroad contractor, accustomed to handle large yardage at a low figure, would hesitate a long time before be-fore contracting to move Feather river gravel at 12 cents, yet so perfect is the equipment in dredging and so thorough do the men in charge of the dredges understand their work, that from what would be termed by outsiders the dregs of poverty, these Californians win fortunes Dredging on the Feather river is a study in human ingenuity and resourcefulness. |
