The Current Magazine Winter 2019 | Page 37

Wading up the River

"Silver rivers run here, the sweetest in the world. They wind and wind among the rocks and mossy roots, with California lilies and the yew with scarlet berries dripping in the water, and trout idling in the eddies and cool places by the basket full." - Joaquin Miller, 1873. From Life Amongst the Modocs: Unwritten History

A river once teeming with both trout and salmon, the Upper Sacramento still cascades through the canyon, and though the trout remain, the salmon have long since eddied out. As I note the infamous 1991 herbicide spill by the railroad, there have been at least two other historical setbacks through which the river has rebounded.

During the early 1850's, a trapper and adventurer called 'Mountain' Joe Dr Bloney built a way station at the confluence of Soda Creek and the Upper Sacrament River, to trade with the Indians and to supply miners on their way up the canyon to the Yreka gold fields. His camp cook was a young man called Cincinnatus Hiner Miller, who later achieved considerable fame as Joaquin Miller, hailed by the press as, 'The Poet of the Sierras.'

De Bloney let slip that the fabled 'Lost Cabin Mine,' (later fictionalized by Miller) was somewhere in the vicinity of Soda Creek. Hundreds of miners flowed into the region in 1854 and a flurry of mining activity ensued. Miller claims the situation as follows, "Thousands of men! The little valley of Soda Creek back of Castle Crags Tavern was a white sea of tents. Every bar on the Sacramento was the scene of excitement. The world was literally turned upside down. The river rand dark and sullen with sand and slime. The fishes turned on their sides and died."

continued on page 56