Nature Noir by Jordan Smith (romantic books to read .TXT) 📗

standards in database programs, and the name of the software into which Finch entered every event reported by the permanent rangers on that temporary river was one most people wouldn't recognize today.

It was a program called Paradox.

4 / Occurrence at Yankee Jims Bridge

AT SOME POINT in the last five million years as it flowed southwest out of the Sierra Nevada, the American River fell in with a line of secret cracks in the earth called the Gillis Hill Fault. A river always takes the easiest way to where it is going and, like some people, will exploit any weakness in its surroundings to get there. So just east of what is today the town of Colfax, the North Fork insinuated itself into the promising cleft of the fault and began running along it. But as it cut downward the river seems to have slid sideways, for the rocks along the fault dip east, at a right angle to its channel. Eventually the North Fork no longer ran along the fault but ran parallel to it. And as is also true of people, rivers sometimes keep doing things long after the reasons for doing them are gone. So for many years—hundreds of thousands, perhaps even a million or more—the river has continued to flow that way.

From the time of the Gold Rush, the five miles of the North Fork along the Gillis Hill Fault were known to be rich in gold, and that reputation persisted even after the North Fork canyon was to be inundated by the Auburn Dam. By the time of my first patrol of it in June 1986, that part of the river had long been one of my fellow rangers more troublesome responsibilities. True to form, during that first reconnaissance I caught sight of a squatter's shack along the canyon wall and a gold dredge below it in the river. Back at the ranger station I found no permit for a mining camp there, so in July, Doug Bell and I hiked back up the river to investigate. And in this simple way began a dark chain of events that continued into the fall of that year.

To hike to that part of the North Fork, Bell and I would start from the bridge where the road between Colfax and the ghost town of Yankee Jims crossed the river. Completed in 1884, the Colfax—Yankee Jims Road consisted of a crooked shelf barely wide enough for one car, chipped into the slatey shale wall of a tributary called Bunch Canyon with the typical economy of roads built with hand tools and intended for use only by horse-drawn vehicles. Leaving the outskirts of Colfax on it, you passed a couple of abandoned shacks and a collection of junked cars riddled with bullet holes. Beyond these you came to an occupied cabin separated from the road by a tall board fence, on which the resident had painted in large white letters: HAVE A FUCKED DAY!, TRESPASSERS WILL BE EXECUTED, and I SHOOT FIRST AND ASK QUESTIONS LATER. Beyond that outpost you passed several abandoned mine shafts and our shot-up boundary sign, and eventually you reached the bottom of the canyon and Yankee Jims Bridge. Completed in 1930, the bridge's creaky deck depended from two rusty cables about seventy-five feet above the rocky breach full of rushing water, and however tentatively you drove onto it, the whole structure bucked and swayed underneath you in the most unsettling way. In all, Yankee Jims was a forbidding place for a ranger in those days.

On the far side of the bridge that morning, I took a 12-gauge shotgun from our truck and slung it over one shoulder. Bell carried only his revolver. Leaving the road on foot, we forded Shirttail Creek, which tumbled into the North Fork from a rocky slot just upstream of the bridge. From there we followed an old miners' trail up the canyon wall, past a series of ledgelike indentations supported by rock retaining walls—the footings of Gold Rush miners' cabins.

As we started up the canyon, it still mystified me why we tolerated mining. Any such activity was clearly in violation of not one but several state park laws. Since my first look at suction dredging, I had questioned my fellow rangers about it several times. I had received only the most cryptic responses. But the mere mention of mining seemed to incite in them such a mixture of smoldering anger and hopeless resignation that I soon abandoned the subject. It wasn't until a decade and a half later—in the course of research for this book—that I finally learned what had happened to those men.

In 1965, when the legislation authorizing the Auburn Dam was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson, the price of gold was just over thirty-five dollars an ounce. A decade passed, and the project ran into extended delays in construction. Most landowners in the canyons upstream had been bought out or condemned by then. Meanwhile, by 1976, gold prices quadrupled.

Although large-scale gold extraction was essentially a dead industry in California, unemployed men, men running from child support or the law, and those who were simply square pegs in the round holes of society had never stopped coming to Northern California to prospect. By the 1970s the availability of portable suction dredges and scuba-diving gear made it easier for small operators to recover gold from rivers, and with no one around to tell them to leave, miners equipped with this kind of gear settled in the site of the Auburn Reservoir as squatters. Semi-permanent camps and shacks appeared all over the place. Untended campfires ignited wildfires. Piles of garbage and old cars were dumped down the canyon walls. Guns were pulled in mining-claim disputes. Murder victims began turning up in shallow graves. The Bureau of Reclamation didn't have its own rangers, so as the North and Middle Forks descended into anarchy, the agency tried bringing in federal marshals for occasional sweeps, but that didn't even put