E.LeBras. Autograph Letter Signed (French text). “Marys Creek, Placer de San Andres [San Andreas, Calaveras County], Aug. 19, 1852. 3pp.+stampless address leaf, postmarked Stockton and Calais, sent “via Panama”. To his uncle, M.Aumaitre, a Navy shipping agent at Brest.
A letter of more than 1200 words from a young French prospector, explaining in elementary detail his work and living conditions in the California gold fields.
Loosely translated: LeBras was a young man who had left France, with financial support from his family, to seek his fortune in California. He was living and working with two other Frenchmen who had the “necessary qualities of the miner”, sobriety and economy – one, an artist of “lithography n stone”, the other, a cadet at the St.Cyr military academy. “I work with my hands”, he explained in simple terms, panning for gold in poor “auriferous ground”, irrigated by the “indispensable” water of “cagnades” (a “little ravine formed by the junction of two mountains”), creeks and rivers, which too often ran dry. Life in the mining region was expensive and he ate sparingly, a good meal, if he was lucky, consisting of soup, beefsteak and a half-bottle of wine. A trip to San Francisco was beyond his means. He and his comrades had strict “rules of association” for dividing whatever gold they found, according to each man’s labors. But that was little enough. In another letter (listed below), sent a year later from Mokelumne Hill, LeBras, ill and fatigued, lamented that he had not been blessed with good fortune. Though the Gold Rush brought tens of thousands of hopeful Europeans, many of them Frenchmen, to California, letters such as this, from non-American miners, are far more scarce than those from adventurous Yankees.