Camp O'pera, Amador County Ghost Town

Here with Camp O'pera there is posed a question or mayhap a mystery concerning its spelling. Contemporary references to it spell it Camp Opra. It is thus spelled in mention of it in an issue of Holiday magazine of sometime back. The older records, however, give it unanimously as Camp O'pera. Neither English nor Spanish orthography would seem to account for this horse feather of an apostrophe riding high between the capital 0 and the lower-case p. But there it is, so let us see what we can do with it.

Such fragments as may be recovered and assembled of its earliest period seem to agree that in the summer of 1849 forty or fifty Sonoran miners were dry washing with bateas and getting a fair return of coarse gold. The account parallels that which may be discovered at this time if one engages in washing operations during the winter rains in the little creek that runs by the town site edge. The gold you get is of a faintly violet shade and is no larger and no smaller than a grain of wheat.

Until the government closure of the mines in the early 1940s, the personnel at the San Francisco Mint and at the Selby Smelting and Refining Company in the Transbay could pinpoint to within a mile and a half the point of origin of any gold mainly by the color test. Sluice box robbers, claim jumpers, and all kinds of illegal operators were by this fact uncovered and brought to an accounting with the law.

No very large addition to the population seems to have occurred until the Isaac's Ditch brought water to the placers in 1851. The count seems to have gone up to several hundred.

The push to the final population peak came with the arrival of the Lancaster Ditch. This, for long stretches, paralleled the Isaac's at a level 30 feet higher. This brought water, under increased pressure, to the hills back of the town.

Operations in Black Gulch, or Arroyo Negro if you prefer the Spanish, were multiplied many times. In turn the population rose to an estimated two or three thousand. It was somewhere in this bracket when Juan Sanchez, a member of Joaquin Murrieta's band, was taken out of the Grand Palace Saloon and hung by Sheriff Clark's posse on February 23, 1853. Where the hanging tree stood we will never know. It may have been one of the great oaks still standing.

The old accounts tell that it was a town of twenty buildings and that twelve of those buildings were saloons. One can not help but wonder what mundane purposes the other eight structures served. Could they have been stores, livery stables, and warehouses? One small segment of this question answered years back when with a metal detector was dimensioned out a blacksmith shop of perhaps 25 by 50 feet directly across the little stream from the town well. It is highly improbable that any of these eight structures were used as private dwellings, at least not in the earlier phases.

The story comes down to us that in the olden time the place was notorious for its graveyard of drunks, that the cemetery was the last resting place for those who died of delirium tremens. Its location is known to very few at this time. It is an approximate mile to the west of the town site, the terrain gently rolling, and studded with great oaks. Any connecting road has long since disappeared.

Until forty years ago or thereabouts, the one remaining piece of evidence of it once being a place of interment was a bricked-up plot enclosure. We have accounted for the disappearance of the brick in our bit on French Camp. No evidence whatever remains of the original purpose to which the field was placed. A word about the owner of the former bricked-up enclosure: Upon the word of James Moore, William Nichols, and Richard Barnett, it was one Painter. This seems to have been anglicized from Pintor. Anyway, it adds up to Painter in both languages.

It was he who planted the black mission figs that still grow along the bank of the stream and the yellow nopal cactus that grew in profusion until destroyed by the great freeze of some years back. In the deep trench of Cactus Gulch it grew solid, bank to bank.

All through the Mother Lode one may follow the trails left by the Mexicans by what they planted the nopal cactus and the black mission fig. The cactus was sweet fruit in season and green vegetable, vitamin C for salad the twelve month around. The black mission fig was heavy with fruit in June and again with the second crop in September. When dried it was absolutely tops as a confection and as iron rations of pack saddle, in saddle bags, or even in any available space in a pocket.

From a source now utterly lost, Padre Ugarte brought the black fig to the Mission of San Jose Commondu in Baja California in the year 1747- From Commondu it was taken to all of the missions of Alta California. In the influx of people from below the border, scions were picked up at the missions, brought to the Lode and planted to the great good fortune of those of us who came by later. Padre Ugarte said that the mission fig would enrich the California's for the next thousand years. So it was and so it shall be.

Upon the south slope of a hill of deep black soil, once a part of the old ranch and still called by old-timers the Painter Place, he raised vegetables, berries, and fruit. He sold to the miners and gave the food to them when they were broke or in hard circumstances, a true benefactor of mankind.

For many years the gateposts of his long vanished home stood, in springtime and summer, in a glorious mass of the old stickery Blass moss roses beloved of the 49ers. By the long gone right-hand post there still stands a tall oak supporting a large grape vine, which he planted. In the month of September it is loaded with 18 inch long clusters of the Almena or Red Malaga, tasty beyond belief.

Since all communities must have an economic base, let us examine for a moment the placer fields that nourished the town and kept the little balls clicking in the roulette wheels in the palaces of chance. Black Gulch, in its flanks and in places at the crest, has visibly been scoured out and eroded to a depth of many feet. To the immediate west of the building sites one-half of a hill is missing. The remaining portion has the look of having been parted from the front section with a giant cleaver.

Now let us see if we cannot take several pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, fit them together, and form a picture. Within a half-mile of the town on the west there is, at present, a small watercourse. It is now active only during the winter and spring rains. On the old Spanish maps it is marked as "Las Cienegas del Sur" and shows a series of small lakes clear down to the confluence with Jackson Creek. We will use the English term current hereabouts, "the South Slough." One of these lakes, just east of Highway 88 is still there, exactly as the old maps show. It is almost a mile long, perhaps a hundred yards wide and 10 to 15 feet deep, ample water to float both the Robert E. Lee and the Natchez.

In the 1920's a well was sunk; it was close to the upper part of the water course. At a depth of 90 feet, the diggers struck what was obviously the town dump bottles, crockery, and various bits of book and magazines, all in Spanish. Now we know what happened. The lakes were filled by the blast of the monitors with earth from the slopes above Now for some side effects: It is well documented that Jackson Valley, immediately to the west, supported the greatest concentration of Indian population in all California. U.S. Gregory, in his memoirs, states that as late as the 1870s there were five thousand Indians there resident.

Their base of subsistence was this. The valley was one giant orchard of mammoth oaks yielding acorns by the uncounted tons, which, after the elaborate processes applied by the Indians to remove the tannic acid, became good and nutritious food.

As was true along the Mokelumne, the king salmon choked the waters of the South Slough, requiring only to be hauled out and kippered to fill the native store houses with their dietetic requirement of protein for each season. Such an aboriginal Elysium has had few if any duplications in history. Small wonder that the kiva, or dance house, now in ruins at the community of Uu-poo-sun-e, was the largest in California.

And there was more. South and west of the valley there is a giant natural forti, fication, a plateau of rim rock several hundred acres in extent exhibiting almost all of the features of 17th and 18th Century military defenses.

It is all there from the hand of nature, scarp, glacis, bastion, sally port, even an inner enciente, formed by two Buena Vista peaks and the cliffs surrounding them. The peaks function as watch towers for the whole system. Nothing seems to have been forgotten. In the saddle between the peaks there gushes forth a live stream of pure ice cold water.

Long after the last faro dealer and Mexican girl from the Casa de Baile had departed for greener fields, there remained two old Spaniards, Carlos and Julio. Their surnames are not of record. They both are believed were out of the Estremadura that godforsaken part of the Spanish Wild West that is below Madrid.

They were content to pan gold in the gulches for a return that kept them in bacon, beans, and blue jeans. After years, the infirmities of age removed Julio to the county hospital and to his exit from a troubled world. Carlos carried on. Finally he was discovered to be missing, and, after an intensive search, his body was found up one of the canyons. In his cabin was found a cap box half filled with coarse gold, in value probably around two hundred dollars.

Information, photographs courtesy of the Amador County Archives, The Historical Marker Database, The Chronicling America Database, and Larry Cenotto, Amador County's Historian