Lower Rancheria, Amador County Ghost Town

Old writers always speak of Lower Rancheria as being on a steep incline or U pitch of the main Mother Lode, which in this area they state achieves a gradient of forty-five per cent. This is head on with all published maps. They show the Lode, where it surfaces, as being miles west and running approximately through Amador City to give this as being the nearest point to Rancheria.

An attempt at resolving these two opposed positions might run something like this: The early writers may have had in mind the East Lode. For more than a cen­tury, the assertion or denial of the existence of the East Lode is enough to launch a controversy among mining men that is far from being resolved at this date.

A factor that may assist in a partial compromise of these two stands is this: Whether or not it does exist, there is an outcropping, separated in places by miles, of quartz that at some points is of great richness, roughly in paralleling alignment to the main Mother Lode. Upon this line are found the Defender, Climax, and Rainbow mines to mention but a few, that from pocket formations or veins that varied tremendously in content, did at times and in places pay handsomely. Of course, the great and enormously productive mines of the Grass Valley-Nevada City complex, as illustrated by the Empire, the Idaho Maryland, and the North Star, are all on the East Lode.

Now let us try for a synthesis in that the difference appears to narrow to this: The outcroppings are or are not connected by a magma at great depth. When and if this depth is sounded, we will have the answer.

There are many references in the 1850s, before the enactment of the tragedy, to arrastres and chile mills that were giving a high return. Arrastres powered by water get frequent mention. This is most unusual, and astonishingly enough one comes to notice, of which steam was the moving force. However, nothing of the record can be located that shows any effort was expended upon deep hard-rock mining.

Deep Gulch and Slate Gulch were tremendously rich and were said to equal or surpass anything in the county, the area of Lancha Plana being excepted. Now, as we must, we come to the terrible thing that must be told of a gang of twelve Mexicans, who were first reported of [acalitos and traced to Drytown, where a show of force drove them off. Descending upon Rancheria they murdered eight persons on August 6, 1855.

A posse gathered by Phoenix, the first sheriff of Amador, tracked them on a twisted trail that ended in a gun battle at a big adobe cantina and casa de baile on the west face of Bear Mountain in Calaveras on August 12, 1855. The gallant sheriff was killed, as were also several members of the posse, and several of the posse were wounded. An undetermined number of the bandits were killed, the rest escaping to the brush behind the building.

This next is even worse: the disarming, murder, indignities, violence, and expulsion visited upon the whole peaceful Mexican population of the Rancherias, Drytown, and adjacent areas that culminated in the burning of the Catholic church of Drytown. This outrage brought out the decent elements of the communities in an at least partially successful restoration of law and order. All this is here sketched as briefly as possible. The whole account is given in detail by Mason, to which anyone interested is referred.

These gruesome happenings are thought to have been an aftermath of the killing of Joaquin Murrieta, Three Fingered Jack, and several others of the band at the Arroyo Cantova by the California Rangers, captained by Harry Love on July 23,1853- Out of all of this came the abandonment of the entire county by both Americans and Mexicans. This is fully documented in county archives that list several hundred registered voters resident in the early 1850's and not a solitary one as of 1860.

Old stone footings of massive buildings sprawl across the base of Quartz Mountain and out onto the flat, any order or sequence that they may originally have possessed being obscured by returning vegetation. At roadside granite, marked of generous dimensions, centers a long concrete slab covering the graves of several members of the Dynan family, including Mary, who was one of those killed by the bandits on August 6, 1855. This very beautiful work of remembrance was erected by a grandson of R.H. Dynan in 1941.

At a distance of perhaps 100 yards southwest, in the center of a grassy meadow, a fence protects a small cemetery shaded by a lone oak of colossal size. Here are grouped the marble tablets bearing the epitaphs of other victims of the massacre, together with other interments, nearly all within the date bracket of the decade 1850 to 1860.

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