Spanish Gulch, Amador County Ghost Town

From its confluence with Dry Creek, Spanish Gulch extends due north for a mile and a half. It is lined with crumbling chimneys and building foundations, the many times repeated layout of the string bean town that sprang up along a water course.

A ruined building of quarried and cut stone coursed in lime mortar stands on a little hummock at the junction of the gulch with Dry Creek. Its outer wall has a fireplace of which the back measures 12 feet in width. This is quite the largest that has been encountered at any of the sites. This structure, on the evidence that it presents, must have served some public or semi-public need. What that was has small chance of ever being known.

As has been said before, some communities of which hardly a physical vestige survives bulk large in the news and comment of the early days. Conversely, extensive construction in the best of durable materials went unnoticed in the early press, and in some cases even a name is hard or sometimes impossible to discover. Of these two categories, Spanish Gulch groups in the latter. We do have the name and that is just about all.

At the upper end of the gulch, a tapia or rammed-earth house, still as of this writing standing, gives point to what was said of the durability of this type of con­struction in the prologue. Within less than a hundred yards of this, a cemetery still owns a protecting fence and marking headstones. The epitaphs are mostly indecipherable due to the weathering of more than a century. Upon a very few the dates that are legible are those of the 1850s.

North of this cemetery a distance of perhaps 50 yards, three arrastres are still recognizable. An explanation of this statement is probably in order. In the depression years, most of them were broken up and destroyed by the great army of swip­ers who invaded the old diggings, scratching meager returns that even the Chinese, preceding them by two or three generations, would have scorned. The beds and even the guide walls of the arrastres were taken apart, and the stones were washed to glean the pitiful remnant of precious metal. For this reason an unwrecked speci­men is a rarity, though they do exist.

One of the three mentioned above is quite unusual, in that the king post or pivoting bar and the sweep are of heavy iron. One could go far afield indeed to duplicate this.

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