In her seventh letter, Louise describes the log cabin Fayette acquired for her on the sparsely populated Indian Bar, upriver from Rich Bar but within walking distance:

Enter my dear; you are perfectly welcome; besides, we could not keep you out if we would, as there is not even a latch on the canvas door….The room into which we have just entered is about twenty feet square. It is lined over the top with white cotton cloth….The sides are hung with a gaudy chintz, which I consider a perfect marvel of calico printing. The artist seems to have exhausted himself on roses…from earliest budhood up to the ravishing beauty of the ‘last rose of summer.’ A curtain of the above described chintz divides off a portion of the room, behind which stands a bedstead….The fireplace is built of stones and mud, the chimney finished off with alternate layers of rough sticks….The mantle piece…is formed of a beam of wood, covered with strips of tin procured from cans, upon which still remain in black hieroglyphics, the names of the different eatables which they formerly contained….I suppose that it would be no more than civil to call a hole two feet square in one side of the room, a window, although it is as yet guiltless of glass.

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The path between Indian Bar, where the Clapp cabin stood, and Rich Bar, where Fayette had his office, was somewhat precarious. Footbridges across the river were felled logs still wrapped in bark and moss. Large rocks and countless mining pits, 6 or more feet deep, with accompanying gravel heaps, had to be skirted. One pit was only a few feet from their cabin door.

On the way to Indian Bar, Louise recorded: ‘The first thing that attracted my attention, as my new home came in view, was the blended blue, red and white of the American banner…suspended on the Fourth of July last, by a patriotic sailor, who climbed to the top of the [cedar] tree to which he attached it, cutting away the branches as he descended, until it stood among its brethren, a beautiful moss-wreathed Liberty pole, flinging to the face of Heaven the glad colors of the Free.’

She also glimpsed the ‘artificial elegance’ of a hotel:

Over the entrance…is painted in red capitals…the name of the great Humboldt spelt without the d. This is the only hotel in this vicinity, and as there is a really excellent bowling alley attached to it, and the bar-room has a floor on which the miners can dance, and, above all, a cook who can play the violin, it is very popular. But the clinking of glasses, and the swaggering air of some of the drinkers, reminds us that it is no place for a lady.

Louise Clapp enjoyed being a ‘lady,’ but she sometimes showed an unladylike willfulness, describing herself as the sort of ‘obstinate little personage, who has always been haunted with a passionate desire to do everything which people said she could not do.’ Taking up residence in a mining town was an adventure most ladies avoided. So was panning for gold. When Louise washed a single pan of dirt, she found $3.25 in gold placer. She also discovered it was hard, dirty work, and she did not repeat the experiment, not for years. But she did observe and write about the gold miners. The methods they used, as well as the claim system that governed them, is the subject of her 15th’severely utilitarian’ letter:

First, let me explain to you the ‘claiming’ system. As there are no State laws upon the subject, each mining community is permitted to make its own. Here, they have decided that no man may ‘claim’ an area of more than forty foot square. This he’stakes off’ and puts a notice upon it….If he does not choose to ‘work it’ immediately, he is obliged to renew the notice every ten days; for without this precaution, any other person has the right to ‘jump it’….There are many ways of evading the above law. For instance, an individual can ‘hold’ as many claims as he pleases if he keeps a man at work in each….The laborer…can jump the claim of the very man who employs him…[but] generally prefers to receive the six dollars per diem, of which he is sure…[rather than] running the risk of a claim not proving valuable….The labor of excavation is extremely difficult, on account of the immense rocks…[in] the soil. Of course, no man can work out a claim alone. For that reason…they congregate in companies of four or six, generally designating themselves by the name of the place from whence the majority of the members have emigrated; for example, the ‘Illinois,’ ‘Bunker Hill,’ ‘Bay State,’ etc., companies. In many places the surface soil, or ‘top dirt,’ ‘pays’ when worked in a ‘Long Tom.’

Some companies discarded top dirt and chose instead to hunt for gold in bedrock crevices. They dug ‘coyote holes’ into the sides of surrounding hills, creating tunnels ‘that sometimes extended hundreds of feet,’ in order to get at the bedrock. A large company of miners pooled resources and built a wing dam and flume that diverted water from the riverbed, where they expected to find ‘rich diggings’ in the bedrock. Of ‘the dreadful flume,’ as Louise calls it, she wrote: ‘The machinery keeps up the most dismal moaning and shrieking, painfully suggestive of a suffering child.’

In her third letter, Louise paints a picture of the setting in which the miners worked, describing Rich Bar as ‘a tiny valley, about eight-hundred yards in length and thirty in width…hemmed in by lofty hills, almost perpendicular, draperied to their very summits with beautiful fir trees; the blue bosomed ‘Plumas’ or Feather River…undulating along their base.’ Here, the mining town sprang up suddenly, ‘as if a fairy’s wand had been waved above the bar.’ There were ‘about forty tenements…round tents, square tents, plank hovels, log cabins, etc. — the residences varying in elegance and convenience from the palatial splendor of ‘The Empire’ down to a ‘local habitation,’ formed of pine boughs and covered with old calico shirts.’

The people populating Rich Bar and Indian Bar varied as much as their houses. Besides white Americans and Californios (the Spanish-speaking residents who Clapp called ‘Spaniards’), there were Swedes, Chilenos, Frenchmen, Mexicans, Indians, Hawaiians, Englishmen, Italians, Germans, American blacks and mulattos. The mulattos included Humbolt-owner Ned ‘Paganini’ (as Louise nicknamed him) and the legendary mountain man and trailblazer Jim Beckwourth. Louise describes Beckwourth in her eighth letter:

He is fifty years of age, perhaps, and speaks several languages to perfection. As he has been a wanderer for many years and for a long time was a principal chief of the Crow Indians, his adventures are extremely interesting. He chills the blood of the green young miners, who, unacquainted with the arts of war and subjugation, congregate around him [to hear] the cold-blooded manner in which he relates the Indian fights that he has been engaged in.

Unlike Jim Beckwourth, most men at Rich and Indian bars could not speak more than one language fluently, although some Americans seem to have tried. In her 14th letter, Louise wrote: ‘Nothing is more amusing than to observe the different styles in which…Americans talk at the unfortunate Spaniard.’ She adds that ‘mistakes made on the other side are often quite as amusing.’ Fayette’s colleague, Dr. Canas, told Louise of a Chileno who heard an American use the words’some bread’ when purchasing said item, and immediately afterward informed his friends that the English word for bread was the same as the Spanish word for hat — sombrero. Unfortunately, the humor in such misunderstandings was often overlooked. Alcohol, gambling losses, and envy of a neighbor’s mining success contributed to ill will. Yet things remained relatively peaceful through the winter of 1851-52.

In February 1852, provisions were becoming scarce. The rancheros who had been driving beef herds into the valley and the mule drivers who brought in onions, potatoes, butter and coffee could not get through the deep snow that covered the hills surrounding the bars. So the Clapps and their neighbors lived for three months on flour, dark ham, salted mackerel, and rusty pork. And when the snow finally melted, spring floods commenced, sweeping away flume machinery, log bridges, long toms, cradles, a newly finished sawmill and several men. By mid-May, the waters calmed down and fresh provisions arrived. So did a large number of mostly American newcomers. On May 25, Louise noted: ‘Hundreds of people have arrived upon our Bar within the last few days; drinking saloons are springing up in every direction; the fluming operations are rapidly progressing, and all looks favorably for a busy and prosperous summer.’ Some of these newcomers had fought in the Mexican-American War and tended to perceive Spanish-speaking people as enemies.

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