A Gold Miner Writes About His Life

"Becoming California, a series that brings the California Gold Rush
alive with the people who lived it."

by Don Baumgart

"For nearly sixty years a piece of California's history has been in my family's possession. My father found a black purse in a mineshaft, that contained the last personal effects of an old gold prospector, Peter Voiss." With those words Brookelea Heintz Lutton begins her introduction to "Old Man of the Mountains", Peter Voiss' story of his part of the Gold Rush. The purse lay in a drawer gathering dust. Brookelea inherited the purse and the stories inside it that Peter Voiss had written about living in the foothills with his burros. He wrote of traveling the mountains and gulches, looking for gold. "Inside a deep crevice of a pocket of the purse was a 2" pencil stub," Lutton writes. "It had been tucked away and hidden inside the purse for more than 70 years." 

Peter Voiss arrived in America in 1893 sailing steerage from Antwerp, Belgium. "California's deepest mines were my home," Voiss wrote, "the Empire, the North Star and many others. I hated working below the earth, working like a mole in constant darkness. I couldn't breathe, I couldn't see my sky. But I learned. And today, as I look back, I know that no fancy engineer, with a string of initials after his name, can beat me at mining."

Pete also wrote poems about his above ground mining. "You see me trudging to some secret holes, that yawn from out a rocky ledge I know. Close followed by my burros - faithful souls. Pick and pan clanking as we go." "I washed that morning early and when the burros were around, and I did not watch out every time, they drink the soapwater and I had to go and get new water. They had a creek full of water but they preferred soapsuds," Pete complained. Hanging his wash on a line, he went to his diggins. "I came back (and) they had all my underwear chewed to pieces."

The thirties brought the Great Depression. As banks failed Pete Voiss buried his gold back in the ground, which he considered the safest bank in the world. "It will never fail," he wrote. In the 1920s gold harvested by Voiss brought him just over $20 an ounce. By the mid-1930s, with Pete pushing 70, the price was at nearly $35. In February of 1931 he visited the Ott Assay office in Nevada City where his nuggets were weighed and he was paid $20 an ounce.

By 1934 he had found a way to supplement his meager income from gold prospecting. People wanted to take pictures of him and his burros - for 25 cents. Lutton formed a company and published the words from that long-lost black purse. The book, “Old Man of the Mountains” can be ordered from golddustpublishing.com.

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Copyright Don Baumgart, 2010