Page:California Historical Society Quarterly vol 22.djvu/78

 machinery. By 1857 he was fairly permanently settled at the place now known as Fourth Crossing^ where he had a 140 by 400 foot claim on the Ross and Bordwell lead.^^ The site of his cabin is still marked by a great walnut tree. Nearby a road leads off through the hills to L. Costa's store at Calaveritas where Bachman was accustomed to unburden himself of his small findings in a game of "pedro" with his friend, Captain Moses Thorpe. Bachman's lean figure, always accompanied by a dog (his dogs were invariably called "Heck") is still remembered by those who were children at the Fourth Crossing school in the early seventies. They called him "the goose man." He earned the name when he calmly broke a setting of goose eggs to prevent his neighbor from raising any more noisy geese, an action which started a long feud and a legal argument.

Entries in his diary during the sixties and seventies are skeletal. He men- tions various mining activities, none remarkable except for one pocket.^^ From 1872 until 1 878 he served three successive terms as justice of the peace. His salary for this service, dependent on the fees collected, was an inconsid- erable amount in so small a community, and Bachman finally discarded the office as financially unprofitable.

One morning in June 1 879 Bachman was missing from his usual haunts and was later discovered dead in his cabin. Explanations of his death ranged from murder, with robbery as the motive, to death from hemorrhage of the lungs The long history of tuberculosis in the Bachman family, from which disease nearly every known member had died,^^ and the improbability that Bachman ever had any considerable amount of money hidden in his cabin would indi- cate the less spectacular death. The Calaveras County Court records show that at the auction sale of his estate his quartz claim near Fourth Crossing brought only $200. His books sold for $50.

Although Bachman is not a significant figure his diary is valuable as a first-hand account of a way of living followed by thousands of men who came to California in the gold rush, men who spent their lives prospecting in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, who tried farming and returned to pros- pecting, who lived all their lives in anticipation of a rich strike, but who finally died in the little one-room cabins they had first built, without ever having found the riches that had lured them to California.

Audubon's California Company arrived in San Diego on November i, 1 849, completely exhausted and discouraged. Some of the men were so weak from the long overland journey that it was decided to send them on to San Fran- cisco by boat, while the rest of the men would take the valley route north. Both divisions planned to rendezvous near Stockton. Bachman, suffering greatly from fatigue, was given a berth on the ship but was prevented from occupying it because a certain Perry "jumped his claim." Omitting the entries from November 17 to 20, we begin the second part of Bachman's diary as the ship nears San Francisco Bay: