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Tents..... When I first got into mining camp history, if I ran across a reference to a town that no longer existed, I'd try to find its location using old maps and descriptions in stories, articles and books of the day. I'd spend days, weeks and months trying to find out as much as I could about it.
I'd arrive at the site and start poking around, finding the can and garbage dumps, a few square nails and the occasional trace of a wooden foundation, but no deteriorating log or board walls or anything like that, leading me to believe that the size of the camp was seriously exaggerated or that I wasn't in the right location at all, but in an outlying area.
I mean, why would I find a few wooden foundations or floors, but no walls? I didn't read anything about a town fire and even if there was, why didn't the wooden flooring burn too? And why weren't there as many nails laying around as you'd expect?
Was I even in the right spot? Like I said, I was working from period maps for the most part and those damned things are notoriously inaccurate, especially after the companies of miners a decade later would relocate entire stretches of rivers so they could clean the riverbeds out, and over the next 100+ years those original riverbeds would get overgrown with scrub trees, manzanita and buckbrush. A man could be off as much as a couple hundred yards using those maps and never realize it.
More than once I've found myself on the bank of a river looking for the townsite indicated on the maps, but gee whiz, the map shows a bend in the river where I think I'm standing and there ain't no bend at all. This sucker runs straight and true. Well, that's because the original riverbed was 150 yards thataway before that company of miners relocated it.
After a while I figured out how to tell if a river's been rerouted - if the rocks on the bed are worn smooth and rounded by eons of water wear, it's in the original bed. Sharp and jagged rocks tells me it's been rerouted.
Then one day on my wanderings, I ran across a historical marker on the lower part of the Mother Lode at the edge of some rangeland that said this is the site of such and such mining camp, population 2,000, but nothing remains of the town today because it was comprised mainly of tents.
It was one of those 'Oh, okay' moments. That explains why I was finding some flooring and wooden foundations, but no walls at the other sites. No wood or brick buildings means no walls, but their tents had wooden flooring in them to keep the miners out of the mud during the rainy winters.
Yeah, I know. Give me a break here, guys. This was something that I started doing on my own, working out of books and drawing my own conclusions because I had no mentor or friend to point the obvious out to me.
So why were there so many tent cities, particularly in placer mining areas? Because placer miners were transient as hell. Some of those 'booming' mining camps didn't last 6 months. As soon as they cleaned out their claims or heard rumors of a richer strike somewhere, they'd pack their shit up and move out smartly for better diggin's.
If you'll look at the towns and camps in the Mother Lode that survived after the gravels played out in the 1860s, you'll see that while there was some initial and sometimes sustained placer mining in the area, almost every damned one of them had a hard rock mine or two close by that extracted gold or gold ore from the depths of the earth. The time alone that was invested in these ventures almost guaranteed permanent structures and houses. Hell, a lot of those bigger mines operated until the 1930s and 40s, only shutting down because the cost of production and manpower kept going up but the price of gold stayed capped by the government at 35 bucks an ounce, effectively making hard rock mining on a large scale a losing proposition.
