The history of Douglas Flat is typical of many other towns in the California foothills, with its booms and busts, colorful characters, and reliance first on mining and then on agriculture (Figure GLO). The prosperity of the community was first based on the rich placer gold found in Coyote Creek and its tributaries Wild Goose Gulch, Missouri Gulch, and Pennsylvania Gulch.. First the “easy” gold was found in the streambeds and mined with pans, rockers, and long toms. The miners soon traced the gold’s source to the ancient Tertiary Central Hill Channel beneath the Table Mountains. Shafts were sunk (Figure mining), drifts and tunnels were run under the tables and, when water became plentiful, the hillsides were scoured with hydraulic monitors.
The town, however, developed slowly. The mines were deep, rich, and extensive, with most of the diggings on the south side of Coyote Creek. In 1857, although the camp was described as having “a permanence”—primarily because of its agricultural facilities and conveniences for irrigation—it was also characterized as dull, with few people in town, and having no post office or express office. Most of the families were Welsh or Italian, with 28 children in school (San Andreas Independent). The post office was at Murphys, which also served many of the other nearby placer-mining communities (Heckendorn & Wilson 1856:105).
In the later nineteenth century, several mining companies continued to work their claims on Coyote Creek, including some companies of Chinese. The most extensive mining in Douglas Flat, however, shifted to the Ohio and Buckminster hydraulic claims below Table Mountain northwest of the town. Hydraulicking ceased about 1900 when the tailings pond south of the highway was filled, although a long, north-trending tunnel was prospected intermittently from the 1930s to the early 1950s (Clark and Lydon 1962:201). In the 1950s, a dredge on pontoons worked up Coyote Creek from Vallecito through Douglas Flat (John Davies 2007), erasing many of the features of the early-day placer mines along the creek.
Most of the long-term settlers in the community came from Wales and Italy. The Welsh included the Roberts, Evans, Williams, Prothero, Thomas, and other families, with the Italians being represented by the Malatestas, Arratas, Malespinas, Copellos, Sanguinettis, Valentes, Lavagninos, Gagliardos, Grenittas, Bertattas, and others. Most of the men mined and farmed, especially the Italians.
It was not long before Douglas Camp was transformed into a community. By 1854 the miners had built a small building to serve as a church and town hall, and it soon served as a school as well, as more and more families settled in the area. The following year three merchants, a hotel keeper, a printer, a “ranchero”, and seven miners were listed as residing in Douglas Flat (Heckendorn & Wilson 1856:98) (Figure Store).
As the mines waxed and waned, it was the ranchers and farmers who supported the town. In the late 1850s the County Assessor noted more than 20 ranches on the flat and along Coyote Creek, ranging in size from 15 to 360 acres. By the 1880s, most of the smaller ventures had been absorbed into larger ranches by settlers who remained in the area for many years, some of whose descendents still farm the land (Calaveras County Assessment Rolls, various). The farm of Ansil Davis was described as a successful place of 40 acres, with 3,000 trees of all varieties of fruit. Included were apples, pears, peaches, and plums, as well as 3,000 grapevines of select varieties (Elliott 1885:92) (Figure DavisRanch).
By this time the Malespina, Bertatta, Raffetto, Copello, Sanguinetti, and other Italian families had established cattle operations on their ranches, practicing transhumance (Figure JoeBertatta).
Water has always been and continues to be of major importance in the development of Calaveras County. Water was essential to the recovery of gold, and since foothill rivers are seasonal and unpredictable, it wasn’t long before entrepreneurs constructed dams to store water, and ditches and flumes to transport it between drainages. Often transitory in nature, many of these ditch systems were abandoned as the placers played out, while others were improved and extended for hydraulic and hard-rock mining. Several small ditches in the project area served first the mining and later the agricultural needs of the community.
The county’s largest and most important ditch systems—the Union Water Company, now the Angels-Utica system, and the Mokelumne Hill Canal and Mining Company, now operated by the Calaveras County Water District, continue to serve communities on either side of the county. After the demise of mining, these ditches were converted to agricultural and domestic uses, and later to the production of hydroelectric power.
North of Coyote Creek, a small abandoned ditch (OHP Number P-05-3304) is identified as being part of the early Angels-Utica system. It was surveyed and built by the Calaveras County Water Company (CCWC) incorporated on November 1, 1856, with its principal place of business at Vallecito. The system took water from the North Fork Stanislaus River and, by a series of ditches, flumes, and creekbeds, delivered it to Coyote Creek, Vallecito, and Carson Hill. When the system was acquired by the Utica Gold Mining Company in the 1880s, major expansion of, and improvements to, the flumes, ditches, and reservoirs were made (Davis-King et al. 1993:5-17). After the Utica Mine was shut down in 1915, the Company shifted its focus from supplying water for mining to providing it for agricultural and residential uses. In 1946, Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E) purchased the entire Angels-Utica system, and in the 1920s the route of the old CCWC system through the project area was finally abandoned (PG&E 1947, in Davis-King et al. 1993:5-15, 5-17).