$165.00
The Untold Story of Nevada City’s Gold Mining Ditches,
the Men Who Built Them, and Their Thirst for Water and Power
by Dom Lindars
Hardcover, 884 pages
Nevada City History, April 7, 2023
For its first 100 years, everything in Nevada City revolved around gold. But this is not another book about finding gold. To get gold, you needed water — to pan for it, to blast away a hillside with a water cannon, or to turn the water wheel for your quartz-ore stamp mill.
This book instead How did they get the water? It reveals the engineering marvels that brought water to Nevada City’s dry hills from tens of miles away. But what if all the water in every ravine, creek and valley around Nevada City was controlled by just three men? Well, for three decades, every miner, farmer or business had to buy water from the South Yuba Canal Company. What would happen if you got into an argument with them? Or couldn’t afford to pay their water bill? Or even dared to compete with them?
The book traces the ingenuity and hard work of the town’s miners and ditch builders, highlighting the origins of various local neighborhoods, including Nevada City, Gold Flat, Willow Valley, Alpha, Omega, Blue Tent, Cement Hill, Scotts Flat, Hirschman’s Pond, Sugar Loaf Mountain, Manzanita Diggings and many others. What began as a search to uncover a sprawling network of old ditches, turned into a collection of never-before-told stories of the gold miners, the ruthless and greedy ditch company, and the rivals that it crushed. The domineering ditch company later enabled the next generation of monopoly to provide electrical power. This, in turn, led to the now more forward-looking stewardship of the Nevada Irrigation District.
The unique format of this book blends beautiful archival images with more than 35 in-depth biographies of key figures in Nevada City. This 884 page hardcover book includes over 600 full-color illustrations, including 200 historic photographs and 75 hand-crafted maps based on modern lidar technology that reveal the locations of the old mining ditches, flumes, mines and tunnels. Find out more and go explore the maps online now at nevadacityhistory.com.
About the Author
Dom Lindars is a historian and genealogist with a passion for storytelling and discovering unsung heroes. He grew up in England and moved to California in 1995, where he worked in software product development in the Bay Area. After leading several unspectacular startups, Dom ran teams designing the next generation of cloud software until retiring in 2019. A resident of Nevada City since 2013, he enjoys researching and writing about the town’s gold mining history.