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spoke with George Stickle, the postmaster at Angels Camp, who told him that the Calaveras skull had actually been brought to him by Mr. J. L. Boone, from an Indian burial place in Salt Spring Valley, 12 miles from Angels Camp. The likelihood of such a thing happening cannot be easily dismissed. As Holmes (1899, p. 463) noted: “There were ancient skulls in plenty in this region in early times, and the valley and the county received their name Calaveras—which in Spanish signifies skulls—from this circumstance. The Indians of the high sierra do not bury their dead, but cast them into pits, caverns, holes in the rock, and deep gorges. . . . Skulls were plentiful at Angels in those days.”

After remaining in his store for a few weeks, said Stickle, the skull fell into the hands of Scribner and his fun-loving friends, who were always pulling practical jokes on each other (Holmes 1899, p. 463). Stickle also testified that the skull taken from Mattison’s mine was whole and white in color, and did not at all resemble the skull sent by Dr. Jones to Whitney. Yet Dr. Hudson reported that when Mrs. Mattison was shown a photograph of the Calaveras skull she identified it as the same one she had kept in her home. These stories are rather sketchy and incomplete, but at any rate there appears to be some doubt about the real age of the skull examined by Whitney.

After visiting Calaveras county, Holmes (1899, p. 469) examined the actual Calaveras skull at the Peabody Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and concluded that “the skull was never carried and broken in a Tertiary torrent, that it never came from the old gravels in the Mattison mine, and that it does not in any way represent a Tertiary race of men.” Some testimony supporting this conclusion comes from persons who examined the matrix of pebbles and earth in which the Calaveras skull had been discovered. Dr. F. W. Putnam of Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Natural History testified: “Had it been taken from the shaft there probably would have been some trace of gravel, such as is found in the beds through which the shaft was sunk, mixed with the materials taken from the skull by Professors Whitney and Wyman, but no such gravel has been found in the several examinations which have been made of the matrix” (Sinclair 1908, p. 129). Professor William J. Sinclair of the University of California also personally examined the matrix and concluded that it “is not strictly a gravel” and that “the material is dissimilar in every respect to either of the gravels exposed on Bald Hill. In every respect it is comparable to a cave breccia” (1908, p. 126). A breccia is a deposit of various kinds of stone fragments mixed in a matrix of sand or clay. Sinclair believed that tiny fragments of bone, belonging to humans and small mammals, found adhering to the skull, along with a decorative bead found inside it, all reported by Whitney, were evidence of a recent cave origin.

On the other hand, Holmes (1899, p. 467) reported: “Dr. D. H. Dall states that while in San Francisco in 1866, he compared the material attached to the skull with portions of the gravel from the mine and that they were alike in all essentials.” And W. O. Ayres (1882, p. 853), writing in the American Naturalist, stated: “I saw it and examined it carefully at the time when it first reached Professor Whitney’s hands. It was not only incrusted with sand and gravel, but its cavities were crowded with the same material; and that material was of a peculiar sort, a sort which I had occasion to know thoroughly. It was the common

‘cement’ or ‘dirt’ of the miners; that known in books as the auriferous gravel.” Ayres, a competent observer, intimately familiar with the region, should have been able to distinguish a recent cave breccia from Pliocene or Eocene auriferous gravels.

But even if it were true that some auriferous gravel was adhering to the skull, that would not have satisfied Holmes (1899, p. 467), who stated that “the peculiar agglomeration of earth, pebbles, and bones is readily explained by referring to the conditions existing