Ralph Mullican: Collector of local history

It's a very hot day on a steep dusty grade. But a boulder the size of a small pickup has caught his customer's eye, so Ralph Mullican — excavator, demolition artist, security systems engineer and treasure hunter — leaves his air conditioned vehicle to hear the man out.

The customer wants just the right stone to fashion into a fireplace for a wealthy client. After an hour on Mullican's property alongside the lower Yuba River, he thinks he may have found it. Dimensions and a plan of action are put forward, and Mullican, 67, is happy to oblige.

"It costs $20,000," he tells the rock shopper. "You buy it, and I'll do anything you want with it."

As a businessman, Mullican is savvy and enterprising.

He holds a patent for the steel-blue stone he calls Yuba Blue, and the product, he says, is now North America's most expensive natural landscaping material. The top grade he sells goes for $1,200 per ton.

But lucrative deals don't bring a bounce to his step or flash to his eyes.

Mullican's passion lies in mysteries that lurk between rocks, below dust and soil, and beneath gravel at the river's edge.

A metal detector and a pair of experienced eyes begins to unlock those mysteries, Mullican has found. The area's Gold Rush past is a treasure trove to him, and any bit of paraphernalia he manages to locate on his 63 acres by the river or his two acres outside Smartville brings a lilt to his voice.

Something so simple as a battered metal bucket at rest outside Mullican's nondescript house becomes a launching-off point for lessons on the process of alchemy. The bucket had been used to smelt gold, possibly a century ago or earlier.

Next, flows a geological survey of the past 30-million years, during which the Yuba River matured and changed, and from which the gold in the bucket had likely been picked or dredged.

"I love hunting artifacts," Mullican says of the many metal-detecting expeditions he has made on his own property, and the learning expeditions that often follow. "You're reading the layers, and you're thinking about those old days. You're trying to put the stories all together."

Local treasure

He once found a King Ferdinand VII coin, he says. Such foreign currency was not unusual for prospectors to carry. They were risk takers and had traveled long distances to reach the Sierra foothills and stake their claim, he explains.

Mullican lifts a small item from his window sill and places it tenderly into the palm of his other hand.

"It's the hammer of an old gun," he says, holding it out with boyish pride. "To me, it's a priceless artifact. It's like a link to the old days, so I want to have it preserved.

His collections include coins from around the world, and from nearly every decade of the 19th century. He has buttons from old military jackets. They had been brought by prospectors from the East Coast, he says, for the express purpose of trading with American Indians.

Mullican shows off a patina-covered powder flask made of copper, detailed with an ornate raised design.

"I found this more than a foot deep," he says. "They really had fancy stuff at one time."

If Mullican were to preserve everything he has collected and saved in this house over the past 50 years, he might need a professional crew.

His American Indian finds alone would require a university department. He is careful to tread lightly on territory he believes may have been sacred ground to the native Maidu. If he uncovers something he believes should not have been disturbed, he returns it.

"But I record everything," he says of what looks to be a meticulous process. "I try to put it all together."

If he lacks the scholarly expertise to explain what he has found, or where, he consults books, the Internet, researchers and public records.

Occasionally, he covets objects found by other local treasure hunters. He'll buy, bargain or trade, if he wants something badly enough.

He won't divulge what he paid for a wagon sitting in the middle of what would be — if it were not covered in parts of Mullican's unwieldy construction projects — his front yard.

The wagon, at one time, would have hauled ore and other heavy equipment and materials to and from mining sites. Worn stenciled paint still identifies the vehicle's owner: YCGF. Yuba Consolidated Gold Fields.

"I didn't want this to go out of the area," Mullican says of his decision to purchase the wagon and park it in his yard.

Reassembling history

He felt the same way a decade or so ago when he paid a Marysville man $5,000 for an old stamp mill, he says.

The mill, which once crushed ore from the riverbeds, lies in pieces at the Yuba City Corporate Yard, waiting to become a Marysville landmark, Mullican says.

A site was chosen for it at D and Third streets, according to Marysville High School teacher Steve White, who has tried in vain to generate enough interest in the anachronistic machine to have it reassembled and displayed.

"Everyone is interested, but nobody does anything about it," says White.

Mullican would like to see his purchase put to good use, and that means displaying it for modern residents and visitors to Marysville. He has made presentations to various community groups and to the Marysville Business Improvement District to try and generate interest in the project, he said. But he has stopped short of moving it himself.

He is very busy, he says.

Third and D is a corner Mullican knows well. It had once been the site of Scott's Ideal Bakery and the Chiseler's Inn.

Mullican and his demotion crew had been hired to take down the historic buildings, which have never been replaced. Mullican took detailed photographs of the frozen timescapes left inside.

An old intact wine bottle remained stuck between columns of bricks, unharmed by the wrecking ball, and Mullican documented with his camera 100-year-old wallpaper, and graffiti scrawled beneath it.

Mullican collects paper artifacts too. He bought the original claim notices from more than half a dozen gold mining operations of the 1850s and 1860s.

He's found hundreds of items on his own property that he treasures.

"I'm interested in so many things," he says, his clear blue eyes sparkling. "I can't keep up with all of them."