Melting snow from the surrounding mountains drains into Holcomb Valley, where underlying rocks and soils keep the water from percolating down and create a wet meadow that stays saturated through most of the spring before slowly evaporating in summer. Trees cannot grow in the saturated soil, but other plants thrive, and the Serrano Indians used the meadow grasses for basket weaving and hunted deer feeding on the shrubs. In May 1860, Billy Holcomb found placer gold in the dirt along Caribou Creek, which flows through the meadow, and miners quickly washed gold from sand and gravel with metal pans or large wooden sluice boxes. Most of this placer gold was removed from Holcomb Valley streams and creeks within two years of its discovery. By 1861, miners were turning to ledges above Holcomb Valley for veins of gold-bearing quartz, crushing rock with arrastres in small operations and stamp mills in larger ones. One of the most promising sites was the Mammoth Vein in the hills north of Holcomb Valley, where a 20 stamp mill was erected below the ledges and iron rails with ore cars carried ore from the mine adits to the mill. In 1860, wooden cabins and stores were built quickly to house swarms of prospectors and their families in the settlement of Belleville, but hard rock mining proved difficult, the deposits were disappointing, and after the terrible winter of 1861-1862 Belleville became a ghost town by 1864.