o keep up steam for a few days longer. He expressed his
conviction that every point, headland, island and wooded tract on the
coast from the Cape to San Francisco had not only been seen by him, but
had resounded with the sturdy blows of his axe during the apparently
interminable voyage. His experience, with the exception of the axe
exercise, was that of thousands.

The extent to which the gold fever had impelled people on shipboard
may be judged by the facts that from the first of January, 1849, five
hundred and nine vessels arrived in the harbor of San Francisco; and the
number of passengers in the same space of time was eighteen thousand,
nine hundred and seventy-two. Previous to this time, one or two ships
in the course of a year found their way through the Golden Gate and
into the beautiful harbor of San Francisco in quest of hides, horns and
tallow, and gave languid employment to two or three Americans settled
on the sand hills, and engaged in collecting these articles of trade and
commerce. In the closing days of 1849, there were ninety-four thousand,
three hundred and forty-four tons of shipping in the harbor. The stream
of immigration moved over the Plains, likewise; and through privation,
fatigue, sickness, and the strife of the elements, passed slowly and
painfully on to the goal of their hopes.

Thus pouring into California in every direction and by every route,
this strange and heterogeneous mass of men, the representatives of every
occupation, honest and dishonest, creditable and disgraceful; of every
people under the sun, scattered through the gulches and ravines in the
mountains, or grouped themselves at certain points in cities, towns and
villages of canons or adobe. Perhaps never in the world's history did
cities spring into existence so instantaneously, and certainly never was
their population so strangely diverse in language, habits and customs.
Of course gamblers of every kind and color; criminals of every shade and
degree of atrocity; knaves of every grade of skill in the arts of fraud
and deceit abounded in every society and place. In these early times
gold was abundant, and any kind of honest labor was most richly and
extravagantly rewarded. The honest, industrious and able men of every
community, therefore, applied themselves strictly to business and would
not be diverted from it by any considerations of duty or of patriotism.
Studiously abstaining from politics; positively refusing to accept
of