e and vermilion, dressed in red blankets, and
bearing a hatchet in their hands, their only visible weapon. The women
were dressed in tawdry colors,--striped government blankets and red
flannel leggins, with a profusion of colored beads about their necks,
and cheap jewelry on fingers and wrists; each one with an infant
strapped in a flat basket to her back. They did not beg ostensibly, but
were ready to receive trinkets, tobacco, pennies, or food. The women
were very uncleanly in their appearance, their coarse long hair entirely
uncared for, but they were good-natured and smiling, while the men wore
a morose and frowning expression upon their countenances. War, whiskey,
and exposure are gradually but surely blotting out the aborigines.

We were thus, without any special haste, but twelve days in crossing the
American continent, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, on about the
fortieth parallel of latitude, the trip having afforded us much quiet
enjoyment and a great variety of bold and beautiful scenery, too near
home and too familiar to our readers to dilate upon in these pages.

San Francisco, with its population of three hundred thousand, is a city
of great commercial wealth, much architectural pretension, and
progressive ideas, affording the traveler the best and cheapest hotel
accommodations in the world. As is well known, it owes its early impetus
to the discovery of gold in 1848, but the product of the precious metal
has long since been exceeded more than tenfold in intrinsic value by the
agricultural development of the great Pacific region, which finds its
shipping point through the Golden Gate. Though California still produces
and sends out into the world at large an average of two millions of gold
each month, still the shining ore is but a secondary consideration in
her productiveness, and is also surpassed by her export of wine and
fruit. Men who came here with the gold fever, between twenty and thirty
years ago, gradually recovered from their unwholesome Aladdin-like
dreams, and settled down to reap from agriculture and legitimate
business surer and more permanent fortunes. The population which sought
its gains in wild and lawless adventure, characterized by all the
objectionable features of rude pioneer life, has gradually given place
to one of a more stable nature, governed by a respect for the laws and
the wise conventionalities of society. There lies a brilliant future
before this section of the country, wh