tt's_, in Philadelphia, are no
unworthy competitors with these for public favor.

During the forties began a new era of national expansion, somewhat
resembling that described in a former chapter, and, like that, bearing
fruit eventually in literature. The cession of Florida to the United
States in 1845, and the annexation of Texas in the same year, were
followed by the purchase of California in 1847, and its admission as a
State in 1850. In 1849 came the great rush to the California gold
fields. San Francisco, at first a mere collection of tents and board
shanties, with a few adobe huts, grew with incredible rapidity into a
great city--the wicked and wonderful city apostrophized by Bret Harte
in his poem, _San Francisco_:

"Serene, indifferent of fate,
Thou sittest at the Western Gate;
Upon thy heights so lately won
Still slant the banners of the sun. . . .
I know thy cunning and thy greed,
Thy hard, high lust and willful deed."

The adventurers of all lands and races who flocked to the Pacific
coast, found there a motley state of society between civilization and
savagery. There were the relics of the old Mexican occupation, the
Spanish missions, with their Christianized Indians; the wild tribes of
the plains--Apaches, Utes, and Navajoes; the Chinese coolies and
washermen, all elements strange to the Atlantic sea-board and the
States of the interior. The gold-hunters crossed, in stages or
caravans, enormous prairies, alkaline deserts dotted with sage-brush
and seamed by deep canons, and passes through gigantic mountain ranges.
On the coast itself nature was unfamiliar: the climate was subtropical;
fruits and vegetables grew to a mammoth size, corresponding to the
enormous redwoods in the Mariposa groves and the prodigious scale of
the scenery in the valley of the Yosemite and the snow-capped peaks of
the sierras. At first there were few women, and the men led a wild,
lawless existence in the mining camps. Hard upon the heels of the
prospector followed the dram-shop, the gambling-hell, and the
dance-hall. Every man carried his "Colt," and looked out for his own
life and his "claim." Crime went unpunished or was taken in hand, when
it got too rampant, by vigilance committees. In the diggings shaggy
frontiersmen and "pikes" from Missouri mingled with the scum of eastern
cities and with broken-down business men and young college graduates
seeking their fortune. Surveyors and geologists came of ne