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Title: The Adventures of a Forty-niner

Author: Daniel Knower

Release Date: June 4, 2004 [eBook #12518]

Language: English

Character set encoding: US-ASCII

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THE ADVENTURES OF A FORTY-NINER

An Historic Description of California, with Events and Ideas
of San Francisco and Its People in Those Early Days

By

DANIEL KNOWER

1894

DEDICATED TO
Colonel Jonathan Stevenson,
Colonel John C. Freemont, and
Captain John A. Sutter,

THE THREE PRE-EMINENT PIONEERS OF CALIFORNIA.

[Illustration: DANIEL KNOWER.]

PREFACE

The discovery of gold in California, in 1848, with its other mineral
resources, including the Alamada quicksilver mine at San Jose, which is
an article of first necessity in working gold or silver ore; and the
great silver mines of Nevada, in 1860, the Comstock lode, in which, in
ten years, from five to eight hundred millions of gold and silver were
taken out, a larger amount than was ever taken from one locality before,
the Alamada quicksilver mine being the second most productive of any in
the world, the one in Spain being the largest, said to be owned by the
Rothschilds. Its effect upon the general prosperity and development of
our country has been immense, almost incalculable. Before these
discoveries the amount of gold in the United States was estimated at
about seventy millions, now it is conceded to be seven hundred millions.
The Northern Pacific coast was then almost unpopulated. California a
territory three times as large as New York and Oregon and the State of
Washington, all now being cultivated and containing large and populous
cities, and railroads connecting them with the