plete one. She
made one now. The artificiality of the towns, with their false
standards and atmosphere of pretence, had begun to pall. She wanted to
try a fresh _milieu_. Everybody was talking just then of Grass Valley,
a newly opened-up district, set amid a background of the rugged
Sierras, where gangs of miners were delving for gold in the bowels of
Mother Earth, and, if half the accounts were true, amassing fortunes.
Why not go there and see for herself? It would at least be a novel
experience.

No sooner said than done. Hiring a mule team and wagon, and
accompanied by Patrick Hull, she started off on a preliminary tour of
inspection of the district.

Travelling was unhurried in those leisurely days. There were several
stoppages; and the roads were rough, and long detours had to be made
to avoid yawning canyons. "At the end of two weeks from the time they
left Sacramento behind them, Pat Hull and his charming bride wheeled
across the mountains into Grass Valley."

"There were about 1600 people in the township of Marysville at this
period," says a chronicler, "and 1400 of them were of the masculine
sex. The prospect of sudden riches was the attraction that drew them.
England and the Continent were represented by some of the first
families. A dozen were graduates of Oxford and Cambridge; there were
two young relatives of Victor Hugo; there were a number of scions of
the impoverished nobility of Bohemia; and several hundred Americans.
Among the latter was William Morris Stewart, a Marysville lawyer, who
was afterwards to become a senator and attorney-general."

Grass Valley at this period (the autumn of 1853) was little more than
a wilderness. The nearest town of any size was Nevada City, fringed by
the shadows of the lofty Sierras. Between the gulches had sprung up as
if by magic a forest of tented camps and tin-roofed shanties, with
gambling-booths and liquor saloons by the hundred, in which bearded
men dug hard by day, and played faro and monte and drank deep by
night. Fortunes were made--and spent--and nuggets were common
currency. The cost of living was very high. But it cost still more to
be ill, since a grain of gold was the accepted tariff for a grain of
quinine.

The whole district was a melting-pot. Attracted by the prospect of the
precious metal that was to be wrung from it, there had drifted into
the Valley a flotsam and jetsam, representatives of all nations and of
all callings. As was natural, Ameri