ace for a dozen fertile and beautiful valleys, she was then
merely an outfitting point for parties of travelers, prospectors,
cattlemen and the like, and was also a station and terminus for
various stage lines.

[Illustration: OLD BARRACKS (1912) ON NORTH SIDE OF ALAMEDA STREET, NEAR
MAIN, WHERE Co. C, 1st U. S. CAVALRY, CAMPED IN 1866 ON ITS ARRIVAL IN
TUCSON]

Through San Jose, too, came those of the gold-seekers, bound for the
high Sierras on the border of the desert, who had not taken the
Sacramento River route and had decided to brave instead the dangers of
the trail through the fertile San Joaquin, up to the Feather River and
thus into the diggings about Virginia City. Gold had been found by that
time in Nevada and hundreds of intrepid men were facing the awful Mojave
and Nevada deserts, blazing hot in day-time and icy cold at night, to
seek the new Eldorados. Since this is a book about pioneers, and since I
am one of them, it is fitting to stay awhile and consider what
civilization owes to these daring souls who formed the vanguard of her
army. Cecil Rhodes opened an Empire by mobilizing a black race; Jim Hill
opened another when he struck westward with steel rails. But the
pioneers of the early gold rushes created an empire of immense riches
with no other aid than their own gnarled hands and sturdy hearts. They
opened up a country as vast as it was rich, and wrested from the very
bosom of Mother Earth treasures that had been in her jealous keeping for
ages before the era of Man. They braved sudden death, death from thirst
and starvation, death from prowling savages, death from the wild
creatures,--all that the works of man might flourish where they had not
feared to tread. It is the irony of fate that these old pioneers, many
of whom hated civilization and were fleeing from her guiles, should have
been the advance-guard of the very Power they sought to avoid.

The vast empire of Western America is strewn with the bones of these
men. Some of them lie in kindly resting places, the grass over their
graves kept green by loving friends; some lie uncared for in potters'
fields or in the cemeteries of homes for the aged, and some--a vast
horde--still lie bleached and grim, the hot sand drifted over them by
the desert winds.

But, wherever they lie, all honor to the pioneer! There should be a day
set apart on which every American should revere the memory of those men
of long ago who hewed the way for the soft paths