l of
push and energy, and royally endowed with every attribute that goes to
make up a peerless and magnificent manhood--the very pick and choice of
the world's glorious ones. No women, no children, no gray and stooping
veterans,--none but erect, bright-eyed, quick-moving, strong-handed young
giants--the strangest population, the finest population, the most gallant
host that ever trooped down the startled solitudes of an unpeopled land.
And where are they now? Scattered to the ends of the earth--or
prematurely aged and decrepit--or shot or stabbed in street affrays--or
dead of disappointed hopes and broken hearts--all gone, or nearly all
--victims devoted upon the altar of the golden calf--the noblest holocaust
that ever wafted its sacrificial incense heavenward. It is pitiful to
think upon.

It was a splendid population--for all the slow, sleepy, sluggish-brained
sloths staid at home--you never find that sort of people among pioneers
--you cannot build pioneers out of that sort of material. It was that
population that gave to California a name for getting up astounding
enterprises and rushing them through with a magnificent dash and daring
and a recklessness of cost or consequences, which she bears unto this
day--and when she projects a new surprise, the grave world smiles as
usual, and says "Well, that is California all over."

But they were rough in those times! They fairly reveled in gold, whisky,
fights, and fandangoes, and were unspeakably happy. The honest miner
raked from a hundred to a thousand dollars out of his claim a day, and
what with the gambling dens and the other entertainments, he hadn't a
cent the next morning, if he had any sort of luck. They cooked their own
bacon and beans, sewed on their own buttons, washed their own shirts
--blue woollen ones; and if a man wanted a fight on his hands without any
annoying delay, all he had to do was to appear in public in a white shirt
or a stove-pipe hat, and he would be accommodated. For those people
hated aristocrats. They had a particular and malignant animosity toward
what they called a "biled shirt."

It was a wild, free, disorderly, grotesque society! Men--only swarming
hosts of stalwart men--nothing juvenile, nothing feminine, visible
anywhere!

In those days miners would flock in crowds to catch a glimpse of that
rare and blessed spectacle, a woman! Old inhabitants tell how, in a
certain camp, the news went abroad early in the morning that a