gage
car, the latter loaded with bullion and valuable parcels, and in charge
of two "express agents." Each of these cars is forty-five feet long.
Then came two cars loaded with peaches and grapes; then two "silver
palace" cars, each sixty feet long; then a smoking car, at that time
occupied mainly by Chinamen; and then five ordinary passenger cars,
with platforms like all the others, making altogether a train about 700
feet in length.

The platforms of the four front cars were clustered over with Digger
Indians, with their squaws, children, and gear. They are perfect
savages, without any aptitude for even aboriginal civilization, and are
altogether the most degraded of the ill-fated tribes which are dying
out before the white races. They were all very diminutive, five feet
one inch being, I should think, about the average height, with flat
noses, wide mouths, and black hair, cut straight above the eyes and
hanging lank and long at the back and sides. The squaws wore their
hair thickly plastered with pitch, and a broad band of the same across
their noses and cheeks. They carried their infants on their backs,
strapped to boards. The clothing of both sexes was a ragged, dirty
combination of coarse woolen cloth and hide, the moccasins being
unornamented. They were all hideous and filthy, and swarming with
vermin. The men carried short bows and arrows, one of them, who
appeared to be the chief, having a lynx's skin for a quiver. A few had
fishing tackle, but the bystanders said that they lived almost entirely
upon grasshoppers. They were a most impressive incongruity in the
midst of the tokens of an omnipotent civilization.

The light of the sinking sun from that time glorified the Sierras, and
as the dew fell, aromatic odors made the still air sweet. On a single
track, sometimes carried on a narrow ledge excavated from the mountain
side by men lowered from the top in baskets, overhanging ravines from
2,000 to 3,000 feet deep, the monster train SNAKED its way upwards,
stopping sometimes in front of a few frame houses, at others where
nothing was to be seen but a log cabin with a few Chinamen hanging
about it, but where trails on the sides of the ravines pointed to a
gold country above and below. So sharp and frequent are the curves on
some parts of the ascent, that on looking out of the window one could
seldom see more than a part of the train at once. At Cape Horn, where
the track curves round the ledge of a