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Updated: May 22, 2025
Men sunburnt almost to blackness, in red shirts and canvas trousers, walked along the streets as if the town and all in it belonged to them in virtue of the store of gold-dust tied up in their waist-belts. In these, revolvers and bowie-knives were stuck conspicuously, and the newly-arrived emigrants looked with awe and envy at these men who had already reaped a harvest at the mines.
"Why, it looks like a New England town," said Clover, amazed; "I thought there were no trees here." "Yes, I know," said Dr. Hope smiling. "You came, like most Eastern people, prepared to find us sitting in the middle of a sandy waste, on cactus pincushions, picking our teeth with bowie-knives, and with no neighbors but Indians and grizzly bears.
An appetite for personalities developed, and these derogatory remarks ordinarily led to personal encounters. The streets became battle-grounds of bowie-knives and revolvers, as rivals hunted each other out. This picture may seem lurid and exaggerated, but the cold statistics of the time supply all the details. The politicians of the day were essentially fighting men.
We heard of a project devised by many masters to massacre all the blacks. One brought in three hogsheads marked sugar. A little slave girl, hearing her master say at dinner-table, that he had one filled with loaded pistols, another with dirks, and the third with bowie-knives, went and told her mother.
Then there was three minutes of smoke and fire and blood. Then a desperate hand-to-hand struggle. Our men had charged the breastwork, with their rifles in their hands and their bowie-knives between their teeth. When rifles and pistols had been discharged they flung them away, rushed on the foe, and cut their path through a wall of living Mexicans with their knives.
To behold five or six tables in the saloon of a steamer, with half a dozen men playing cards at each, with money, pistols, and bowie-knives spread in splendid confusion before them, is an ordinary thing on the Mississippi River. On the fourth morning, the Patriot landed at Grand Gulf, a beautiful town on the left bank of the Mississippi.
Most of the men worked singly with the pan, and used large bowie-knives with which they picked gold from the crevices of the rocks in the bed of the stream, or scratched the gravelly soil from the roots of the overhanging trees, which were usually rich in deposits.
Picture to yourself a large hall gleaming from top to bottom with firearms and weapons of all sorts: carbines, rifles, blunderbusses, bowie-knives, revolvers, daggers, flint-arrows in a word, examples of the deadly weapons of all races used by man in all parts of the world. Everything was neatly arranged, and labelled as if it were in a public museum. "Poisoned Arrows.
As they were creeping away in the darkness they saw Joaquin Murieta and Three-Fingered Jack rush into the camp waving their bowie-knives exultantly above their heads, and for a long time afterward they heard the band whooping like Apaches while they killed the wounded.
The Mexicans, scared and stupefied by this sudden attack, were running about in the wildest confusion, seeking their arms, and not knowing which way to turn. After firing our pistols, we threw them away as we had done our rifles, and, drawing our bowie-knives, fell, with a shout, upon the masses of the terrified foe.
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