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You could not think of Jimville as anything more than a survival, like the herb-eating, bony-cased old tortoise that pokes cheerfully about those borders some thousands of years beyond his proper epoch. Not that Jimville is old, but it has an atmosphere favorable to the type of a half century back, if not "forty-niners," of that breed.
It was nearly half a century after the journey of Lewis and Clark that the Forty-Niners were crossing the Plains, whither, meanwhile, the Mormons had trekked in search of a country where they might live as they liked. Still the wealth of the Plains remained untouched. California was in the eyes of the world. The great cow-range was overleaped.
I must be true to my subject, the days of the Forty-niners. As it would be, at least, three months before the ship could come in with my houses, and my health had improved, I was anxious to get up to the mines.
I had a cottage built in the quiet and beautiful valley of Schoharie, where I have passed more than thirty years of happy married life. While not possessing the wealth of the successful pioneer, I have been content. "Interview with Doctor Knower, who has Charge of It Some Interesting Reminiscences of Forty-niners.
They gave up the attempt to explain the magic of San Francisco that city-personality which transcends the opal hills and rare amber sunlight, festivals, and the transplanted Italian hill-town of Telegraph Hill, liners sailing out for Japan, and memories of the Forty-niners.
Think of the thousands of people who endured hardships of which we can not even imagine just to follow westward that trail, blazed by such sturdy old men as Dad Wright and others like him. I've heard Dad tell many a time of that caravan of forty-niners, all their earthly possessions packed in one of those old prairie schooners, drawn by slow, patient oxen.
Every student of the history of the Pacific coast is indebted to the monumental work of Hubert H. Bancroft. Three titles concern the period of the Forty-niners: The History of California, 7 vols.
He had been a Mormon preacher, and was a captain in Colonel Stevenson's regiment. He was very enterprising and generous, a prominent figure with the "Forty-niners."
From Independence on the Missouri this famous pathway led to Fort Laramie, a distance of 672 miles; another 800-mile climb brought the traveler through South Pass; and so, by way of Fort Bridger, Salt Lake, and Sutter's Fort, to San Francisco. The route, well known by hundreds of Oregon pioneers in the early forties, became a thoroughfare in the eager days of the Forty-Niners. *
Back in the hills there men died by scores trying to carry a ship across the Isthmus, the Spanish viceroys passed with their rich trains, there on some unknown knoll Balboa reached four hundred years ago the climax of a career that began with stowing away in a cask and ended under the headsman's ax no end of it, down to the "Forty-niners" going hopefully out and returning filled with gold or disease, or leaving their bones here in the jungle before they really were "Forty-niners"; on down to the railroad days with men wading in swamps with survey kits, and frequently lying down to die.
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