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Updated: May 18, 2025
"I have not-a the pleasure of knowing-a the Miss Minnie, but the jewelry, when she arrives, to the throat-a of Miss Yerba, she has not lost the value the beauty the charm." "No," said Woods, cheerily. "The fact is, Baker, you were too slow. Miss Yerba's folks gobbled up the necklace while you were thinking. You were a new-comer. Old 'forty-niners' did not hesitate over a thing they wanted."
The frontier of settlement advanced from the western edge of Missouri into mid-Kansas, and almost met the growing population of the Far West, whose economic possibilities had already attracted attention. The discovery of gold-dust in a mill-race in California had drawn the "Forty-niners" to ... lands of gold That lay toward the sun.
The idea bein' don't you see? that blamed old 'forty-niners like us, or ordinary greenhorns, ain't allowed to see the difficulties they've got to go through before reaching a strike. Mighty cute, ain't it?
But, before gold in California was dreamed of, there had come back to the States reports of lands rich in resources other than gold, lying in the far Northwest, beyond the great mountain ranges and, before the Forty-Niners were heard of, farmers, homebuilders, emigrants, men with their families, men with their household goods, were steadily passing out for the far-off and unknown country of Oregon.
These men were never better described in a line than when, years ago, at a banquet of California Forty-niners, Joaquin Miller, the poet of the Sierras, speaking of the splendid types the men of forty-nine represented, said: "The cowards never started, and all the weak died on the road!"
"Here, you white boy," spoke Charley's neighbor, at the rail. "Can't you get in there and do something for your country? Can you swim?" He was a pleasant looking man, with iron-gray hair and beard, and wore white linen. He might have been a banker. The California held all kinds of Forty-niners. "Yes, sir; some. I can swim in the Mississippi," answered Charley. "But I can't swim like that."
The early pioneers had some conflict with the Indians in the interior of the country. Five Oregon men were massacred by them when engaged in digging gold, but a terrible retribution was visited upon those Indians concerned in it by the enraged Forty-niners. The Indians, at first, had nothing but bows and arrows, and, of course, could not compete with rifles.
Such was life in California in the days of the Forty-niners. Having some leisure I thought I would take a trip up the mining regions, and make a visit to my old friends there. More than a year had passed, and greater changes had taken place than would have occurred in any other country in many years.
Something of the mining-camp spirit still hung over California, which had been settled by adventurers, forty-niners, gold seekers, men who had left the East to "make a new start" where there was pay dirt. The State had a wild zest for life which was untrammeled by Puritanism. San Francisco had its Barbary Coast and in every restaurant its private dining rooms for women.
Early in the summer her father had been invited to conduct a reunion of old frontiersmen, up in Wyoming, near Laramie, and he took Thea along with him to play the organ and sing patriotic songs. There they stayed at the house of an old ranchman who told them about a ridge up in the hills called Laramie Plain, where the wagon-trails of the Forty-niners and the Mormons were still visible.
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