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"If it is better than 'The Heart of a Schoolgirl', or 'The Forty-Niners', or 'The Boys of the Draft', then it must be some scenario, Miss Ruth. The last two are still going strong, you know. And I have hopes of the 'Seaside Idyl' catching the public fancy just when we are all getting rather weary of war dramas. "If you can only rewrite this new story " "But Mr. Hammond!
In the case of California, if the "forty-niners" could have waited about a thousand years they would have found the precious swamp lands all properly filled in for them and ready for use; for the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers long since have been working at the task of filling up the big hollow between the mountain ranges.
If the head bad man not the secondary bad man who stayed bad all through, or the tertiary bad man who was fatally extinguished with gun-fire in Reel Two, but the chief, or primary, bad man who reformed and married Little Nell, the unspoiled child of Death Valley wore the smartest frontier get-up of current year's vintage that the Chicago mail-order houses could turn out; if Little Nell's father, appearing contemporaneously, dressed according to the mode laid down for Forty-niners by such indubitable authorities as Bret Harte; if the sheriff stalked in and out of lens range attired as a Mississippi River gambler was popularly supposed to have been attired in the period 1860 to 1875; and if finally the cavalry troopers from the near-by army post sported the wide hats and khaki shirts which came into governmental vogue about the time of the Spanish War, all very well and good.
The chase sent me more than once stumbling away across rock-tumbled Gatun dam that squats its vast bulk where for long centuries, eighty-five feet below, was the village of Old Gatun with its proud church and its checkered history, where Morgan and Peruvian viceroys and "Forty-niners" were wont to pause from their arduous journeyings. They call it a dam.
When, crossing some of the mountain ranges, the train halted to let the oxen blow, one bull-whacker would say to another: 'Well, I'd like to see old Tom Benton get his railroad over this mountain. When Felix told me this he said 'There's a railroad to-day crosses those same mountain passes over which we forty-niners whacked our bulls.
The Empire was used as a stable. Barnes's place and Morton's next door had burned down. Only three of the many houses were inhabited. In two of them dwelt old men, tending small gardens and orchards. I do not doubt they too were Forty-niners; but I did not stop. The place was full of too many ghosts. We made our way out of the hills without adventure worth noting.
Excuse this diversion, I must get back to my subject, the days of the forty-niners. I stopped at the American Hotel. I was somewhat in a dilapidated condition from the experiences of my trip from Chagres. The waiter in my room at the hotel took the best of care of me. I soon found he was no ordinary waiter. He had resigned a position in Washington of $2,000 a year to go to the gold Eldorado.
Inception and Organization of the Pony Express Following the discovery of gold in California in January 1848, that region sprang into immediate prominence. From all parts of the country and the remote corners of the earth came the famous Forty-niners. Amid the chaos of a great mining camp the Anglo-Saxon love of law and order soon asserted itself.
In the days of gold in San Francisco among the "Forty-niners" William Walker was one of the most famous, most picturesque and popular figures. Jack Oakhurst, gambler; Colonel Starbottle, duellist; Yuba Bill, stage-coach driver, were his contemporaries. Bret Harte was one of his keenest admirers, and in two of his stories, thinly disguised under a more appealing name, Walker is the hero.
But then came the miner and the cowboy, and with them the new vocabulary. Monte San Matéo slinks in unmerited shame to hide its heralded deformity as Baldhead Butte. What devilish inspiration impelled the Forty-Niners to damn Monte San Pablo to go down to eternity as Bill Williams' Mountain?
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