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Here, at these very towns, was the outfitting place and departing point of the caravans of the early Santa Fé trade; here the Oregon Trail left for the far Northwest; and here the Forty-niners paused a moment in their mad rush to the golden coast of the Pacific.
I remember the house whose foundations were made of boxes of plug tobacco part of a jettisoned cargo used instead of more expensive lumber; and the adjacent warehouse where the trunks of the early and forgotten "forty-niners" were stored, and never claimed by their dead or missing owners were finally sold at auction.
It was the American River before the Forty-niners swarmed along its edges, and there was gold in its sands, sunk in a sediment below its muddy deposit, caked in cracks through the rocks round which its currents had swept for undisturbed ages. They worked feverishly, the threat of the winter rains urging them on.
One of these Forty-niners, Delano, a man of some distinction in the later history of the mining communities, says that five men drowned themselves in the Humboldt River in one day out of sheer discouragement. He says that he had to save the lives of his oxen by giving Indians fifteen dollars to swim the river and float some grass across to him.
In popular estimation the interest and romance of the Forty-niners center in gold and mines. To the close student, however, the true significance of their lives is to be found even more in the city of San Francisco. At first practically everybody came to California under the excitement of the gold rush and with the intention of having at least one try at the mines.
By Parisian girl I mean not the order of Austrian wenches who twist their tummies in elaborate tango epilepsies in the Place Pigalle, nor the order of female curios who expectorate with all the gusto of American drummers in La Hanneton, nor yet the Forty-niners who foregather in the private entrance of 16 Rue Frochot.
There was a lot of money flyin' around the world in them days, and Cap Kidd knew how to get holt of it. The trouble is with people, Colonel, they forget that there was a lot of gold in the world before the 'Forty-niners' got busy." "But Bodge," snorted the Colonel. "He " "Certain men for certain things," declared Hiram, firmly. "Most every genius is more or less a lunatic.
An awning was stretched over the upper deck, for shade; and as the Georgia sped out of the Gulf and headed south for the Yucatan Channel under the Tropic of Cancer, between Cuba and Yucatan, the shade felt mighty good. A number of passengers got out their white suits of linen or cotton; but the majority of the Forty-niners stuck to their flannel shirts and coarse trousers and boots.
As the canoe grounded, old Cruces, with its regulation thatched cane huts and a few very few wooden buildings, looked sleepy enough in the late afternoon sunlight, as if treasure-trains and pirates and even those other gold seekers, the California Forty-niners, never had been here. The other boatmen hauled the canoe higher. "Angel's gone to find the mules," explained Mr.
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