Chapter LVII

It was in this Sacramento Valley, just referred to, that a deal of the
most lucrative of the early gold mining was done, and you may still see,
in places, its grassy slopes and levels torn and guttered and disfigured
by the avaricious spoilers of fifteen and twenty years ago. You may see
such disfigurements far and wide over California--and in some such
places, where only meadows and forests are visible--not a living
creature, not a house, no stick or stone or remnant of a ruin, and not a
sound, not even a whisper to disturb the Sabbath stillness--you will find
it hard to believe that there stood at one time a fiercely-flourishing
little city, of two thousand or three thousand souls, with its newspaper,
fire company, brass band, volunteer militia, bank, hotels, noisy Fourth
of July processions and speeches, gambling hells crammed with tobacco
smoke, profanity, and rough-bearded men of all nations and colors, with
tables heaped with gold dust sufficient for the revenues of a German
principality--streets crowded and rife with business--town lots worth
four hundred dollars a front foot--labor, laughter, music, dancing,
swearing, fighting, shooting, stabbing--a bloody inquest and a man for
breakfast every morning--everything that delights and adorns existence--
all the appointments and appurtenances of a thriving and prosperous and
promising young city,--and now nothing is left of it all but a lifeless,
homeless solitude. The men are gone, the houses have vanished, even the
name of the place is forgotten. In no other land, in modern times, have
towns so absolutely died and disappeared, as in the old mining regions of
California.

It was a driving, vigorous, restless population in those days. It was a
curious population. It was the only population of the kind that the
world has ever seen gathered together, and it is not likely that the
world will ever see its like again. For observe, it was an assemblage of
two hundred thousand young men--not simpering, dainty, kid-gloved
weaklings, but stalwart, muscular, dauntless young braves, brimful of
push and energy, and royally endowed with every attribute that goes to
make up a peerless and magnificent manhood--the very pick and choice of
the world's glorious ones. No women, no children, no gray and stooping
veterans,--none but erect, bright-eyed, quick-moving, strong-handed young
giants--the strangest population, the finest population, the most gallant
host that ever trooped down the startled solitudes of an unpeopled land.
And where are they now? Scattered to the ends of the earth--or
prematurely aged and decrepit--or shot or stabbed in street affrays--or
dead of disappointed hopes and broken hearts--all gone, or nearly all--
victims devoted upon the altar of the golden calf--the noblest holocaust
that