They were awakened by the usual concert of hee-haws, as the burros, who followed at their heels all day like dogs, (except when they got contrary), woke the echoes with their loneliness.
That day led them over another of the parallel ridges that comb the West flank of the Sierra, and into a precipitous canyon, over red sandstones and green shales, and slates of Tertiary formation, till they came to another hot spring and decided to pitch camp and all hands make use of the hot water. A natural bath tub and a smaller wash tub were found hollowed out of the stony banks, doubtless carved by whirling bowlders from the spring floods, and with the joy known only to the weary camper they performed their ablutions, filling the tubs, each in turn, by means of the nested pails. What grinding and whirling it must have taken, they reflected, as they felt the smoothness of their symmetrical bowls, to have hollowed these from the solid rock! With accompaniment of drift logs tumbling end for end, as the river rose and foamed beneath the thousand trickles of melting snow!
“Ever been up here in winter?” Ace asked the old prospector.
“Not exactly here, but I been places almighty like it.”
The old prospector told them how, in the days of the 49ers, (vivid recollections of which his father had collated to his youthful ears), the Mexicans had been treated in a way they had practically never forgiven. The land was free. Discovery and appropriation of a mining claim gave title, provided it was staked out and a notice scratched on a tin plate affixed to the claim stake, and likewise provided that the size of the claim accorded with the crude ruling for that region. Fifty feet was generally allowed along a river, or even a hundred where the claim was uncommonly poor and inaccessible, though where it was uncommonly rich, miners were sometimes restricted to ten square feet apiece.
But Mexicans were generally refused the benefits of the gold claims, the “greasers” often being ejected by force of arms from the more valuable claims. Sometimes they were given three hours’ grace for their getaway. More within the letter of the law, a tax was imposed on alien claim holders, but at first such a heavy one that it was practically prohibitive. This resulted in border warfare, and to many of the Mexicans originally on the land, abject poverty. At the Mexican dry diggings, which, with their bull rings and fandangoes, had sprung up here and there in the foothills, there was bloody defiance of the tax collector. Other groups became highwaymen, who robbed and murdered the blond race whom they felt had cheated and maltreated them, stabbing from ambush, or organizing into bands of road agents, who systematically robbed miners of their dust and stage drivers of their express boxes, and as often murdering their victims.
There was Rattlesnake Dick, among other desperadoes, who with two gangsters, Alverez and Garcia, had terrorized the gold diggings till, five years after the gold rush, he had been killed by a rival bad man.
Ace was so tired, he rested again that day, merely bringing his bi-plane in to the new camp site.
As Long Lester drawled over the camp fire, the drowsy boys lived again in the days when a pinch of gold dust in a buckskin bag was currency, and red shirted miners gambled away their gains or drank it up, in a land of hot sunshine and hard toil, where a tin cup and a frying pan largely comprised their bachelor housekeeping apparatus, their provender such as could be brought in on jingle belled mule teams, their chief diversions the occasional open air meeting or the lynchings of their necessarily rough and ready justice.
The more adventurous always abandoned a moderate prospect for a gold rush. Some of them made rich strikes; others ended their days in poverty, after all.