Gold was discovered in the Sacramento Valley in August, 1848, by a workman who was building a mill-race. A struggle ensued over this ground as to who should own the race. It threatened to terminate in a race war, but was settled amicably.
In eighteen months one hundred thousand people went to the scene. Thousands left their skeletons with the red brother, and other thousands left theirs on the Isthmus of Panama or on the cruel desert. Many married men went who had been looking a long time for some good place to go to. Leaving their wives with ill-concealed relief, they started away through a country filled with death, to reach a country they knew not of. Some died en route, others were hanged, and still others became the heads of new families. Some came back and carried water for their wives to wash clothing for their neighbors.
SOME CAME BACK AND CARRIED WATER FOR THEIR WIVES TO WASH CLOTHING.
It was a long hard trip then across the plains. One of the author's friends at the age of thirteen years drove a little band of cows from the State of Indiana to Sacramento. He says he would not do it again for anything. He is now a man, and owns a large prune-orchard in California, and people tell him he is getting too stout, and that he ought to exercise more, and that he ought to walk every day several miles; but he shakes his head, and says, "No, I will not walk any to-day, and possibly not to-morrow or the day following. Do not come to me and refer to taking a walk: I have tried that. Possibly you take me for a dromedary; but you are wrong. I am a fat man, and may die suddenly some day while lacing up my shoes, but when I go anywhere I ride."
When he got to Sacramento, where gold was said to be so plentiful, he was glad to wash dishes for his board, and he went and hired himself out to a citizen of that country, and he sent him into the fields for to feed swine, and he would fain have filled his system with the California peaches which the swine did eat, and he began to be in want, and no man gave unto him, and if he had spent his substance in riotous living, he said, it would have been different.
About thirty years after that he arose and went unto his father, and carried his dinner with him, also a government bond and a new suit of raiment for the old gentleman.
I do not know what we should learn from this.