"Those was tough times, even for the first lot that come from 'Frisco. There was no sort o' law an' order in the camps, no sanitation an' no doctors. Typhoid an' dysentery got a good hold by the end o' June. You could get the reek o' fever an' disease a mile away.
"Men too sick to walk crawled out to their claims an' died there, scary lest some claim-jumper should seize their claims. Hope stuck with 'em to the last. Scores fell dead into the stream, wi' the pan still in their hands. One time, when they come to carry a dead man from beside his pan, that he hadn't time to clean up afore death took him, there was the first color in it that had been found on the claim. It brought in a pile o' money later.
"Later, when the real forty-niners came, men o' red blood, vigilance committees were organized an' the camps got sort o' human. But at the start, it was ugly. If a man didn't clean up quick, he starved. If he did, somebody jumped his claim, or put a bullet in him. If the body of a miner was found floatin', it was called accidental death, even if his head was blown off, for, the sayin' used to go, 'A miner ought to carry enough gold dust on him to sink.' Scores, aye, hundreds, died o' gun-play.
"About the fine breed o' men that come later, the forty-niners that crossed the whole plains o' the West from Missouri to Santa Fé an' beyond, men that brought their women an' children in long lines o' prairie schooners, keepin' scouts out ahead an' one each side, fightin' famine, thirst an' redskins all the way, you won't want me to tell you. Every American knows their story.
"But every one don't know what them trains o' gold-seekers looked like, when they reached the diggin's! My father's told me, though.
"He's seen 'em reach the Sacramento, half-scalped an' with wounds that never healed. He's seen swingin' at their saddles the scalp-locks o' Indians they'd scalped theirselves. He's seen women come in with nary one o' their men-folk left alive. He seen 'em come in crazy, never to be sane again, after the horrors o' that trail. He's seen a man come in safe an' untouched, after wheelin' a wheelbarrow nigh three thousand miles. He's seen seven men an' nine women get to the Sierras out of a party of 118, leaving 102 dead on the road.
The Coming of the Forty-Niners.