"I was jest a-sayin'," continued Jim, who had listened with impatience to Owens' explanation, "that them as says there ain't no luck in minin' ain't never done no minin'. I've been showin' you how some men got rich in a minute an' hundreds got nothin'.
"But there was some fields that was a frost, right from the start. They promised big an' give big for the first scratch or two. Then—nothin'! Kern River was one o' those an' Father got bit.
"My grand-pap, he'd gone back to Utah to take command of a band o' 'Destroyin' Angels', as the Gentiles called the Danites, leavin' Father to go on pannin' on the Sacramento. The claims was peterin' out fast, but there was good day's wages to be got, still.
"Then, in 1855, come the news o' the Kern River strike. If folk had gone crazy in forty-nine, they got crazier still this time. There was all the fame o' the last strike to lure 'em on. The same ol' story o' desert trails without water, o' minin' camps that were death-traps, was repeated, only ten times worse. Twenty thousand started in the same week. The last few miles was a trail o' blood. Men stabbed their friends in the back to get to the diggin's first. The stakin' o' claims was done, six-shooter in hand.
"And, o' the twenty thousand, there wasn't twenty that cleaned up rich. My father, he wasn't one o' the twenty. He prospected, up an' down, until he'd spent the last ounce o' gold-dust he'd got from five years' work, an' all but starved to death on his way across the desert, headin' for Utah.
"When he got into Nevada, he didn't have a pound o' flour left. He didn't have nothin' left, nothin' but his pick an' shovel an' pan. All the rest was gone. He didn't have no trade but prospectin'. Well enough he knew he'd leave his bones on the trail if he tried to foot it to Salt Lake City.
"He'd heard about gold being found on the Carson River, in Nevada, in 1850, by Prouse Kelly and John Orr, an' he knew that they'd gone back an' done well. Several other small placers had been found, noways rich, but still enough to keep a busy man goin'. He'd learned from his Kern River experience that a man did better, stickin' to a small claim'n tryin' for the big prizes, an' he made for the small placers o' the Carson River. A store-keeper grub-staked him, to start with, an' in a month or two, he was clear.
"Next year, that was '56, his pard struck what looked like a silver vein, an' started off to the city wi' some samples. Father, he stuck by the gold. That's where he lost out. He prospected in Six Mile Cañon an' found little color—his bad luck again, for, in '57, two prospectors made a rich strike less'n a quarter of a mile away from where he'd been pannin'. They found signs o' silver, too, but chucked the stuff aside. Father plugged along, an' at last struck a little pocket in a creek off the Carson. A month's work gave him near a thousand dollars' worth o' dust, an' he reckoned he'd go back to Salt Lake City. He'd been away eight years.
"Grand-pap was still alive an' told Father to stay home an' go farmin'. But it didn't go. The prospectin' bug had hit Father too hard. In the spring o' '59 he started back for the Carson River again, an' Mother come along. She reckoned she might never see him again, if she didn't.
"That summer, there was three folks on the claim. Another pard had come, a little one, what had for his first toy a nugget o' gold tied on a bit o' string. I was born on a minin' claim, for that little pard was—me!"