He used to say to his friends in confidence that he certainly would have made a great poet had he begun in his youth. And perhaps he would, for he was certainly fit for nothing else under the sun.
The Forks was the wildest and the freshest bit of the black-white, fir-set, and snow-crowned Sierras that ever the Creator gave, new from His hand, to man.
One thousand men! Not a woman, not a child, down in that cañon of theirs, so deep that the sun never reached them in the Winter and but a little portion of the day in Summer.
Forests, fir and pine, in the cañon, and out of the cañon, up the hills and up the mountains, black and dense, till they broke against the colossal granite peaks far above and crowned in everlasting snow.
Three little streams came tumbling down here from the snow peaks in different directions, meeting with a precision which showed that they knew their ways perfectly through the woods; and from this little union of waters the camp had taken the name of "The Forks."
They had no law, no religion; but, for all that, the men were not bad. It is true they shot and stabbed each other in a rather reckless manner; but then they did it in such a manly sort of a way that but little of the curse of Cain was supposed to follow.
Maybe it was because life was so desolate and dreary that these men threw it away so frequently, and with such refreshing indifference, in the misunderstandings at the Forks; for, after all, they led but wretched lives. That vast freedom of theirs became a sort of desolation.
This was the new Eden. It was so new, it was still damp. You could smell the paint, as it were. Man had just arrived. He had not yet slept. The rib had not yet been taken from his side. He was alone. Behold, these men went up and down the earth, naming new things and possessing them.
Strong, strange men met there from the farthest parts of the world.
Men were grandly honest there. They invariably left gold in their gold-pans from day to day open in the claim—ounces, pounds of it, thousands of dollars to be had for the taking up. Locks and keys were unknown, and, when the miner went down to the Forks on Saturday night to settle his account, he, as a rule, handed the merchant his purse and let him weigh whatever amount he demanded, without question.