The gold hunters

by John David Borthwick

However, I was not thinking of this while sitting on the Hangtown stage. I had too much to look at, and some of my neighbors also took up my attention. I found seated around me a varied assortment of human nature. A New Yorker, a Yankee, and an English Jack-tar were my immediate neighbors, and a general conversation helped to beguile the time till the “runners” had succeeded in placing a passenger upon every available spot of every wagon. There was no trouble about luggage—that is an article not much known in California. Some stray individuals might have had a small carpet-bag—almost every man had his blankets—and the western men were further encumbered with their long rifles, the barrels poking into everybody’s eyes, and the butts in the way of everybody’s toes.

At last the solid mass of four-horse coaches began to dissolve. The drivers gathered up their reins and settled themselves down in their seats, cracked their whips, and swore at their horses; the grooms cleared out the best way they could; the passengers shouted and hurrahed; the teams in front set off at a gallop; the rest followed them as soon as they got room to start, and chevied them up the street, all in a body, for about half a mile, when, as soon as we got out of town, we spread out in all directions to every point of a semicircle, and in a few minutes I found myself one of a small isolated community, with which four splendid horses were galloping over the plains like mad. No hedges, no ditches, no houses, no road in fact—it was all a vast open plain, as smooth as a calm ocean. We might have been steering by compass, and it was like going to sea; for we emerged from the city as from a landlocked harbor, and followed our own course over the wide wide world. The transition from the confinement of the city to the vastness of space was instantaneous; and our late neighbors, rapidly diminishing around us, and getting hull down on the horizon, might have been bound for the uttermost parts of the earth, for all we could see that was to stop them.

To sit behind four horses tearing along a good road is delightful at any time, but the mere fact of such rapid locomotion formed only a small part of the pleasure of our journey.

The atmosphere was so soft and balmy that it was a positive enjoyment to feel it brushing over one’s face like the finest floss silk. The sky was clear and cloudless, the bright sunshine warmed us up to a comfortable temperature; and we were traveling over such an expanse of nature that our progress, rapid as it was, seemed hardly perceptible, unless measured by the fast disappearing chimney tops of the city, or by the occasional clumps of trees we left behind us. The scene all round us was magnificent, and impressed one as much with his own insignificance as though he beheld the countries of the earth from the summit of a high mountain.

Out of sight of land at sea one experiences a certain feeling of isolation: there is nothing to connect one’s ideas with the habitable globe but the ship on which one stands; but there is also nothing to carry the imagination beyond what one does see, and the view is limited to a few miles. But here, we were upon an ocean of grass-covered earth, dotted with trees, and sparkling in the sunshine with the gorgeous hues of the dense patches of wild flowers; while far beyond the horizon of the plains there rose mountains beyond mountains, all so distinctly seen as to leave no uncertainty as to the shape or the relative position of any one of them, and fading away in regular graduation till the most distant, though clearly defined, seemed still to be the most natural and satisfactory point at which the view should terminate. It was as if the circumference of the earth had been lifted up to the utmost range of vision, and there melted into air.

Such was the view ahead of us as we traveled towards the mines, where wavy outlines of mountains appeared one above another, drawing together as they vanished, and at last indenting the sky with the snowy peaks of the Sierra Nevada. On either side of us the mountains, appearing above the horizon, were hundreds of miles distant, and the view behind us was more abruptly terminated by the Coast Range, which lies between the Sacramento river and the Pacific.

It was the commencement of spring, and at that season the plains are seen to advantage. But after a few weeks of dry weather the hot sun burns up every blade of vegetation, the ground presents a cracked surface of hard-baked earth, and the roads are ankle-deep in the finest and most penetrating kind of dust, which rises in clouds like clouds of smoke, saturating one’s clothes, and impregnating one’s whole system.

We made a straight course of it across the plains for about thirty miles, changing horses occasionally at some of the numerous wayside inns, and passing numbers of wagons drawn by teams of six or eight mules or oxen, and laden with supplies for the mines.

The ascent from the plains was very gradual, over a hilly country, well wooded with oaks and pines. Our pace here was not so killing as it had been. We had frequently long hills to climb, where all hands were obliged to get out and walk; but we made up for the delay by galloping down the descent on the other side.

The road, which, though in some places very narrow, for the most part spread out to two or three times the width of an ordinary road, was covered with stumps and large rocks; it was full of deep ruts and hollows, and roots of trees spread all over it.