A FATHER.
Then, again, a novel appearance was given to the streets of our seaport towns by the daily presence in them of men dressed in red woollen shirts, slouch hats, and cowhide boots,—men wearing pistols and dirks, or carrying rifles,—whom it was not easy to know for peaceful citizens just turned out of their farms or workshops or counting-houses. Nor was the emigration confined to the bone and sinew of society only. Men of every walk in life were drawn into it. A scholar might have a day-laborer for his companion. Larkin has told us how this worked in the mines. The one purpose to dig for gold quickly put all on an equal footing, for in making labor the sole means of wealth, as in the beginning it was, the common laborer had become the peer of the most learned scholar in the land. Hence every ship and every caravan carried its little republic of equality. And hence society seemed going back into its original elements, as if gold were the magnet attracting all else to itself.
MOUNT SHASTA.
The sailing of many ships, full freighted with eager gold-seekers, was followed in the early spring by the march of thousands across the plains. Like colonies of migratory ants the long line of wagons crept along the roads leading to the South Pass and Rio Grande. At Salt Lake City, which we have just seen founded, the weary emigrants tarried a while to recruit their failing animals for the dreaded passage of the desert; then to the road again to struggle ever on through the parched valleys, where their gaunt beasts died of thirst, or up the granite sides of the Sierras, where they dropped from exhaustion, till the Sacramento Valley was reached at last, and Shasta Peak burst on their enraptured sight. Hundreds perished by the way, and long after the march for gold in 1849 might be traced by the abandoned wagons or dead animals that strewed its path.
Many reached Panama by way of the Chagres River, whose course led up to the mountain chain dividing the waters of the Atlantic from those of the Pacific. Day by day a motley fleet of dug-out canoes might have been seen toiling with pole and oar against the swift current of this mountain stream. At the head of boat navigation, in an open spot, under the high mountains, a few cocoanut palms lifted tufts of graceful foliage above a clump of miserable huts, whose owners were of mixed Spanish and Indian blood. This was on the route the Spaniards had discovered in 1513. This was Gorgona.
