“They are the true Mother Lode, the bourne of the seekers of gold, greater, far, than the crazed brains of the old prospectors had the power to conceive. A further-reaching, broader arc than the most wondrous rainbow of their imaginings born of dreams, and built of hunger and despair.”
“So shall we find, at last, the Mother Lode, the virginity of the essence of creation, the beginning and the end. The curve of the circle which is unchanging, insoluble, omniscient; which shall return to that which created it; which is all; which is God!”
“'49”
“We have worked our claims,
We have spent our gold,
Our barks are astrand on the bars;
We are battered and old,
Yet at night we behold
Outcroppings of gold in the stars.
Where the rabbits play,
Where the quail all day
Pipe on the chaparral hill;
A few more days,
And the last of us lays
His pick aside and is still.
We are wreck and stray,
We are cast away,
Poor battered old hulks and spars!
But we hope and pray,
On the judgment Day,
We shall strike it, up in the stars.
—Joaquin Miller.
One Sunday in Stinson's Bar
I
“On that broad stage of empire won,
Whose footlights were the setting sun;
Whose flats a distant background rose
In trackless peaks of endless snows;
Here genius bows, and talent waits
To copy that but One creates.”
—Bret Harte.
Now-a-days when you want to go from San Francisco to the Sierra Nevada country you step into your perfectly good Packard (or whatever it is—all the way down to a motorcycle side car), and you ferry across the bay and the straits, and if the motor-cop isn't around, you come shooting up the highway forty miles an hour, and at the end of a glorious five-hour run you are there.
In the early fifties—when there was less to see, too—you took more time to it. You came to Sacramento on the river boat. Then if you were rich, you bought a horse or a mule and rode for the rest of your journey. If you were poor, or thrifty perhaps, you walked, or tried to get a ride on one of the ox-freight teams which plied their way across Haggin Grant to Auburn and Dutch Flat, or to Folsom and Coloma.
Later a railway was built as far as Auburn station, then situated at a point three miles east of Loomis which was at that time called Pino.