nothing, so little of the hull of the boat appears above
water, and showing none of the lines which, in a ship,
convey an idea of buoyancy and power of resistance,
but, on the contrary, suggesting only the idea of how
easy it would be to smash them to pieces following
in imagination these fragile-looking fabrics over the
seventeen thousand miles of stormy ocean over which
they had been brought in safety, one could not help
feeling a degree of admiration and respect for the
daring and skill of the men by whom such perilous
undertakings had been accomplished. In preparing
these steamboats for their long voyage to California,
the lower storey was strengthened with thick plank-
ing, and on the forward part of the deck was built a
strong wedge-shaped screen, to break the force of
the waves, which might otherwise wash the whole
house overboard. They crept along the coast, having
to touch at most of the ports on the way for fuel ;
and passing through the Straits of Magellan, they
escaped to a certain extent the dangers of Cape
Horn, although equal dangers might be encountered
on any part of the voyage.

But besides the question of nautical skill and
individual daring, as a commercial undertaking the
sending such steamers round to California was a very-
bold speculation. Their value in New York is about



CHEAP TRAVELLING. 97

a hundred thousand dollars, and to take them round
to San Francisco costs about thirty thousand more.
Insurance is, of course, out of the question (I do not
think 99 per cent would insure them in this country
from Dover to Calais); so the owners had to play a
neck-or-nothing game. Their enterprise was in most
cases duly rewarded. I only know of one instance
though doubtless others have occurred in which such
vessels did not get round in safety : it was an old
Long Island Sound boat ; she was rotten before ever
she left New York, and foundered somewhere about
the Bermudas, all hands on board escaping in the
boats.

The profits of the first few steamers which arrived
out were of course enormous ; but, after a while, com-
petition was so keen, that for some time cabin fare
between San Francisco and Sacramento was only one
dollar ; a ridiculously small sum to pay, in any part
of the world, for being carried in such boats two
hundred miles in ten hours ; but, in California at
that time, the wages of the common deck hands on
board those same boats were about a hundred dollars
a-month ; and ten dollars were there, to the generality
of men, a sum of much less consequence than ten
shillings are here.

These low fares did not last long, however; the
owners of steamers came to an understanding, and
the average rate of fare from San Francisco to
Sacramento was from five to eight dollars. I have

only alluded to the one-dollar fares for the purpose

G



98 CALIFORNIA!* RIVERS.

*

of giving an idea of the competition which existed
in such a business as " steamboating," which re-
quires a large capital ; and from that it may be
imagined what intense rivalry there was among
those engaged in less important lines of business,
which engrossed their whole time and labour, and
required the employment of all the means at their
command.

Looking at the map of California, it will be seen
that the " mines " occupy a long strip of mountain-
ous country, which commences many miles to the
eastward of San Francisco, and stretches northward
several hundred miles. The Sacramento river run-
ning parallel with the mines, the San Joaquin joining
it from the southward and eastward, and the Feather
river continuing a northward course from the Sacra-
mento all of them being navigable present the
natural means of communication between San Fran-
cisco and the " mines." Accordingly, the city of
Sacramento about two hundred miles north of San
Francisco sprang up as the depot for all the
middle part of the mines, with roads radiating from
it across the plains to the various settlements in the
mountains. In like manner the city of Marysville,
being at the extreme northern point of navigation
of the Feather river, became the starting-place and
the dep6t for the mining districts in the northern
section of the State ; and Stockton, named after
Commodore Stockton, of the United States navy,
who had command of the Pacific squadron during



OCEAN AND INLAND STEAM NAVIGATION. 99

the Mexican war, being situated at the head of
navigation of the San Joaquin, forms the interme-
diate station between San Francisco and all the
" southern mines."

Seeing the facilities that California thus presented
for inland navigation, it is not surprising that the
Americans, so pre-eminent as they are in that branch
of commercial enterprise, should so soon have taken
advantage of them. But though the prospective
profits were great, still the enormous risk attending
the sending of steamboats round the Horn might
have seemed sufficient to deter most men from
entering into such a hazardous speculation. It must
be remembered that many of these river steamboats
were despatched from New York, on an ocean voyage
of seventeen thousand miles, to a place of which
one-half the world as yet even doubted the existence,
and when people were looking up their atlases to
see in what part of the world California was. The
risk of taking a steamboat of this kind to what was
then such an out-of-the-way part of the world, did
not end with her arrival in San Francisco by any
means. The slightest accident to her machinery,
which there was at that time no possibility of
repairing in California, or even the extreme fluctua-
tions in the price of coal, might have rendered her at
any moment so much useless lumber.

In ocean navigation the same adventurous energy
was manifest. Hardly had the news of the discovery
of gold in California been received in New York,



100 OCEAN AND INLAND STEAM NAVIGATION.

when numbers of steamers were despatched, at an
expense equal to one-half their value, to take their
place on the Pacific in forming a line between the
United States and San Francisco via Panama ; so
that almost from the first commencement of the
existence of California as a gold-bearing country,
steam-communication was established between New
York and San Francisco, bringing the two places
within twenty to twenty-five days of each other.
It is true the mail line had the advantage of a mail
contract from the United States government ; but
other lines, without any such fostering influence, ran
them close in competition for public patronage.

The Americans are often accused of boasting
perhaps deservedly so ; but there certainly are many
things in the history of California of which they may
justly be proud, having transformed her, as they did
so suddenly, from a wilderness into a country in
which most of the luxuries of life were procurable ;
and a fair instance of the bold and prompt spirit of
commercial enterprise by which this was accom-
plished, was seen in the fact that, from the earliest
days of her settlement, California had as good means
of both ocean and inland steam-communication as
any of the oldest countries in the world.

Sacramento City is next in size and importance to
San Francisco. Many large commercial houses had
there established their headquarters, and imported
direct from the Atlantic States. The river is navigable
so far by vessels of six or eight hundred tons, and



STREET NOMENCLATURE. 101

in the early days of California, many ships cleared
directly for Sacramento from the different ports on
the Atlantic ; but as the course of trade by degrees
found its proper channel, San Francisco became
exclusively the emporium for the whole of California,
and even at the time I write of, sea-going vessels
were rarely seen so far in the interior of the country
as Sacramento.

The plains are but very little above the average
level of the river, and a "leveV had been built all along
the front of the city eight or ten feet high, to save it
from inundation by the high waters of the rainy
season. With the exception of a few handsome
blocks of brick buildings, the houses were all of
wood, and had an unmistakably Yankee appearance,
being all painted white turned up with green, and
covered from top to bottom with enormous signs.

The streets are wide, perfectly straight, and cross
each other at right angles at equal distances, like
the lines of latitude and longitude on a chart. The
street nomenclature is unique very democratic, in-
asmuch as it does not immortalise the names of pro-
minent individuals and admirably adapted to such a
rectangular city. The streets running parallel with
the river are numbered First, Second, Third Street,
and so on to infinity, and the cross streets are desig-
nated by the letters of the alphabet. J Street was
the great central street, and was nearly a mile long;
so the reader may reckon the number of parallel
streets on each side of it, and get an idea of the



1 02 STAGING.

extent of the city. This system of lettering and
numbering the streets was very convenient, as, the
latitude and longitude of a house being given, it
could be found at once. A stranger could navigate
all over the town without ever having to ask his
way, as he could take an observation for himself at
the corner of every street.

My stay in Sacramento on this occasion was
limited to a few hours. I went to a large hotel,
which was also the great staging-house, and here
I snoozed till about five o'clock, when, it being
still quite dark, the whole house woke up into
active life. About a hundred of us breakfasted
by candlelight, and, going out into the bar-room
while day was just dawning, we found, turned out
in front of the hotel, about four-and-twenty four-
horse coaches, all bound for different places in the
mines. The street was completely blocked up with
them, and crowds of men were taking their seats,
while others were fortifying themselves for their
journey at the bar.

The coaches were of various kinds. Some were
light-spring-waggons mere oblong boxes, with four
or five seats placed across them ; others were of the
same build, but better finished, and covered by an
awning ; and there were also numbers of regular
American stage-coaches, huge high -hung things
which carry nine inside upon three seats, the middle
one of which is between the two doors.

The place which I had intended should be the



SCENE BEFORE STARTING. 103

scene of my first mining exploits, was a village
rejoicing in the suggestive appellation of Hangtown ;
designated, however, in official documents as Placer-
ville. It received its name of Hangtown while yet
in its infancy from the number of malefactors who
had there expiated their crimes at the hands of Judge
Lynch. I soon found the stage for that place it
happened to be one of the oblong boxes and, pitch-
ing in my roll of blankets, I took my seat and lighted
my pipe that I might the more fully enjoy the scene
around me. And a scene it was, such as few parts
of the world can now show, and which would have
gladdened the hearts of those who mourn over the
degeneracy of the present age, and sigh for the good
old days of stage-coaches.

Here, certainly, the genuine old mail-coach, the
guard with his tin horn, and the jolly old coachman
with his red face, were not to be found ; but the
horses were as good as ever galloped with her Ma-
jesty's mail. The teams were all headed the same
way, and with their stages, four or five abreast, occu-
pied the whole of the wide street for a distance of
sixty or seventy yards. The horses were restive, and
pawing, and snorting, and kicking ; and passengers
were trying to navigate to their proper stages through
the labyrinth of wheels and horses, and frequently
climbing over half-a-dozen waggons to shorten their
journey. Grooms were standing at the leaders' heads,
trying to keep them quiet, and the drivers were sit-
ting on their boxes, or seats rather, for they scorn a



104 PASSENGERS "HURRIED UP."

high seat, and were swearing at each other in a very
shocking manner, as wheels got locked, and waggons
were backed into the teams behind them, to the dis-
comfiture of the passengers on the back-seats, who
found horses' heads knocking the pipes out of their
mouths. In the intervals of their little private
battles, the drivers were shouting to the crowds of
passengers who loitered about the front of the hotel ;
for there, as elsewhere, people will wait till the last
moment ; and though it is more comfortable to sit
than to stand, men like to enjoy their freedom as long
as possible, before resigning all control over their
motions, and charging with their precious persons a
coach or a train, on full cock, and ready to go off, and
shoot them out upon some remote part of creation.

On each waggon was painted the name of the place
to which it ran ; the drivers were also bellowing it
out to the crowd, and even among such a confusion
of coaches a man could have no difficulty in finding
the one he -wanted. One would have thought that
the individual will and locomotive power of a man
would have been sufficient to start him on his journey ;
but in this go-ahead country, people who had to go
were not allowed to remain inert till the spirit
moved them to go ; they had to be " hurried up ;" and
of the whole crowd of men who were standing about
the hotel, or struggling through the maze of waggons,
only one half were passengers, the rest were "runners "
for the various stages, who were exhausting all their
persuasive eloquence in entreating the passengers to



"RUNNERS. 105

take their seats and go. They were all mixed up
with the crowd, and each was exerting his lungs to
the utmost. " Now then, gentlemen," shouts one of
them, " all aboard for Nevada City ! Who's agoin 1
only three seats left the last chance to-day for Ne-
vada City take you there in five hours. Who's
there for Nevada City 1" Then catching sight of
some man who betrays the very slightest appearance
of helplessness, or of not knowing what he is about,
he pounces upon him, saying " Nevada City, sir ?
this way just in time," and seizing him by the arm,
he drags him into the crowd of stages, and almost
has him bundled into that for Nevada City before the
poor devil can make it understood that it is Caloma
he wants to go to, and not Nevada City. His captor
then calls out to some one of his brother runners who
is collecting passengers for Caloma " Oh Bill ! oh

Bill ! where the are you ? " " Hullo !" says Bill

from the other end of the crowd. " Here's a man for
Caloma ! " shouts the other, still holding on to his
prize in case he should escape before Bill comes up to
take charge of him.

This sort of thing was going on all the time. It
was very ridiculous. Apparently, if a hundred men
wanted to go anywhere, it required a hundred more
to despatch them. There was certainly no danger
of any one being left behind ; on the contrary, the
probability was, that any weak-minded man who hap-
pened to be passing by, would be shipped off to parts
unknown before he could collect his ideas.



106 LUGGAGE.

There were few opposition stages, excepting for
Marysville, and one or two of the larger places ; they
were all crammed full and of what use these " run-
ners " or " tooters" were to anybody, was not very
apparent, at least to the uninitiated. But they are a
common institution with the Americans, who are not
very likely to support such a corps of men if their
services bring no return. In fact, it is merely part of
the American system of advertising, and forcing the
public to avail themselves of certain opportunities,
by repeatedly and pertinaciously representing to them
that they have it in their power to do so. In the
States, to blow your own horn, and to make as much
noise as possible with it, is the fundamental principle
of all business. The most eminent lawyers and doc-
tors advertise, and the names of the first merchants
appear in the newspapers every day. A man's own
personal exertions are not sufficient to keep the world
aware of his existence, and without advertising he
would be to all intents and purposes dead. Modest
merit does not wait for its reward it is rather too
smart for that it clamours for it, and consequently
gets it all the sooner.

However, I was not thinking of this while sitting
on the Hangtown stage. I had too much to look at,
and some of my neighbours also took up my atten-
tion. I found seated around me a varied assortment
of human nature. A New-Yorker, a Yankee, and an
English Jack-tar were my immediate neighbours,
and a general conversation helped to beguile the time
till the " runners " had succeeded in placing a pas-



THE PLAINS. 107

senger upon every available spot of every waggon.
There was no trouble about luggage that is an article
not much known in California. Some stray indi-
viduals 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 buts 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 hurraed ; 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 com-
pass, and it was like going to sea ; for we emerged
from the city as from a landlocked harbour, and fol-
lowed 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
neighbours, rapidly diminishing around us, and get-
ting hull down on the horizon, might have been



108 IMPRESSIVE SCENERY.

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 travelling
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 insignifi-
cance 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 cer-
tain 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 gor-
geous 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



THE PLAINS IN SUMMER. 109

relative position of any one of them, and fading
away in regular gradation till the most distinct,
though clearly denned, 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 travelled
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 waggons 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.



1]0 AN AMERICAN STAGE-DRIVER.

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 w r e
made up for the delay by galloping down the descent
on the other side.

The road, which, though in some places very nar-
row, 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.

To any one not used to such roads or to such
driving, an upset would have seemed inevitable. If
there was safety in speed, however, we were safe
enough, and all sense of danger was lost in admira-
tion of the coolness and dexterity of the driver as he
circumvented every obstacle, but without going one
inch farther than necessary out of his way to save us
from perdition. He went through extraordinary
bodily contortions, which would have shocked an
English coachman out of his propriety ; but, at the
same time, he performed such feats as no one would
have dared to attempt who had never been used to
anything worse than an English road. With his
right foot he managed a break, and, clawing at the
reins with both hands, he swayed his body from side
to side to preserve his equilibrium, as now on the
right pair of wheels, now on the left, he cut the
" outside edge " round a stump or a rock ; and
when coming to a spot where he was going to
execute a difficult manoeuvre on a piece of road
which slanted violently down to one side, he trimmed



WE ENTER THE "MINES." Ill

the waggon as one would a small boat in a squall,
and made us all crowd up to the weather side to
prevent a capsize.

When about ten miles from the plains, I first saw
the actual reality of gold-digging. Four or five
men were working in a ravine by the roadside, dig-
ging holes like so many grave-diggers. I then con-
sidered myself fairly in " the mines," and experienced a
disagreeable consciousness that we might be passing
over huge masses of gold, only concealed from us by
an inch or two of earth.

As we travelled onwards, we passed at intervals
numerous parties of miners, and the country assumed
a more inhabited appearance. Log-cabins and clap-
board shanties were to be seen among the trees ; and
occasionally we found about a dozen of such houses
grouped together by the roadside, and dignified with
the name of a town.

For several miles again the country would seem
to have been deserted. That it had once been a
busy scene was evident from the uptorn earth in the
ravines and hollows, and from the numbers of un-
occupied cabins ; but the cream of such diggings
had already been taken, and they were not now
sufficiently rich to suit the ambitious ideas of the
miners.

After travelling about thirty miles over this moun-
tainous region, ascending gradually all the while,
we arrived at Hangtown in the afternoon, having
accomplished the sixty miles from Sacramento city
in about eight hours.



CHAPTER VI.



HANGTOWN FIRST IMPRESSION OF "THE DIGGINS IDEA OF A
MINING TOWN GAMBLING HOUSES THE STEEET THE STORES
JEW SLOP-SHOPS THE JEWS : THEIR PECULIARITIES HANGTOWN