treacherous, vacillating, above all lazy, with the elderly females doing all the hard work. Thus, in
a nomadic party of Ogillallahs,
The moving spirit of the establishment was an old hag of eighty. You could count all her
ribs through the wrinkles of her leathery skin. Her withered face more resembled an old
skull than the countenance of a living being, even to the hollowed, darkened sockets, at
the bottom of which glittered her little black eyes. Her arms had dwindled into nothing
but whipcord and wire. Her hair, half-black, half-grey, hung in total neglect nearly to the
ground, and her sole garment consisted of the remnant of a discarded buffalo-robe tied
round her waist with a string of hide. Yet the old squaw's meager anatomy was
wonderfully strong. She pitched the lodge, packed the horses, and did the hardest labor in
the camp. From morning till night she bustled about the lodge screaming like a screech-
owl when anything displeased her.
Parkman's marvelous account of his excitements and privations, The Oregon Trail, published
in 1849, was an immediate success both with literary New England and with the great public.
But by that time the modern world had already overtaken the arcadia he described. The month
before the Treaty with Mexico was signed, at Sutter's Mill in the Sacramento Valley, gold was
discovered on January 24, 1848. A workman found tiny nuggets of gold in the mill-race. For
some time the news was concealed while the few in the secret worked frenziedly to ice the veins
and stake claims. By September, the East Coast papers were publishing reports from the California goldfields,' telling of ‘nuggets collected at random and without any trouble.' The real rush started after President Polk, in his December 1848 message to Congress, boastingly confirmedthe accounts of the abundance of gold' in the territory recently acquired'-by him.
That spring, scores of thousands went to California, from all over the world. Some went direct
from Australia, which had had a gold rush of its own in the I830s. The people of Cutler, in
Maine, built and rigged their own ship and sailed her round the Horn to San Francisco Bay.
Some went via the Panama Isthmus. More went over the Rockies by the Oregon and California
trails. The early Forty-Niners got their gold by sifting off the gravel and soil using wire mesh-
what they called panning' orplacer' mining. Or they ran a stream through a 'long-tom' or sluice-
box. That was the easy bit, and inspired the ditty: Oh California / That's the land for me / I'm off for Sacramento / With my washbowl on my knee.' But as the surface was worked out it became necessary to sink shafts and build crushing mills to grind the gold from the imprisoning quartz; that needed capital and organization. Many disappointed Forty-Niners went home in disgust, penniless-30,000 a year. But many more stayed because there were ample other opportunities in California, besides gold. Before the first strike, the non-Indian population of the territory was less than 14,000. By 1852 it was over 150,000. San Francisco had become a boomtown of 15,000 people, crowded with gamblers, financiers, prostitutes and wild women, actors and reporters, budding politicians and businessmen. It was free-for-all America at its best and worst. The atmosphere of the mining camps is wonderfully conveyed in the stories of Bret Harte (1836-1901), a young man from Albany, New York, who was in California in 1854 where he worked on the Mother Lode and later went into printing and journalism in San Francisco. His The Luck of Roaring Camp' is the greatest of all mining stories. The prototype rush having
taken place, there were plenty of others: Gold Hill, Colorado (1859), Virginia City, Nevada
(186o), Orofino, Idaho (1861), Virginia City, Montana (1863), Deadwood, South Dakota (1876),
Tombstone, Arizona (1877), Cripple Creek, Colorado (1891), and the great Alaska-Yukon rush,
beginning at Nome in 1899. Nevada mining is described in glorious detail in another Mark