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Show FROM BRIDGER'S PASS, & c. 47 as for weeks afterward, we were almost constantly meet ing the trains of emigrants returning from California. It was surprising to witness this great tide of emigration from the Land of Gold back to the Eastern States. Hundreds of families, with all their wordly goods and their entire households, were seeking again the homes of their earlier years. I have often heard of the Pacific coast as being most prolific in its multiplication of the genus homo, but I never fully realized the extent to which the " blessings " and " re sponsibilities" of the Californian might be increased until I saw these trains. " A poor man for children," is an old vulgar adage, but I would substitute for it, u A Californian for children." We passed wagon after wagon with juve nile heads in front, juvenile heads behind, juvenile heads to the right, and juvenile heads to the left literally rows of little faces, from two to a dozen years old, peeping out from under the covers all around, and all dirty, healthy, and happy. I inquired the cause of this great exodus from a land into which, only a few years ago, over the same road, the gold-seeking travellers poured like pilgrims into Mecca, and learned that California now is the gold- field only for China men and capitalists. Gold is still abundant in extensive quartz ledges, but is fast disappearing from the beds of streams, where a few years ago so much was obtained by the miner with his pick, shovel, and wash- pan. Extensive machinery is required in mining profitably the ledges to which I refer, and these ledges are now monopolized by capitalists with their immense quartz- crushing and hydrau lic mining machines, and the yield of gold from them, though as great perhaps as ever from quartz mining, is now divided among the few instead of the masses, as formerly. The primitive mode of mining has ceased to be profitable to all save " John Chinaman," who toils hard in the almost exhausted " diggings " for a very small quantity of gold ; and his frugality is such that he will save money where even the prudent Yankee would starve. The latter, therefore, |
