These California pioneers were restless fellows, but those who came by the overland trail were not without education and refinement; they were, indeed, many of them, the very cream of Americans.  The new scenes and associations, the escape from the influence of home and friends, of wife and children, led some off the dim track, and their restlessness could not well be put down.  Reasonable men could not expect all persons under these circumstances to be models of virtue.  Then the Missouri River seemed to be the western boundary of all civilization, and as these gold hunters launched out on the almost trackless prairies that lay westward of that mighty stream, many considered themselves as entering a country of peculiar freedom, and it was often said that “Law and morality never crossed the Missouri River.”  Passing this great stream was like the crossing of the Rubicon in earlier history, a step that could not be retraced, a launching to victory or death.  Under this state of feeling many showed the cloven foot, and tried to make trouble, but in any emergency good and honest men seemed always in the majority, and those who had thoughts or desires of evil were compelled to submit to honorable and just conclusions.

There were some strange developments of character among these travelers.  Some who had in long attendance at school and church, listened all their lives to teachings of morality and justice, and at home seemed to be fairly wedded to ideas of even rights between man and man, seemed to experience a change of character as they neared the Pacific Coast.  Amiable dispositions became soured, moral ideas sadly blunted, and their whole make-up seemed changed, while others who at home seemed to be of rougher mould, developed principles of justice and humanity, affection almost unbounded, and were true men in every trial and in all places.  A majority of all were thus fair-minded and true.

Men from every state from New Hampshire to Texas gathered on the banks of the Missouri to set out together across the plains.  These men reared in different climates, amid different ways and customs, taught by different teachers in schools of religion and politics, made up a strange mass when thus thrown together; but the good and true came to the surface, and the turbulent and bad were always in a hopeless minority.  Laws seemed to grow out of the very circumstances, and though not in print, flagrant violations would be surely punished.

Some left civilization with all the luxuries money could buy—­fine, well-equipped trains of their own, and riding a fat and prancing steed, which they guided with gloved hands, and seemed to think that water and grass and pleasant camping places would always be found wherever they wished to stop for rest, and that the great El Dorado would be a grand pleasure excursion, ending in a pile of gold large enough to fill their big leather purse.  But the sleek, fat horse grew poor; the gloves with embroidered gauntlet wrists were cast aside; the trains grew small, and the luxuries vanished, and perhaps the plucky owner made the last few hundred miles on foot, with blistered soles and scanty pack, almost alone.  Many of these gay trains never reached California, and many a pioneer who started with high hopes died upon the way, some rudely buried, some left where they fell upon the sands or rocks.