During the forties began a new era of national expansion, somewhat resembling that described in a former chapter, and, like that, bearing fruit eventually in literature.  The cession of Florida to the United States in 1845, and the annexation of Texas in the same year, were followed by the purchase of California in 1847, and its admission as a State in 1850.  In 1849 came the great rush to the California gold fields.  San Francisco, at first a mere collection of tents and board shanties, with a few adobe huts, grew with incredible rapidity into a great city—­the wicked and wonderful city apostrophized by Bret Harte in his poem, San Francisco: 

  “Serene, indifferent of fate,
  Thou sittest at the Western Gate;
  Upon thy heights so lately won
  Still slant the banners of the sun. . . . 
  I know thy cunning and thy greed,
  Thy hard, high lust and willful deed.”

The adventurers of all lands and races who flocked to the Pacific coast, found there a motley state of society between civilization and savagery.  There were the relics of the old Mexican occupation, the Spanish missions, with their Christianized Indians; the wild tribes of the plains—­Apaches, Utes, and Navajoes; the Chinese coolies and washermen, all elements strange to the Atlantic sea-board and the States of the interior.  The gold-hunters crossed, in stages or caravans, enormous prairies, alkaline deserts dotted with sage-brush and seamed by deep canons, and passes through gigantic mountain ranges.  On the coast itself nature was unfamiliar:  the climate was subtropical; fruits and vegetables grew to a mammoth size, corresponding to the enormous redwoods in the Mariposa groves and the prodigious scale of the scenery in the valley of the Yosemite and the snow-capped peaks of the sierras.  At first there were few women, and the men led a wild, lawless existence in the mining camps.  Hard upon the heels of the prospector followed the dram-shop, the gambling-hell, and the dance-hall.  Every man carried his “Colt,” and looked out for his own life and his “claim.”  Crime went unpunished or was taken in hand, when it got too rampant, by vigilance committees.  In the diggings shaggy frontiersmen and “pikes” from Missouri mingled with the scum of eastern cities and with broken-down business men and young college graduates seeking their fortune.  Surveyors and geologists came of necessity, speculators in mining stock and city lots set up their offices in the town; later came a sprinkling of school-teachers and ministers.  Fortunes were made in one day and lost the next at poker or loo.  To-day the lucky miner who had struck a good “lead” was drinking champagne out of pails and treating the town; to-morrow he was “busted,” and shouldered the pick for a new onslaught upon his luck.  This strange, reckless life was not without fascination, and highly picturesque and dramatic elements were present in it.  It was, as Bret Harte says, “an era replete with