It was amazing how wild the people became all over the Pacific coast.  In San Francisco and other large cities barbers, hack- drivers, servant-girls, merchants, and nearly every class of people would club together and send agents representing all the way from $5,000 to $500,000 or more to buy mines.  They would buy anything. in the shape of quartz, whether it contained any mineral value or not.

The letters which went from the Aurora miner to Orion are humanly documentary.  They are likely to be staccato in their movement; they show nervous haste in their composition, eagerness, and suppressed excitement; they are not always coherent; they are seldom humorous, except in a savage way; they are often profane; they are likely to be violent.  Even the handwriting has a terse look; the flourish of youth has gone out of it.  Altogether they reveal the tense anxiety of the gambling mania of which mining is the ultimate form.  An extract from a letter of April is a fair exhibit: 

Work not yet begun on the “Horatio and Derby”—­haven’t seen it yet.  It is still in the snow.  Shall begin on it within 3 or 4 weeks —­strike the ledge in July:  Guess it is good—­worth from $30 to $50 a foot in California....

    Man named Gebhart shot here yesterday while trying to defend a claim
    on Last Chance Hill.  Expect he will die.

    These mills here are not worth a d—­n—­except Clayton’s—­and it is
    not in full working trim yet.

    Send me $40 or $50—­by mail-immediately.  I go to work to-morrow
    with pick and shovel.  Something’s got to come, by G—­, before I let
    go here.

By the end of April work had become active in the mines, though the snow in places was still deep and the ground stony with frost.  On the 28th he writes: 

I have been at work all day blasting and digging, and d—­ning one of our new claims—­“Dashaway”—­which I don’t think a great deal of, but which I am willing to try.  We are down, now, 10 or 12 a feet.  We are following down under the ledge, but not taking it out.  If we get up a windlass to-morrow we shall take out the ledge, and see whether it is worth anything or not.

It must have been hard work picking away at the flinty ledges in the cold; and the “Dashaway” would seem to have proven a disappointment, for there is no promising mention of it again.  Instead, we hear of the “Flyaway;” and “Annipolitan” and the “Live Yankee” and of a dozen others, each of which holds out the beacon of hope for a little while and then passes from notice forever.  In May it is the “Monitor” that is sure to bring affluence, though realization is no longer regarded as immediate.

    To use a French expression, I have “got my d—–­d satisfy” at last. 
    Two years’ time will make us capitalists, in spite of anything.