It was a driving, vigorous, restless population in those days.  It was a curious population.  It was the only population of the kind that the world has ever seen gathered together, and it is not likely that the world will ever see its like again.  For observe, it was an assemblage of two hundred thousand young men—­not simpering, dainty, kid-gloved weaklings, but stalwart, muscular, dauntless young braves, brimful of push and energy, and royally endowed with every attribute that goes to make up a peerless and magnificent manhood—­the very pick and choice of the world’s glorious ones.  No women, no children, no gray and stooping veterans,—­none but erect, bright-eyed, quick-moving, strong-handed young giants—­the strangest population, the finest population, the most gallant host that ever trooped down the startled solitudes of an unpeopled land.  And where are they now?  Scattered to the ends of the earth—­or prematurely aged and decrepit—­or shot or stabbed in street affrays—­or dead of disappointed hopes and broken hearts—­all gone, or nearly all —­victims devoted upon the altar of the golden calf—­the noblest holocaust that ever wafted its sacrificial incense heavenward.  It is pitiful to think upon.

It was a splendid population—­for all the slow, sleepy, sluggish-brained sloths staid at home—­you never find that sort of people among pioneers —­you cannot build pioneers out of that sort of material.  It was that population that gave to California a name for getting up astounding enterprises and rushing them through with a magnificent dash and daring and a recklessness of cost or consequences, which she bears unto this day—­and when she projects a new surprise, the grave world smiles as usual, and says “Well, that is California all over.”

But they were rough in those times!  They fairly reveled in gold, whisky, fights, and fandangoes, and were unspeakably happy.  The honest miner raked from a hundred to a thousand dollars out of his claim a day, and what with the gambling dens and the other entertainments, he hadn’t a cent the next morning, if he had any sort of luck.  They cooked their own bacon and beans, sewed on their own buttons, washed their own shirts —­blue woollen ones; and if a man wanted a fight on his hands without any annoying delay, all he had to do was to appear in public in a white shirt or a stove-pipe hat, and he would be accommodated.  For those people hated aristocrats.  They had a particular and malignant animosity toward what they called a “biled shirt.”

It was a wild, free, disorderly, grotesque society!  Men—­only swarming hosts of stalwart men—­nothing juvenile, nothing feminine, visible anywhere!

In those days miners would flock in crowds to catch a glimpse of that rare and blessed spectacle, a woman!  Old inhabitants tell how, in a certain camp, the news went abroad early in the morning that a woman was come!  They had seen a calico dress hanging out of a wagon down at the camping-ground—­sign of emigrants from over the great plains.  Everybody went down there, and a shout went up when an actual, bona fide dress was discovered fluttering in the wind!  The male emigrant was visible.  The miners said: