I Can Well Imagine Him, A Slight Boyish Figure,
Flitting From Camp To Camp, Wrapped In His Own Thoughts, Keeping His Own
Counsel.
Yet he alone of that little band, unless you except Mark Twain,
possessed the divine spark we call "genius.
" Centuries after the names
of all the rest are buried in oblivion, Bret Harte's stories of the
Argonauts in the mining towns of California will remain the classics
they have already become.
Yet as before stated, when once I got fairly started on the road, the
pioneers themselves and their worthy descendants absorbed my interest
and assumed the center of the stage to the exclusion, for the time
being, of the romancers; who, after all, each in his own fashion,
depicted only what most appealed to him in the characters of these same
men and their contemporaries. Bayard Taylor in his interesting work "El
Dorado," the first edition of which appeared in 1850, thus states his
opinion of the men of '49:
"Abundance of gold does not always beget, as moralists tell us, a
grasping and avaricious spirit. The principles of hospitality were as
faithfully observed in the rude tents of the diggers, as they could be
by the thrifty farmers of the North and West. The cosmopolitan cast of
character in California, resulting in the commingling of so many races,
and the primitive mode of life, gave a character of good-fellowship to
all its members; and in no part of the world have I ever seen help more
freely given to the needy, or more ready co-operation in any human
proposition.
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