generations, born with their feet in the flowers
grown from the mother-gold of decent manhood and glorious womanhood--the
precious metals of the spirit, unalloyed and unafraid.

"They are the true Mother Lode, the bourne of the seekers of gold,
greater, far, than the crazed brains of the old prospectors had the
power to conceive. A further-reaching, broader arc than the most
wondrous rainbow of their imaginings born of dreams, and built of hunger
and despair."

"So shall we find, at last, the Mother Lode, the virginity of the
essence of creation, the beginning and the end. The curve of the circle
which is unchanging, insoluble, omniscient; which shall return to that
which created it; which is all; which is God!"

"'49"

"We have worked our claims,
We have spent our gold,
Our barks are astrand on the bars;
We are battered and old,
Yet at night we behold
Outcroppings of gold in the stars.

Where the rabbits play,
Where the quail all day
Pipe on the chaparral hill;
A few more days,
And the last of us lays
His pick aside and is still.

We are wreck and stray,
We are cast away,
Poor battered old hulks and spars!
But we hope and pray,
On the judgment Day,
We shall strike it, up in the stars.

--Joaquin Miller.

Contents

One Sunday in Stinson's Bar
The Tom Bell Stronghold
The Hanging of Charlie Price
Rattlesnake Dick
Indian Vengeance
Grizzly Bob of Snake Gulch
Curley Coppers the Jack
The Race of the Shoestring Gamblers
The Dragon and the Tomahawk
The Barstow Lynching

One Sunday in Stinson's Bar

I

"On that broad stage of empire won,
Whose footlights were the setting sun;
Whose flats a distant background rose
In trackless peaks of endless snows;
Here genius bows, and talent waits
To copy that but One creates."

--Bret Harte.

Now-a-days when you want to go from San Francisco to the Sierra Nevada
country you step into your perfectly good Packard (or whatever it
is--all the way down to a motorcycle side car), and you ferry across
the bay and the straits, and if the motor-cop isn't around, you come
shooting up the highway forty miles an hour, and at the end of a
glorious five-hour run you are there.

In the early fifties--when there was less to see, too--you to