cisco with all objects usable
and unusable made the following years astounding from an economic point
of view; but not less bizarre was the social development, nor less
extraordinary the problems of state-building in a society "morally and
socially tried as no other American community ever has been tried"
(Royce). There was of course no home life in early California. In 1850
women numbered 8% of the population, but only 2% in the mining
counties. The miners were an energetic, covetous, wandering, abnormally
excitable body of men. Occasionally a kind of frenzy even would seem to
seize on them, and lured by the hope of new deposits of unheard-of
richness thousands would flock on unfounded rumours to new and perhaps
distant localities, where many might perish from disease and starvation,
the rest returning in poverty and rags. Such were the Kern River fever
of 1855 and the greater "Fraser River rush" of 1858, the latter, which
took perhaps 20,000 men out of the state, causing a terrible amount of
suffering. Many interior towns lost half their population and some
virtually all their population as a result of this emigration; and it
precipitated a real estate crash in San Francisco that threatened
temporary ruin. Mining times in California brought out some of the most
ignoble and some of the best traits of American character. Professor
Josiah Royce has pictured the social-moral process by which society
finally impressed its "claims on wayward and blind individuals" who
"sought wealth and not a social order," and so long as possible shirked
all social obligations. Through varied instruments--lynch law, popular
courts, vigilance committees--order was, however, enforced, better as
times went on, until there was a stable condition of things. In the
economic life and social character of California to-day the legacies of
1848 are plain.

Disputed land grants.

The slavery question was not settled for California in 1850. Until the
Civil War the division between the Whig and Democratic parties, whose
organization in California preceded statehood, was essentially based on
slavery. The struggle fused with the personal contests of two men,
rivals for the United States Senate, William McKendree Gwin (1805-85,
U.S. senator, 1850-55 and 1857-61), the leader of the pro-slavery party,
and David Colbreth Broderick (1819-1859), formerly a leader of Tammany
in New York, and after 1857 a member from California of the United
States Senate,