ts juices during the winters, and drawing up sap
and greenness into the old blades in the first suns of spring. This
bunch-grass grows in great abundance, and it is only in winters of
extreme severity that animals suffer from a lack of nourishing food.

Specks of gold may be found in a pan of dirt from any of these streams,
followed back to the mountain chasm of its source. Upon one of them, in
June, 1863, a party of gold-hunters stopped to camp on their return to
Bannack, after an unsuccessful trip to the Yellowstone. While dinner was
being cooked, one of them washed out a pan of dirt and obtained more
than a dollar. Further washings showed even greater richness; and,
hurrying to Bannack, they returned at once with supplies and friends,
and formed a mining district. In the absence of law, the miners frame
their own law; and so long as its provisions are equal and impartial, it
is everywhere recognized. The general principle of such laws is to grant
a number of linear feet up and down the gulch or ravine to the first
squatter, upon compliance with certain conditions necessary for mutual
benefit. In deliberations upon these laws, technicalities and ornament
are of little weight, and only the plainest common-sense prevails.
Prominent among their conditions was a provision--for the exorcism of
drones--that every claim must be worked a fixed number of days in each
week, or else, in the miners' expressive vocabulary, it should be
considered "jumpable." Compliance with law was never more rigidly
exacted by Lord Eldon than by the miners' judges and courts, and in the
first days of this legislation a hundred revolvers, voiceless before any
principle of justice, yet too ready before any technicality, fixed the
construction of every provision beyond all cavil.

This was the beginning of Virginia Gulch, from which twenty-five
millions of dollars in gold have been taken, and which has to-day a
population of ten thousand souls. The placer proved to be singularly
regular, almost every claim for fifteen miles being found profitable.
From the mouth of the canon to its very end, among snows almost
perpetual, are the one-storied log-cabins, gathered now and then into
clusters, which are called cities, and named by the miner from his old
homes in Colorado and Nevada. In travelling up the crazy road, with
frowning mountains at our left, and yawning pit-holes at our right, we
pass seven of these cities,--Junction, Nevada, Central, Virginia,