ocean of fog, and finally we would be enveloped ourselves. Ascending a
hill a few hundred yards above our house and looking westward over a
great depression or mountain valley, one had in full view the Snowy
range over twenty miles away, with its crests and peaks covered with
perpetual snow, and Mount Gray still further in the distance. In the
fall and winter almost every day local snowstorms and blizzards were
seen playing over this great basin and on the sides of the distant
range. Our location was some nine or ten thousand feet above the sea.
The lightness of the air gave some inconvenience and many surprises to
new comers. They would get out of breath in a few minutes in walking up
a hill. I would wake up several times in a night with a feeling of
suffocation, draw deep breaths for a few minutes and thus get relief
before going to sleep again. It took ten minutes to boil eggs, two to
three hours for potatoes, and beans for dinner were usually put on the
fire at supper time the day before.

Coin and bank bills were seldom seen. The universal currency was
retorted gold, broken up into small pieces, which went at $16 an ounce.
Every man had his buckskin purse tied with a string, to carry his "dust"
in, and every store and house had its small scales, with weights from a
few grains to an ounce, to weigh out the price when any article from a
newspaper to a wagon was purchased. No laws were in force or observed
except miners' laws made by the people of the different districts. When
a few dozen miners, more or less, settled or went to work in a new place
they soon organized, adopted a set of laws and elected officers,
usually a president, secretary, recorder of claims, justice of the
peace and a sheriff or constable. Appeals from the justice, disputes of
importance over mining claims, and criminal cases were tried at a
meeting of the miners of the district. We were in the district of
Russell's gulch. Sometimes we had a meeting of the residents of our own
gulch. One chap there stole a suit of clothes. The residents were
notified to meet at once, and the same day the culprit was tried and
found guilty, and a committee, of which I was one, was appointed to
notify him to leave our locality within two hours and not to return, on
penalty of death. He went on time. Had he been stubborn and refused to
go, I don't know what course the committee would have taken. This member
of it would have been embarrassed. An adjoining district wa