all the world was pouring its most adventurous spirits into the
wilderness of California.

This discovery of gold in California and the remarkable inpouring of men
that followed, meant very much to the United States. In a few months it
cleared a wilderness and built up a great state. In one step it advanced
the interests and the importance of the United States half a century in
the policies and the commerce of the Pacific. It threw wide open the
great doors of the West and invited the world to enter. It poured into
the pockets of the people and into the treasury of the United States a
vast amount of gold--alas! soon to be sorely needed to defray the
expenses of the most costly war of the ages. Indeed, when the length and
the breadth of its influence is considered, this discovery of gold in
California becomes one of the most important factors in the developing
of our nation, the great corner-stone in the upbuilding of the West;
and, as such, it deserves a much more important place in the history of
the United States than any historian has yet given to it.

In the present story an attempt has been made, not only to tell an
interesting tale, but to interest the younger generation in this
remarkable and dramatic phase of our national development, possibly the
most picturesque and dramatic period in the history of the nation: to
picture to them how these knights of the pick and the shovel lived and
worked, how they found and wrested the gold from the hard hand of
nature, and to give to them something of an idea of the hardships and
the perils they were obliged to endure while doing it.

The period was a dramatic period, crowded with unusual and startling
happenings, as far removed as possible from the quiet commonplaceness
and routine life of the average boy and girl of to-day; and the reader
is cautioned to remember this--if disposed at any time to think the
incidents narrated in the present tale too improbable or too startling
to have ever happened--that they could not happen to-day, even in
California; but they might have all happened then and there in
California.

The author is one of those who believe that the boys and the girls of
to-day should know something of the foundation stones on which the
superstructure of our national greatness rests, and how and with what
toils and perils they were laid; and, it is in the hope that the reading
of this story will interest them in this, the laying of the great
corner-stone