thought he'd go into Fayetteville an' see if, maybe, he could raise a
few dollars on the stone, as a curiosity. He took it to a jeweler, who
said he thought there might be gold in it, an' told the young fellow
to come back in the afternoon.

"When Reed came back, the jeweler showed him a thin wire o' gold,
about as long as a lead pencil, an' said that was all the gold in the
chunk. He offered Reed $3.50 for the gold an' Reed took it. How much
the jeweler kept for himself, no one can't say.

"That started a little local talk, an' one or two men begun
prospectin' in a shiftless sort o' way. They found nothin'. In 1813,
some placers were found an' there was a mild rush, but it died right
out. There was gold there, sure enough, but scattered so's a man
didn't earn more'n a day's wages at washin'. Jest the same, all the
gold in the United States came from North Carolina for twenty years
after that, more'n a hundred thousand dollars' worth bein' sent to
the Mint. But that's durn little, when you come to look at it, less'n
fourteen dollars a day. An' that's not much for a bunch o' men!"

"No," admitted Owens, "you couldn't start a gold rush on that. And the
second strike, Jim?"

"That was the Georgia deposits, at Dahlonega, where Humphrey came
from. They're workin' yet, though small potatoes beside Californy an'
Colorado.

"Californy was jest about uninhabited, then. There was only fifteen
thousand folks in the whole durn State in 1848. Over a hundred
thousand more came in the two years followin'. O' that lot, ninety per
cent. was prospectors an' the rest was sharks, livin' off 'em. At the
time o' the strike, 'Frisco didn't boast a hundred houses wi' white
folks in them, an' they didn't know nothin' about Georgia an' Carolina
gold.

"On May 8th, though, one o' the mill-hands come down from Sutter's
Mill. He'd quit work to try gold-findin' on his own, an' takin' a tip
from Humphrey, he'd washed out 23 ounces in four days. A 'Frisco man
paid him $500 for his dust, cash down. That was good earnin's for four
days.

"Sudden, the fever hit! The news got over the little town like a
prairie fire durin' a dry spell. By night, half the town was talkin'
gold; next mornin', the other half. Nine out o' every ten men quit
work. A pick an' shovel an' a tin pan was worth a hundred dollars
before night. One man paid a thousand dollars for an outfit, includin'
a tent an' a month's grub. He was found dead half-way to the diggings,
murd