as she passed she reached a sword of silver through the pines and laid it at my feet.

We are right under Mount Shasta here, in his eternal world of snow; and yet is Mount Shasta a day's ride. distant! This long, pine-covered and oak-clad water-shed, sloping down toward the south from Mount Shasta, is the California Piedmont. It is much like the Piedmont of Italy and not unlike the famous Piedmont of Virginia. This region is fairly well watered from natural springs which bubble up out of the ground, fed by melting snows on the majestic mountain before us, and out of which flow the headwaters of the Sacramento river. And a little cost and care in diverting this river and the smaller mountain streams out over this rich soil would make it very profitable.

Nearly all this ground that lies in ravines and gulches has been washed over and over, some of it five and even ten times, for gold. It was a famously rich mining camp forty years ago, and here I dug for gold, working by the side

of strong men, when but a lad. This new generation may be curious to know how the various mines throughout California were found. Let me briefly state that the first men in these mines were a sort of madmen. Like Cortez and his men, they expected every day, every hour, to come upon untold wealth. Men really expected to find houses of gold, or at least nuggets as big as barns. I remember that I always, day after day, year after year, expected, sometime, and in some strange and sudden way, to stumble on a colossal fortune. Yet, if I should receive twenty-five cents a day for what work I did in the mines, there would today be quite a balance to my credit, and a hundred thousand miners could say as much.

No, the mines never paid the men who worked them, greatly, whether in this rich camp or elsewhere. But the gold that was dug out contributed to the wealth of the world and carried it on and up, so that no one should now complain. The great big lumps of gold, however, were never found. You can

-they would gather in the chief's or other great bark lodges, and tell and listen to stories

search the gold history of all Australia through and through, as well as California, and be surprised to learn that there was never yet a single lump or nugget of gold found too heavy to be handled by even a woman. Many nuggets were found, it is true, that were very promising in weight and size, but that was all. Yet they were like alluring beacon lights, and every new nugget, or new and rich deposit of dust, only excited men the more. So, like the

gold-hunting Spaniards, they pierced every mountain pass, every canyon, and burrowed in the bed of every accessible river on the western slope before they had been here a single year. It is a notable fact that all the placer mines of California were found during the first three months. The Comstock mines, bear in mind, are of quite another character. In the placers we washed the gold out of the dirt and put it in our purses the same day, clean

and ready for the mint, while the gold or silver from the Comstock and other similar mines, is ground out of solid rock by a long and tedious process. I remember we used to wonder why we never found any silver. But while perhaps as many mountains of silver as of gold have been washed down, scattering silver dust up and down the gulches, you must know that silver dust corrodes and perishes, while gold dust endures forever.

These mines here in Shasta were found by four Oregonians. They made a "rocker" out of boards split from a sugar-pine tree, which they cut down for that purpose, and "rocked" out their fortune in a few weeks. Then they pushed on through the wilderness to their homes in Oregon, and sent a small party by water to San Francisco to get a stronger force and push up the Sacramento river to this spot from which I now write. Ex-Governor Boggs, of Missouri, whose wife was a daughter of Daniel Boone, threw his sons and his fortune into the expedition and, of course, expected tremendous But, alas, for miner's luck! the great-grandsons of Daniel Boone, who was one of the leaders of the expedition, told me only a few days since, in San Francisco, that nearly all the cattle and some of the men perished from the extreme heat and for want of water; and the rest were glad to leave everything behind them in the wilderness and escape with their lives.

One of

But when I first came to this place, in 1855, it was very far from being a wilderness. It was here that I first saw a brick house or a hotel of any sort above the size and capacity of a roadside inn. This, indeed, was my first city, my first glimpse of civilization. I had been badly hit in one of the Indian battles, a little further on up the river toward the Oregon line, and was brought down here for treatment. An arrow had struck me so deep and so near the base of the brain that I was a mental and physical wreck. I could scarcely speak and my memory was a shadow. But

oh, the heart, the heart of those miners! I was brought into the place on a mule, one evening after the many lamps were lighted in the one long and denselycrowded street, and it seems to me I

shall never see anything so thrilling as was that scene-the braying mules, the Mexican packers or drivers, the redshirted miners crowding each other good-naturedly or shouting hurriedly back and forth and across. Splendid! I climbed Mount Shasta for the first time in 1854, as a sort of helper to Mountain Joe, one of Fremont's men, and a friend of my father's. He had located at what is now Castle Crag, and was making mountaineering a business. On this occasion, he was guiding the first party of men and women that had ever made the ascent. So said the Indians who went with us. We took the same route as now, from Sisson, then known as Strawberry valley, although there is a better route via Nowowa valley, south side. What a shame that this beautiful Nowowa should now be known as Squaw valley! There is a still better way up to the summit by way of Pilgrim Camp, quite the other side from Sisson.

There were then three tribes of Indians encircling the mountain, each having its own language, traditions and customs, and all splendid fighters; fighting among themselves like dogs, almost like Christians! Joe, wisely kept at peace with Modoc, Pit and Shasta for months, but bad white men came and he was badly hurt, barely got out alive.

he

But ah, these few months of peace! they were perfect. We rode quite around Mount Shasta, time after time. We were made quite at home with the terrible Modocs, or Nomads, who had destroved one third of Fremont's force and but for Kit Carson would have blotted out his entire little band in blood.

But Indian life to an active mind is monotonous, listless, dull and almost melancholy. We rode, we fished, we hunted, and hunted and fished and rode, and that was nearly all we could do by day. If, however, we had no intense delights, we had no great concern. dreamed dreams and built castles higher than the blue columns of smoke that waved toward the heavens through the dense black boughs above. And so the season wore away.

We

Under all this, of course, there was another current, deep and exhaustless.

Indians have their loves and hates, and, as they have but little else, these filled up most of our lives. That I had mine I do not deny; and how much this. had to do with my remaining here I do not care to say. Nor can I bring my will to write of myself in this connection. These things must remain untold. They were sincere then and shall be sacred now.

At night, when no wars or excitements of any kind stirred the village, they would gather in the chief's or other great bark lodges around the fires, and tell and listen to stories; a red wall of men in a great circle, the women a little back, and the children still behind, asleep in the skins and blankets. How silent! You never hear but one voice at a time in an Indian village.

The Indians say the Great Spirit made this mountain first of all. "Can you not see how it is?" they say. "He first pushed down snow and ice from the skies through a hole which he made in the blue heavens by turning a stone round and round, then he stepped out of the clouds on to the mountain top and descended and planted the trees all around by putting his finger on the ground. The sun melted the snow, and the water ran down and nurtured the trees and made the rivers. After that he made the fish for the rivers out of the small end of his staff. He made the birds by blowing some leaves which he took up from the ground among the trees. After that he made the beasts out of the remainder of his stick, but made the grizzly bear out of the big end, and made him master over all the others. He made the grizzly so strong that he feared him himself, and would have to go up on the top of the mountain out of sight in the forest to sleep at night, lest the grizzly, who was much more strong and cunning then than now, should devour him in his sleep. Afterward, the Great Spirit, wishing to remain on earth and make the sea and some more land, converted Mount Shasta, by a great deal of labor, into a wigwam, and built a fire in the center of it and made it a pleasant home. After that his family came down, and they all have lived in the mountain ever since."

They say say that before the white man came they could see the fire ascending from the mountain by night and the smoke by day, every time they chose to look in that direction.

This, I have no doubt, is true. Mount Shasta is, even now, in one sense of the word, an active volcano. Sometimes only hot steam, bringing up with it a fine, powdered sulphur, staining yellow the snow and ice, is thrown off. Then again boiling water, clear at one time, and then muddy enough, boils up through the fissures and flows off into a little pool within a few hundred feet of the summit. Sometimes you hear most unearthly noises.even a mile from the little crater, as you ascend, and when you approach, a tumult like a thousand engines with whistles of as many keys; then again you find the mountain on its good behavior and sober enough.

When Vice-President Stevenson and party passed this way a few years back, I went along, securing from each a written statement as to what he thought the most impressive point from which to contemplate this solitary monarch of mountains. Strangely enough, no two agreed. And stranger still, each changed his mind many times as the mountain of White Silence suddenly burst upon us from behind some black headland like a mighty leaping thing of life.

Starr King's favorite point of view was from the top of a butte near Yreka. Mount Shasta, or any other solitary snow peak, should be seen from the summit of some lesser mountain, with clouds below and between. To my mind, the one supreme place to take off your hat is the summit of the Siskiyou mountains just before plunging down into the Rouge (Red) river valley. Look back! Lone as God and white as a mid-winter moon Chaste Butte starts up, sudden and solitary, from out the unbroken black forests of northern California, as if a part of another world. Here it was the French explorers, climbing up out of the gorge of Red river, stood and gave the mighty white mountain its name. Here I first contemplated this mighty white splendor in its stately solitude, and said, "Lone as God," longer ago than most readers can remember.