Down the Mother Lode | Page 5

foothills
of the Sierra Mountains. Down about Melones, and Sonora, and
Angel's Camp it goes, and through Table Mountain, and under Jackass
Hill. It comes north, and north, past Coloma, and Auburn, to Nevada
City and then it disappears."
I remembered the engineer's statement, but was silent.
"It was the haunt of Harte, and Twain, and Canfield in the north; it was
the bank of such men as Hopkins, Crocker, Huntington and Stanford;
the foundation of one of the greatest states in the Union, the Mother
Lode, the Mother of Gold!"
"Child, my old eyes have watched it spread for nearly ninety years - the
power of gold, and of the men who came to seek it, The influence of
gold controlled by the human intellect. I am old and tired and soon I
shall sleep, but the old see clearly, too clearly, that which they are
leaving, and that to which they pass."
"'Thus, facing the stars, we go out amongst them into darkness'," I
quoted, softly.
"Not to darkness, but to eternal light, to rise again from the Mother
Lode to mingle in the busy lives of men."
"'Who maketh His messengers with two, and three, and four pairs of
wings'."
"Exactly. To be born again, and yet again. The real mother-vein of gold
was imbued in the men shaped by the life of the frontier. It was the
cornerstone of great fortunes, of families, of enterprises, of
achievements which are peculiarly California's own.
"It was the clearing house and open sesame of the vast trade of the
Orient which is just coming into being; the foundation for the bridge of
gold which shall reach across the seas; a fit monument to posterity
which shall be erected with all the lightness and grace and stability of
the present cultured generations, born with their feet in the flowers
grown from the mother-gold of decent manhood and glorious

womanhood - the precious metals of the spirit, unalloyed and unafraid.
"They are the true Mother Lode, the bourne of the seekers of gold,
greater, far, than the crazed brains of the old prospectors had the power
to conceive. A further-reaching, broader arc than the most wondrous
rainbow of their imaginings born of dreams, and built of hunger and
despair."
"So shall we find, at last, the Mother Lode, the virginity of the essence
of creation, the beginning and the end. The curve of the circle which is
unchanging, insoluble, omniscient; which shall return to that which
created it; which is all; which is God!"

"'49"
"We have worked our claims, We have spent our gold, Our barks are
astrand on the bars; We are battered and old, Yet at night we behold
Outcroppings of gold in the stars.
Where the rabbits play, Where the quail all day Pipe on the chaparral
hill; A few more days, And the last of us lays His pick aside and is still.
We are wreck and stray, We are cast away, Poor battered old hulks and
spars! But we hope and pray, On the judgment Day, We shall strike it,
up in the stars.
- Joaquin Miller.

Contents

One Sunday in Stinson's Bar The Tom Bell Stronghold The Hanging of
Charlie Price Rattlesnake Dick Indian Vengeance Grizzly Bob of Snake
Gulch Curley Coppers the Jack The Race of the Shoestring Gamblers
The Dragon and the Tomahawk The Barstow Lynching

Copyright, 1922
By Vivia Hemphill

One Sunday in Stinson's Bar
I
"On that broad stage of empire won, Whose footlights were the setting
sun; Whose flats a distant background rose In trackless peaks of endless

snows; Here genius bows, and talent waits To copy that but One
creates."
- Bret Harte.

Now-a-days when you want to go from San Francisco to the Sierra
Nevada country you step into your perfectly good Packard (or whatever
it is - all the way down to a motorcycle side car), and you ferry across
the bay and the straits, and if the motor-cop isn't around, you come
shooting up the highway forty miles an hour, and at the end of a
glorious five-hour run you are there.
In the early fifties - when there was less to see, too - you took more
time to it. You came to Sacramento on the river boat. Then if you were
rich, you bought a horse or a mule and rode for the rest of your journey.
If you were poor, or thrifty perhaps, you walked, or tried to get a ride
on one of the ox-freight teams which plied their way across Haggin
Grant to Auburn and Dutch Flat, or to Folsom and Coloma.
Later a railway was built as far as Auburn station, then situated at a
point three miles east of Loomis which was at that