The Cave of Gold

The Cave of Gold, by Everett
McNeil

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Title: The Cave of Gold A Tale of California in '49
Author: Everett McNeil

Release Date: December 17, 2006 [eBook #20126]
Language: English
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THE CAVE OF GOLD
A Tale of California in '49
by
EVERETT McNEIL
Author of "Fighting with Fremont," "In Texas with Davy Crockett,"
"With Kit Carson in the Rockies," Etc.

New York E. P. Dutton & Company 681 Fifth Ave.
First Printing, January, 1911 Second Printing, August. 1919 Third
Printing, June, 1926 Printed in the U.S.A.

TO THE DESCENDANTS YOUNG OR OLD OF THE HARDY
FORTY-NINERS THIS STORY OF THE EXCITING DAYS OF THE
DISCOVERY OF GOLD IN CALIFORNIA IS HOPEFULLY
DEDICATED

[Illustration: "YOU LIE!" AND THE HARD FIST LANDED
SQUARELY ON THE MAN'S CHIN.]

FOREWORD
On a cold January morning of 1848, James Wilson Marshall picked up
two yellow bits of metal, about the size and the shape of split peas,
from the tail-race of the sawmill he was building on the South Fork of
the American River, some forty-five miles northeast of Sutter's Fort,
now Sacramento City. These two yellow pellets proved to be gold; and
soon it was discovered that all the region thereabouts was thickly sown
with shining particles of the same precious yellow metal. A few months
later and 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
in the upbuilding of the West, that this tale of the Discovery