438 RESOUECES OF CALIFORNIA. 



nomadic in character. Most of them have poor claims, or 

 none at all; and they enact laws, or establish customs having 

 the force of laws, that all claims shall be small, usually not 

 more than one hundred feet square. These small claims are 

 worked out in a month or two, or at most in a year or two, 

 and then the miner must go. Perhaps he will find his next 

 claim within ten miles, perhaps not within fifty. When he 

 gets a claim he may not be able to work it out ; he must not 

 only occupy his claim, but he must work it. If he absent him- 

 self from it more than three days, during the season in which 

 it can be worked, for other cause than sickness, it becomes for- 

 feit to whomsoever will seize it. In no case can he who mines 

 in the river-beds, banks, flats, or gulches consider his claim a 

 home for life ; in one case out of a thousand it may employ 

 him for ten years. Quartz and tunnel claims are more lasting, 

 and many of them will not be exhausted in a lifetime ; but- the 

 miners employed in these are a small portion of the total 

 number. 



The miner is not only not tied to his claim by ownership, or 

 the hope of long employment and lasting profit, but he is con- 

 stantly tempted by other tracts wiiich are open to him with- 

 out price. He may consider himself owner of all the unoccu- 

 pied land in the country. He can take and use any of it. Xo 

 one has a better title than he. Every unoccupied gully, flat, 

 hill-side, river-bar, river-bank, and quartz-vein is persistently 

 trying to seduce him. He can scarcely take a pleasure-walk 

 on a Sunday morning without seeing some place which invites 

 him to come there and settle, to desert his old home and make 

 a new one. And when there is nothing to protect him against 

 such temptations, save his belief in the superior mineral wealth 

 of his first location, that belief may often be changed by a 

 very brief examination of the new place. He has no title to 

 the spot where he dwells, no substantial improvements, no 

 property of any kind save such as he can carry on his back at 

 one load. 



The world never saw such a people of travellers as the Call- 



