200 NEW TRACKS IN NORTH AMERICA. 
reward that led the early Spaniards to explore places, stilf 
unsettled, in their search for an “El Dorado.” Could the 
varied and adventurous experience of these searchers for gold 
be written we should have a record of daring and peril tha 
no fiction could approach, and the very sight of gold would 
suggest to our minds some scene of startling tragedy, some 
story of hair-breadth escape. Could we but gather and set 
down in proper form the geographical knowledge possessed 
by these men, we should know as much of the western wild s 
as we now do of the long-settled portions of the Americs n 
continent. 3 4 
Tt has fallen to the lot of one of these prospectors to be 
the learned at home and abroad, who could but theorise 
before his voyage as to the stupendous chasms or cafior 
through which the Colorado cleaves its course, | 
the swagger or bravado peculiar to the majority of frontier 
men. Like thousands of our own young men, well enough 
off at home, he grew weary of the slow but certain method 
of earning his bread by regular employment at a stated 
salary. He had heard of men leaping into wealth at a singl 
_ bound in the Western gold-fields, and for years he yearned to 
— go to the land where fortune was so lavish of her favours : 
