iv PREFACE. 
by the liberality with which the mines were thrown open 
and made free to all comers; by the rush of adventurers 
of every color and of every tongue; by the prices of her 
labor, and the rates of her interest for money, double those of 
the other American states, and quadruple those of Europe ; 
by the vast extent of her gold-fields, and the facility with 
which they could be worked; by the auriferous rivers in 
which fortunes could be made in a week ; by antediluvian 
streams richer than those of the present era; by beds of 
lava, which, after filling up the beds of antediluvian rivers, 
were left, by the washing away of the banks and adjacent 
plains, to stand as mountains, marking the position of great 
treasures beneath; by nuggets each worth a fortune; by 
the peculiar nature of her mining industry; by new and 
strange inventions; by the washing down of mountains ; 
by filling the rivers of the Sacramento basin with thick 
mud throughout the year; by lifting a hundred mountains 
from their beds; by six thousand miles of mining ditches ; 
by aqueducts less durable, but scarcely less wonderful 
than those of ancient Rome ; by silver mines that promise 
to rival those of Peru; by quicksilver mines surpassing 
those of Spain; by great deposits of sulphur and asphal- 
tum; by lakes of borax; by mud volcanoes, geysers, and 
natural bridges; by a valley of romantic and sublime beauty, 
shut in by walls nearly perpendicular and more than three- 
quarters of a mile high, with half a dozen great cascades, 
in one of which the water at two leaps falls more than the 
third of a mile; by a climate the most conducive to health, 
and the most favorable to mental and physical exertion—so 
temperate on the middle coast that ice is never seen and 
thin summer clothing never worn, and that January differs 
in average temperature only eight degrees of Fahrenheit 
from July; by a singular botany, including the most 
splendid known group of coniferous trees, of which half a 
