438 RESOURCES 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 ont 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 which 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. No 
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 
anew 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 Cali- 
