The Forty-Niners: A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado

The foundation of trouble in California at this time was formal legalism. Legality was made a fetish. The law was a game played by lawyers and not an attempt to get justice done...

From the earliest period Spain had discouraged foreign immigration into California. Her object was neither to attract settlers nor to develop the country, but to retain politica...

This execution naturally occasioned a great storm of indignation among the erstwhile powerful adherents of the law. The ruling, aristocratic class, the so-called chivalry, the b...

In popular estimation the interest and romance of the Forty-niners center in gold and mines. To the close student, however, the true significance of their lives is to be found e...

The Governor of the State at this time was J. Neely Johnson, a politician whose merits and demerits were both so slight that he would long since have been forgotten were it not...

In the westward overland migration the Salt Lake Valley Mormons played an important part. These strange people had but recently taken up their abode in the desert. That was a fo...

By the mid-fifties San Francisco had attained the dimensions of a city. Among other changes of public interest within the brief space of two or three years were a hospital, a li...

Judge Terry was still a thorny problem to handle. After all, he was a Judge of the Supreme Court. At first his attitude was one of apparent humility, but as time went on he rega...

The two streams of immigrants, by sea and overland, thus differed, on the average, in kind. They also landed in the country at different points. The overlanders were generally a...

The discovery of gold--made, as everyone knows, by James Marshall, a foreman of Sutter's, engaged in building a sawmill for the Captain--came at a psychological time.[4]The Mexi...

The dominant people of California have been successively aborigines, _conquistadores_, monks, the dreamy, romantic, unenergetic peoples of Spain, the roaring mélange of Forty-ni...

Of the three roads to California that by Panama was the most obvious, the shortest, and therefore the most crowded. It was likewise the most expensive. To the casual eye this ro...

San Francisco in the early years must be considered, aside from the interest of its picturesqueness and aside from its astonishing growth, as a crucible of character. Men had th...

The overland migration attracted the more hardy and experienced pioneers, and also those whose assets lay in cattle and farm equipment rather than in money. The majority came fr...

In two years the population of the city had vastly increased, until it now numbered over thirty thousand inhabitants. At an equal or greater pace the criminal and lawless elemen...

The military conquest of California was now an accomplished fact. As long as hostilities should continue in Mexico, California must remain under a military government, and such...