"AS I REM - FIMBER THEM."
[To THY EDITOR OP THE " SPECTATOR:1
SIR,—A very interesting book of random Western biographies
has reached me from Salt Lake City. The writer, Judge C. C. Goodwin, must be almost the last of those Argonauts who travelled overland with the "'forty-niners," or on their heels, to the Golden State of California. Judge Goodwin flashes the big Bonanza miners across his pages, and the magic lantern displays a world of men and things which can know no resur- rection on this planet. To have lived his life with Leland Stanford and D. 0. Mills, with C. P. Huntington and Ralston and Sharon, with John Mackay and "Jones of Nevada," and to have seen those great Pacific States hewed out of the red- wood forests, and to live to tell its tale with an unflagging enthusiasm—what a remarkable survival is this! And the tale is of an elemental world, indeed; its huge unearned increments, its undiscriminating generosities ; what a vast unending gamble the lives of the Argonauts !
John Bidwell was nominated on the Prohibition ticket for the Presidency of the United States so lately as 1892 and polled a great vote. Judge Goodwin tells how Bidwell drifted west from the Ohio River in 1842, with all his goods in an ox wagon. Crossing the Rocky Mountains at some point in northern Colorado, he headed west through the terrible and utterly unknown Humboldt Desert, to pioneer the northern limit of what men now call " Death Valley."
" It was enough to break the heart of any man thrust out on that awful waste—no trail to follow, animals growing weaker and weaker as the difficulties of the trail increased, the grass giving way at last and nought in view save the desert, and finally the scaling of the Sierras at a point which mon have ever since evaded, so terrible is it. How that little company survived it without growing daft is a marvel that grows in magnitude the more it is studied. The horror of the day, the terrible silence of the night, the awful fatigue, the impossibility of return, the hopelessness of the advance, all maks of the journey one of the most striking achievements of the age."
We gather incidentally the history of the great " Bonanza " mines upon the " Mother Lode." How Alyinza Hayward and Jones, both alive but yesterday, got the Crown Point mine, and bow the shares " in a very few months" jumped from half-a- dollar to eighteen hundred. And here, too, is an amazing story of a fortune.
"Thomas H. Williams was one of Virginia City's great lawyers. He carried through successfully a difficult lawsuit and his client gave him a small fee and one thousand eight hundred shares of
Consolidated Virginia Stock. Williams tried to sell it, but the mine was in borasco then, and on the stock board was rated at only a few cents a share. But after awhile whispers began to circulate that there was something in Consolidated Virginia, and the stock began to rise. Williams woke up ono morning to find himself worth twelve million dollars."
Two and a quaker millions sterling for conducting a success- ful lawsuit! Ii is hardly conceivable that a man still lives and writes with the vivid picturesqueness of an eye-witness about all this "winning of the West" in the early 'forties. And there is at least one other survivor of that gallant hand whose name frequently occurs in these bright pages, Mr. J. B. Haggin of the Anaconda.—I am, Sir, &c.,
MORETON FREWEN.
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