PIONEER DAYS

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 102, 1 May 1937, Page 26

PIONEER DAYS

FAMOUS COLD RUSHES

A vivid account of famous gold rushes in America is given with a wealth of picturesque detail by G. C. Quiett in "Pay Dirt: A Panorama of American Gold Rushes." In the prologue the reader meets the Californian carpenter, John Marshall, curiously picking a few shining specks from a mill-race on Johann Augustus Sutter's estate at Coloma, and breathing the word "Gold!" that started not only the greatest gold rush, but the greatest mass dash into the unknown since the Crusades. Incidentally, he ruined Suiter, an Immensely wealthy land owner till a horde of gold-mad prospectors settled like locusts, stole his herds, tore up his irrigated fields, and ruined him—the owner of land containing the riches of the Indies.

At first Sutter hoped to keep the discovery a secret for six weeks, till he could finish his flourmill; but his Mormon workmen, crawling about on their stomachs, scratching up little nuggets with' a knife, wrote to other Mormons in confidence, and soon the fever had spread until it infected the whole world. On the day that Brann:.a reached San Francisco, brandishing a flask-of gold and bellowing "Gold! Gold! Gold!" the'town's "200 inhabitants had practically all set out, leaving (=> :ttie' editor of the "Californian" lamented) fields half-tilled, houses halfbuilt, and (worst of all), nobody to print or read the "Californian." The old Californian titles by which Sutter and others held land were disallowed, and the unhappy man, robbed of the millions, for which he had worked so hard, spent the rest of his life oh a small pension, a shabby old man, buttonholing Congressmen and trying to obtain redress. There are few more pathetic figures in history. No wonder HoUywgod has made a film about him. ■ . Marshall was given . nothing at all —treatment he was never tired of contrasting with the £15,000 given to another pioneer, Hargraves, by the Australian and English Governments:

The incredible hardships endured by the Forty-niners- make unpleasant reading, but there is something very gripping in the story of the boom days of Montana, of the gamblers and des r peradoes of Cripple Creek and Deadwood Gulch and Bannack, of the rush to Alaska and the trail of '98. We meet prospectors who became milliona" in "a \ day, tinhorn gamblers, saloon-keepers, bandits, and mass-mur-derers like George Ives, whose manners were so charming and scruples such that he shouted to his victims to turn round, so that he wouldn't have to shoot them in the back.

In Mr. Quiett's pages we meet, too, notorious characters like: Calamity Jane; Soapy Smith, whose name was derived from his trade as a pedlar and was no reflection on his admittedly polished manners; Sheriff Wyatt Earp, one of the genuine herpes of the West, who cleaned up the roaring frontier town of Dodge City as an apprenticeship to his still more suicidal job in Tombstone, Arizona.

Most picturesque of all, perhaps, was Wild Bill Hick.k, still a legend for the bewildering speed and accuracy of his. gunplay. He leapt into fame in 1861, when he shot four horse-thieves dead in less than as many seconds and polished off six others with his knife; and thousands of boys' stories have kept alive his reputation as the greatest gunman and killer of outlaws and Indians America has ever known. Of his brilliance of technique, there is no doubt: he exhibited.'. it' in Buffalo Bill's circus until a property man annoyed him with a spotlight and Wild Bill instantly shot it out. Dispassionate research suggests, however, that the horse-thieves he slew en masse were probably law-abiding citizens trying vto; collect.a debt, and it is a fact that-.h.is ruthlessness; with a gun (carried in a trick holster ' under his left arm) eventually earned him first place on a list of public enemies invited to leave Cheyenne. As a gesture, he cut tho notice to pieces with his bowie knife and stayed thre^ months.