, love of
wealth most of them, and love of lawlessness and crime not a few.
The distance by these routes was about 2,000 miles, though 3,000 miles of trackless wilderness were trod by some of the earlier caravans. Their path lay through vast prairies, over the Rocky range, across the alkaline plains, then up the Sierra Nevada, and down into the garden of California. For weeks and months the emigrants were out of sight of any human habitation ; even the homes of the savages that now and then swept down upon them, were unknown and out of view. On reaching the game region, elk, wild turkeys, and an occasional panther were seen, which some would pursue, but with the exception of now and then a wiser hunter who would strike a noble quarry, their incipient ^kill in the use of fire-arms secured little food. Bands of buffalo and scattering antelope, with the gray wolf, coyote, raven, and other beasts of prey, with nomadic tribes of savage men and women, were the sole occupants of this vast, and sometimes sterile region. At intervals was water, and here and there vegetation. Sometimes grass buried the travellers in its long wavey folds, and again it would be too poor even to feed the fires that an- nually swept over it.
To cross the mountains during winter was prac- tically impossible; and as news of the gold discovery reached the east too late for the summer of 1848, it was not until about the middle of 1849 that the tide of overland emigration fairly set in. Independence, Missouri, was one of the chief points of departure from the northern states, and Sacramento the goal ; or if for southern California, the Santa Fe trail was taken — that old trail, never by any chance passing within shot of the black oak timber that occasionally dotted the horizon or filled the ravines, for the wary old pioneers who had laid it out knew better than that. At this time 30,000 souls and more,each in its glowing ardor, and from its individual history, might
