related by eye-witnesses. Among them was the following:
After the first rush to the placers, and when the building of permanent towns had fairly commenced, lumber fit for building purposes became in great demand, and in the forest near the sea coast, where transportation was readily obtainable, immense camps sprung up, and the scenes of the flush times in the mines were repeated. Lumber was worth hundreds of dollars per thousand feet, and money was gained and lost with a lavishness and rapidity almost incredible in these days. In one camp in the redwood forests of Humboldt, not far from the present town of Eureka, there were some six hundred men at work, and business was lively, in every sense of the word. There were two "stores" at which articles for miners' and lumbermen's use—heavy clothing, groceries, provisions, and notably whisky and cards—were dispensed at round prices. Every store in those days was a saloon, and a gambling-house as well; and poker, monte, faro and fights were the order of the day and night. It was no uncommon thing for a prosperous gambler on a Sunday morning to knock the head out of a barrel of whisky, put a tin cup in it, and set it in the middle of the store, for all comers to help themselves free of charge. And it was the dearest whisky man ever drank at that, for nine out of every ten who partook of it left from ten to a thousand times its nominal value at the gambler's bank before he went home that night. The feast of Belshazzar was nothing to the wild carousals which took place sometimes in
