The How and Why Library/Geography/Section XII
====XII. The Golden Fleece of America==== Did you ever hear the old Greek story of Jason who sailed away to find the gold fleece? Many people think this a story of the world-old hunt for gold mines. Nearly every people has some such story in its history. We have one in our history. Some of your grandfathers can remember when gold was found in California. Some of them were Jasons themselves. They can tell you how they sailed away in prairie schooners (skoon-ers) in search of gold. Prairie schooners were not ships. They were covered wagons drawn by horses or oxen. The seas they sailed were seas of prairie grass.
Don't be ashamed to ask where Cal-i-forn-ia is. Sixty years ago grown up people had to ask where it was and how to get there. They found out that a bird in New York City would have to fly overland three thousand miles, straight west, to get to Cal-i-forn-ia. People wished they had wings too. On half of that land no white people were living. One thousand miles was over high mountains and deserts. It was a terrible journey. Still a great many people went. They thought they would be happier if they had more money.
Men left fields half plowed, houses half built. They sold their farms and ships. In the East they hurried to New York to catch ships, for you could go a long way around by sea. In the West they hurried to Chicago. Chicago was the most western city. It had twenty thousand people. There the gold-seekers bought horses and oxen and covered wagons. They bought flour and bacon and beans; blankets and clothing; guns and tools and water barrels. Eighty thousand men, some women and a few children really went to California that way, the first summer after gold was found. They went in big parties because it wasn't safe to go alone. All the kinds of people who were in America went.
For five hundred miles west of Chicago there were small towns, corn and wheat fields and lonely cabins. Omaha was just a fort in the Indian country. Near it was a French fur-trading post. You remember the French children who came up the Mississippi, don't you? Then it was just wild-der-ness. The fierce Sioux, the Om-a-has and the Paw-nee Indians lived there. Great herds of buffalo fed on the high, dry, grassy plains. There were no trees at all except along the few wide rivers. But, oh, the flowers! Millions of them, red and blue and yellow and white, starred the green or brown grass. The land climbed slowly for five hundred miles, until the plain was a mile above the sea. The air was very pure and clear. Fifty miles away people could see the mountains.
One morning the children climbed out of their beds in the covered wagons to see a wall of mountains. It stood nearly two miles high above the plains. Forests were up the sides, snow on the tops. It took days to cross these mountains through high, winding passes, although they were only twenty miles wide. Brown bears and black bears and grizzly bears were in those mountains, and big-horn sheep. In the wide valley behind them were elk and deer, coy-otes, a kind of small wolves, and villages of prairie dogs. After that came mountains again, and then the wide, burning desert.
Here and then, in the desert, was bunch grass for the horses and oxen, but most of the time there was nothing growing but sage brush and thorny cactus. Little rivers trickled through deep gorges. Sometimes the water was bitter with soda. Streams sank away in the sand. Coy-otes howled at night. Black buzzards circled around the sky. There were rattle-snakes and stinging scor-pions.
Whenever water was found the barrels were filled, and every drop was used carefully. Without water the horses and oxen died. Then, everything was left behind and people stumbled across the burning land. Some died on the way. Those who found water came to another steep mountain range. From the top of this they looked down a long, gentle slope. It was green with trees and bright with mountain brooks. At the bottom was a wide, green valley and a river. Gold, in little grains and lumps, was mixed with the sand and gravel in the river beds.
Mining camps sprang up all along the streams. The miners stood in the water. They scooped up pans full of gravel and sand and washed out the gold. A few men found a great deal of gold and became rich. Most of the miners found little. But very few people went home again. The journey was too hard. Besides, Cal-i-forn-ia had many other kinds of wealth. Today we call it the Wonderland of America. See California, page 308.