IK THE JOURNEY OVERLAND
with the ill- covered graves of men and women, ghastly skeletons of golden hopes. Some were overtaken by the snow, and losing their way, perished ; some were shot by savages; some fell by disease. In the words of a pilgrim, "the last part of the emigration resembled the rout of an army, with its distressed multitudes of helpless sufferers, rather than the voluntary movement of a free people." On reaching the Truckee, their weary spirits grew buoyant again; for now the trail was good, water and grass abundant, and the first tall trees which they had seen for eight hundred miles, appear. So on the survivors come, sometimes worn out by famine and fatigue, over sterile hills and scorch- ing Saharas, through the valleys of death and from the plains of desolation, heedless if not heartless, up by the pathway through the cloven granite, through the mountain pass, then zig-zag down the steep slopes, and beneath the shadowy pines of the Sierra, empty- ing all that is left of them and their belongings into the valley of the Sacramento, or into the garden of Los Angeles, ready after their toilsome march to reap and riot with the best of them.
Fortunate indeed are they if their last flour be not cooked, and the last morsel of rancid bacon be not de- voured, before reaching their journey's end. Once among the settlers, however, and they are sure of the means of appeasing their hunger ; for there 3^et remains something of that substantial hospitality which the poorest western emigrant would think it shame to re- fuse another.
Now they may revel in the realms of golden dreams. Here, indeed, is the promised land; and these dirt- colored, skin-cracked, blinded, and footsore travellers, whose stomach linings are worn and wasted from car- rying foul food and fetid water — let them enjoy it. Stripping off their ragged and gritty clothes, the newly-arrived may bathe in the inviting streams, drinking in the cool, refreshing water at every pore ; they may put on fresh apparel, and fiil themselves
