The Shasta courier., 1869-10-30
NUMBER 33
A Revisit.

The October number of the Overland
contains pleasant sketch under the title
of +" Knapsack and Blanket" of a recent
tramp on foot from Stockton to tho scenes
of the writer's mining operations and ex-
periences in 40. After their many dis
appointments in securing "pile" by river
damming, deep sinking, tunnelling, Kern,
Frazer and Cariboo expeditions, he finds
some Of his twenty years since comrades in
adventure back, trying to mend, and even
still hoping to make, the fortunes they
came the long Cape Horn voyage for, in
the old fields of their earliest golding dig
ging and here is what he says of his visit
to his old friends at Indian Bar:
Some of these boys are now gray and
grizzled. In their cabins found the in
evitlble sack of flour, of potatoes, the hang
ing piece of pork, the little, rough table
with its scanty array of crockery, the
blanket spread out, the India rubber and
leather boots, the canvass mud-staiued
mining clothes, the cracked and battered
stove, the walls plastered with prints from
pictorials, whereupon year after year, Fed
erals and Confederates stand in unchang-
ing hostile attitude-loading, firing and
charging, while heroic Generals still COM
mand-vieled in a sort of dirty obscurity,
the accumulation of years of smoke, dust
and flies Outside, we have the rheumatic
dog, double dear to the g boys" by reason
of the memory of his former master, long
ago drowned on yonder foaming rifle;
few bold and intrusive hens, constantly
making forrays, inside of the cabin, after
the table cumbs and perhaps, the little
garden enclosure Of old sluice- lumber, grow
ing potatoes, onions and radishes.
The boys still hung their hopes on some
rich and unworked spot in the river-bed.
Year before last they "got in,' but the
river rose just as they had taken out enough
to pay expenses. Last year they had barely
''got in" ere the river came down, and they
took out-nothing. This year they will
"play for home stake" "No whisky or
poker games this season, sir.
So, in the long twilight-the supper
cooked and eaten did the boys talk over
their pipes and tobacco Then after the
inevitable fashion, they recited they golden
glories of "47:" Down there, by that
jutting mass of rocks, Sam Holden took
out his pound per day Had barrel of
brandy always on tapin his tent. Pete
Wilkins was found murdered in his cabin
in yonder gulch. He was known to have
buried pickle jar full of dust somewhere
on the hillside yonder, few days before
And, bow we did make money, and gamble,
and drink, and shoot, then
That was twenty years ago. Twenty
years And these men talk of going home
East, just as they talked five years ago;
yes and ten years ago They hardly realize
that for them, in their long forsaken native
towns and villages in the States, there is
no home; that faces, to their mental vision,
fresh and blooming, are scanned wrinkled
as their own; that in their birth-places
they would be as strangers in strange
land.
Here is their real home Here, where
the dashing river sings the same evening
lullaby as it sang ere robbed of its treasure;
here, where the air is SO soft and balmy
where the rude changes of the Northern
climate are unknown; where with the least
caress, the generous earth pours forth veg
etables, fruit, milk, and wine in profusion;
where, still, metallic treasure lies locked
in the hills to be revealed by time and
accident. This is their home; but they
know it not.