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The days of
Forty-Nine, considered as a social phenomenon, did not come to a term
when the placers ceased to yield and there were fewer rich chances for
the single miner or the wandering pair of "pardners." Nor did they end
in 1854, when the easy years of disorder, speculation and high-living
climaxed; when the tide of immigration began to ebb, and when the world
began to realize that fortunes could be won in California only on the
same hard terms as elsewhere.
The
financial depression of 1855 ended many bright hopes and swallowed up
much wealth that luck and labor had wrested out of the rich earth. Many
one-time miners took up farm land. Others who failed to find "even the
color" in their pans returned to the home towns from which they had set
out with high hopes and boastful words. And still one could not say
that the great adventure had come to an end.
The
old free-and-easy independence of life in the gold rush days
deteriorated into license and abuse, became insolent, and brought down
on itself the wrath of the "better element" during 1856. Amid general
approval, the reign of law and order was instituted by illegal but
understandable means. As society began to stratify, the bonds of
convention began to tighten and conduct became more decorous.
Californian industry, by 1858, was no longer an uproarious,
single-minded search for El Dorado; for as the commercial life of the
state revived, the economic structure was reared on broader bases, and
new industries and occupations came to the fore. In the great march of
time, the accidental facts of the gold rush dwindled in importance and
disappeared, but its spirit and symbolism remained. It is even yet an
immortal American memory; a tale told by fathers to sons; a legend of
high heroism and laughter in adversity, from which the darker elements
have long since been purged away.
No
less does the gold rush survive in the permanent impress it left on the
character of California and Californians. In the spirit of the
pioneers, the people of the state have always taken pride in their
ability to accept troubles as healthy challenges to head and hand. Just
as the Forty -Niners looked to qualities proved on the trails and
deserts, in flood and fire, for their measure of a man, so Californians
of later times tend to judge their fellows by man-standards rather than
by the accidents of birth or bank-account. They have never lost the
awareness of special character, so well expressed by one of the
pioneers:
"The
world, you know, is composed generally of three classes—good, bad and
indifferent. But California is an exception to this rule. I haven't
made up my mind whether it always formed a component part of the
earth, or whether it is an offshoot of some comet that dropped into
this spot by the law of gravitation. California is either very good or
very bad. The soil is very wet or very dry, the land is very high or
very low, the people very good or very bad. It is either percussion or
squib, and but small chance for indifferent. If you get a farm, it will
be No. 1 or No. 0. If you go into business, it will be good or good for
nothing."
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