In the gloomy little drawing above, Captain Bruff summarized his opinion of the whole adventure, Gold Lake included.
Other and later adventurers were not at all discouraged by repeated failure. In the picture below, a
stagecoach climbs past laboring miners, its hopeful passengers lending
the animals a shoulder on the road to some new strike. Before the
formation of the California Stage Company by James E. Birch and Frank
Stevens in 1853, dozens of companies were competing for the business at
rates that left only a tiny profit for their proprietors.
