Page:The Columbia River - Its History, Its Myths, Its Scenery Its Commerce.djvu/307

Rh history reached the utmost intensity in the fever strife for gold on the Sacramento. The Willamette and Columbia were almost equally stirred. During the first two years of the gold excitement homes on the Columbia were well-nigh deserted. Then the Oregonians began to drift back again. Some came with gold-bricks in their pockets and sacks of gold-dust in their packs. Some came broken in health and spirits, sick with disappointment. Some did not come at all, and their bones found unmarked graves in the pestilential ditches of the Sacramento.

But the shrewder Oregonians perceived that they had better than a gold mine in the trade with California. Grain, fruit, eggs, lumber,—these were in such demand that frequently twenty ships at a time were moored by the dense forests of the lower Willamette waiting for cargoes. Gold-dust was the universal medium, and it seemed to be cheaper than anything else. Four bushels of Oregon apples brought five hundred dollars in gold-dust in San Francisco. Tons of eggs were sold for a dollar apiece in the gold mines.

Portland, the lonely little village on the Willamette, with just enough of a foothold by the edge of the forest to keep from rolling into the River, sprang at a bound into the rank of a city. The huge firs were dug out, and wharves went in. The face of nature, even, as well as that of industry and politics, was transformed by that gold-dust in Marshall's mill-race on the Sacramento.

But, most of all, the disposition of the people was changed. The serene, idyllic, pastoral age passed, and the fierce lust for wealth, the boundless imagination,