The Dalton gang of train
robbers lived and died (some with their boots on) not far from the
village entitled Paradise. Stage coaches were robbed frequently. Every
large rancher suffered much at the hands of cattle and horse thieves.
The writer has talked to Frank James, the most famous of Western
desperados; he has enjoyed the acquaintance of Judge Lynch, who hanged
two men from a bridge within half-a-mile of the ranch-house; he
remembers the Chinese Riots; he has witnessed many a fight between the
hungry squatter and the old settler with no title to the leagues over
which his herds roamed, and so, in a modest way, he may claim to be a
historian, not forgetting that the original signification of the word
was a narrator of fables founded upon facts.
Apologies are tendered for the dialect to be found in these pages.
There is no Californian dialect. At the time of the discovery of gold,
the state was flooded with men from all parts of the world, and
dialects became inextricably mixed. Not even Bret Harte was able to
reproduce the talk of children whose fathers may have come from
Kentucky or Massachusetts, and their mothers from Louisiana.
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25