Excerpt from The Cave of Gold: A Tale of California in '49 In the present story an attempt has been made, not only to tell an interesting tale, but to interest the younger generation in this remarkable and dra matic phase of our national development, possibly the most picturesque and dramatic period in the his tory of the nation: to picture to them how these knights ofsthe pick and the shovel lived and worked, how' they found and wrested the gold from the 'hard hand of nature, and to give to them something of an idea of the hardships and the perils they were obliged to endure while doing it. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.