At their bottoms they were
solid, massive; on their crests they broke delicately into fine serrated
edges where the pines and redwoods outlined their million of tops
against the high white horizon. Here and there the mountains lifted
themselves out of the narrow river beds in groups like giant lions
rearing their heads after drinking. The entire region was untamed. In
some places east of the Mississippi nature is cosey, intimate,
small, and homelike, like a good-natured housewife. In Placer County,
California, she is a vast, unconquered brute of the Pliocene epoch,
savage, sullen, and magnificently indifferent to man.
But there were men in these mountains, like lice on mammoths' hides,
fighting them stubbornly, now with hydraulic "monitors," now with drill
and dynamite, boring into the vitals of them, or tearing away great
yellow gravelly scars in the flanks of them, sucking their blood,
extracting gold.
Here and there at long distances upon the canyon sides rose the headgear
of a mine, surrounded with its few unpainted houses, and topped by its
never-failing feather of black smoke. On near approach one heard
the prolonged thunder of the stamp-mill, the crusher, the insatiable
monster, gnashing the rocks to powder with its long iron teeth, vomiting
them out again in a thin stream of wet gray mud.
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