Diverging roads

The tale of California's early days is an epic, an immortal song of daring, of hope, of the urge of youth to unknown trails, of struggle, and of heartbreak.Across the great American plains the adventurers came, scrawling the story of their passing in lines of blood; they came around the Horn in wind-jammers, beating their way northward in the strange Pacific; they forced their way into the wilderness, awakening California's hills from centuries-long sleep, and they pitched their tents and built their cabins by thousands in Cherokee Valley.

Those were the great days of Cherokee, days of feverish activity, of hard, fierce living, of marvelous event.The tales came down to Masonville, where the stage stopped to change horses, and drivers, express-messengers, and prospectors gathered in Mason's bar.The Chinese laundryman had found beside his cabin a nugget worth sixteen hundred dollars; the stage to Honey Creek had been held up just north of Cherokee Hill; Jim Thane had struck it rich on North Branch.

Mason, prospering, ordered a billiard-table sent up from San Francisco, built a dance-hall.Richardson came in with his family and put up a general store.Cherokee was booming; Cherokee miners came down with their sacks of gold-dust, and Masonville thrived.

But the great days passed.The time came when placer mining no longer paid in Cherokee, and the camp moved on across the mountains.Cherokee Valley was left behind, a desolate little hollow among the hills, denuded of its trees, disfigured here and there by the scars of shallow tunnels where hope still fought against defeat.A handful of dogged miners remained, and a few Portuguese families living in little cabins, harvesting a bare subsistence from the unwilling soil.

A few discouraged men came down to Masonville and took up homestead claims, clearing the chaparral from their rolling acres, sowing grain or setting out fruit-trees.They had wives and children; in time they built a school-house.Later the railroad came through, and there was a station and a small bank.

But the stirring times of enterprise and daring were gone forever.The epic had ended in bad verse.Masonville slipped quietly to sleep, like an old man sitting in the sun with his memories.And youth, taking up its old immortal song of courage and of hope, went on to farther unknown trails and different adventure.