Just then the editor appeared in the doorway of his sanctum. He was a pleasant-faced man, and he asked me in a kindly tone whose boy I was and where I belonged.
"Why, your father is one of my subscribers. I want an apprentice to learn the printer's trade. I can give you twenty-five dollars for the first year, thirty for the second, and fifty dollars and the carrier's address for the third year, with your board and washing."
"All right." In less time than it takes to write it I was behind the press, and in five minutes I was covered with printer's ink from head to foot.
[Illustration: A bull-whacker. The loaded whip was used in two hands and was twenty feet long, or more, in the lash. In some cases it had a horseshoe-nail in the end of the snapper.]
During the ten years immediately following the discovery of gold in California, the main-traveled road across the continent was what was known as the Platte River route. Starting from Council Bluffs, Iowa, a town then famous as the "jumping-off place" for California emigrants, the adventurers crossed the Missouri by a rope ferry and clambered up a steep, slippery bank to the site of the modern city of Omaha. The only building of any considerable dimensions in the early fifties was a large, unpainted, barn-like structure, which, we were proudly told, was to be the capitol of the Territory of Nebraska, the Territorial organization of which was authorized by Congress in 1854.
The trail from the Rocky Mountains to Salt Lake valley grew more and more difficult as we approached the rocky fastnesses of the Wahsatch range of mountains, that defends the land of the Latter-Day Saints on its eastern border. Leaving the valley and skirting the northern end of Great Salt Lake, the route followed the general course of the Humboldt, crossed the dreadful desert which takes its name from the river, and we finally caught sight once more of civilization in Honey Lake valley, at the eastern base of the Sierra Nevada. Here the trail began a toilsome ascent of the gigantic mountain wall, and scaling the roof of the world, as it seemed to us, slid down into the valley of the Sacramento through the wooded ridges of the Plumas mining region.
The average cost of a journey to California in those days did not greatly vary whether one took the water route by the way of Cape Horn or the land route by the trail just described. In either case the emigrants usually clubbed together, and the cost per man was therefore considerably reduced. A party of overland emigrants, supplied with a team of horses or oxen,--preferably the latter,--and numbering four or five men, were expected to invest about five hundred dollars for their outfit. This included the cost of provisions, clothing, tent, wagon, and animals, and a small sum of ready money for emergencies by the way. The necessaries of life were few and simple. The commissariat was slender, and included flour, dried beans, coffee, bacon, or "side-meat," and a few small stores--sugar, salt, baking-powder, and the like. In those days the art of canning goods had not been invented, and the only article in that category was the indispensable yeast-powder, without which bread was impossible. The earliest emigrants experimented with hard bread, but soft bread, baked fresh every day, was found more economical and portable, as well as more palatable.