We were not at this time, however, to be given an opportunity to see as much of San Francisco as most of us would have liked. After a short stay at the Presidio we were sent to Wilmington, then a small port in the southern part of the State but now incorporated in the great city of Los Angeles. Here we drew our horses for the long trek across the desert to our future home in the Territory of Arizona. There was no railroad at that time in California, the line not even having been surveyed as far as San Jose, which was already a city but, instead of being, as now, the market-place for a dozen fertile and beautiful valleys, she was then merely an outfitting point for parties of travelers, prospectors, cattlemen and the like, and was also a station and terminus for various stage lines. [Illustration: OLD BARRACKS (1912) ON NORTH SIDE OF ALAMEDA STREET, NEAR MAIN, WHERE Co. C, 1st U. S. CAVALRY, CAMPED IN 1866 ON ITS ARRIVAL IN TUCSON] Through San Jose, too, came those of the gold-seekers, bound for the high Sierras on the border of the desert, who had not taken the Sacramento River route and had decided to brave instead the dangers of the trail through the fertile San Joaquin, up to the Feather River and thus into the diggings about Virginia City. Gold had been found by that time in Nevada and hundreds of intrepid men were facing the awful Mojave and Nevada deserts, blazing hot in day-time and icy cold at night, to seek the new Eldorados. Since this is a book about pioneers, and since I am one of them, it is fitting to stay awhile and consider what civilization owes to these daring souls who formed the vanguard of her army. Cecil Rhodes opened an Empire by mobilizing a black race; Jim Hill opened another when he struck westward with steel rails. But the pioneers of the early gold rushes created an empire of immense riches with no other aid than their own gnarled hands and sturdy hearts. They opened up a country as vast as it was rich, and wrested from the very bosom of Mother Earth treasures that had been in her jealous keeping for ages before the era of Man. They braved sudden death, death from thirst and starvation, death from prowling savages, death from the wild creatures,--all that the works of man might flourish where they had not feared to tread. It is the irony of fate that these old pioneers, many of whom hated civilization and were fleeing from her guiles, should have been the advance-guard of the very Power they sought to avoid. The vast empire of Western America is strewn with the bones of these men. Some of them lie in kindly resting places, the grass over their graves kept green by loving friends; some lie uncared for in potters' fields or in the cemeteries of homes for the aged, and some--a vast horde--still lie bleached and grim, the hot sand drifted over them by the desert winds.