To Mexico the gift of liberty was as the boon of eternal life to the wandering Jew. Freed from the exactions of a despotic master, absolved by the bounty of nature from the stern, ceaseless struggle for physical life, stirred no longer by the warlike spirit of the conquerors, the Latin races in America seemed for a time to have fallen into a condition of hopeless lethargy. To redeem this fair land, with its boundless mineral and agricultural wealth, from the hands of its slothful owners, was a dream which fired the ambition and, it may be added, the cupidity of many daring minds. With the decline and final overthrow of Spanish power the richest mines of Northern Mexico were abandoned for lack of strength to repel the never-subdued and ever-hostile Indian tribes. Mexico was weak, torn by strife, and disorganized. In her feeble hands the mines of Sonora and Arizona were literally "treasure hoarded in the ground." There was in California, in 1852, a man of high birth and humble calling, a day labourer, with the proudest French ancestral blood in his veins--a soldier of Algiers, a count by birth and rank. Raousset-Boulbon, or, to give him his full name and title, Count Gaston Raoulx de Raousset-Boulbon, was a prodigal. He had squandered his substance in the riotous living of Paris and come to the land of gold to mend his fortunes. Unhappily for his peaceful aspirations, California, in 1852, offered a poor field to the man whose only gifts were education, the use of arms, nobility of soul, and a patrician title. Such endowments were neither rare nor deemed precious in that primitive community. The poet has sung, and the novelist painted, the wild contrasts of that marvellous period, but no flight of fancy could exaggerate the picture. San Francisco, the sea-port, was a truly cosmopolitan city. There were two French newspapers published daily, so great were the attractions of El Dorado to the rarely migrating Gaul. Among the hundreds of his countrymen who, like himself, had failed to find a fortune in the golden state, Gaston judged that he might easily enroll a band of adventurers for any bold undertaking. He was not mistaken when the occasion offered itself. In the indescribable human medley of California the Count Raousset-Boulbon cannot be said to have been out of place. Nobody, nothing was that. He was discontented with a career hitherto fruitful only in misfortune.