So much for worthy Thomas Gage, and his estimate of the Mexicans of his day. AMERICANS IN CALIFORNIA. I arrived at San Francisco in the midst of the gold excitement. The town was crowded with rough-looking muscular men in red shirts, slouch hats, and trowsers over which were drawn high-topped boots. A Colt's revolver, a belt filled with gold, and an unshaven visage completed the _tout ensemble_ of a crowd who were purchasing supplies for their companions in the mines. They strode along, conscious that they belonged to the Anglo-Saxon race and the aristocracy of labor. As they turned into the temporary houses or booths which then constituted the town, or threaded their way among the piles of merchandise that encumbered the streets, the effeminate natives instinctively shrunk back, conscious of their own imbecility; the Spanish Americans were overawed by their presence; and even Sidney convicts thought it most profitable to turn their thoughts to honest labor. The miner had his vices too as well as his virtues. If you will follow him as he opens right and left a crowd that surrounds a table heaped with lumps of gold and silver coin, you will see how carelessly he throws down a piece of metal, looking sharply into the eye of the cunning dealer of the monte cards. If he detects a false move, he cocks his weapon, and draws the gold back into his bag and strides away. Such were the men who knew no fear, and dreaded no labor or fatigue, and who have made California in five short years a state more powerful than the Republic of Mexico. In an interior town I was called to practice as an attorney. My first client was the driver of an ox-team, who was suing for extra services in addition to his regular wages of five hundred dollars a month and board (Doe _vs._ Pickett). My office was a space of four feet by six, partitioned off by two cotton sheets, in the corner of a canvas store. The ground was for a while the floor; yet I paid in advance the monthly rent of two ounces of gold, and never had occasion to regret the outlay. The heavy winter rains at length compelled my landlord to lay a floor of rough boards, which cost him seven hundred dollars for a thousand feet. Before the establishment of the state government, there was a judiciary created by an autocratical edict of General Riley; and a pamphlet, extracted and translated from the Mexican Constitutional laws of 1836, constituted the _Corpus Juris Civilis_ of the Territory of California. The remainder of the law was made up of the judge's ideas of equity, and of the law he had read before leaving home. Inartificial and rude as was this system, still it was wonderfully efficient; and it was well for the people of California that it was so, for an unparalleled immigration had brought with it an unparalleled amount of litigation.