The emigrants and gold-seekers were population in transit. Their burial-places were as fleeting. With the building of new towns and cities were established cemeteries, but there still continued to be the thousands of unknown graves. A father, brother, husband, or son dies away from home. His name may not have been known, or if it was, the pencil-marks on the pine board soon lost their tracing in the weather-beaten changes that time brings. How often in my own experience in the mining camps I have seen men die far away from the tender and loving care of mother, wife, and sister. How terrible then is the struggle with death! The desire to live and to see the old home-faces again becomes a passion. In their delirium the passion becomes a reality. In their feverish dreams I have seen the dying miner in his cabin fancy he was home again. He talks to his wife, and with words of endearment tells her that he has found a fortune in the mines. I never knew of a miner who, in the delirium of death, when he was talking of the mines, but what he was rich. He had struck the precious metal. He tells his people at home about it, and many a poor fellow has seemingly died content, founded on the fancy that he had a mine and that his wife and family would always have plenty. Out of many instances I will relate but one. A young man from Galena, Ill., eleven years ago, was taken sick and soon the fever was upon him. He grew rapidly worse, but bravely fought the pale reaper, for he wanted to see home again. But courage was not equal to the task. The poor fellow had to die, and when the fever was at its height, he imagined that he was with his wife and baby. How tenderly he spoke to his young wife. He thought he had a rich mine, and told her where it was located. Then he imagined that his pillow was his baby, and that he was running his fingers through the child's curly hair, and would fondle the child up to his bosom. As I gazed on the bronze and weather-beaten faces of those present in the cabin, I saw tears come into the eyes of some when the dying man was murmuring child-love talk to the baby. At the time of the great Leadville rush, many came who never returned. Unknown, many of them sleep in their last resting place--in the gulches, on the mountain sides, and under the shadows of the pine trees and granite peaks. Exposure and not being prepared to guard against the sudden changes of climate caused many to die of pneumonia and fevers. The writer went through a hard attack of typhoid pneumonia in one of the mining camps. After the worst was over and I was conscious again, one of the boys said to me, "Hello, pard, when you were in the fever you thought you had found enough gold mines to have bought out the Astors and Vanderbilts."