Among the crowds of people on the hillside there was little of the distress and excitement one might have expected to see on such an occasion. The houses and stores had been gutted as far as practicable of the property they contained, and all that it was possible to do to save any part of the town had already been attempted, but the hopelessness of such attempts was perfectly evident. The greater part of the people, it is true, were individuals whose wealth was safe in their buckskin purses, and to them the pleasure of beholding such a grand pyrotechnic display was unalloyed by any greater individual misfortune than the loss of a few articles of clothing; but even those who were sitting hatless and shoeless among the wreck of their property showed little sign of being at all cast down by their disaster; they had more the air of determined men, waiting for the fire to play out its hand before they again set to work to repair all the destruction it had caused. The fire commenced about half-past one o’clock in the morning, and by three o’clock it had almost burned itself out. Darkness again prevailed, and when day dawned, the whole city of Sonora had been removed from the face of the earth. The ground on which it had stood, now white with ashes, was covered with still smoldering fragments, and the only objects left standing were three large safes belonging to different banking and express companies, with a small remnant of the walls of an adobe house. People now began to venture down upon the still smoking site of the city, and, seeing an excitement among them at the lower end of the town, I went down to see what was going on. The atmosphere was smoky and stifling, and the ground was almost too hot to stand on. The crowd was collected on a place which was known to be very rich, as the ground behind the houses had been worked, and a large amount of gold having been there extracted, it was consequently presumed that under the houses equally good diggings would be found. During the fire, miners had flocked in from all quarters, and among them were some unprincipled vagabonds, who were now endeavoring to take up mining claims on the ground where the houses had stood, measuring off the regular number of feet allowed to each man, and driving in stakes to mark out their claims in the usual manner. The owners of the houses, however, were “on hand,” prepared to defend their rights to the utmost. Men who had just seen the greater part of their property destroyed were not likely to relinquish very readily what little still remained to them; and now, armed with pistols, guns, and knives, their eyes bloodshot and their faces scorched and blackened, they were tearing up the stakes as fast as the miners drove them in, while they declared very emphatically, with all sorts of oaths, that any man who dared to put a pick into that ground would not live half a minute. And truly a threat from such men was one not to be disregarded.