Prospecting generally was done by organized parties numbering anywhere from five to fifty men. These companies consisted of experienced miners, who usually had already mined in California. Careful preparation in advance was made. An expedition might travel for weeks or even for many months, studying the geology of the land as carefully as professors from great universities and prospecting wherever promising indications presented themselves. When diggings that seemed to afford reasonable likelihood of profit were found, claims were staked out. The plan of the miners' camp corresponded more closely to that of a town than to that of a country district. This feature is another of several which prove that combination, cooperation and organization formed basic features in the work of the miner. It is not the least of the merits of Dr. Trimble's monograph that it enables and in fact compels the lay reader unacquainted with the ways of miners to see that their social and governmental activities were a seed of the political commonwealth and rendered its existence and growth inevitable. The discoverers of pay-dirt as a rule had to return for supplies to some commercial center. Here the news of a find invariably leaked out and generated a stampede to the new field. Merchants and packers pushed freight-caravans ahead with strenuous but reasoned energy. The man who rushed a well supplied set of teams into a new community was certain to reap great profits. Before much work was performed by the miners at their Eldorado they held a mass-meeting and organized the community. A judge, recorder and sheriff were elected, and laws for the camp enacted. The political instinct of the English and the Americans for government and ordered society was prompt to manifest itself. Men who had been schooled in the Californian camps not only had learned to mine skillfully, but turned spontaneously to the form of political organization that the mines of that golden commonwealth had developed. This was the case no less in British than in American communities. Work on claims ceased and universally or almost universally in winter, but might stop at other times, such as seasons of drouth, when want of water handicapped operations. The arrangement gave the miners an opportunity to visit home or to pass the winter at such towns as Boise, Lewiston or Portland. Men seldom thought of making homes for themselves at the Mining camps. But a considerable number would usually remain there through cold weather, and in deep diggings actual mining could still be carried on. The miner's lot was a most laborious life. It did not consist in picking large, loose nuggets from streams and in spending most of the time on fun or adventure. There were cabins to build--and the skill of American axmen, especially of the Missourians, was greatly admired by English observers--ditches to be dug, flumes and sluices to be constructed, and lumber to be obtained.