Near one clearing, half a mile away, was the remnant of a miner’s cabin only lately fallen to the ground. The old man who lived there had buried a sack of gold-dust, and later been unable to find it again. For years he lived on at the mountain shack; lonely after the others had gone, searching with a lantern at night for the spot where he had buried his fortune, until his mind was entirely gone. From Greenhorn we dropped down to the upper Kern River valley, shut in the hills, where we found other rough little towns of bygone days—not yet deserted, because of the valley crops and ranges; Bodfish, Isabella, and Kernville, all much as they were in the years of Bret Harte, when men went mad for California gold. And now, before comparing the early boom days of the film industry to the rush of a newly discovered gold field, with all its roughness and lawlessness and glamor and adventure and sudden wealth, let us imagine ourselves, for a moment, in Bodfish, in the early days. Gold is being panned in nearly every neighboring stream. Mostly, the big “strikes” are being made haphazard, according to who has the best luck. In Foaming Gulch Big Bill, the butcher from Maine, is panning out a dozen ounces a day. From the far-away Bumpus Basin, the other side of the range, come reports of a new bonanza, and several of the boys are pulling up stakes and striking out for Bumpus. No one has ever heard of Bakersfield yet; there is no such place. Nor has any one thought of oil; much less of crops. But Buckeye Flat is already famous, because that is where Razzer Jones, who used to run the National Barber Shop at Altoona, has taken a fortune from the ford of Buckeye Creek. On the other hand, the three sky-pilots, Billy Williams, Goose-eye Toney, and Preacher Wills, have all failed even to find color in Poso Creek, and are thinking of going back to their chosen calling once more. Easy come, easy go. Big Bill is paying three prices for everything he buys, and gambling away nearly all the rest of his dust at the Faro layout in the Buckeye saloon, also far and favorably known as the Life-Saving Station and Thirst Parlor. It’s no unusual thing for the stage to be held up on the River Road, and about every once in so often there’s an informal but enthusiastic party among the buckeye-trees on Hang Man’s Hill. Next, let us turn to the beginnings of the motion picture industry. We find the same conditions that made possible sudden wealth and sudden death, hold-ups and hangings in the Kern River valley, seventy-odd years ago. Impossible? Let us see.—First, who goes to the gold country, anyway, in the first mad rush?