Like nearly every one else in those days, Uncle Nick was gold-minded. He coveted some of that gold. In fact, we all did in our day—uncle, father, brother, and I. With sails all set for California and the placers, my father, William Bristow, actually got out as far as Kansas in 1856. But someone in old Doniphan, a relative of the Floyds who had been to California, took the wind out of his sails with a negative report. My father was then twenty-one years old. He visited his brother here, then went back to Nashville, got married, and came out here again with his family in 1865. He finally went to California to live out his last years. He died at Fresno in 1908. In California, my father did not take up the hunt for gold—though, on one occasion when I was visiting him, he drove with me over to the old site of Millerton, which was one of the rich placers in the early days. It is where the San Joaquin river comes down out of the mountains. The only remaining evidence of that once hell-roaring town of 10,000 inhabitants is the old territorial jail, a large stone building with heavily barred windows and three foot walls — a relic of the wicked past. While standing on the west bank of that swift flowing stream, watching the foaming waters among the boulders rush past, my father, pulling at his own whiskers in a sort of meditative way, said, with apparent regret, “If it hadn’t been for that old long-whiskered cuss back there at Old Doniphan, I might have been out here when there was something doing; and probably”—he glanced toward the old jail which was then closed to the public—”have gotten to see the inside of that building.” While at old Millerton my father told me that my brother Dave, then in business in Fresno, had sent a representative and $5,000 into the Klondike country. In passing, I may say here that my brother’s five “grand” found a permanent home in the frozen north. Also, the miner sent to Alaska on a grubstake agreement got back within two years with nothing more than a sizable tale of hardships—and ten frosted toes. Julius Pohl, from Horton; Col. Ed. Post, from Atchison; and Sam Ebelmesser, formerly of Wetmore, now living in Los Angeles, were in that frenzied, frozen, Alaskan gold rush. Also, my brother Dave had some non-productive experience in seeking “black gold” in the Bakersfield oilfield—$15,000 worth of it. My Uncle Nick was a Union soldier in the Civil war, and before that a soldier in the Mexican war of 1848—the war that dashed the heaven out of Brigham’s haven. Also, in a way, he was a soldier of fortune. He hunted gold, and he hunted mountain lions in the Rockies.