with the tougher and more miscellaneous element of the western population which was streaming through the Golden Gate—the Australians, the European adventurers, the Mexicans, the Chinese, and questionable wanderers from eastern cities. And here, if his memory is to be trusted, he wrote his first song, in celebration of an adjutant cook's marriage to a woman from Australia.
Joaquin was at this time small for his age, slender, pale, frail-looking, with hair of the color of "hammered gold," reaching to his shoulders. The camp diet of bacon and beans did not agree with him and his first mining experience was terminated by a serious attack of scurvy. He was nursed back to health in Yreka by Dr. Ream and a "kind little Chinaman;" and then was taken by a mysterious stranger to another camp for the winter by the forks of several little streams which flow into the Klamath River from the north of Mt. Shasta. Here, at a later period, he laid the scene of The Danites—"my famous play but have always been sorry I printed it, as it is unfair to the Mormons and the Chinese." The tall stranger with whom he spent the winter is another of his heroes whom at this time he seems to have regarded with unqualified adoration. He figures so largely and mysteriously in his work that he requires identification. In the introduction to the collected poems he is described merely as "the Prince," and is said to have gone "south," in the spring of 1855. But in
