at first, a proportion of the men was told off to represent the fair
sex. At one camp the invariable rule was to consider as ladies those who
possessed patches on the seats of their trousers. This was the
distinguishing mark. Take it all around, the day was one of noisy,
good-humored fun. There was very little sodden drunkenness, and the
miners went back to their work on Monday morning with freshened spirits.
Probably just this sort of irresponsible ebullition was necessary to
balance the hardness of the life.

In each mining-town was at least one Yankee storekeeper. He made the
real profits of the mines. His buying ability was considerable; his
buying power was often limited by what he could get hold of at the coast
and what he could transport to the camps. Often his consignments were
quite arbitrary and not at all what he ordered. The story is told of one
man who received what, to judge by the smell, he thought was three
barrels of spoiled beef. Throwing them out in the back way, he was
interested a few days later to find he had acquired a rapidly increasing
flock of German scavengers. They seemed to be investigating the barrels
and carrying away the spoiled meat. When the barrels were about empty,
the storekeeper learned that the supposed meat was in reality
sauerkraut!

The outstanding fact about these camps was that they possessed no
solidarity. Each man expected to exploit the diggings and then to depart
for more congenial climes. He wished to undertake just as little
responsibility as he possibly could. With so-called private affairs
other than his own he would have nothing to do. The term private affairs
was very elastic, stretching often to cover even cool-blooded murder.
When matters arose affecting the whole public welfare in which he
himself might possibly become interested, he was roused to the point of