If the modern era in American history—call it the age of gold—was born at Coloma in 1848, it reached maturity at Promontory in 1869. By then the youthful effervescence of the Gold Rush years—the race from all over the world to California, the frantic assault on the goldfields, the wild times in San Francisco and the mining camps—was fading into memory. The Forty-Niners were growing arthritic; the placermen had long since been muscled aside by the hydraulickers and quartz borers; many of the camps had closed and fallen into ruin; San Francisco was dully proper compared to the days of the
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