The Diary of a Forty-Niner Quotes

“I never realized before how much pleasure there was to be had in reading. There are seven volumes, and I have read them by the firelight until I could not hold my eyes open any longer, and tackled them again after breakfast, lying on my back under the old pine tree, so interested that I forgot when dinner time came around. There are four heroes: Athos, Porthos, Aramis and D’Artagnan, and they surely had most surprising adventures. I like D’Artagnan best, although Porthos is a great fellow. It’s wonderful how in reading so interesting a romance one forgets everything around him and lives in another world.”
― Chauncey L. Canfield, The Diary of a Forty-Niner

“I would like to have enough capital so that I would not have to slave from sunrise till dark as I did on dad's farm. I don't know as the work was any harder than what we do here, but there is a difference. There all we got was just about a bare living, at the best a few hundred dollars put away for a year's work, but here one don't know what the next stroke of the pick, or the next rocker full of dirt, may bring forth—an ounce or twenty ounces it may be. That is the excitement and fascination that makes one endure the hardships, working up to one's knees in cold water, breaking one's back in gouging and crevicing, the chance that the next panful will indicate the finding of a big deposit.”
― Chauncey L. Canfield, The Diary of a Forty-Niner