Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 247, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 October 1910 — HAPPENINGS IN THE CITIES [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

HAPPENINGS IN THE CITIES

’49ers Going Into History, Unwept

CHICAGO. —The ’49ers of California gold fever fame are passing into history. The epoch of which they are survivors Is closed and the last of them are becoming too feeble to come to the annual reunion which has ben held In Chicago on "admission day” each year for the last twenty years. A notice reluctantly admitting these facts was issued recently by Secretary George W. Hotchkiss, the youngest of the California gold hunters, who at the age of seventy-nine is In too feeble health to take charge of a convention. The entire committee of the organization appointed last year is either dead or under a temporary disability preventing them from serving, and half of the fourteen pioneers who attended last year’s meeting have since died. A heroic effort to' get trace of all surviving pioneers in the middle west resulted in the return “not found” of half of the hundred letters sent out by Mr. Hotchkiss, and, while he hopes to find a few ’49ers for a meeting on “discovery day,” January 18, the secretary said sadly that in ten years they would all be gone and nothing but printed pages could tell of a movement whose like the world can never see again. “It was a picked lot of young men

who reached California in those days,” he declared. “Only those who had the grit to spend months at Bea or across Indian-infested plains and mountains succeeded in getting there. The people of today do pot know how much their country owes to the ’49* ers. They did more toward the development of the United States than the men who fought in the revolution or any other single group of men. Most of them were very young. The man among them who was over twenwas rare. And they did not get rich. The men who came afterward on the railways, with capital and improved mining methods, or who went into real estate were the. ones who reaped fortunes. * The pioneer who got enough for hia railway fare and SI,OOO more with which to buy a farm considered himself lucky. Those who came afterward on the railway we do not cOnslder real pioneers. They are not eligible to our society. “We were privileged to take part In an epoch of history unlike anything that had ever gone before, and it is something whose like can never he seen again. There may be other countries still to be developed, but there is no place left In the world where such a spreading of civilization over an enormous wilderness can take place In so few decades as it did in the western United States. The ’49ers, as they went west In their prairie schooners, saw miles upon miles of fertile country whose existence had been scarcely ksown, and they were the most Important factor in developing the entire west.’*