Many were young men of good family, good education and gentlemanly instincts.

Their parents had been able to support them during their minority, and to give them good educations, but not to maintain them afterwards.

From 1849 to 1853 there was a rush of people to the Pacific coast, of the class described.
All thought that fortunes were to be picked up, without effort, in the gold fields on the Pacific.

Some realized more than their most sanguine expectations; but for one such there were hundreds disappointed, many of whom now fill unknown graves; others died wrecks of their former selves, and many, without a vicious instinct, became criminals and outcasts.
Many of the real scenes in early California life exceed in strangeness and interest any of the mere products of the brain of the novelist.
Those early days in California brought out character.

It was a long way off then, and the journey was expensive.