More Gold
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MORE GOLD.
As will have been seen by the California news via "Star of the West," published in our paper of yesterday, another gold fever is raging on the Pacific Shore, almost, if not quite so virulent as that which raged in '49 and there-about.
The San Francisco papers state that the Frazer's River excitement, so far from having abated, has vastly increased, and that a regular stampede has taken place which threatens to depopulate the city. "The course of Empire" which has so long taken a westward direction seemed, from these accounts, to be tending northward. 40, 000 people, it is stated by the Californian press, will have gone to Frazer's River within the first half year. California will, of course, be seriously affected and the tone of her press indicates a rather despondent state of feeling. Says the Bulletin:
First, the ditch companies in the interior will feel the shock; then the merchants and traders, and real estate holders of the interior towns. These are the classes that will suffer the most; they will feel the reverse soonest, and it will continue for them the longest. And in every interior town, not even excepting Sacramento, we may expect to see property depreciate with rapidity. The poorer quartz mills, now running will be temporarily stopped; some tunneling operations will for a time cease; a few ditch-projects will be abandoned—and the amount of gold taken from our mines will be considerably diminished.
It seems to us likely that should the mines turn out to be in area and richness what present discoveries indicate, that the gold fever will not stop on the other side of the Rocky Mountains, but that our own States will be more or less affected as they were a few years ago. There are thousands of young men eager and anxious for some new excitement, who would as soon shout "Ho! For New Caledonia" as not. Other results will follow of no little importance. The new territory will be populated as if by magic and what is now a wilderness will be thickly studded with cities and towns. So far as we can perceive, this new development in our great northwestern territories will hasten in a very great degree the admission of new and vigorous States into our glorious confederation and give an impulse to all that vast region which, in the ordinary course of events, it must have awaited for many years.