Many once noble souls who had been tenderly brought up were led astray.

Away from home and its restraining associations, gambling, drinking, and other sins and vices became their ruin.

In calm moments when alone or under some momentary impulse of goodness there would rise before them the vision of God-fearing parents--of open Bibles--of hallowed Sundays; but the thirst for gold could not be quenched, the mad race must be run, and to the bitter end, dishonour, death, the grave! Shelley, if he had stood in the midst of the gamblers, staking all, even their souls, for gold, in those California days of wild revelry, could not have expressed himself more appositely than in his graphic and truthful lines, in Queen Mab: "Commerce has set the mark of selfishness; The signet of its all-enslaving power Upon a shining ore, and called it gold: Before whose image bow the vulgar great, The vainly rich, the miserable proud, The mob of peasants, nobles, priests, and kings, And with blind feelings reverence the power That grinds them to the dust of misery.
But in the temple of their hireling hearts Gold is a living god, and rules in scorn All earthly things but virtue." The saloons fifty years ago were the centres of attraction for the over-wrought miner, the aimless wanderer, the creature of impulse, the child of passion.

They were decorated with an eye to brilliant colours, to gorgeous effect, to all that appeals to the sensuous element in our nature.

They were the best built and most richly furnished houses in the San Francisco of that period.