LIFE SKETCHES OF A JAYHAWKER 45 



on the counter was about a foot from the top. All the main part of the city 

 was under water; where the Golden Eagle Hotel stood, a steamboat could 

 have been floated, and all the other streets the same way. The city was 

 deserted, there wasn't three hundred people in the place, all had gone to 

 San Francisco, and some of them were living at the soup houses. 



I wanted to go to Stockton so I had to take the boat to Benecia and 

 then take the Stockton boat up from there. I saw quite a queer sight 

 going up the river. We passed a floating island with about sixty head of 

 cattle on it, the peat or tulles had let loose and floated to the surface of the 

 water and they had to ship hay to the cattle on boats to keep them alive. 

 When I arrived at Stockton, it was almost in the same condition as Sac- 

 ramento. The next day I chartered a man with a small row boat to take 

 me to the ranch, seventeen miles out, and we struck a bee line for the 

 place and didn't know when we crossed the river, only the current was 

 stronger there. We tied the boat up to the back yard fence and found 

 about forty-five people in the house, as it was the only house in the whole 

 neighborhood that was above high water mark. We had a great time boat- 

 ing as we had to bring all our provisions from Stockton in small boats. 

 That worked well when the wind did not blow, but we had some narrow es- 

 capes from heavy seas when the wind was up. We had a great time gath- 

 ering honey as there were thousands of stands of bees on the river, when 

 the flood came. Every willow thicket was full of bee hives, full of honey. 

 There was a man keeping bees on our place who lost four hundred hives. 

 One man above us lost a thousand. 



As this brings me back to the ranch again, I would like to mention a 

 few incidents that happened when we first settled there on the river in 

 1854. The whole San Joaquin plains were covered with mustangs, elk, ante- 

 lope and other smaller game and we used to think it great sport to go out 

 and catch mustangs. The Spanish people over in the Livermore valley would 

 come over and camp at our place and we would all start from there. Our 

 mode of procedure was to send out relays all up the plains about four miles 

 apart and then start a bunch of mustangs. There were generally about 

 thirty in a bunch, sometimes more. The first relay would run them to 

 the next and so on for fifteen or twenty miles and the ones at the end of 

 the line would turn them and start them down the line again, so we would 

 keep them going up and down the plains all day and at night we would leave 

 them and go to camp. The next morning we would be after them again, 

 when they would be so sore and stiff from their run the day before, they 

 could not run and we could lassoo them as fast as we wanted to and tie 

 them down. When we had them all caught, we would save all the young 

 that we thought could be broken and the rest would be killed for they were 

 a great nuisance. We were cured of trying to break them but the Spaniards 

 would take all the one, two and three year olds home and break them to 

 ride and some of them made good saddle horses and were usually very 

 tough. 



There was another thing, by way of variety that caused us trouble at 

 times and some times much annoyance, and that was prison breaking. 

 Very often, there would be forty or fifty get away from San Quentin at one 

 time and we lived right on their route to the back country. They would 

 just start in and rob everything they came to and we would raise a posse 



