XIV PREFACE. 



without regret that we had ventured upon them. I can mention but I 

 cannot describe the anxiety of finding that a desert which we expected 

 to cross in forty miles was much longer, and on being told by a man 

 who met us that he had been thirty miles further and found no sign of 

 grass or water. Our oxen were already exhausted, and such a distance 

 was impracticable. Nobody that we knew had been over the road, nor 

 had we any guides. We went on, however, and found two families 

 men, women, and children in tears, their oxen all dead, themselves 

 helpless. We still pressed on, and the next morning we and the unfor- 

 tunate families were in camp at an oasis, and fiddling and dancing fol- 

 lowed the suffering. Neither can I describe the delight with which we 

 looked down from the summit of the Sierra Nevada over the distant 

 valley of the Sacramento, dim and golden in the rays of the setting sun. 

 We had come to dig for gold, and nearly all who came by land went 

 to mining. Though we did not make so much as we had hoped, we 

 still found the placers wonderfully rich. It was no uncommon event 

 for a man alone to take out five hundred dollars in a day, or for two or 

 three, if working together, to divide the dust at the end of the week by 

 measuring it with tin cups. But we were never satisfied. Others were 

 getting more : we were not making enough. We went prospecting far 

 out into the districts occupied by hostile Indians ; we found diggings 

 that would at last make millionaires of us ; but in the midst of our re- 

 joicings we ran out of provisions, and had to live for days on grass and 

 acorns, picked from the holes in trees where they had been placed by 

 woodpeckers. We had to meet the savages in battle ; and more danger- 

 ous than that, we had to swim the large mountain torrents in full flood 

 height. For months we slept under no shelter and saw no house. And 

 worst of all, our diggings, which we had gone so far and risked so much 

 to find, at last deceived us. They were not so rich as we imagined ; the 

 water gave out, and we were not numerous enough to keep up a guard 

 at all points against the Indians. All these things I went through in 

 person, and my experience was, perhaps, not so eventful as that of most 

 pioneer miners. The expenses, the time spent in traveling and prospect- 

 ing, and the lack of all the luxuries and many of the comforts of life, 

 made many of us think it was cheaper to get gold in any other way 



