How long the journey had been I did not really know until Eben Jordan came to where Ellen and I were sitting on the grass with the skirts of our gowns filled with flowers. He had in his hands a bit of paper on which he had set down, from what had been told him by the leaders of the company, the distance we people had traveled since leaving Independence. This was no less than two thousand and ninety miles, to which one must add, in order to learn how long was our march, the distance from Pike County to Independence, which would, so Eben said, make a total of about two thousand two hundred.
Even then we were nearly two hundred miles from San Francisco; however it was not the intention of our fathers to journey so far across California, for we had not come expecting to find gold, but to make for ourselves farms, where we could live comfortably by honest industry.
Already I am writing as if we had come to an end of our journey, and so it seemed to me while we remained in camp on the bank of the Truckee River; but there were yet many days of toil before we arrived at the place where our people had decided to buy land.
It was yet necessary that we cross the Sierra Nevada, where we found a seemingly impassable trail over the mountains, yet we knew that people like ourselves, traveling in the same way, had gone before us, and all the dangers and the difficulties seemed lessened because of the fact that we had come so near to where we intended to make our new homes.
A HOME IN THE SACRAMENTO VALLEY
After much labor in descending the Sierras, we came upon the first settler's house we had seen since starting out. It stood in the valley of the Sacramento, on what is called Bear Creek, and was owned by Mr. Johnson, who himself was a Piker.
To me the house was odd looking, not because of being so small as to have only two rooms, but because it was built half of logs and half of adobes, or bricks of mud which have been dried in the sun. It was a rough building, and yet how homelike it appeared!
Unfortunately Mr. Johnson and his family were not at home. The building was closed, and although the door was not really locked, it had been fastened with strips of rawhide in such a manner as to show that the owner wished to keep out stragglers.
