The gold hunters

by John David Borthwick

On the tops of the cabins and sheds, on piles of firewood, or up in the trees, were fowls calmly waiting their doom; while pigs, cows, and horses were all huddled up together, knee-deep in water, on any little rising ground which offered standing-room, dying by inches from inanition. The squatters themselves were busy removing in boats whatever property they could, and at those cabins whose occupants were not yet completely drowned out, a boat was made fast alongside as a means of escape for the poor devils, who, as the steamer went past, looked out of the door the very pictures of woe and dismay. We saw two men sitting resolutely on the top of their cabin, the water almost up to their feet; a boat was made fast to the chimney, to be used when the worst came to the worst, but they were apparently determined to see it out if possible. They looked intensely miserable, though they would not own it, for they gave us a very feigned and uncheery hurrah as we steamed past.

The loss sustained by these settlers was very great. The inconvenience of being for a time floated off the face of the earth in a small boat was bad enough of itself; but to have the greater part of their worldly possessions floating around them, in the shape of the corpses of what had been their live stock, must have rather tended to damp their spirits. However, Californians are proof against all such reverses,—they are like India-rubber, the more severely they are cast down, the higher they rise afterwards.

It was hardly possible to conceive what an amount of rain and snow must have fallen to lay such a vast extent of country under water; and though the weather was now improving, the rain being not so constant, or so heavy, it would still be some time before the waters could subside, as the snow which had fallen in the mountains had yet to find its way down, and would serve to keep up the flood.

Sacramento City was in as wretched a plight as a city can well be in.

The only dry land to be seen was the top of the levee built along the bank of the river in front of the town; all the rest was water, out of which rose the houses, or at least the upper parts of them. The streets were all so many canals crowded with boats and barges carrying on the customary traffic; watermen plied for hire in the streets instead of cabs, and independent gentlemen poled themselves about on rafts, or on extemporized boats made of empty boxes. In one part of the town, where the water was not deep enough for general navigation, a very curious style of conveyance was in use. Pairs of horses were harnessed to large flat-bottomed boats, and numbers of these vehicles, carrying passengers or goods, were to be seen cruising about, now dashing through a foot or two of mud which the horses made to fly in all directions as they floundered through it, now grounding and bumping over some very dry spot, and again sailing gracefully along the top of the water, so deep as nearly to cover the horses’ backs.

The water in the river was some feet higher than that in the town, and it was fortunate that the levee did not give way, or the loss of life would have been very great. As it was, some few men had been drowned in the streets. The destruction of property, and the pecuniary loss to the inhabitants, were of course enormous, but they had been flooded once or twice before, besides having several times had their city burned down, and were consequently quite used to such disasters; in fact, Sacramento suffered more from fire and flood together than any city in the State, without, however, apparently retarding the growing prosperity of the people.

I arrived in Sacramento too late for the steamer for San Francisco, and so had the pleasure of passing a night there, but I cannot say I experienced any personal inconvenience from the watery condition of the town.

It seemed to cause very little interruption to the usual order of things in hotels, theaters, and other public places; there was a good deal of anxiety as to the security of the levee, in which was the only safety of the city; but in the meantime the ordinary course of pleasure and business was unchanged, except in the substitution of boats for wheeled vehicles; and the great source of consolation and congratulation to the sufferers from the flood, and to the population generally, was in endeavoring to compute how many millions of rats would be drowned.

On arriving in San Francisco the change was very great—it was like entering a totally different country. In place of cold and rain and snow, flooded towns, and no dry land, or snowed-up towns in the mountains with no food, here was a clear bright sky, and a warm sun shining down upon a city where everything looked bright and gay. It was nearly a year since I had left San Francisco, and in the meantime the greater part of it had been burned down and rebuilt. The appearance of most of the principal streets was completely altered; large brick stores had taken the place of wooden buildings; and so rapidly had the city extended itself into the bay that the principal business was now conducted on wide streets of solid brick and stone warehouses, where a year before had been fifteen or twenty feet of water. All, excepting the more unfrequented streets, were planked, and had good stone or plank side-walks, so that there was but little mud notwithstanding the heavy rains which had fallen. In the upper part of the town, however, where the streets were still in their original condition, the amount of mud was quite inconceivable. Some places were almost impassable, and carts might be seen almost submerged, which half-a-dozen horses were vainly trying to extricate.

The climate of San Francisco has the peculiarity of being milder in winter than in summer. Winter is by far the most pleasant season of the year. It is certainly the rainy season, but it only rains occasionally, and when it does it is not cold. The ordinary winter weather is soft, mild, subdued sunshine, not unlike the Indian summer of North America. The San Francisco summer, however, is the most disagreeable and trying season one can be subjected to. In the morning and forenoon it is generally beautifully bright and warm: one feels inclined to dress as one would in the tropics; but this cannot be done with safety, for one has to be prepared for the sudden change in temperature which occurs nearly every day towards the afternoon, when there blows in off the sea a cold biting wind, chilling the very marrow in one’s bones. The cold is doubly felt after the heat of the fore part of the day, and to some constitutions such extreme variations of temperature within the twenty-four hours are no doubt very injurious, especially as the wind not unfrequently brings a damp fog along with it.