I awoke at sun-up, lit my pipe, and wandered off to see what had become of my mules. I found the trusty guard sound asleep, coiled up under a tree, but not a mule. A sharp admonition, administered through the medium of my foot, soon dispelled his dreams, and awoke him to a lively sense of reality. He rapidly uncoiled, started up, stared vacantly around, and thus relieved his feelings:—
‘I guess they’re gone, Cap’en, every tarnation coon of ’em, right slick back to the Bluffs.’
I could have pistolled the rascal there and then, but the mules had to be recovered; so I bottled up my wrath, roused all my sleeping camp, and we started in pursuit of the missing culprits.
May 4th.—Three days have elapsed. I have got the mules together, but three are still absent. Again we started. I made a long march, crossing Cottonwood Creek, through Major Raddon’s ranch—one Of the finest in California for grazing—struck the Upper Sacramento, and camped about sundown on a creek called Stillwater.
May 5th.—In the night it came on a deluge of rain, that regularly soaked through everything; but it cleared towards morning, and we dried ourselves in the sun as we rode along.
The next three days we travelled through a beautiful parklike country, very lightly timbered, covered with grass, and thickly dotted with magnificent ranches (farms); we struck Pitt river on the fourth day, crossed it safely, swam the mules, and ferried over the packs.
May 9th.—Our journey for the first twelve miles lay through a narrow rocky gorge—the trail; simply a ledge of rock, barely wide enough for a mule to stand upon. Three hundred feet below rolled the river. The least mistake—a single false step, and over goes mule or man, as it may be, and you see the last of him.
Here I passed a most curious place called the Devil’s Pocket; the trail winds along the very edge, and you peer down into an immense hollow kind of basin, that looks as if it had once been a lake, and suddenly dried up. The hills are lofty, sharply pointed, and capped with snow.
At the head of this gorge I, for the first time, saw an encampment of Digger Indians, and a more famished picture of squalid misery can hardly be imagined. Their wretched comfortless huts are like large molehills; there is a pit sunk in the ground, and a framework of sticks, shaped like a large umbrella arched, over it; old skins and pieces of bark are thrown over this frame, and the whole is covered with earth. The entrance is a hole, into which they creep like animals.
Their food consists principally of esculent roots of various kinds, which they dig during the summer months, and dry in the sun. The field-cricket (Acheta nigra) they also dry in large quantities, and eat them just as we do shrimps. Bread made from acorn-flour is also another important article of their diet. They seldom fish or hunt. Their arms are bows and arrows; their clothing, both male and female, simply a bit of skin worn like an apron; they are small in stature; thin, squalid, dirty, and degraded in appearance. In their habits little better than an ourang-outang, they are certainly the lowest type of savage I have ever seen.