The sandy road was a great relief to us after the lumpy one of the morning, and we tramped merrily on, until we reached the Mokulumne, and saw a comfortable (for this country), log and jacal built house, and passing about two hundred yards further on, spread our blankets under some half dozen magnificent oaks, and after washing away the dust and heat in the clear, cold little river, very rapid but smooth, ate our lunch of fried pork and bread, and stretched ourselves out to rest for an hour, when we packed up, and being ferried across in a pretty good flat-boat, the only one between Stockton and Sacramento, we continued our walk to Dry Creek over just the same description of country we had had in the morning; but it became more sandy if anything, and towards evening was more of a rolling country. Before we camped for the night we swam "Riley" across a creek about twenty feet wide, and paid one dollar and fifty cents for ourselves and belongings to cross in a sort of canoe, which took us about five minutes.
At the ferry house was a comfortable looking woman with four little children, one an infant; like the Texans she told us they had plenty of cattle, but only one milch cow, so we went on.
April 25th. This morning mounting a slight rise of ground we at once found ourselves on a high dry, too dry, prairie, facing a bracing northwest wind, just strong enough to feel it stirring up our spirits, and we went cheerily on for about eight miles to a bridge, crossed it, and for about two miles had a succession of sloughs to cross, some boggy, some quicksand, others we had to swim. By carefully sounding we kept our packs dry in crossing, and safely reached the back of Murphy's corral, where I skinned a magpie I had shot, and Layton took a nap. We then went to admire Mr. Murphy's fine stock of brood mares, and the young horses he is raising. At three in the afternoon we packed and left for Sacramento City, keeping to the road for eight miles, when we came to a wood where we collected sufficient fuel for our evening cooking, and went on two miles or so to a lagoon of excellent water, and camped. We had no tent poles, so did as we had done often before, spread one side of the tent on the ground and laid our blankets on that, and covered ourselves with the other part; a corner was put over my gun used as a pole, which gave a place to sit, and also protected our solitary candle from the wind, so we ate our supper in comfort, and enjoyed a kill-deer and a couple of snipe we had shot.
We did not hear a sound but the croakings of hundreds of frogs from the pond by our side. Our long campings out had accustomed us to solitudes like this, but on our desolate, half starving march of last year, doubt, anxiety, yes and fear, had always taken from the complete enjoyment of such freedom as this. The country was so flat that the horizon was lost even in the bright moonlight, and the perfect silence, the pure cloudless sky overhead, the quiet little lake, tended to make everything full of solemnity and peace.
April 26th. This morning half a gale was blowing from the northwest and we were glad to wear our blanket coats until the sun warmed up the earth. We reached "Sutter's Fort" at noon, and lay down under the adobe wall to take our lunch. I was disappointed in the view I had hoped to take; here, on a boundless plain, with two or three hospitals around it, stands a sort of rancho, not so good in many respects as those of New Mexico, but all in the same style, the sides being a series of rooms, one corner being better fitted up for the rancher and his family.
Under some grand old oaks three hundred feet to the eastward, is a cemetery containing a number of graves all made, they tell me, last year when miners and emigrants alike succumbed to illness brought on in many cases by exposure, poor food, and, in some cases, doubtless by disappointed hopes.
Sacramento City is a country village built on a flat point, between a lagoon and the river just below the junction of American River, so low as to be eighteen inches under average high water mark. It has been a source of such speculations as '36 never heard of. I was shown a plot of some half-dozen half lots, which cost last fall two hundred and fifty dollars. The gentleman who owned them, Dr. Pierson, told me he had sold two of them, about a quarter of the whole, for three thousand five hundred dollars, after holding them six months. Truly people did come to California to make money, and some made it, but California will for the present lower the moral tone of all who come here.
There are few refining influences and men become coarse and profane in language, while the hard life does not improve the temper; the sight of the gold they see dug, and the fortunes they hear of that have been made in months, some few even in weeks, make them avaricious.
Many lots of land, valued last year at one thousand dollars, are now valued at ten thousand dollars, but sooner or later the fall must come.
Sutter's Fort appears to have been built with great care as to its means of defence, though at first sight a visitor would be puzzled to know why it was called a fort at all; closer examination shows that it once had, from all appearances, four square towers, some twenty-five feet high, one at each corner, each tower mounting four, eighteen, or at most, twenty-four pound carronades, and the effect of these on the Indians was all that was required for protection, for the Indians here are a very low class and poor race, far inferior to the eastern tribes, and like the Mexicans cowardice is their chief trait, or at least their most prominent one; and if Mr. Sutter could have had twenty faithful followers, he must have been "monarch of all he surveyed."