About ten o’clock we partook of a little breakfast that had been prepared for us, it being the first of anything we had eaten for upward of forty hours. On an investigation a little later we found the river had risen about twenty-five feet during the night, occasioned from the heavy rains together with the melting of large bodies of snow in the Sierra Nevada mountains.
After two days’ rest we all felt nearly or quite as well as if nothing had befallen us, and strange as it may seem, not one of the party even caught the slightest cold from all the exposure.
The night of the 8th of January, 1850, will probably be long remembered by all of this little party of four men.
At that time the great freshet and overflow at Sacramento City was experienced, which destroyed an enormous amount of property and caused so great an amount of sickness, suffering and death—when it was said the population of the city decreased about three-fourths in the space of six weeks, owing to deaths from cholera, fevers and others diseases, and from immigration to other places.
CHAPTER VII.
LIFE IN THE MINES.
After a lapse of 44 years—January, 1894—I resumed this narrative.
The foregoing was written not long after the events therein written had transpired, from notes taken from day to day. All those events were then fresh in my memory.
Such notes as I took subsequent to the 9th of January, 1850, while I remained in California, and later while I was in Oregon, were not so copious and full, and what I may hereafter write in relation to my experiences in those states (then territories) for the next four years and more will be drawn from these scanty notes, with the assistance of a very retentive memory.
At the date of the sad experience with the boat on the Feather River, January 9, 1850, I was a young man of a little more than twenty-one years of age; while at this time I am more than sixty-five, yet my memory is still quite fresh in regard to many of those events that transpired in those times, while I doubt not that many others of equal interest may have been forgotten altogether; or I may retain only a partial or faint recollection of them at this time.
In consequence of this, whatever I may write in the following pages will be such only as I distinctly remember, and they will be a few of the leading incidents connected with my residence in California and Oregon until August, 1854, when I returned to New Hampshire.