It was May 21, 1851, when Amasa and Llewellyn Bixby and Dr. Thomas Flint left their Maine homes and followed the trail of the gold seekers. They sailed from New York on the steamer Crescent City, and met the usual conditions of travel at that period. A retelling of these facts might become monotonous; the actual experiences of each traveler were new, and varied according to the personal equipment and sensibility.
After a week the young men landed at Chagres. They started up the river on a small stern-wheel steamer, which they occupied for two days and two nights, during the latter tied up to the bank. At Gorgona they transferred to a small boat, propelled by the poles of six natives. The railroad was in course of construction, but not yet ready for use.
All the afternoon of the third day and the entire fourth was spent in a leisurely tramp over the mountain trail that led down to the Western port. This walk they enjoyed greatly, observing the strange tropical land. Several times during the long day they refreshed themselves by bathing in the clear mountain pools. When from a high point of land they saw the blue Pacific, they felt like Balboa on his peak in Darian.
While waiting for the S. S. Northerner for San Francisco,—on which they had passage engaged—a number of days were spent happily, comfortably, and at reasonable expense in the ancient walled city of Panama.
The steamer, when it came, proved a very poor means of transportation, being much over-crowded, dirty, infested with vermin, poorly supplied with food and leaking so badly that it was necessary to use the pumps during the entire journey. A stop for a day at Acapulco brought a welcome change with dinner at a good hotel and an attractive walk into the country.
They arrived in San Francisco the sixth of July, but made no stop, going on that afternoon by boat to Sacramento, and from there on to Volcano Diggings, their objective point. Here they found Benjamin Flint, a brother of Thomas, who had come out in 1849. Their time from home was fifty-three days.
Volcano was a characteristic mining town, not far from Sutter’s Mill, Mokelumne Hill, Hangtown, and other places familiar to all who have read of those early California days. It was the point on the overland trail to which Kit Carson was accustomed to conduct emigrants, leaving them to find their own way from there on to their various destinations. The wheel marks of the old wagons may still be seen on the limestone rocks above the town.
After a few months father’s brothers, Marcellus and Jotham, came around the Horn in a sailing vessel, the Samuel Appleton. Uncle Marcellus commented in his diary on the monotony of the long trip—“a dull business going to California on a sail ship.” He spoke of the beauty of the extreme southern mountains like white marble pyramids, of the killing of an albatross with a fourteen-foot wing-spread, of the cape pigeons, “the prettiest birds alive.”
With these brothers came two cousins, making the family group in this one little settlement about a dozen.
They all of them dabbled more or less in the search for gold, but gradually turned to agricultural pursuits. Father’s mining days were limited to one week, employed in driving a mule for gathering up pay dirt; that satisfied him. He took a job in the local butcher shop at one hundred and fifty dollars a month, with “keep,” a very important item in those days of high living cost. He preferred the sureness of stated wages to the uncertain promise of gold.