Twenty-seven days out from San Francisco they reached New York, and, taking their gold in a valise, set out at once for Philadelphia. They arrived at night and went to the Hotel Washington, where they took a room together in order to protect the valuable satchel. The next morning it was safe in the mint, where everything was assayed, fifty dollar slugs, coins from private mints of San Francisco, and native gold.
Of the experience in Philadelphia, Dr. Flint writes: “January 29: Got our mint receipts of the value of our deposits. We were dressed a little rough when we arrived, and at the hotel were seated at the most inconvenient table. But as we dressed up somewhat and the report of our gold got more known we were moved pretty well up in the dining room before we left.”
The next day they went on to Boston where they stopped at the United States Hotel, a hotel to which my father took me nearly forty years later, when he escorted me east to enter Wellesley College.
The evening of February first they reached their home, just a month from San Francisco. The journey west two years before had taken nearly twice as long.
Since they were among the first to return from the gold fields, they were objects of great interest to all the neighbors round about. They had scores of visitors, all eager for news of their own men-folk in far away California, the land so vaguely known, its great distances so under-estimated. They assumed that the returned travelers might know everyone in the new state.
They visited at home for five weeks. “We talked,” says Dr. Flint, “until our vocal chords could stand the strain no longer and were glad to start west.”
CHAPTER V
DRIVING SHEEP ACROSS THE PLAINS
On March 8, 1852, the cousins began the long return journey by rail, horseback, emigrant wagon and foot that ended just ten months later at San Gabriel, in Southern California. Dr. Flint, at the end of his diary, sums up the distances as follows:
“Today closes the year 1853, and one year from the time we left San Francisco on the steamship Northerner; in which time we have traveled by steamship 5,344 miles. By railroad 2,144 miles. I have, by steamboat on Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, 1,074 miles. On horseback and on foot 2,131 miles, making a total of 10,693 on a direct line between points reached.”
This diary is said to have especial historical value because the author put down daily specific facts of cost, distance and conditions of travel. Many accounts of the overland trip are but memories.