22 miles.
13th. Our road followed the river until noon, when we had another stretch of desert for 13 miles. The valley begins to narrow somewhat.
23 miles.
14th. Passed through a canon seven miles, continually crossing brooks of cold clear water from the mountains—beautiful meadows and rich land on the bottoms. Desert plains back, and still back lofty Sierra Nevadas, their sides covered with the evergreen pine, their summits with snow.—Passed some hot springs, and trading stations. The latter have little to sell but whiskey; some few of them beef.
27 miles.
15. Passed the Mormon station, saw a party of Californians and Mexicans prospecting. There is gold this side of the mountains. Entered the seven mile Kanyon, which begins the real pass of the Sierra Nevada. A branch of the Carson River runs through it, which stream we follow to its head. The Kanyon is a wild, picturesque place, with perpendicular wall of gray granite hundreds of feet high, with lofty pines in the bottoms, and a perfect chaos of granite blocks rent from the walls above. We were compelled to camp in it with nothing for our horses to eat, which somewhat destroyed the romance of the thing; as for eating ourselves, it is so long since we have had anything to eat that we don't trouble ourselves about it.
23 miles.
16th. Got out of the Kanyan into the valley, and stopped to bait. Drove about six miles and camped for the night; grass abundant in this valley. J. Ingalls killed a California partridge to-day. It is larger than a partridge In the States, and finely flavored.
8 miles.
17. This morning we had the Nevadas to climb; this is the point which will stop the Pacific Railroad on this route, if anything will do it. This rise is said to be 9000 feet in 13 miles. After climbing the first mountain we descended to a lake, which is the head of one of the branches of the Sacramento. It is the crater of an extinguished volcano. The next mountain, the Snowy Peak, is still worse than the last, although both for most part of the way are as steep as the roof of a house; in climbing it our road lay over the snow, which was 20 feet deep for 80 rods up its side. Having reached the top of the snowy peaks, we took a cut-off, descended about two miles and camped at a small brook where we found good grass. We had the good fortune to shoot three woodchucks [groundhogs,] this evening which, in addition to three lbs. of flour we coaxed out of a Californian, made us feel as rich as the Rothschilds. We have not eaten for the last two weeks (all of us) as much as one man would have eaten if he could have had all that he required, consequently we are living in the greatest luxury and abundance to-night, having all we can eat. It does not take much to make man happy after all; here we have been starving along for the last month, crossing deserts, drinking rotten, alkali or salt water, or deprived entirely, and now we've got to the top of the Nevadas, around our camp fire amid snow drifts, with plenty of good water and three woodchucks for three of us, and we are the happiest mortals alive; we seem to have forgotten that we ever suffered privation.