Next day I went on up the divide and found a house on the trail leading farther east, where two men lived, but they seemed to be doing nothing. There were no mines and miners near there, and there seemed to be very little travel on the trail. The fellows looked rough, and I suspected they might be bad characters. The stream they lived near was afterward called Bloody Run, and there were stories current that blood had been shed there.
Here was a section of comparatively level land, for the mountain divide, and a fine spring of good cold water, all surrounded by several hundred acres of the most magnificent sugar pines California ever raised, very large, straight as a candle, and one hundred feet or more to the lowest limbs. This place was afterward called Snow Tent, and S.W. Churchill built a sawmill at the spring, and had all this fine timber at the mercy of his ax and saw, without anyone to dispute his right. He furnished lumber to the miners at fifty dollars or more per thousand feet. Bloody Run no doubt well deserves its name, for there was much talk of killing done there.
I, however, went up and talked to the men and told them I wished to hire a cross cut saw for a few days to get out stuff for a cabin, and agreed to pay two dollars a day for the use of it till it came back.
We cut down a large sugar pine, cut off four six feet cuts, one twelve feet, and one sixteen feet cut, and from these we split out a lot of boards which we used to make a V-shaped flume which we placed in our ditch, and thus got the water through. We split the longer cuts into two inch plank for sluice boxes, and made a small reservoir, so that we succeeded in working the ground. We paid wages to the two men who worked, and two other men who were with us went and built a cabin.
I now went and got another load of provisions, and as the snow could be seen on the high mountains to the east, I thought the deer must be crowded down to our country, so I went out hunting and killed a big fat buck, and the next day three more, so fresh meat was plenty.
About this time a man came down the mountain with his oxen and wagon, wife and three or four children, the eldest a young lady of fifteen years. The man's name was H. M. Moore. We had posted notices, according to custom, to make mining laws, and had quite a discussion about a name for the place. Some of the fellows wanted to name it after the young lady, "Minda's Flat," but we finally chose "Moore's Flat" instead, which I believe is the name it still goes by. Our laws were soon completed, and a recorder chosen to record claims. We gave Mr. Moore the honor of having a prospecting town named after him because he was the first man to be on hand with a wife.
I became satisfied after a little that this place would be a very snowy place, and that from all appearances it would fall from two to four feet deep, and not a very pleasant place to winter in. An honest acquaintance of mine came along, Samuel Tyler and to him I let my claim to work on shares and made McCloud my agent, verbally, while I took my blankets and started for the valley.
The first town I passed through was a newly discovered mining town called French Corral. Here I found an old Wisconsin friend Wm. Sublet, the foster father of the accomplishen wife of Mayor S.W. Boring of San Jose. From here I went to Marysville. The storm had been raging high in the mountains for some days, and the Yuba river rising fast, overflowing its banks as I walked into town, and the next day the merchants were very busy piling their goods above high water mark. I went to a hotel and called for a bed. "Yes," says the landlord "Is your name John or Peter?" I told him William, which he set down in his book and we went up stairs to the best room which was fitted up with berths three tiers high on each side, and only one or two empty ones. He looked around for covers, but none could be found unoccupied, but one fellow who was sound asleep and snoring awfully, so he took the blanket off from him saying: "He wont know a thing about it till morning, be jabers, so don't say a word."
Next morning the river was booming, its surface covered with all sorts of mining outfit such as flume timber, rockers, various qualities of lumber, pieces of trees as well as whole ones, water wheels and other traps. The river between Downieville and here must have been swept clean of all material that would float, including "long Toms." The water continued to rise till it covered the Plaza, and in two days a steamer came up and sailed across the public square. This looked like a wet season to me, and when the boat was ready to go down the river I went on board, bound for Sacramento. Here it was also getting terrible wet and muddy, and the rain kept pouring down. In the morning I worked my way up J street and saw a six-mule team wading up the streets the driver on foot, tramping through the sloppy mud, occasionally stepping in a hole and falling his whole length in the mud. On the street where so much trouble was met by the teamsters, a lot of idlers stood on the sidewalk, and when a driver would fall and go nearly out of sight, they would, like a set of loafers, laugh at him and blackguard him with much noise, and as they were numerous they feared nothing.
Suddenly a miner, who had lately arrived from the mountains, raised his room window in the second story of a house, put out one leg and then his body, as far as he could, and having nothing on but his night clothes, shouted to the noisy crowd below:—"Say can't you d----d farmers plow now?" At this he dodged back quickly into his window as if he expected something might be thrown at him. The rain continued, and the water rose gradually till it began to run slowly through the streets, and all the business stopped except gambling and drinking whisky, which were freely carried on in the saloons day and night.