Our entrance into California was in Nevada County, thence through Placer, Sacramento, Solano and Napa, and into Sonoma.
Over the last one hundred miles we saw evidences that the valleys, great and small, were rapidly filling with settlers.
The last stream forded was the Russian River, flowing southwesterly through Alexander Valley, to the sea. Having crossed to the western shore, our motley throng found itself in the settlement embracing the village of Healdsburg, an aggregation of perhaps a dozen or twenty houses. There our worn and weather-stained troop made its final halt; and the jaded oxen, on whose endurance and patient service so much—even our lives—had depended, were unyoked the last time, on September seventeenth, just four months after the departure from the Missouri River.
Considering all the circumstances of the journey, through two thousand miles of diversified wilderness, during which we rested each night in a different spot; it seems providential that, on every occasion when the time came for making camp, a supply of water and fuel was obtainable. Without these essentials there would have been much additional suffering. Sometimes the supply was limited or inferior, sometimes both; especially during those trying times in the westerly portion of the Humboldt region; but we were never without potable water nor fire, at least for the preparation of our evening meal. Nature had prepared the country for this great overland exodus from the populous East; a most important factor in the upbuilding of the rich western empire, theretofore so little known, but whose development of resources and accession of inhabitants since have been the world's greatest marvel for more than half a hundred years.
As I look back, through the lapse of nearly sixty years, upon that toilsome and perilous journey, notwithstanding its numerous harrowing events, memory presents it to me as an itinerary of almost continuous excitement and wholesome enjoyment; a panorama that never grows stale; many of the incidents standing out to view on recollection's landscape as clear and sharp as the things of yesterday. That which was worst seems to have softened and lapsed into the half-forgotten, while the good and happy features have grown brighter and better with the passing of the years.
Whether pioneers in the most technical sense, we were early Californians, who learned full well what was meant by "Crossing the Plains."
END.
Transcriber's Notes
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