Left San Francisco Tuesday night. The run up the bay was fine, the hill-forms being noble and the play of light upon them beautiful, but the shores were nearly bare of wood, the surface being everywhere smooth dead-brown grass. The boat was of the little Rossville style with a few state-rooms. Got up at six, Wednesday and found her running through a natural canal, swaying high bull-rushes—tula. A few houses showing above these, proved to be Stocton, a village of broad dusty streets and chiefly one-story wooden-shops with scattering temporary cottages & shantees. We got a decently cooked breakfast, indecently served in a dirty restaurant, such as you would look for John Gorman in at Stapelton. A decent strong Rockaway with a pair of common hackney coach horses was provided & Mr Billings, Charles & I started. It was difficult getting out of town, for want of defined roads and of character out of common in any visable object. Mr Billings navigated us through a dead flat, dead brown prairie, with scattering remnants of trees, which grew scarcer & scarcer [98]

as we proceeded. At length ran out of them altogether and gradually into the Great Plains, and so for seventy miles or more, exactly like six days’ journey of the Emigrant Trail, the most desolate, dreary, tiresome journey I ever made. Near the crossings of the rivers, (nearly dry, but with trails of red mud) there were vegetable productions bearing some resemblence to overgrown, delapidated apple-trees, the leaves being represented by curled, leathery tags, gray with dust, but which would I presume wash dark-green. The ground under them was strewn with long narrow acorns without cups. The Sierra Nevada appeared on the left, and we gradually approached it. The nearer mountains sometimes coming out distinctly. We could see that they were dotted with trees to the tops—dotted I say for the trees always stand singly. There are no woods. The shade of one tree never connects with that of another, so far as I have seen.

About sunset, we began to work into a more broken country, rounded hills, with narrow ledges of slate pushing out of them perpendicularly, and as the water courses—swales where water might run if there were any—the general desolation was relieved a little by a great multitude of children’s graves. They proved to be tailings of washings of placer miners in the rainy season. As it came dark, we got into a more distinctly hilly region, and finally to a considerable height, the view back from which over the plain, with the sunset red glow in the sky resting on the dark mass of the coast range, was really very fine. This was the “foothills”, and at half past seven we descended, by a well graded road into a valley which was Bear Valley. The Oso Hotel was a decent inn of the [99]

Rossville Hotel order—slightly built, with decent cheap furniture. The dining-room, (cheapest and dreariest throughout), with stools at the table, no chairs. It was quiet, & we had a very good supper, a well-cooked omelette & excellent vegetables.

Morning. The village consists of about a score of small shops three of which are bar rooms, one a billiard saloon, two inns; the dwellings, outside inns, are half a dozen shantees. The street between, about 100 feet, wavey with the twists of rock pushing up near a surface of deep red dust. There are a few of the vegetable productions—evergreen oaks and some dry deciduous trees, in and about it, a small foundry within a stone’s throw, and more shantees within sight. Half the visable population Chinamen. The mountain, Mt. Bullion, over which the sun comes about seven o’clock, is so different from our mountains that I can’t readily describe it. It is a mountain, however, (looking smaller, nearer & lower than it really is) comparing in height with the mountains east of Brattleboro’, not precipitous, but with very steep places, (gullies.) It is better wooded than any other ground I have seen in California, and looking across the face, in some places, really seems green. It is more or less mountainous on both sides up & down the valley, and there is—I can [100]

detect—some variety of foliage up the mountains. Near the bottoms I see little but the oak and various bushes, thorny chaparral with clumps or patches of dwarf horse chestnut or buckeye. It is—I really don’t understand it & won’t say whether it is beautiful or not. It is not—yet it may be, after you are used to the hot, dry, winter, which I find it very hard to put up with. But I can believe that in the spring it is very beautiful—spring & summer, when this brown is green & tinted with flowers as they describe it.

The store building is small—everything is smaller than I had imagined, but it is clean—& so far as furnished, very well furnished. The store—as a store, is excellent & well-kept, but, it is just a miner’s village—no women & everything as it must be where men don’t live but merely camp.