m. We
continued the survey up some twenty miles into the hills above the
mill of Dailor and Sheldon. It took about a month to make this
survey, which, when finished, was duly plotted; and for it we
received one-tenth of the land, or two subdivisions. Ord and I
took the land, and we paid Seton for his labor in cash. By the
sale of my share of the land, subsequently, I realized three
thousand dollars. After finishing Hartnell's survey, we crossed
over to Dailor's, and did some work for him at five hundred dollars
a day for the party. Having finished our work on the Cosumnes, we
proceeded to Sacramento, where Captain Sutter employed us to
connect the survey of Sacramento City, made by Lieutenant Warner,
and that of Sutterville, three miles below, which was then being
surveyed by Lieutenant J. W. Davidson, of the First Dragoons. At
Sutterville, the plateau of the Sacramento approached quite near
the river, and it would have made a better site for a town than the
low, submerged land where the city now stands; but it seems to be a
law of growth that all natural advantages are disregarded wherever
once business chooses a location. Old Sutter's embarcadero became
Sacramento City, simply because it was the first point used for
unloading boats for Sutter's Fort, just as the site for San
Francisco was fixed by the use of Yerba Buena as the hide-landing
for the Mission of "San Francisco de Asis."

I invested my earnings in this survey in three lots in Sacramento
City, on which I made a fair profit by a sale to one McNulty, of
Mansfield, Ohio. I only had a two months' leave of absence, during
which General Smith, his staff, and a retinue of civil friends,
were making a tour of the gold-mines, and hearing that he was en
route back to his headquarters at Sonoma, I knocked off my work,
sold my instruments, and left my wagon and mules with my cousin
Charley Hoyt, who had a store in Sacramento, and was on the point
of moving up to a ranch, for which he had bargained, on Bear Creek,
on which was afterward established Camp "Far West." He afterward
sold the mules, wagon, etc., for me, and on the whole I think I
cleared, by those two months' work, about six thousand dollars. I
then returned to headquarters at Sonoma, in time to attend my
fellow aide-de-camp Gibbs through a long and dangerous sickness,
during which he was on board a store-ship, guarded by Captain
George Johnson, who now resides in San Francisco. General Smith