istance elsewhere, even in darkest Africa, without passing
the conventional domicile of some member of his own race. Long ago
such an experience became impossible in the United States.

[Illustration: Pack-mule route to placer diggings]

This house was a small wayside inn, situated where a miners' trail
crossed the emigrant route; a roughly-made, two-story, frame building,
with a corral adjoining; at which mule pack-trains stopped overnight,
when carrying supplies from Sacramento and Marysville for miners
working the gold placer diggings along the American and Yuba rivers.
We camped beside the little hotel, and the next morning were for the
first time permitted to enjoy a sample of the proverbially generous
California hospitality, when the landlord invited our entire company
into his hostelry for breakfast.

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 access