rn and commence
again and manage my affairs in a more conservative way, and what I could
control. Well I closed my matters out the best I could and engaged my
passage on the steamer for Relago. There was considerable excitement at
this time about the Nicaragua route. The above place would be the
terminus on the Pacific coast, and, consequently, a place of importance.
As I had missed it in trading six of my houses for lots in San
Francisco, there might be a chance to get some there in advance of any
rise on them. Any way, I wanted to get out of my entangling alliances
and take a fresh start. The night before I sailed Mr. Brady (Colonel
Stevenson's son-in-law) came to me and said the colonel did not like to
have me go. I told him I had paid my passage, $200. He said the colonel
understood that. He put his hand in his vest pocket and pulled out a
roll of bills. He said, here is the $200, which he told me to give you,
so you will not lose any thing by not going. There was once a lady, the
wife of one of the officers of his regiment, who arrived there,
expecting to meet her husband, but he was up in the country. The colonel
asked me to go down to the steamer and meet her, and escort her to a
boarding-house to stay until her husband arrived, which I did. I told
him that she was short of funds, having expected to meet her husband. He
gave me $150 and told me to give it to her, as if I loaned it to her,
and when her husband paid me I could return it to him. I mention these
little incidents to show that whatever faults he may have had, he was
the most generous of friends.

Colonels Stevenson, Freemont and Captain Sutter will stand pre-eminent
in the future history of the State as its most prominent founders.

I sailed out of the port of San Francisco on the steamer _Ecuador_ for
Relago, Central America, expecting to return to California within sixty
days. In a few days, out at sea, we began to hear unfavorable rumors
about our vessel; that the engineer had left the day before our sailing;
that he did not consider it safe to go in it; that it could not carry
coal enough to take it to Acapulco, the next coaling place. And we were
informed that it was a steamer that had been running from Panama to
Valparaiso, and had been bought up by a speculator and sent up to San
Francisco as an experiment, to see if it would pay. The officers and men
had never been up the coast before, and knew nothing about the port. One
day we were startled