ng in the
California wilds. His herds were populous and prosperous; only the
merest pretence of fences broke their dream, without affecting their
reality, of limitless pasture. His ranch ostensibly consisted of a few
hundred acres; but Old Shasta was his only surveyor of landmarks, and
his base of supplies was coextensive with the base of the mountain. His
family consisted of an admirably energetic and thrifty wife, who had
accompanied him from Illinois, where he used to be a schoolmaster, and
one pretty little baby-girl indigenous to Strawberry Valley. The
presence of this mother and child in a wilderness which otherwise howled
chiefly with rough sporadic men and equally rough ubiquitous bears, was
a perpetual delight to us, so far from our domestic communications. We
admired Shasta all the more for looking at it over a little, gentle,
pink-and-white baby who lay asleep in its shadow, like a cherub pressed
to the bosom of one of the Djinn. Escaping from the poetical ground, I
may observe, that, between the chief French _restaurant_ of Sacramento
City and the Dennison House in Portland, Oregon, no family whom we
encountered lived in such wholesome and homelike luxury as Sisson's. If
a Society for the Diffusion of Gastronomic Intelligence among the
Heathen is ever founded in California and Oregon, (and how bitterly such
a philanthropic enterprise is needed my diary spotted with the
abominable grease of universal _frying_ bears abundant witness,) I hope
that the first tract which it publishes will be a biography of Mrs.
Sisson, the first point insisted on by that tract, "This excellent and
devoted woman used a gridiron." Bless her! how she could broil things!
No man who has not built up his system during a long expedition with
brick after brick of pork fried hard in its own ooze,--who has not
turned all his brain's active phosphorus into phosphate of soda by
alkali-biscuits drawn from the oven in the hot-dough stage,--who has not
drunk his pease-coffee without milk at the tables of repeated Pike
settlers too shiftless to milk one of their fifty kine,--who has not
slept myriads in a bed with _Cimex lectularius_ and his livelier
congener of the saltatory habits,--can imagine what a blissful bay in
the iron-bound coast of bad-living Sisson's seemed to us both in
fruition and retrospection. We occasionally had beef, when Sisson, or
some near neighbor ten miles off, "killed a critter" and distributed it
around; excellent mounta