from the writing.
What happened to the old pedestrian emigrants; what was the tedium
suffered by the Indians and trappers of our youth, the imagination
trembles to conceive. This is now Saturday, 23rd, and I have been
steadily travelling since I parted from you at St. Pancras. It is a
strange vicissitude from the Savile Club to this; I sleep with a man
from Pennsylvania who has been in the Navy Yard, and mess with him and
the Missouri bird already alluded to. We have a tin wash-bowl among
four, I wear nothing but a shirt and a pair of trousers and never button
my shirt. When I land for a meal, I pass my coat and feel dressed. This
life is to last until Friday, Saturday or Sunday next. It is a strange
affair to be an emigrant, as I hope you shall see in a future work. I
wonder if this will be legible; my present station on the wagon roof,
though airy, compared to the cars, is both dirty and insecure. I can see
the track straight before and straight behind me to either horizon....

"Our journey is through ghostly deserts, sage brush and alkali, and
rocks without form or color, a sad corner of the world. I confess I am
not jolly, but mighty calm, in my distresses. My illness is a subject of
great mirth to some of my fellow travellers, and I smile rather sickly
at their jests.

"We are going along Bitter Creek just now, a place infamous in the
history of emigration, a place I shall remember myself among the
blackest.--R.L.S."

When California was finally reached he decided to rest and recover
strength by camping out for a few days in the Coast Range Mountains
beyond Monterey, but the anxiety and strain of the long journey had been
greater than he realized, and he broke down and became very ill. For two
nights he lay out under the trees in a kind of stupor and at length was
rescued by two frontiersmen in charge of a goat-ranch, who took him to
their cabin and cared for him until he partly recovered.

"Here is another curious start in my life," he wrote to Sidney Colvin.
"I am living at an Angora goat-ranch, in the Coast Line Mountains,
eighteen miles from Monterey. I was camping out, but got so sick that
the two rancheros took me in and tended me. One is an old bear hunter,
seventy-two years old, and a captain from the Mexican War; the other a
pilgrim, and one who was out with the bear flag and under Fremont when
California was taken by the States. They are both true frontiersmen, and
most kind and pleasant. Captain Sm