ft his native hills of Connecticut, to sell
clocks, first in the South and then in the lumber camps of Michigan.
There, the business of Yankee pedlar having failed, he found himself
stranded. His father was a prosperous farmer; but a stepmother ruled the
household. So young Palmer hired out to a Michigan farmer, for he was
one of those hardy New Englanders who ask no favors of fortune.
Imagining a pretty frontier girl to be a sylvan goddess, with a
Puritan's devotion he made love to her, only to be scorned for his
modesty. But failure and disappointment served but to strengthen him,
and he struck out for California.

He nearly perished on the way there, while crossing the deserts of
Nevada. In Wyoming he had fallen into the hands of that brave true man,
John Enos, then in his prime, who had guided Bonneville, Fremont and the
Mormon pilgrims, and who,--living to the age of a hundred and four
years,--saw the wilderness he had loved and explored for eighty years
transformed to a proud empire. Enos had guided Fremont through Wyoming.
It is rather too bad that Palmer could not have accompanied Fremont and
Kit Carson when, in February, 1844, they crossed the snowy summit of the
Sierras and descended through the deep drifts to Sutter's Fort and
safety. That was four years before the discovery of gold in El Dorado
County.

Palmer was not crazy for gold. Arrived in the Sacramento Valley, he
spent three or four years at farming. Perhaps his Yankee shrewdness saw
larger profits in hay and cattle than in washing gravel. But certainly
his New England integrity and soberness of character were more in
keeping with the spirit of the pioneer than with the spirit of the
adventurer.

While reckless young men were swarming up the valleys of South, Middle
and North Yuba, finding fabulous quantities of gold and squandering the
same upon the Chinese harlots of Downieville, Robert Palmer was making
hay while the sun shone, which was every day in the Sacramento Valley.
But land titles were so uncertain that in 1853 he turned to mining,--at
Jefferson, on the South Yuba. He prospered to such an extent that by
1859 he had sent $8,000 back to Connecticut to pay his debts; and he had
laid by as much more. Frozen out of his claim by a water company--for
without water a miner can do nothing--he sold out to the company in
1860, and went over to the Middle Yuba, where he bought a claim on
Fillmore Hill, with a water ditch of its own.

Here Palmer l