Thence I Went To Mariposa
County, And Colonel Fremont's Mines, And Made An Interesting
Visit To "The Colonel," As He
Is called all over the country,
and Mrs. Fremont, a heroine equal to either fortune, the salons
of Paris and
The drawing-rooms of New York and Washington, or the
roughest life of the remote and wild mining regions of Mariposa, - with
their fine family of spirited, clever children. After a rest there,
we went on to Clark's Camp and the Big Trees, where I measured one
tree ninety-seven feet in circumference without its bark, and the
bark is usually eighteen inches thick; and rode through another which
lay on the ground, a shell, with all the insides out - rode through
it mounted, and sitting at full height in the saddle; then to the
wonderful Yo Semite Valley, - itself a stupendous miracle of nature,
with its Dome, its Capitan, its walls of three thousand feet of
perpendicular height, - but a valley of streams, of waterfalls from
the torrent to the mere shimmer of a bridal veil, only enough to
reflect a rainbow, with their plunges of twenty-five hundred feet,
or their smaller falls of eight hundred, with nothing at the base
but thick mists, which form and trickle, and then run and at last
plunge into the blue Merced that flows through the centre of the
valley. Back by the Coulterville trail, the peaks of Sierra Nevada
in sight, across the North Fork of the Merced, by Gentry's Gulch,
over hills and through cañons, to Fremont's again, and thence to
Stockton and San Francisco - all this at the end of August, when
there has been no rain for four months, and the air is dear and
very hot, and the ground perfectly dry; windmills, to raise water for
artificial irrigation of small patches, seen all over the landscape,
while we travel through square miles of hot dust, where they tell
us, and truly that in winter and early spring we should be up to
our knees in flowers; a country, too, where surface gold-digging
is so common and unnoticed that the large, six-horse stage-coach,
in which I travelled from Stockton to Hornitos, turned off in the
high road for a Chinaman, who, with his pan and washer, was working
up a hole which an American had abandoned, but where the minute
and patient industry of the Chinaman averaged a few dollars a day.
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