It pleased me right well when father said that we were to remain in
camp one full day by the side of this river, in order to give the
animals the opportunity of feeding upon the rich grass which grew in
abundance on every hand.
At last we had come into California, and a beautiful country indeed
it appeared to me while we remained near the river,--all the more
beautiful, perhaps, because of the suffering which it had cost us to
get there. Both Ellen and I now came to believe our fathers had been
wise indeed to leave the banks of the muddy Mississippi for so glorious
a river as the Truckee.
All around us were evidences of bountiful nature, for the land was
seemingly overcrowded with game, with food on every hand for the
cattle, beautiful flowers, and everything which goes to make one happy.
How long the journey had been I did not really know until Eben Jordan
came to where Ellen and I were sitting on the grass with the skirts
of our gowns filled with flowers. He had in his hands a bit of paper
on which he had set down, from what had been told him by the leaders
of the company, the distance we people had traveled since leaving
Independence. This was no less than two thousand and ninety miles,
to which one must add, in order to learn how long was our march, the
distance from Pike County to Independence, which would, so Eben said,
make a total of about two thousand two hundred.
[Illustration]
Even then we were nearly two hundred miles from San Francisco; however
it was not the intention of our fathers to journey so far across
California, for we had not come expecting to find gold, but to make for
ourselves farms, where we could live comfortably by honest industry.
Already I am writing as if we had come to an end of our journey, and so
it seemed to me while we remained in camp on the bank of the Truckee
River; but there were yet many days of toil before we arrived at the
place where our people had decided to buy land.
It was yet necessary that we cross the Sierra Nevada, where we found a
seemingly impassable trail over the mountains, yet we knew that people
like ourselves, traveling in the same way, had gone before us, and all
the dangers and the difficulties seemed lessened because of the fact
that we had come so near to where we intended to make our new homes.