of June. It is now the latter part of
September. We have spent almost four months on the road. And here let me
say, that had I given a description of the country, its rivers, its
mountains, its scenery, its abundance of game, among the noblest of which,
are the buffalo, bears of different kinds, deer, antelope, mountain sheep;
its numerous rivers abounding with a great variety of fishes,--had I
endeavored to give a full description of all these, it would have demanded
a volume rather than a chapter.

Here I was at Benicia, and winter was at hand. I decided not to go to the
mining district until the spring sun should return. Provisions commanded
almost fabulous prices. Packers got a dollar a pound for packing flour,
sugar, rice and other things which the miners must have.

But an unexpected opening presented itself to me. Mr. Frederick Loring was
about to set out on a surveying tour in behalf of the government. I
secured a position in the party as chain-man.

We set out for San Rafael, which is in Marin county, on the coast of the
Pacific, just north of San Francisco. We had been out but five or six
weeks, when Mr. Loring's health began seriously to fail him. One day he
called me to him, and said:

"I wish you now to quit chaining and to carry my instrument and to watch
me, that you may learn to use it yourself. I shall probably not be able to
finish this contract. I ought to be on my bed now."

Very readily I fell in with this arrangement. Having studied navigation
while a boy at school, which is somewhat similar to surveying, it did not
take me a great while to learn to adjust the instrument, or to take the
variations at night, on the elongation of the north star. I will here
remark in passing, that Mr. Loring soon became so enfeebled that he
returned to San Francisco, where he died.

One day while surveying in the coast range, we had descended a mountain,
and upon a plain below had found a dense chaparral or thicket of bushes,
so closely interwoven that we could not penetrate it with our pack
animals. We therefore sent the boys down the plain, along the edge of the
thickets, to find some better place to go through. Mr. Loring, our
chain-man and I prepared to make a triangulation, in order to get the
distance from the point we were at, to a white stone on our line of
survey, which was on the side of the opposite mountain and across the
chaparral.

Having finished the triangulation, Mr. Loring and I endeavored to