The Project Gutenberg EBook of California 1849-1913, by L. H. Woolley

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Title: California 1849-1913
or the Rambling Sketches and Experiences of Sixty-four
Years' Residence in that State.

Author: L. H. Woolley

Posting Date: August 18, 2009 [EBook #4638]
Release Date: November, 2003
First Posted: February 20, 2002

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Produced by David Schwan. HTML version by Al Haines.

California

1849-1913

or

The Rambling Sketches and Experiences of
Sixty-four Years' Residence in that State

By

L. H. Woolley

Member of the Society of California Pioneers
and of the Vigilance Committee of 1856

California

1849-1913

Trip Across the Plains.

The year 1849 has a peculiarly thrilling sensation to the California
Pioneer, not realized by those who came at a later date. My purpose in
recording some of my recollections of early days is not for publication
nor aggrandizement, but that it may be deposited in the archives of my
descendants, that I was one of those adventurers who left the Green
Mountains of Vermont to cross the plains to California, the El
Dorado--the Land of Gold.

In starting out I went to Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Cincinnati,
St. Louis and Independence, Missouri. Here I joined the first mule train
of Turner, Allen & Co.'s Pioneer Line. It consisted of forty wagons, one
hundred and fifty mules, and about one hundred and fifty passengers. We
left the frontier on the fourteenth of May 1849, and here is where our
hardships commenced. Many of us had never known what it was to "camp
out" and do our own cooking. Some of the mules were wild and unbroken,
sometimes inside the traces, sometimes outside; sometimes down,
sometimes up; sometimes one end forward and sometimes the other; but
after a week or two they got sobered down so as to do very well.

Our first campfire at night was on the Little Blue River, a few miles
from Independence; it was after dark when we came to a halt, and it was
my friend Gross' turn to cook, while the rest brought him wood and water
and made a fire for