and by the advice of some friendly Indians who came into our camp, we
kept the "big trail" for three days and came to Walker's Pass. While on
this trail we were followed at night by a number of wild Indians, but we
prudently avoided any collisions with them and kept moving on. Going on
through the pass we followed the right hand branch of the trail, the
left hand branch leading more to the south and across a wide plain. We
soon came to a fair-sized stream, now known to be the south fork of the
Kern River, which we followed until we came to its junction with a
larger river, the two making the Kern River. Here we were taken across
by some friendly Indians who left the Missions farther west during the
Mexican war and took to their own village located at the foot of the
Sierra Nevada Mountains. At this village we were on exhibition for
several hours with an audience of five hundred people or more, of the
red men, and on the following morning we commenced the ascent of the
mountains again, the Indians furnishing us with a guide in the person of
an old Pi-Ute. He brought us over the range, through the snow and over
the bleak ridges, in the month of December, 1849, and we made our first
camp at an Indian village in Tulare Valley, a few miles south of where
Porterville now stands.

From this Indian village we walked on until we arrived at the present
site of Millerton on the south bank of the San Joaquin River. Our
sufferings were terrible from hunger, cold, and wet, for the rains were
almost continual at this elevation, and we had been forced several times
to swim. The sudden change from the dried-up desert to a rainy region
was pretty severe on us. On our arrival at the San Joaquin River we
found a camp of wealthy Mexicans who gave us a small amount of food, and
seemed to want us to pass on that they might be rid of us. I can well
believe that a company of twenty-one starving men was the cause of some
disquietude to them. They gave us some hides taken from some of the
cattle they had recently slain, and from these we constructed a boat and
ferry rope in which we crossed the river, and then continued our journey
to the mining camp on Aqua Frio, in Mariposa county.

It is very strange to think that since that time I have never met a
single man of that party of twenty-one. I had kept quite full notes of
the whole trip from the state of New York to the mines, and including my
early mining experience up to the year 1851. Unfortun