days, meeting several of our old Death Valley party, and Mr.
D.J. Dilley, Mrs. Bennett's father. Mrs. Bennett left surviving her a
young babe.

I returned to Moore's Flat, and soon sold out my store, taking up the
business of purchasing gold dust direct from the miners, which I
followed for about two years, and in the fall of 1859 sold out the
business to Marks & Powers. I looked about through Napa and Sonoma
Counties, and finally came to San Jose, where I purchased the farm I now
own, near Hillsdale, of Bodley & McCabe, for which I paid $4,000.

In the fall of the same year my old friend W.M. Stockton of Los Angeles
Co. persuaded me to come down and pay him a visit. His wife had died and
he felt very lonely. I had been there but a few days when my old friend
A. Bennett and his children also came to Stockton's. The children had
grown so much I hardly knew them, but I was glad indeed to meet them.

I found Mr. Bennett to be a poor man. He had been persuaded to go to
Utah, being told that a fortune awaited his coming there, or could be
accumulated in a short time. He gave away the little babe left by his
wife to Mrs. Scott, of Scott's Valley, in Santa Cruz Co. and sold his
farm near the mouth of the Salinas River. With what money he had
accumulated he loaded two 4 mule teams with dry goods, put his four
children into his wagon, and went to Cedar City, Utah.

He gave a thrilling account of passing through Mountain Meadows, where
he saw, here and there little groups of skeletons of the unhappy victims
of the great massacre at that place of men, women and children, by J.D.
Lee, and his Mormon followers and told me the terrible story, which I
here omit.

Smarting under the terrible taxation of one tenth of everything, Bennett
grew poorer and poorer and at last resolved that he must go away, but
his wife could not leave her own people, and so he set off with his
children, somewhat afraid he might be shot down, but he reached Los
Angeles Co. in safety. One daughter married a lawyer in San Bernardino,
and died a few years afterwards. The other married a Capt. Johnson of
Wilmington, and Bennett and two sons went to Idaho.

A few years ago in passing from San Jose to the Coast, my wife and I
spent Sunday at Scott's Valley. Mrs. Scott invited us to visit them in
the evening at the house when all would be at home. Mrs. Scott was the
lady to whom Bennett gave his girl baby when he started away for Utah,
and I felt very anxious