And another corrupt element arrived by sea, the ex-convicts from Sidney.

I went to Coloma one day to get supplies for the party.  I rode one of the mules, the other followed to be packed with the purchases.  When I bought what was wanted, I handed the storekeeper my bag of gold to pay him.  When he returned it to me, I found his statement made was between three and four dollars less than I knew was in it.  I informed him of the discrepancy.  He said he did not see how that could be; that he weighed it right.  He came in in a few minutes and apologized, saying that he had weighed it in the scales that he used when he traded with the Indians.  It needs no comment to know that the Christian man is not always superior to the Indian in integrity.  There was an Indian who had struck a pocket.  He came to Coloma with $800 in gold dust that he got out in a short time.  He invested it all with the storekeepers in a few hours.  He had dressed himself in the height of fashion, including a gold watch.  He was dressed as no California Indian ever had been before.  The gold he could not eat nor drink.

[Illustration:  DRESSED AS NO CALIFORNIA INDIAN EVER WAS BEFORE.]

How the gold came there is one of the mysteries of nature.  One theory is, that the Sierra Nevada mountains were once the banks of the Pacific ocean, and all California had been thrown up from the bottom of the sea from that depth where gold was a part of the formation of the earth, in connection with quartz, and as all gold appears in a molten state, which would go to corroborate this theory.  A person informed me that he went through a ravine where one side of the road was half of a large rock, and on the other side, the other half.  He could see where the two halves would match each other exactly.  Well, I lived that life for two months.  We had an addition to what I have described to eat—­pork and beans on Sunday, and Chili pudding.  It had been baked and sweetened, and then ground up like flour and put in bags.  All you had to do was to moisten it with water to eat it.  All our flour came from that country, put up in sacks of fifty and one hundred pounds each, but we had no vegetables.  One day we heard that they had dried-apple sauce at the hotel at Coloma for dinner.  The next day, Sunday, three of us walked eight miles to get there to dinner to get a taste of it.  We paid $2 apiece for our dinner, and they had the sauce; it tasted so good that we did not begrudge the price of the dinner and the walk back again.  We were fully satisfied.

The rainy season set in.  It rained three days, and although it was three or four weeks before it would be possible for my houses to arrive, yet it was a new country and no bridges.  The streams might get up so as to be impassable, and the houses were consigned to me, and no one but myself to receive them.  I thought I had better get back to San Francisco at once.  What I was making in the mines was mere nothing to what I had at stake in the houses.