We left Independence on the third 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 cross the chaparral by a direction different from that which the main body of the party was pursuing.  Suddenly Mr. Loring dropped his instrument and in a tone of terror exclaimed: 

“Look at that bear.”  I looked as he pointed in the direction of a large rock, and there were three huge grizzly bears.  Loring, being longer legged than I, left me like a shot from a gun.  I ran to a tree, near by, from four to six feet in circumference, and very speedily found myself perched among its branches.  I looked for the bears.  One had not left the spot where we discovered them.  Another was growling and snarling at the foot of the tree which I had climbed.  The other was going after Loring at no very slow pace.