He explained that he was a surveyor, and had been in the lower country engaged in surveying land; that the horse had escaped him with his saddle-bags containing all his notes and papers, and some six hundred dollars in money, all the money he had earned.  He spent the night with us on the ground, and the next morning we left him there to continue the search for his horse, and I afterward heard that he had found his saddle-bags all right, but never recovered the horse.  The next day toward night we approached the Mission of San Francisco, and the village of Yerba Buena, tired and weary—­the wind as usual blowing a perfect hurricane, and a more desolate region it was impossible to conceive of.  Leaving Barnes to work his way into the town as best he could with the tired animals, I took the freshest horse and rode forward.  I fell in with Lieutenant Fabius Stanley, United States Navy, and we rode into Yerba Buena together about an hour before sundown, there being nothing but a path from the Mission into the town, deep and heavy with drift-sand.  My horse could hardly drag one foot after the other when we reached the old Hudson Bay Company’s house, which was then the store of Howard and Mellus.  There I learned where Captain Folsom, the quartermaster, was to be found.  He was staying with a family of the name of Grimes, who had a small horse back of Howard’s store, which must have been near where Sacramento Street now crosses Kearney.  Folsom was a classmate of mine, had come out with Stevenson’s regiment as quartermaster, and was at the time the chief-quartermaster of the department.  His office was in the old custom-horse standing at the northwest corner of the Plaza.  He had hired two warehouses, the only ones there at the time, of one Liedsdorff, the principal man of Yerba Buena, who also owned the only public-house, or tavern, called the City Hotel, on Kearney Street, at the southeast corner of the Plaza.  I stopped with Folsom at Mrs. Grimes’s, and he sent my horse, as also the other three when Barnes had got in after dark, to a coral where he had a little barley, but no hay.  At that time nobody fed a horse, but he was usually turned out to pick such scanty grass as he could find on the side-hills.  The few government horses used in town were usually sent out to the Presidio, where the grass was somewhat better.  At that time (July, 1847), what is now called San Francisco was called Yerba Buena.  A naval officer, Lieutenant Washington A. Bartlett, its first alcalde, had caused it to be surveyed and laid out into blocks and lots, which were being sold at sixteen dollars a lot of fifty vuras square; the understanding being that no single person could purchase of the alcalde more than one in-lot of fifty varas, and one out-lot of a hundred varas.  Folsom, however, had got his clerks, orderlies, etc., to buy lots, and they, for a small consideration, conveyed them to him, so that he was nominally the owner of a good many lots.  Lieutenant Halleck had bought one