of the Sacramento approached quite near the river, and it would have made a better site for a town than the low, submerged land where the city now stands; but it seems to be a law of growth that all natural advantages are disregarded wherever once business chooses a location.  Old Sutter’s embarcadero became Sacramento City, simply because it was the first point used for unloading boats for Sutter’s Fort, just as the site for San Francisco was fixed by the use of Yerba Buena as the hide-landing for the Mission of “San Francisco de Asis.”

I invested my earnings in this survey in three lots in Sacramento City, on which I made a fair profit by a sale to one McNulty, of Mansfield, Ohio.  I only had a two months’ leave of absence, during which General Smith, his staff, and a retinue of civil friends, were making a tour of the gold-mines, and hearing that he was en route back to his headquarters at Sonoma, I knocked off my work, sold my instruments, and left my wagon and mules with my cousin Charley Hoyt, who had a store in Sacramento, and was on the point of moving up to a ranch, for which he had bargained, on Bear Creek, on which was afterward established Camp “Far West.”  He afterward sold the mules, wagon, etc., for me, and on the whole I think I cleared, by those two months’ work, about six thousand dollars.  I then returned to headquarters at Sonoma, in time to attend my fellow aide-de-camp Gibbs through a long and dangerous sickness, during which he was on board a store-ship, guarded by Captain George Johnson, who now resides in San Francisco.  General Smith had agreed that on the first good opportunity he would send me to the United States as a bearer of dispatches, but this he could not do until he had made the examination of Oregon, which was also in his command.  During the summer of 1849 there continued to pour into California a perfect stream of people.  Steamers came, and a line was established from San Francisco to Sacramento, of which the Senator was the pioneer, charging sixteen dollars a passage, and actually coining money.  Other boats were built, out of materials which had either come around Cape Horn or were brought from the Sandwich Islands.  Wharves were built, houses were springing up as if by magic, and the Bay of San Francisco presented as busy a scene of life as any part of the world.  Major Allen, of the Quartermaster’s Department, who had come out as chief-quartermaster of the division, was building a large warehouse at Benicia, with a row of quarters, out of lumber at one hundred dollars per thousand feet, and the work was done by men at sixteen dollars a day.  I have seen a detailed soldier, who got only his monthly pay of eight dollars a month, and twenty cents a day for extra duty, nailing on weather-boards and shingles, alongside a citizen who was paid sixteen dollars a day.  This was a real injustice, made the soldiers discontented, and it was hardly to be wondered at that so many deserted.