water.  When the stones were sufficiently heated, the patient would draw himself into the oven; a blanket would be thrown over the open end, and hot stones put into the water until the patient could stand it no longer.  He was then withdrawn from his steam bath and doused into the cold stream near by.  This treatment may have answered with the early ailments of the Indians.  With the measles or small-pox it would kill every time.

During my year on the Columbia River, the small-pox exterminated one small remnant of a band of Indians entirely, and reduced others materially.  I do not think there was a case of recovery among them, until the doctor with the Hudson Bay Company took the matter in hand and established a hospital.  Nearly every case he treated recovered.  I never, myself, saw the treatment described in the preceding paragraph, but have heard it described by persons who have witnessed it.  The decimation among the Indians I knew of personally, and the hospital, established for their benefit, was a Hudson’s Bay building not a stone’s throw from my own quarters.

The death of Colonel Bliss, of the Adjutant General’s department, which occurred July 5th, 1853, promoted me to the captaincy of a company then stationed at Humboldt Bay, California.  The notice reached me in September of the same year, and I very soon started to join my new command.  There was no way of reaching Humboldt at that time except to take passage on a San Francisco sailing vessel going after lumber.  Red wood, a species of cedar, which on the Pacific coast takes the place filled by white pine in the East, then abounded on the banks of Humboldt Bay.  There were extensive saw-mills engaged in preparing this lumber for the San Francisco market, and sailing vessels, used in getting it to market, furnished the only means of communication between Humboldt and the balance of the world.

I was obliged to remain in San Francisco for several days before I found a vessel.  This gave me a good opportunity of comparing the San Francisco of 1852 with that of 1853.  As before stated, there had been but one wharf in front of the city in 1852—­Long Wharf.  In 1853 the town had grown out into the bay beyond what was the end of this wharf when I first saw it.  Streets and houses had been built out on piles where the year before the largest vessels visiting the port lay at anchor or tied to the wharf.  There was no filling under the streets or houses.  San Francisco presented the same general appearance as the year before; that is, eating, drinking and gambling houses were conspicuous for their number and publicity.  They were on the first floor, with doors wide open.  At all hours of the day and night in walking the streets, the eye was regaled, on every block near the water front, by the sight of players at faro.  Often broken places were found in the street, large enough to let a man down into the water below.  I have but little doubt that many of the people who went to the Pacific coast in the early days of the gold excitement, and have never been heard from since, or who were heard from for a time and then ceased to write, found watery graves beneath the houses or streets built over San Francisco Bay.