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,