gave me $150 and told me to give it to her, as if I loaned it to her,
and when her husband paid me I could return it to him. I mention these
little incidents to show that whatever faults he may have had, he was
the most generous of friends.

Colonels Stevenson, Freemont and Captain Sutter will stand pre-eminent
in the future history of the State as its most prominent founders.

I sailed out of the port of San Francisco on the steamer _Ecuador_ for
Relago, Central America, expecting to return to California within sixty
days. In a few days, out at sea, we began to hear unfavorable rumors
about our vessel; that the engineer had left the day before our sailing;
that he did not consider it safe to go in it; that it could not carry
coal enough to take it to Acapulco, the next coaling place. And we were
informed that it was a steamer that had been running from Panama to
Valparaiso, and had been bought up by a speculator and sent up to San
Francisco as an experiment, to see if it would pay. The officers and men
had never been up the coast before, and knew nothing about the port. One
day we were startled in mid ocean by the stopping of the engine. We soon
found the cause. The captain was about to try his sails so as to save
coal (which verified the reports about being short of coal). We made
some headway with the sails, but lost it again when the wind subsided,
by the currents of the ocean; so that project was abandoned, and after
some days we put into the port of San Blas, in Mexico, for fuel. There
was no coal there, so we laid in all the wood we could to try and reach
Acapulco (here we could not buy any thing with our $5 gold pieces, but
they were ready to sell for silver). The cholera had been there, they
said, but had left. The priests had had a procession, and, with their
incense boxes, had marched through the streets and driven it out. We
took in all the wood we could get and started to make the port of