Fremont, a heroine equal to either fortune, the salons of Paris
and the drawing-rooms of New York and Washington, or the roughest
life of the remote and wild mining regions of Mariposa,-- with
their fine family of spirited, clever children. After a rest
there, we went on to Clark's Camp and the Big Trees, where I
measured one tree ninety-seven feet in circumference without its
bark, and the bark is usually eighteen inches thick; and rode
through another which lay on the ground, a shell, with all the
insides out,-- rode through it mounted, and sitting at full height
in the saddle; then to the wonderful Yo Semite Valley,-- itself a
stupendous miracle of nature, with its Dome, its Capitan, its
walls of three thousand feet of perpendicular height,-- but a
valley of streams, of waterfalls, from the torrent to the mere
shimmer of a bridal veil, only enough to reflect a rainbow, with
their plunges of twenty-five hundred feet, or their smaller falls
of eight hundred, with nothing at the base but thick mists, which
form and trickle, and then run and at last plunge into the blue
Merced that flows through the centre of the valley. Back by the
Coulterville trail, the peaks of Sierra Nevada in sight, across
the North Fork of the Merced, by Gentry's Gulch, over hills and
through canons, to Fremont's again, and thence to Stockton and San
Francisco,-- all this at the end of August, when there has been no
rain for four months, and the air is clear and very hot, and the
ground perfectly dry; windmills, to raise water for artificial
irrigation of small patches, seen all over the landscape, while we
travel through square miles of hot dust, where they tell us, and
truly, that in winter and early spring we should be up to our
knees in flowers; a country, too, where surface gold-digging is so
common and unnoticed that the large, six-horse stage-coach, in
which I travelled from Stockton to Hornitos, turned off in the
high road for a Chinaman, who, with his pan and washer, was
working up a hole which an American had abandoned, but where the
minute and patient industry of the Chinaman averaged a few dollars
a day.
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