We walked on down to
the hotel, and in a few minutes the three came into the hotel
also, the one still crying like a baby. The proprietor only
laughed and said it was a common occurrence for men to come to the
city with even twenty thousand dollars, gamble it off in less than
a week and then return to the mines to make another stake. But he
said he had never seen a man before that took it as hard as this
one did.
It was all new to me, and a little of it went a long ways.
That night after Jim Beckwith and I had retired, I told him that I
had seen all of San Francisco that I cared to, and was ready to
leave. However, we stayed two days longer, after which we pulled
out for the Sierra Nevadas, by the way of Hangtown, a little
mining camp situated at the American Fork. Here we crossed over a
pass that Jim had told me of more than a year previous, which led
us to the headwaters of the Carson river.
I proposed we give it the name of Beckwith Pass; and from that day
to this it has been known by that name, and since has been made a
splendid stage road.
After traveling down the Carson river some distance, we met a
party of miners who informed us that a few days previous a band of
Indians down on the Humboldt had made an attack on an emigrant
train, cut off a portion of the train, stampeded the teams, killed
all the people of that part of the train and burned the wagons.
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