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Show 394 WESTERN WILDS. it is a hundred times as easy for a white man to go wild as for an Indian to become really civilized, We left Reading by stage at one o'clock in the morning, seven men in a little coach, which carried also seventeen hundred pounds of de-layed mail. On top, rear, and " boot," it was piled as long as it could be strapped fast, and half the inside was filled with it. The passes ahead were fast filling with snow, and delayed mail and passengers were scattered at every point along the route. At daylight we crossed Pitt River, where the valley of the Sacramento may be said to end, H as the spurs of the Sierras put out p westward toward the Coast Range, and, in mining parlance, " pinch in" upon | the plain. Pitt River is really the g Upper Sacramento, being the largest B of the confluent streams, and preserv-h ing a general course south- westward, PH after emerging from the mountains. Along its right bluff, we preserved H a general north- east course all day. < Again and again we thought we had ' left it, as the coach turned directly 2 away and labored up mountainous passes, and along frightful " dugways " 8 for miles, to an elevation of hundreds of feet above the stream; then we would turn to the right, and come thundering down a long rocky grade for two or three miles to the water's edge again. And every time we ap-peared to be coming back to the same place; there were the same timbered hills and rocky bluffs, perpendicular on one side of the stream and sloping on the other; the same immense gray bowlders, rocky islands and towers in the bed of the stream, and the same white foaming rapids. |
