Page:A La California.djvu/226

184 bank to bank, and stretching from the Bay of Suisun to the Black Buttes of Marysville and beyond? Yet such it was. In the winter of 1861-2, steamers went twenty miles inland from the banks of the Sacramento, and from tree-tops, hay-stacks, and the roofs of houses and barns, or fixed rafts constructed of house and fence materials, rescued hundreds of families who otherwise must have perished in the raging floods. Those were indeed dark days for the dwellers in the valley of the Sacramento, and it seemed for a time that the whole country must be abandoned forever by man. For more than forty days and forty nights the windows of Heaven were opened, and the rain poured down almost incessantly. San Francisco was filled with refugees, supported by the charity of her citizens; and all the towns of the valley country were flooded, or saved from destruction only by incessant labor upon their levees.

In those days people joked and laughed in the midst of their misfortunes with true California humor. Well do I remember hearing a party of the "drowned out," standing on the deck of a steamer which was carrying them to San Francisco, and relating with grim facetiousness the mishaps and adventures of the hour. One rough-bearded fellow, with a pale, shrinking, feeble woman by his side, and a half-clad, sick child in his arms, told how, while the family were clinging to the boughs of a tree just above the surging waters, they saw a house going swiftly down the stream, with a Chinaman sitting quietly astride the ridge of the roof. "Halloa, John! where are you