Page:History of California, Volume 3 (Bancroft).djvu/429

Rh in the far west; and later to make known his early efforts, to seek a reward, and particularly to complain of the gross wrongs of which he had been the victim. He honestly believed himself to have been the first and most efficient promoter of American colonization on the Pacific coast, and that he had been robbed of the honor and profit that should have resulted from his services.

Another visit of the year was probably apocryphal. Dr John Coulter, in a narrative of adventures in the Pacific published in London, devoted seven chapters to his experience in California, covering a larger part of the year 1834, so far as can be judged from the single date given in the book. The author's knowledge of Californian geography was perhaps derived from earlier books, with a general idea of institutions; but all the rest was evidently evolved from his imagination, since, if he ever saw the country at all, his narrative shows no trace of that fact. It is for the most part an account of absurdly impossible personal adventures, with allusions to magnificent ruins and relics of antiquity: Indians clad in doeskin, decked with gay feathers and paint and silk scarfs and silver bracelets and coronets, and armed with tomahawk and rifle; canoes floating on stream and lake; robbers with their deadly lassos infesting every trail; with lofty pines, shady magnolias, cochineal-feeding prickly pears, and broad ranges of hazel-nut!