Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 24.djvu/61

 Recollections of B. F. Bonney up, so the wagons were taken to pieces and hoisted to the top of the rim rock with ropes. The wagons were put together again, reloaded, and the oxen which had been led through a narrow crevice in the rim rock, were hitched up and we went on. Once again in the Sierras we came to a rim rock that could not be mounted, and repeated the process of hoisting the wagons up. It took us four days to reach the summit of the mountains. In going down the side of the mountains in the Sacramento valley the mountains were so steep in places that we had to cut pine trees and hitch them to the ends of the wagons to keep them from running forward on the legs of the oxen. "At the foot of the Sierras we camped by a beautiful, ice-cold, crystal-clear mountain stream. We camped there for three days to rest the teams and let the women wash the clothing and get things fixed up. "My sister Harriett was 14, and with my cousin, Lydia Bonney, daughter of my father's brother, Truman Bonney, myself and other boys of the party, we put in three delightful days wading in the stream. It was Oc- tober and the water was low. In many places there were sand and gravel bars. "On one of these gravel bars I saw what I thought was wheat, but when I picked them up I found they were heavy and the color of dull yellow wheat. I took one of the pieces about the size of a small pea into camp with me. Dr. R. Gildea asked me for it. That evening he came to my father and, showing him the dull yellow metal I had given him, said : 'What your boy found today is pure gold. Keep the matter to yourself; we will come back here next spring and get rich.' My father thought Dr. Gildea was a visionary and did not pay much atten- tion to him. "Dr. Gildea asked me to pick up all the nuggets I could find. He gave me an ounce bottle and asked me to fill it for him. The next day we hunted along the