Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 4.djvu/233

Rh estate is the beautiful village of "Chico," where, in rural wealth as well as in rural simplicity, live an educated and contented peasantry, all more or less supported by the means of this bachelor millionaire—whose residence, on the banks of the Sacramento, is one of those architectural gems hid away amidst shrubs, trees, orchards, and groves, as if to avoid the gaze of him whose residence is of crowded cities and who is almost unworthy to breath the sweet perfume of a region where such bowers grow. May Major Bidwell long live—though bachelor he be—to dispense his bounties to a people who respect him for the liberal and generous manner in which he shares his wealth with those not similarly blest.

From Tehama the ride of half a day brings us to Oroville, a city well named, for situated as it is on the Feather River, it is in the heart of a rich mining country, where the miners have worked like so many beavers, and where the water of the Feather River is made to run in pipes and reservoirs into lakes for hundreds of feet above the level of the river, at the site of the town. This river is crossed by a ferry. A steamer is said to have once landed here from Sacramento, but such occurrences I regard as rare. The river is rapid; boils and surges over a rocky and rugged bed, and joins the Sacramento at Marysville—to which point a night's ride brings us—continuing to pass through a rich agricultural region, under a state of high cultivation. Marysville is a large, prosperous city—houses, mostly of brick—at the junction of the Yuba and Feather rivers. Thence on to Sacramento, (a journey of eight hours' staging,) the road is over a level, agricultural district, throughout which the piles of drift timber and the absence of fences, in many places, and the presence of boats and bateaux, all told that the water had been here supreme not many months