Page:The Amateur Emigrant-The Silverado Squatters.djvu/15

Rh, he wrote to Mr. Colvin: "The Amateur Emigrant is about half drafted. It was from Monterey that he also wrote to Mr. Colvin: "I am a reporter for the Monterey Californian at a salary of two dollars a week!" From this feeble joke the most foolish tales have arisen, and grown in the re-telling, of his having been a reporter connected with a San Francisco paper. The Monterey Californian was a tiny sheet that was hardly in a position to pay any one so much as two dollars a week. The editor was also the printer and did all the work on his paper with his own hands. The idea of a reporter in a place where "the population is about that of a dissenting chapel on a wet Sunday. . . mostly Mexican and Indian," was thought very amusing by both my husband and Mr. Bronson, the editor, but some one seems to have taken it very seriously. The Amateur Emigrant was partly written in Monterey, and almost finished in San Francisco under the most depressing circumstances of ill health, poverty, and letters of adverse criticism from friends in England. In an unfinished letter dated Calistoga, June 4, 1880, he writes: "To-day at last I send the last of the Double Damned Emigrant. It was all written, after a fashion, months ago, before I caved in; yet I have not had the pluck and strength to finish copying these few