[How Horace Greeley Entered California, Sacramento Union, October 10, 1859]

 

            How Horace Greeley Entered California. -- Horace Greeley, in a letter from Placerville to the New York Tribune, gives the annexed account of his entrance into California from Carson Valley:

            From Carson Valley we rose again for two miles, along a narrow road cut into the side of a mountain, with a precipitous descent on the right. Then we began to descend one more, beside a rivulet which leaped and laughed on its way to the Pacific. The ascent from the Carson side is far shorter than the descent this way, Carson Valley being much higher than that of the Sacramento. But the road, even on this side, is, for most of the way, eaten into the side of a steep mountain, with a precipice from five to fifteen hundred feet on one side, and as steep an eminence on the other. Yet along this more shelf, with hardly a place to each mile where two meeting wagons can pass, the mail stage was driven at the rate of ten miles an hour (in one instance eleven), or just as fast as four wild California horses, whom two men could scarcely harness, could draw it. Our driver was of course skillful; but had he met a wagon suddenly on rounding one of the sharp points or projections we were constantly passing, a fearful crash was unavoidable. Had his horses seen fit to run away (as they did run once, on the unhooking of a trace, but at a place where he had room to rein them out of the road on the upper side, and thus stop them) I know that he could not have held them, and we might have pitched headlong down a precipice of a thousand feet, where all the concern that could have been picked up afterward would not have been worth two bits per bushel. Yet at this breakneck rate we were driven for not less than four hours or forty miles, changing every ten or fifteen, and raising a cloud of dust through which at all times it was exceedingly difficult to see anything. We crossed the South fork of the American river eighteen miles above this, rising two or three miles immediately after to the summit of the ridge south, and thenceforward the road, nearly to this city, descends steadily a beautifully inclined ridge, and, but for the dust, would be one of the finest drives on earth. And right glad was I to find myself once more among friends, surrounded by the comforts of civilization, and with a prospect of occasional rest. I cannot conscientiously recommend the route I have traveled to tourists in quest of pleasure, but it is a balm for many bruises to know that I am in California.