On the wild and dreary track from the States to California, frightful disasters occur to caravans of emigrants, which, encumbered with women and children, and sometimes under incompetent leaders, lose precious time by the way, and are caught and crushed by the terrible winter of those desolate regions. Journeying near the Sacramento, Mr Johnson came upon the house of "old Keysburg the cannibal, who revelled in the awful feast on human flesh and blood, during the sufferings of a party of emigrants near the pass of the Sierra Nevada, in the winter of 1847. It is said that the taste which Keysburg then acquired has not left him, and that he often declares, with evident gusto, 'I would like to eat a piece of you;' and several have sworn to shoot him, if he ventures on such _fond_ declarations to them. We therefore looked upon the den of this wild beast in human form with a good deal of disgusted curiosity, and kept our bowie-knives handy for a slice of him if necessary." Sailor though he is, Mr Wise troubles his reader very little with nautical matters. During a few weeks he was a good deal afloat, having succeeded to the command of the Rosita, a forty ton schooner, with a crew of fifteen sailors, a small boy, and a mulatto cook, who had once been "head bottle-washer of a Liverpool liner, with glass nubs on de cabin doors;" but otherwise most of his time seems to have been spent on shore, riding, shooting, dancing, and love-making, doing military duty in garrison at Mazatlan, throwing up fortifications, and surprising parties of Mexicans, whose fear of the Gringos was most intense and ludicrous. In their civil wars, and when contending with the Spaniards for their independence, the Mexicans have occasionally fought doggedly, although never skilfully; but when opposed to combatants of the Anglo-Saxon race, they have invariably shown themselves arrant cowards. Although the soldiers of the States have even less military discipline than those of Mexico, the bodily strength, skill with the rifle, intrepidity, and self-reliance of the former, would render them formidable opponents even to well-drilled European troops. As to the Mexicans, no matter how great the numerical odds in their favour, they never could or would stand against the hardy Yankee volunteers. In the summer of 1846, Mr Parkman met, upon the wild and lonely banks of the Upper Arkansas, Price's Missouri regiment, on its way to Santa Fé.