Gold was discovered in California in 1848. When Mrs. Frémont arrived in San Francisco the people were in that first frenzy of excitement that disturbed temporarily the whole aspect of their daily existence. The population of the towns was flocking to the mines, and the comparatively few who remained at home had many novel problems to face. The art of cooking without eggs and butter had to be acquired, for there were neither chickens nor cows, though one woman had as many as thirty-seven satin dresses, "and no two off the same piece," she averred. A little Eastern bride, whom San Francisco society, consisting of sixteen ladies, turned out in a body to welcome, set up her first household belongings in a modest frame structure two stories in height, that had been put up at a cost, out of all proportion to its intrinsic value, of ninety thousand dollars. Yet nothing was so valuable as time, and though it was estimated to be worth fifty dollars a minute, there were busy men who paid Mrs. Frémont the compliment of frequent day-time visits. With every personal inducement to favor slave labor in the new territory, both Frémont and his wife were among its most strenuous opposers. Not only did they pay their first house-maid two hundred and forty dollars a month with perquisites, which included the housing of her husband and children, yet even with a disposition to retain her at that neat figure, they found themselves obliged to do without her truly valuable assistance when Mrs. Frémont refused the loan of her gowns as patterns for the wardrobe she was having constructed at the hands of a Chinese modiste. There were, moreover, on the lands that Frémont owned, rich gold deposits, which could be most profitably operated by slave labor. When the convention to draft the constitution under which California should come into the Union met at Monterey, where Frémont had established himself, his home became the head-quarters for the anti-slavery party. Its neatness, the smoothness of its internal workings, and the evident contentment of his wife formed a text for the friends of free soil, and many an incredulous opponent was brought to behold, and, seeing, went away believing in the possibility of domestic happiness without slaves. Mrs. Frémont had, to be sure, a preference for underclothing that had been ironed, and she might have wished also that the two Indian men who presided in her kitchen and pantry had not been gifted with such facilities for terminating both the ornamental and useful career of her china and glassware. Yet these small clouds in no way overshadowed her domestic horizon. Her prejudice to slavery she inherited from both parents, belonging, as she said, "to the aristocracy of emancipation," or to that class of people who, owning slaves, quietly gave them their freedom at infinite sacrifice to themselves, as opposed to the abolitionists of the North, who, with nothing to lose and much to gain, clamored noisily for that freedom.