The camp was soon established, and some of their six months' provisions hauled up the hillside in the old Mexican carts with wooden wheels, "drawn by two or three pairs of oxen yoked by the horns." They brought a saw-mill and a grist-mill with them to the new country. Living was cheap, as cattle cost but eight dollars and fifty cents for the best, or about two cents a pound. Sherman soon met Colonel Frémont, afterwards a candidate for the Presidency, General Kearney, and other officers noted in those early days of California. San Francisco was called Yerba Buena, and Sherman felt almost insulted when asked if he wished to invest money in land "in such a horrid place as Yerba Buena." The best houses were single-story adobes; the population was about four hundred, mostly Kanakas, natives of the Hawaiian Islands. Sherman spent much time in hunting deer and bear in the mountains back of the Carmel Mission, and could often in a single day load a pack-mule with the geese and ducks which he had shot. These geese would appear in profusion as soon as the fall rains caused the young oats to come up. "The seasons in California," he writes, "are well marked. About October and November the rains begin, and the whole country, plains and mountains, becomes covered with a bright green grass, with endless flowers. The intervals between the rains give the finest weather possible. These rains are less frequent in March, and cease altogether in April and May, when gradually the grass dies and the whole aspect of things changes, first to yellow, then to brown, and by midsummer all is burnt up, and dry as an ash-leaf." The "gold-fever" broke out in the spring of 1848. Thomas Marshall found some placer-gold fifteen miles above Mormon Island, in the bed of the American Fork of the Sacramento River. He had worked for Captain Sutter in his saw-mills, and seeing this gold in the tailrace of the saw-mill, tried at first to keep it a secret, after telling Sutter; but others soon found the yellow metal, and not only California, but the whole civilized world, was excited over the discovery. Sutter's saw and grist mills soon went to decay. Men earned fifty, a hundred, and sometimes thousands of dollars a day, if they found a "pocket" of gold. Prices became fabulous. Flour and bacon and other eatables sold for a dollar a pound. A meal usually cost three dollars. Miners slept at night on the ground. All day they worked in cold water in the river-beds, their clothes wet; but no complaints were heard.