I experienced about the narrowest escape of my life in a boat during a freshet on the Tuolumne crossing. I counted myself a good river boatman, and had just ferried over a Swett’s Bar miner. He had come to purchase a gallon of the native juice of the grape, which was then grown, pressed and sold at Red Mountain Bar. When he crossed with me he was loaded with it. Some of it was outside of him in a demijohn and some of it was inside. Indeed it was inside of us both. I set him across all right. On returning, by taking advantage of a certain eddy, one could be rushed up stream counter to the current coming down for a quarter of a mile, and at a very rapid rate. It was very exciting thus to be carried in an opposite direction, within ten feet of the great billowy swell coming down. It was a sort of sliding down hill without the trouble of drawing one’s sled up again. So I went up and down the stream. The Red Mountain wine meantime was working. Night came on, a glorious moon arose over the mountain tops, and I kept sliding up and down the Tuolumne. I became more daring and careless. So that suddenly in the very fury of the mid-stream billows I slipped off the stern sheets at a sudden dip of the boat and fell into the river. I was heavily clad in flannels and mining boots. Of my stay under water I recollect only the thought, “You’re in for it this time. This is no common baptism.” The next I knew I was clinging to a rock half a mile below the scene of the submergence. I had been swept under water through the Willow Bar, the walls of whose rocky channel, chiselled by the current of centuries, were narrower at the top than on the river-bed, and through which the waters swept in a succession of boils and whirlpools. Wet and dripping, I tramped to the nearest cabin, a mile and a half distant, and stayed there that night. Red Mountain Bar, on seeing the mishap, gave me up for lost--all but one man, who was negative on that point for the reason, as he alleged, that I was not destined to make the final exit by water. I reappeared the next morning at the Bar. When I told the boys that I had been swept through the Willow Bar they instituted comparisons of similarity in the matter of veracity betwixt myself and Ananias of old. It was the current impressions that no man could pass through the Willow Bar alive.