The loss sustained by these settlers was very great. The inconvenience of being for a time floated off the face of the earth in a small boat was bad enough of itself; but to have the greater part of their worldly possessions floating around them, in the shape of the corpses of what had been their live stock, must have rather tended to damp their spirits. However, Californians are proof against all such reverses,--they are like India-rubber, the more severely they are cast down, the higher they rise afterwards. It was hardly possible to conceive what an amount of rain and snow must have fallen to lay such a vast extent of country under water; and though the weather was now improving, the rain being not so constant, or so heavy, it would still be some time before the waters could subside, as the snow which had fallen in the mountains had yet to find its way down, and would serve to keep up the flood. Sacramento City was in as wretched a plight as a city can well be in. The only dry land to be seen was the top of the levee built along the bank of the river in front of the town; all the rest was water, out of which rose the houses, or at least the upper parts of them. The streets were all so many canals crowded with boats and barges carrying on the customary traffic; watermen plied for hire in the streets instead of cabs, and independent gentlemen poled themselves about on rafts, or on extemporized boats made of empty boxes. In one part of the town, where the water was not deep enough for general navigation, a very curious style of conveyance was in use. Pairs of horses were harnessed to large flat-bottomed boats, and numbers of these vehicles, carrying passengers or goods, were to be seen cruising about, now dashing through a foot or two of mud which the horses made to fly in all directions as they floundered through it, now grounding and bumping over some very dry spot, and again sailing gracefully along the top of the water, so deep as nearly to cover the horses’ backs. The water in the river was some feet higher than that in the town, and it was fortunate that the levee did not give way, or the loss of life would have been very great. As it was, some few men had been drowned in the streets. The destruction of property, and the pecuniary loss to the inhabitants, were of course enormous, but they had been flooded once or twice before, besides having several times had their city burned down, and were consequently quite used to such disasters; in fact, Sacramento suffered more from fire and flood together than any city in the State, without, however, apparently retarding the growing prosperity of the people. I arrived in Sacramento too late for the steamer for San Francisco, and so had the pleasure of passing a night there, but I cannot say I experienced any personal inconvenience from the watery condition of the town.