The first large camp on my way south from Hangtown was Moquelumne Hill, about sixty miles distant, and as there were no very interesting localities in the intermediate country, I traveled direct to that place. After passing through a number of small camps, I arrived about noon of the second day at Jacksonville, a small village called after General Jackson, of immortal memory. I had noticed a great many French miners at work at I came along, and so I was prepared to find it rather a French-looking place. Half the signs over the stores and hotels were French, and numbers of Frenchmen were sitting at small tables in front of the houses playing at cards. As I walked up the town I nearly stumbled over a young grizzly bear, about the size of two Newfoundland dogs rolled into one, which was chained to a stump in the middle of the street. I very quickly got out of his way; but I found afterwards that he was more playful than vicious. He was the pet of the village, and was delighted when he could get any one to play with, though he was rather beyond the age at which such a playmate is at all desirable. I don’t think he was likely to enjoy long even the small amount of freedom he possessed; he would probably be caged up and shipped to New York; for a live grizzly is there a valuable piece of property, worth a good deal more than the same weight of bear’s meat in California, even at two dollars a pound. From this place there was a steep descent of two or three miles to the Moquelumne River, which I crossed by means of a good bridge, and, after ascending again to the upper world by a long winding road, I reached the town of Moquelumne Hill, which is situated on the very brink of the high land overhanging the river. It lies in a sort of semicircular amphitheater of about a mile in diameter, surrounded by a chain of small eminences, in which gold was found in great quantities. The diggings were chiefly deep diggings, worked by means of “coyote holes,” a hundred feet deep, and all the ground round the town was accordingly covered with windlasses and heaps of dirt. The heights at each end of the amphitheater had proved the richest spots, and were supposed to have been volcanoes. But many hills in the mines got the credit of having been volcanoes, for no other reason than that they were full of gold; and this was probably the only claim to such a distinction which could be made in this case. The population was a mixture of equal proportions of French, Mexicans, and Americans, with a few stray Chinamen, Chilians, and suchlike. The town itself, with the exception of two or three wooden stores and gambling-saloons, was all of canvas. Many of the houses were merely skeletons clothed in dirty rags of canvas, and it was not difficult to tell what part of the population they belonged to, even had there not been crowds of lazy Mexicans vegetating about the doors.