Looking at the map of California, it will be seen that the “mines” occupy a long strip of mountainous country, which commences many miles to the eastward of San Francisco, and stretches northward several hundred miles. The Sacramento river running parallel with the mines, the San Joaquin joining it from the southward and eastward, and the Feather river continuing a northward course from the Sacramento--all of them being navigable--present the natural means of communication between San Francisco and the “mines.” Accordingly, the city of Sacramento--about two hundred miles north of San Francisco--sprang up as the depot for all the middle part of the mines, with roads radiating from it across the plains to the various settlements in the mountains. In like manner the city of Marysville, being at the extreme northern point of navigation of the Feather river, became the starting-place and the depot for the mining districts in the northern section of the State; and Stockton, named after Commodore Stockton, of the United States Navy, who had command of the Pacific squadron during the Mexican war, being situated at the head of navigation of the San Joaquin, forms the intermediate station between San Francisco and all the “southern mines.” Seeing the facilities that California thus presented for inland navigation, it is not surprising that the Americans, so pre-eminent as they are in that branch of commercial enterprise, should so soon have taken advantage of them. But though the prospective profits were great, still the enormous risk attending the sending of steamboats round the Horn might have seemed sufficient to deter most men from entering into such a hazardous speculation. It must be remembered that many of these river steamboats were despatched from New York, on an ocean voyage of seventeen thousand miles, to a place of which one-half the world as yet even doubted the existence, and when people were looking up their atlases to see in what part of the world California was. The risk of taking a steamboat of this kind to what was then such an out-of-the-way part of the world, did not end with her arrival in San Francisco by any means. The slightest accident to her machinery, which there was at that time no possibility of repairing in California, or even the extreme fluctuations in the price of coal, might have rendered her at any moment so much useless lumber.