I struck the middle fork of the American River at a place called Spanish Bar. The scenery was very grand. Looking down on the river from the summit of the range, it seemed a mere thread winding along the deep chasm formed by the mountains, which were so steep that the pine trees clinging to their sides looked as though they would slip down into the river. The face of the mountain by which I descended was covered with a perfect trellis-work of zigzag trails, so that I could work my way down by long or short tacks as I felt inclined. On the mountain on the opposite side I could see the faint line of the trail which I had to follow; it did not look by any means inviting; and I was thankful that, for the present at any rate, I was going downhill. Walking down a long hill, however, so steep that one dare not run, though not quite such hard work at the time as climbing up, is equally fatiguing in its results, as it shakes one’s knees all to pieces. I reached the river at last, and crossing over in a canoe, landed on the “Bar.” What they call a Bar in California is the flat which is usually found on the convex side of a bend in a river. Such places have nearly always proved very rich, that being the side on which any deposit carried down by the river will naturally lodge, while the opposite bank is generally steep and precipitous, and contains little or no gold. Indeed, there are not many exceptions to the rule that, in a spot where one bank of a river affords good diggings, the other side is not worth working. The largest camps or villages on the rivers are on the bars, and take their name from them. The nomenclature of the mines is not very choice or elegant. The rivers all retain the names given to them by the Spaniards, but every little creek, flat, and ravine, besides of course the towns and villages which have been called into existence, have received their names at the hands of the first one or two miners who have happened to strike the diggings. The individual pioneer has seldom shown much invention or originality in his choice of a name; in most cases he has either immortalized his own by tacking “ville” or “town” to the end of it, or has more modestly chosen the name of some place in his native State; but a vast number of places have been absurdly named from some trifling incident connected with their first settlement; such as Shirt Tail Cañon, Whisky Gulch, Port Wine Diggins, Humbug Flat, Murderer’s Bar, Flapjack Cañon, Yankee Jim’s, Jackass Gulch, and hundreds of others with equally ridiculous names. Spanish Bar was about half a mile in length, and three or four hundred yards wide. The whole place was honeycombed with the holes in which the miners were at work; all the trees had been cut down, and there was nothing but the red shirts of the miners to relieve the dazzling whiteness of the heaps of stones and gravel which reflected the fierce rays of the sun and made the extreme heat doubly severe.