Our first visit to Stockton was made in company, on some of Major Graham’s choicest horses. A mettled roan _canalo_ fell to my share, and the gallop of five miles without check was most inspiring. A view of Stockton was something to be remembered. There, in the heart of California, where the last winter stood a solitary ranch in the midst of tule marshes, I found a canvas town of a thousand inhabitants, and a port with twenty-five vessels at anchor! The mingled noises of labor around—the click of hammers and the grating of saws—the shouts of mule-drivers—the jingling of spurs—the jar and jostle of wares in the tents—almost cheated me into the belief that it was some old commercial mart, familiar with such sounds for years past. Four months, only, had sufficed to make the place what it was; and in that time a wholesale firm established there (one out of a dozen) had done business to the amount of $100,000. The same party had just purchased a lot of eighty by one hundred feet, on the principal street, for $6,000, and the cost of erecting a common one-story clapboard house on it was $15,000. He continued by mule from Stockton to the diggings on the Mokelumne River, some forty miles away. He was lodged in an open-air hotel which consisted of two log tables, one for eating, the other for gambling. The morning after arriving he inspected the mining operations: I slept soundly that night on the dining-table, and went down early to the river, where I found the party of ten bailing out the water which had leaked into the riverbed during the night. They were standing in the sun, and had two hours’ hard work before they could begin to wash. Again the prospect looked uninviting, but when I went there again towards noon, one of them was scraping up the sand from the bed with his knife, and throwing it into a basin, the bottom of which glittered with gold. Every knifeful brought out a quantity of grains and scales, some of which were as large as the fingernail. At last a two-ounce lump fell plump into the pan, and the diggers, now in the best possible humor, went on with their work with great alacrity. Their forenoon’s digging amounted to nearly six pounds [_an ounce of gold in California was then worth exactly $16.00_]. It is only by such operations as these, through associated labor, that great profits are to be made in those districts which have been visited by the first eager horde of gold-hunters. The deposits most easily reached are soon exhausted by the crowd, and the labor required to carry on further work successfully deters single individuals from attempting it. Those who, retaining their health, return home disappointed say they have been humbugged about the gold, when in fact they have humbugged themselves about the work. If anyone expects to dig treasures out of the earth, in California, without severe labor, he is woefully mistaken.