It was such a gain to know exactly where
the next water hole was, so it could be steered for and struggled
toward. He even went so far as to say they would have no chance alone,
and that as he now saw the road, he was sure they have would all
perished even before reaching as far as this. We had strong hopes of the
morrow, when we would be all rested, all were shod, and would make every
footstep count in our western progress.
It seems quite a strange occurrence that the only two storms we had had
since we turned westward on this route, Nov. 4th, were snow storms, and
that both had come while we were asleep, so that all our days were
cloudless. Sometimes the sun was uncomfortably warm even in the heart of
the winter. One would have naturally expected that the great rainfall
all over the California coast in the winter of 1849-50, and the deep
snows that came in the Sierra Nevada mountains the same winter, would
have extended southerly the few hundred miles that separated the two
places. Modern science has shown the tracks of the storms and partially
explains the reasons for this dry and barren nature of this region. When
rains do come they are so out of the regular order, that they are called
cloud-bursts or waterspouts, and the washes in the canons and their
mouths show how great has been the volume of water that sometimes rushed
down the slope. If clouds at a warm or moderate temperature float
against these snow peaks all the water they contain is suddenly
precipitated.
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