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I have no excuse for attempting to describe my visit through the fertile and beautiful Napa Valley, nor even, what exceeded that in interest, my visit to old John Yount at his rancho, where I heard from his own lips some of his most interesting stories of hunting and trapping and Indian fighting, during an adventurous life of forty years of such work, between our back settlements in Missouri and Arkansas, and the mountains of California, trapping the Colorado and Gila, and his celebrated dream, thrice repeated, which led him to organize a party to go out over the mountains, that did actually rescue from death by starvation the wretched remnants of the Donner Party.
He will see, besides the larger Napa, Petaluma, Bereyessa, and Russian River valleys, which are already connected by railroad with San Francisco, a number of quiet, sunny little vales, some of them undiscoverable on any but the most recent maps, nestled among the mountains, unconnected as yet with the world either by railroad or telegraph, but fertile, rich in cattle, sheep, and grain, where live a people peculiarly Californian in their habits, language, and customs, great horsemen, famous rifle-shots, keen fishermen, for the mountains abound in deer and bear, and the streams are alive with trout.
The Englishmen Livermore, Gilroy and Mark West, those early settlers, Temple and Rice at Los Angeles, Yount and Pope of Napa Valley, Don Timoteo Murphy of San Rafael, and Lassen the Dane, for whom Lassen's Peak was named, were among those who came here before 1830. Governor Figueroa, called the "benefactor of Alta California" ordered the Missions to be given up to the Indians.
We could look over the dump on miles of forest and rough hilltop; our eyes commanded some of Napa Valley, where the train ran, and the little country townships sat so close together along the line of the rail. But here there was no man to intrude. None but the Hansons were our visitors. Even they came but at long intervals, or twice daily, at a stated hour, with milk.
His honeymoon experiences are recorded in one of the most delightful of his minor writings, "The Silverado Squatters." He went, with his wife, his stepson and a dog, to squat on the eastern shoulder of Mount Saint Helena, a noble mountain which closes and dominates the Napa Valley, a wonderful and fertile valley, running northward from the bay of San Francisco.
We came up the one side, were caught upon the summit by the whole weight of the wind as it poured over into Napa Valley, and a minute after had drawn up in shelter, but all buffetted and breathless, at the Toll House door.
"Yes young man you are young, you may feel bigger than I am, but you are not quite so tough, indeed toughness alone has saved me my life for a good many Christmas mornings. I am a tough old hen, I have seen the world; I have traveled. You know the island in the Napa River just above the railroad bridge? Well, I was wrecked there in my young days and it happened in this manner.
I looked about through Napa and Sonoma Counties, and finally came to San Jose, where I purchased the farm I now own, near Hillsdale, of Bodley & McCabe, for which I paid $4,000. In the fall of the same year my old friend W.M. Stockton of Los Angeles Co. persuaded me to come down and pay him a visit. His wife had died and he felt very lonely.
For, first, the sun now fell on it from high overhead, and its surface shone and undulated like a great nor'land moor country, sheeted with untrodden morning snow. And, next, the new level must have been a thousand or fifteen hundred feet higher than the old, so that only five or six points of all the broken country below me still stood out. Napa Valley was now one with Sonoma on the west.
So it happened, when the posses had begun to penetrate the mountain, and when the man was compelled to make a daylight dash down into the Valley of the Moon to cross over to the mountain fastnesses that lay between it and Napa Valley, that Harley Kennan rode out on the hot-blooded colt he was training. He was not in pursuit of the man who had slain the postmaster of Chisholm and his family.
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