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In 1856 he was in the Carson Valley of Nevada, where he proceeded toward the very notable undertaking of building a wagon road across the Sierra Nevadas to Hangtown, early Placerville. With the rest of the Utah Saints, he was recalled to Salt Lake in the fall of 1857. Layton arrived at St. David February 24, 1883.
It is on the State Highway between Placerville and Carson City, Nevada, and therefore makes all provision for automobilists. For circular address Lawrence & Comstock, Pine Forest Inn, Tallac P.O., Calif. Located between Al Tahoe and Bijou is Camp Bell, conducted by Russell W. Bell. The camp consists of tents and an open-air dining-room.
Holladay was fortunate in securing a new mail contract for the Central route which he now controlled. For supplying a six day letter mail service from the Missouri to Placerville together with a way mail to and from Denver and Salt Lake City, he was paid $1,000,000 a year for the three years beginning July 1, 1861. At the expiration of this period he was to get $840,000.
Undoubtedly the first whites to come over the trails were miners from the Georgetown and Placerville districts, lured by the marvelous discoveries of the Comstock lode in Virginia City.
Yet the schedule had been maintained, and the last seventy-five miles into Salt Lake City had been ridden in five hours and fifteen minutes. At that time Placerville and Carson City were the terminals of a local telegraph line. News had been flashed back from Carson on April 4 that the rider had passed that point safely.
They got at length in the dust the full impressions of the feet of the various monsters in regions wide apart, and they saw that all the cattle were killed in the same way their muzzles torn, their necks broken; and last, the marks on the trees where the Bears had reared and rubbed, then scored them with a broken tusk, the same all through the wide range; and Kellyan told them with calm certainty: "Pedro's Gringo, Old Pegtrack, the Placerville Grizzly, and the Monarch of the Range are one and the same Bear."
The day of the first start, says Colonel Majors, on the 3d of April, 1860, at noon, Harry Roff, mounted on a spirited half-breed broncho, left Sacramento on his perilous ride, covering the first twenty miles, including one change, in fifty-nine minutes. On reaching Folsom he changed again and started for Placerville at the foot of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, fifty-five miles distant.
It was a fair fight, and he had the right on his side. Had he shown the white feather, that would have damaged him with a community in whose estimation courage as the cardinal virtue. Sanders was popular with all classes, and Placerville remembers him to this day.
Crossing the last of the meadows we came to Burton's Pass, so called from H.D. Burton, another Placerville pioneer who used to cut hay here, pack it on mules to McKinney's, and then ship it across to Lakeside, where he sold it for $80 to $100 a ton. We then passed McKinney's old cabin, the place he built and occupied in 1863, before he went to live at the Lake.
This little incident in the county seat of Calaveras County impressed me as an epitome of the changes wrought by time, since the days when in song and story Bret Harte made the name "Calaveras" a synonym for romance wherever the English language is spoken. From San Andreas my objective point was Placerville, distant about forty-five miles.
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