Grandfather hauled freight from Sacramento to Pilot Hill that winter. They said it was a wet winter and must have been very tough going. Best guess he had more money that he had ever seen, not coin but gold dust. When he went to Sac. He put his gold dust in a sack and threw it in the back of the freight wagon, and was never robbed nor molested in any way. I ask mother if it wasn’t a terrible place for a girl, she said it was the safest place she ever lived for if a man to even make the slightest disrespectful word about a women he was immediately hung up to a tree or a bullet put through him. I have in my possession one of invitations to the first 4 of July Ball in Sacramento one of my uncles name is on it as floor manager my mother’s sister attended the ball, but I think my mother did not attend but believe father was there. From Pilot Hill my grandfather went to Sonoma Co., looking for Saw Mill as lumber was still very high and much in demand. He settled in Petaluma and stayed there until 1860. It was here my father and grandfather were together there in the saw mill business.
It was in Petaluma my father got his first insight into Real Estate business. He bought land from the Spanish Grant and paid for it then it was declared government land and he paid the government for it then it was declared Spanish Grant and he paid for it again and was building houses on it all the time and had them all rented when the land was again declared government land and his tenants all filed Squatter’s rights and he lost the whole thing.
Then he and my mother were going to be married and he was hauling logs to the saw mill. He was out in the woods alone when he got caught by one foot between two logs and lay there all day before the men at the mill thought he must be having trouble and went to look for him and found him there hung by his foot. Said he had struggled for hours try to reach the ax, which was just beyond his reach, to cut his foot off. There were no Drs.