John Hewston of San Francisco.
To serve the party we secured a man and a boy. Regarding the former,
perhaps the more truthful assertion would be that he secured us; for, as
will shortly appear, though we bought his services, he sold us in
return. We picked him up in a San-Francisco employment-office, after
looking all over the city for a respectable groom and camp-cook, and
finding that in a scarce-labor country like California even fifty gold
dollars per month, with keep and expenses, were no sufficient bait for
the catch we wanted. He was a meagre, wiry fellow, with sandy hair,
serviceable-looking hands, and no end to self-recommendations; but then
it was impossible to ask after him at his "last place," that having been
General Johnston's camp during Buchanan's forcible-feeble occupation of
Utah. As he said he had been a teamster, and knew that soup-meat went
into cold water, we rushed blindly into an engagement with him,
marriage-service fashion, and took him for better or worse. The thing
which I think finally "fired our Northern hearts" and clinched the
matter was his assertion of nephewship to the Secession Governor Vance,
whose name he bore, combined with unswerving personal loyalty. Lest by
some future D'Israeli this be written down among the traditional
greennesses of learned men, let me say that he was our _pis-aller_,--we
finding ourselves within two hours of the Stockton boat, with nobody to
help pack our mules or care for them and the horses.
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