Not long after Sutter's greedy son all but scooped up every acre of his father's land, even out from under his own vater's nose, the district was growing in ways no one could control! Gone were the days of the Alcalde, the local magistrate, and not simply because Mexico had been pushed out of the picture. The single man of influence, the Sutters of yore, were through: full-blown Eastern commerce had come to town. California had joined the Union.

All of the connections I had, all of the plans I had laid, were ones of this casual, leisurely sort of Western Empire—the kind that left time for leaning again mossy stones with one's gorgeous wife and a glass of wine! All of this had sunk to the bottom of the Bay with a common black trunk of mine! Again, the timing! The timing! It could not have been worse! And, even if I had possessed any of my myriad tacit promises in writing, they would have been sunk to the bottom of the bay.

By doing my civic duty, by bringing California into the Union, I only had everything to lose—so much more than that common trunk. It no longer mattered where I had or hadn't been first! At Sutter's Fort, now called Sacramento, I had been undersold by Sutter, Jr; in Yerba Buena, now San Francisco, my value had been reduced to that of a common, copper penny: e pluribus unum.

To travel to Monterey, I had taken my wife earlier than made sense, however I had to take her. There was no one—and no money—to properly guard our little homestead. And so it happened that Robert Semple, Long Bob, my own partner in the ferry business, told a man who came asking that my little white adobe was abandoned! My own business partner gave up my private El Dorado!

This rube moved right on in as I framed the California Constitution! Did John Adams get this kind of treatment? Did they auction Madison's plantation. At least they put up Jefferson in France while he was out of town! What got into Semple's mind? Was it simply that all our belongings were gone? What was I supposed to do with them? We didn't make much and it made no sense to hire someone to guard them because God knows Constitutional Conventions do not pay well!

But John Sutter, Sr. and I, alas, had something in common: we could not prove we owned our land. I, as his lawyer, so frequently chastised him for never formalizing his claims! However, the land belonged to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as per a land grant of the Mexican government! It would have been—legally speaking—a goddamn mess to buy! Even for me, a judge!

At any rate I could scarcely afford it...I had money, but it was tied up at the time. And the rest was...The rest was floated down the river and then to the bottom of the river—or God knows where—by my good friend Sheriff McKinstry.

They say hope was the last vice to crawl out of Pandora's box—or a common black trunk, as it were.

Yes, I was yet attorney of the Northern District: I had little trouble intimidating the rube into compensation—cattle in this case. It was not the house I had made with my own two hands or the home I had made with my wife and where we had conceived our firstborn, but it was something. Only, at this point all I could think was how we needed that $1,500! We needed to buy a new home! Yes, the papers, the textbooks, the journals, and the other books were far and away larger emotional losses, but we needed the money right at that moment.

This second severe setback that bookended the Convention proved even more jarring for Charlotte that it had for me. She had no home, no Mount Vernon in the back of her mind! Even though we never owned the little white adobe and losing it was so emotionally wretched, at least I had a sense of belonging somewhere before that all. Charlotte did not have any such point of reference—and with her textbooks gone, as well, she was totally unmoored in the world as she nursed William Waitstill Hastings.

Charlotte always said she wanted a big family and I know I had always wanted one too—largely to replace the one I'd left back East—but, again, the timing was uncanny: Charlotte was once again pregnant before we had even found a new home. Of course, I had let the little white adobe go without a greater fight precisely because it was little and we would no doubt need a house quite large to accommodate us, but Charlotte sure had a knack for breaking this kind of news when it would matter most!