After another 72 hours, the cycle once again reached its nadir, but this time, Fate was kind: the bloody, staggering ghosts, whose frostbitten feet trailed gore in their wakes, came upon an Indian village, probably Miwok. Though terrified by these apparitions, the Indians shared what little they had, most likely acorn bread, and pointed the way towards Johnson's Ranch, where only Eddy was strong enough to walk.

He stumbled into the ranch more dead than alive on January 18. The others were rescued from the foothills later that same day.

On January 29, while recovering, Eddy dictated a letter to the local magistrate, begging for assistance; the word went out to Sutter's Fort and continued on to San Francisco.

† January 29, 1847

I recall that exact date for a different reason.

When my fellow Ohioan, William Tecumseh Sherman, came to dinner, he revealed himself to be rather sour that he had not seen any action in the Mexican War—arriving a couple of months too late after his ship had to round Cape Horn to make the journey. Had I known what the future held for the man, I might have forgotten my manners and indulged in some gloating.

However, Sherman was an undistinguished, low-ranking Army officer with over a decade of business failures ahead of him when he dined with Charlotte and me in the little white adobe in 1849. That night, in fact, Sherman and I were of the very same rank, with one great distinction: I had seen action in the Mexican War.

Upon my own return from Fort Bridger in the late autumn of 1846, I rounded up a corps of volunteers and rode directly south to San Jose. Once at the Army camp where we all enlisted, I was elected to lead Company F. The fame-mongering Colonel Fremont—the same man whose shoddy survey had endorsed my cut-off and who would achieve immortality as the first Republican nominee for President—was now the commanding officer of one Captain Hastings.

[He gives a mocking, little salute, as the fiddler humors him with a reprise of "Loop #8, Soldier's Joy."]