Now, I suppose I ought to attend to this situation.

[As he does so, he probably continues talking.]

Clearly—my engagement secure—it was time to leave California and head back East. I had business to attend to—though I was not quite sure just what—and figured that the most efficient way to solve that mystery was to direct my trip home through Mexico.

After the particular awfulness of a rough Pacific—my first time out on open ocean—a reeking coachman, a nasty donkey, and a easily a dozen half-starved horses, when one adequately fed one might have done the job that those emaciated six had to be asked to do by my California spurs, I arrived in Mexico City, where I was received by the American ambassador with all due alacrity, after having enumerated my accomplishments in a missive that preceded my arrival.

John Sutter himself had furnished me with all the credentials I needed to present—credentials I would soon print on the flyleaf of a book I had written: Leader of the Oregon and California Emigrants of 1842. In a series of meetings over a few weeks, the ambassador decided he would take the information I had given him—that California would ere long be another Texas, all but begging for annexation if only emigrants could find their way—and by the power invested in those of such vaunted high office, he would endeavor to...write a report.

Ah, bureaucracy! This was to be but my first brush with the beast—and I would ever journey West to escape its dull, gnawing fangs: death by butter knife! I'll take rope burn from a high branch any day over that, thank you very much!

However, this report, when written and vetted and rewritten and revetted and revised once more and sent somewhere else for approval, would head directly to the Secretary of State, John C. Calhoun!

Departing from Veracruz by steamer, I could be secure that my paper trail was as assuredly blazed as my overland one!

[Perhaps sensing the city in which the story is about to arrive, the fiddler strikes up a little ditty, "Loop #5, Sisyphus".]

I arrived in the Port of New Orleans, back on the Mississippi that I had crossed two years prior en route to Oregon. My head spun that my recommendations were on their way to one third of the Great Triumvirate! Perhaps Henry Clay himself would catch wind of it and Daniel Webster might be blown over so as to change the course of his rhetoric!

But those were three men. My travels back East had brought me in contact with their minions thousands of miles away, who were conspicuously absent of both free will and initiative. I was hazed by an army of functionaries half-drunk on their own unction—their rivers of wax and ink and the horror of parchment that predated telegraph wire (and caught fire with enough regularity to constitute an efficient method of bookkeeping).