And, so I did.

And, so we were wed.

The wedding took place at Sutter's Fort, on July 19 of 1848—intentionally, I scheduled the wedding five years to the day after I first arrived in California!

† May 1, 1846

A California-bound fellow called McBride had started from Independence extremely early in the season; years later, he published an account of his travels in which he wrote of meeting me by the South Pass that summer as I traveled East to meet the emigrants and he continued West to California.

The description he furnished of yours truly is perhaps...perhaps oh, shall we say, excessively fond: I appeared to him a "tall, fine looking man, with light brown hair and beard, dressed in a suit of elegant pattern made of buckskin, handsomely embroidered and trimmed at the collar and openings, with plucked beaver fur...an ideal representative of the mountaineer."

His eye for detail, especially where costume is concerned, I must say was uncanny. Oh, California! Bless her for taking so many types!

On the other hand, he had this to say about my traveling companion, one Mr. Hudspeth: "about as repulsive in manner as Hastings was attractive. He was a coarse, profane creature, who seemed to feel that loud swearing was the best title to public favor."

Now, while I can neither speak to the former character sketch objectively nor claim to be a "mountaineer," I must say the latter depiction is without flaw.

Additionally, I traveled East to Fort Bridger in the company of James Clyman, who desired to return to his family back in the States. Although I lay no claim to the term "mountain man" and will readily admit to having hired many who did, Clyman played the part to the hilt, but he was also of a sedentary bent, having settled his growing family on a farm in Indiana, he was, in fact, returning East for the purpose of retrieving them and then crossing the Continent once more to land he had purchased in Napa Valley.

Clyman also had a knack for arbitrary brushes with American history, beginning with his birth on a farm that George Washington himself owned in northern Virginia. As a young man, he was commissioned as an Indian fighter and land surveyor by Alexander Hamilton's son and, a few years down the road, he enlisted in the Blackhawk War with a certain Illinois militia regiment that I suppose had waived any height requirements, since both young Stephen A. Douglas and young Abraham Lincoln were in it, as well.

However, none of those coincidences interests me and you will require a wiser man than I to tell you what, if anything, they might add up to. Rather, my story concerns another member of that very same regiment whose name is undoubtedly less familiar to you than the lately departed President's: James Frazier Reed.