I built our little white adobe at the confluence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers, looking out to Mount Diablo. I first brought Charlotte there in the late summertime, and one could have been forgiven for mistaking this for yet another leg of our honeymoon (which we had recently concluded in Monterrey).

We were all alone on our patch of Eden—monogamous as Adam and Eve—since the Mormons never made it past the Ruby Mountains to live upon the land they had purchased from the Mexican Government; rather, they settled in the shadow of the Wasatch Range, arrested by the outbreak of the Mexican-American War. As this tract of land was supposed to be known as "Montezuma City" once settled, the little adobe I built was known to travelers as Montezuma House.

Herds of elk and deer and antelope moved lazily through meadow flowers thicker than the buffalo upon the Prairie, loquacious as the California clouds and multi-hued as the California sun. The poppies, the lupine, and the meadow foam waved their gentle welcome in the pulsing, brackish breeze and Charlotte gathered brodiaea to nestle in her hair, next to her electric eyes.

I had come to San Francisco to take up a modest judgeship. My district was Central California, but that did not mean much at the time. Most of my income was made in surveying land claims and I had my eye on operating a ferry business where the rivers converged to empty into the Bay, a business I eventually ran with Dr. Robert Semple, the tallest man west of the hundredth meridian, standing 6'8" in stocking feet. "Long Bob" was so tall that he strapped his spurs to his calves; we first met during the Mexican War—fortunately I did not require his services, but the acquaintance was a lasting one.

We lived on somewhat of a thoroughfare between San Francisco and Sutter's Fort; gold was discovered and our visitors were many. The house itself was only 27 feet by 27 feet with four rooms separated by 11-inch-thick walls. It could not have housed much of a family, but for two newlyweds who enjoyed company for dinner, it served brilliantly.

With the onset of the Gold Rush, I had numerous business ventures and a few civic appointments as attorney and judge. Murder was naturally rampant and theft was a constant problem, along with the illegal sale of liquor to local Indians. However, mostly I recall that year as the first in my marriage to the former Charlotte Catherine Toler.

Charlotte may have been intensely secretive with regard to how she went about the simple, yet profound business of life; yet she was frank physically in a way a woman never would have been back East in the States. No one had ever bothered to teach her otherwise. She had a soft, almost animal, sensuality, not quite wild so much as feral in the most gentle, yet straightforward, way. As she moved about our bedroom on any given morning, she never covered herself, not for want of modesty, but simply because she did not see the need if only we two were present; Charlotte never owned a nightgown until we had children.

As the pagans in Ancient Rome loved on the fields themselves so that they might be fertile, Charlotte brought me to the land she had known all her life. Our time in the little white adobe was a perfect pastoral that all but erased the life I had known back East. My body forgot the nature of the struggles and furiously strained efforts that had conveyed it so far West and settled into these new furrows.