In the meantime, it was Christmas and I had gifts for all! Copies of The Emigrants' Guide to Oregon and California! The Good Lord had given me the infinitely more valuable gift of a safe arrival! Could anyone help but see the talismanic power of this book that had borne me over the mountains so? Could anyone help but ascribe such powers to its author? The sour feelings would fade! Surely they would!

Moreover, I was back West where I belonged!

Oh, to face East for a moment and see that impossible wall of mountains turn white almost the moment I dismounted my horse! To be so sealed into the Other Side of the Frontier! Snow-bound in Paradise! Snow-bound in perpetual Spring!

[The fiddler once again plays, "Loop #3, Signs & Wonders"

or "Loop #2, Frontier." Fiddler's choice.]

To return to California and to see her so! The beauty I had treasured in my memory alone for those two years East of the Mississippi, haunted by it as by some fevered dream I had felt compelled to write down in a book and to declaim like a madman upon the sawdust of the boards in the lyceum theaters, the lights bearing down upon me and the facelessness of the faces in the dusty beyond gawking as I playacted the errant knight separated from his love, the land! To return and see California as beautiful as I had left her—if not all the more so—reaffirmed my enduring fondness for it as my fate.

Later, when we were married, many times, I would leave Charlotte to attend to whatever business I had and, once in a while, I might awake at night, certain my life with her had been a dream—or certain some defect of my own imagination had so endowed her beauty, her grace, her unerring patience and kindness and dignity and her keen mind—only to return home and feel both the elation of reunion and the reaffirmation that it was real increase the intensity of my feeling for her so that I almost could not bear it.

As I recall what it was to tear my hat from my head and feel the wild spray of the Pacific course through my hair after those two years, I can think of nothing else but the sensation of Charlotte's long, red mane ensnaring the beard I let grow during my journeys away from our home. I only wore a beard when living in the saddle and camping under the stars or staying at inns alone, so it was not a sensation I knew as a part of the daily life our bodies spent together. One might say I shaved as though to end a period of mourning spent when we two were apart, but I prefer to think my beard fainted dead away from the pleasure of tangling with her hair.

I first spotted Charlotte late in 1847; I courted her in early 1848. I saw her at a distance in the streets of San Francisco, when it was but a town of 500, destined to explode the following year! She had employment at the tiny schoolhouse her adoptive mother ran. Charlotte was known as much for her beauty as she was for her apparent indifference to it: she was a creature no American man had ever seen.

Charlotte was not an Eastern girl, by any means. She stood nearly as tall as I; her limbs were slender and her shoulders were fine and sharp as her collarbone, though broad; her figure was lithe and lean, but as an athlete's: she had grown from a girl to a woman in the saddle, not the corset. To her porcelain complexion—which a Southern Belle might have guarded more dearly than her own virtue—Charlotte acted with what I could only characterize as utter disregard that veered toward annoyance when the summer sun threatened a burn or discomfort.