The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 44, July 1940 - April, 1941 Page: 12
546 p. : ill., maps ; 24 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Southwestern Historical Quarterly
never would, likely. We have seen enough of his habit, his
destiny, to understand this, even if he had not written it down
in his notes. But he did, and they have come to light; and we
may read.
In 1849, he thought of going to South America, all the way
down the East coast, and wrote a medical friend many letters
about the project. But in that summer, he turned instead to
the north, and went to California, where, he had heard, gold
had been discovered. He took his papers along, and some books,
and borrowed some money from Jesse Sutton, an old partner
on the Trail, and went to San Francisco, where the gold rumors
turned out to be true, hardly at all exaggerated, and commerce
up and down the coast was teeming. Then deciding to go into
the interior, he cached these diaries.
There he heard of things to be done-roads opened, observa-
tions of the country to be made. According to the family tra-
dition, he was commissioned by the Government to go with a
party to find a bay and a townsite at the mouth of the Trinity
River, along whose inland course gold had been found. He
went, he struggled through three-and-a-half months of physical
hardship occasioned by the difficult nature of the land and
psychological hardships created by the men of the party, and
discovered the bay on December 20, 1849. Because he insisted
on enacting his devoted duty, recording phenomena, taking
observations, examining the character of the land that again
and again nearly starved the party to death, his companions
again and again threatened to abandon him, to destroy his
instruments or even kill him. But when they found the bay, he
carved its latitude and longitude on a giant redwood tree. A
town stands there today.
Having performed their mission, the party then made off for
civilization to the south. They divided, some going by the coast,
some going inland.
Ocean, rocks, mammoth trees, a prehistoric landscape in the
foggy winter!
He was forty-four years old.
His companions thought of him, and wrote of him, as an
aged man.
They lived on acorns and herbs. There was snow on the
ridges of the coastwise mountains.
In desperation, at last, Gregg's party decided to abandon12
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 44, July 1940 - April, 1941, periodical, 1941; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth146052/m1/16/?rotate=270: accessed April 24, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.