Box 1
Container
Contains 1 Result:
Letter signed Alex [Badger], Salt Lake City, to Ma [Mrs. Alexander Badger, Sr., St. Louis]. Captain Wallace and I left San Francisco on the afternoon of the twenty-third of December and arrived at Sacramento about two o’clock next morning. We left at daylight on the cars for Folsom. At Folsom we had our baggage weighed and paid seventy-five cents a pound extra for all weight over twenty-five pounds. We took stages here for Carson City. After an all day ride we ascended a high hill and right at our feet lay Placerville. We stayed here all night and it being Christmas Eve they had a party at the Cary House in which we stopped. I went to bed early and so did the Captain, but the Captain snored awfully and the musicians downstairs piped away incessantly and a lot of gossiping women talked away in the hall, so that I slept but little. In the morning we again took the stage and about noon reached the first snow. After climbing a long way up we came to the pass in the mountains through which we were to go, known as Johnson’s Pass. After dinner we reached the south fork of the American River. Late in the afternoon we had Christmas dinner in the stage, way up in the mountains on a narrow road. We had as fine a turkey as I ever saw; a merry party of nine persons. After dark we arrived at the famous “Strawberry” station where we spent the night and at half past three in the morning we bundled into a sleigh for a ride of twelve miles to “Yanks [Yanko?].” We had just eighteen souls in the sleigh. At “Yanks” we found a blazing log fire and breakfast. Here we got into stages again and after twenty or twenty-five miles came in sight of Carson Valley. We stayed all night in Carson and took the stage of Overland Mail Company next day for Salt Lake. The journey from Carson to Salt Lake occupied over five days and nights. All the sleep we got was what we could get sitting in the stage. We changed teams every fifteen miles and drivers about every sixty miles and stages every two hundred miles. Every time we changed horses we had time to get out and get warmed at the stations. The station houses are rudely constructed of lumber or adobe and covered with poles and dirt, the floors generally being the mother earth. We got into Salt Lake City on the afternoon of New Year’s Day. Individuals mentioned: Colonel Evans, Mr. Nolan, and Mr. and Mrs. Norton and daughter Mollie. Places mentioned: Sierra Nevada Mountains, Eagle Valley, and Camp Douglass., 1863 Jan 2
Item — Box: 1, Folder: 2
Scope and Contents
From the Collection:
Collection contains material of the St. Louis-based Badger family, including letters of Capt. Alexander Badger, Sr. and Jr.; newsclippings; bonds; steamboat memoranda; a pilot certificate issued to William H. Cable in 1852; envelopes of Wells Fargo and Overland Mail; cards of steamboat Magnolia and a timetable of St. Louis railroads and steamships; material concerning the Badger, Cable and Cayton families; two Missouri defense bonds issued in 186-; and several letters...
Dates:
1863 Jan 2