“January 29: Got our mint receipts of the value of our deposits. We were dressed a little rough when we arrived, and at the hotel were seated at the most inconvenient table. But as we dressed up somewhat and the report of our gold got more known we were moved pretty well up in the dining room before we left.”
The next day they went on to Boston where they stopped at the United States Hotel, a hotel to which my father took me nearly forty years later, when he escorted me east to enter Wellesley College.
The evening of February first they reached their home, just a month from San Francisco. The journey west two years before had taken nearly twice as long.
Since they were among the first to return from the gold fields, they were objects of great interest to all the neighbors round about. They had scores of visitors, all eager for news of their own men-folk in far away California, the land so vaguely known, its great distances so under-estimated. They assumed that the returned travelers might know everyone in the new state.
They visited at home for five weeks. “We talked,” says Dr. Flint, “until our vocal chords could stand the strain no longer and were glad to start west.”
