(This will be the follow on book to West Towards the Sunset, with Sally Kettering’s brother Jon as the main character. He is now eight years old, and he, Henry and Pa Kettering are part of the crew building a sawmill on the American River, over the winter of 1847-48.)

The stretch of valley where the mill was to be built was one of those lightly wooded vales, with gentle hills on either side and the ice-cold river winding in gentle bends down the middle between. There were stands of trees – bare sycamores holding up their branches against the cold blue sky, and oaks just shedding the last of their bronze-colored leaves. When we came to that place and set up camp, we saw that Captain Sutter’s surveyor had marked certain large trees with blazes and bits of red rag tied to canes thrust into the soil, Mr. Marshall, with Pa and Mr. Wimmer went to walk along the riverbank, looking for the best site for the mill. The weather was so mild that even though it was coming on to winter, we could still sleep in the open, although Pa set up a tent for us – the wall tent that he and Ma had slept in at night, coming over the trail. Even so, Mr. Marshall told us that it would get cold at night when winter did set in for real. He and Mr. Wimmer commenced planning to build a double cabin – the kind that they called a dog-trot cabin in the South; two rooms on either side, with an open porch in between. Pa thought that we three could get along for the moment with our tent, thick pallet beds stuffed with grass, and every heavy quilt that Ma could send with us.

“When are you going to explain to me how a saw mill works?” I asked Henry, after we finished setting up our camp. Pa and Mr. Marshall had not yet returned from walking the open meadow where the river made a gentle bend, sorting out the best place to start building. They were also marking the trees which would be felled for their timbers, timbers that would be needed for the mill, and to build a cabin for the Wimmers and the Mormon workers.

“I will show you,” Henry replied. He was already whittling out with his fine steel German pocketknife. It looked to me like he was cutting little notches into a rounded piece of wood. “I have studied much – existing diagrams and plans for such. It is in my mind to make a working model. For my amusement and to teach to you.”

When Henry talked of such things to us, he always sounded more stilted; as if he were still thinking in German and putting his thoughts then into English.

“Will it really saw planks?” I demanded, and Henry sent me a sideways smile, as he whittled away.

“It might,” He replied, seriously. “If there is enough force from the water, to work the saw blade. It might not. There is a complicated reason why…”

And he went on explaining it to me, in every detail. It all went into my mind and then trickled right out again – just as Ma’s lessons always did.  I just wasn’t made for book-lessons, not the way that Henry, or my sister Sally was. I had come to that realization in the last year or so; it seemed that Pa had come to the same conclusion.

Oh, it was a rare time, those first weeks in the Coloma valley, setting up to build Captain Sutter’s mill! None of Ma’s lessons that always made my poor head ache as if someone was pounding on it with a hammer! The constant soft splashing of the river, the last few leaves on the nearly-bare trees rustling in the light breeze, and the way that the morning fog left glistening droplets on the branches, which sparkled like diamonds once the sun burned off the fog … But there were chores in plenty – but outdoors, and variable, which was much more to my liking. Holding the hammers and saws for the carpentering crew, bringing them dippers of cold water when they were thirsty, watching them fell and trim trees. Pa let me handle a small hand saw, so that I could help trim smaller branches. Within the first week, a cabin of unpeeled logs Mr. Wimmer’s family, and the workers had been built and nearly completely roofed,

I liked the passel of young men that Mr. Marshall had hired, and Mr. Wimmer supervised as I came to know and work with them. They were  all militia volunteers for the Mexican War and sent out to California as part of the Army – but seeing that they were all devout Mormon, they were well-mannered and clean-living to an unusual degree, having eschewed strong drink, and even the drinking of tea and coffee!  Pa remarked quietly to Henry and I that this put them farther over the edge of the temperance side of conduct than any hard-shell Baptist that he had ever heard of. They were all bound for their new colony of Deseret, when winter was over, and spring thawed snow in the high mountain passes. Brigham Young, who was the chief apostle of the new Saints, as they called themselves, had decreed that they would establish the perfect new city for themselves, out in the howling desert wilderness near the great inland Salt Lake. We had not passed through that desert, but some that we had met in California had – and they said nothing good about the awful desert country. I reckoned myself that it was several degrees awfuler than the desert between the Humbolt Sink and the Truckee. I couldn’t see how any sane body would want to set up housekeeping there, and I said so to Pa when we talked of this.

“Having failed in attempts to build such a perfect communal establishment for themselves in the settled country, Mr. Young has decided that the howling wilderness would be the better choice for his folk.”

“Why would that be?” Henry wondered. We were sitting at our fire, a little apart from where the others were camped in and around the half-built log house. “Were they not agreeable to their neighbors?”

You must recall that Henry Steitler’s pa and ma were foreigners, only come to America a year or so before we set out on the trail to California – so Henry might not have paid much mind to the ruckus that had been raised about Mormons in Missouri and Iowa and other like places.

“No,” Pa replied. “For whatever reasons, good or bad – or Mormons, good or bad – their neighbors were not agreeable to them. I’d guess that Mr. Young has decided that they can only get long with their neighbors – if they have no neighbors.” Pa looked over to where the Mormon lads were laughing and joshing around their own campfire as the sun slid down over the far hills in a blaze of gold and orange glory, sending shadows reaching out across the narrow valley. He sighed a little. “It’s gonna be a hard row their chief apostle has set them to hoe – I wish them all the luck in the world, but I just don’t see how they can make a garden out of a desert that forbidding.”

“You think they will fail at that – their Deseret city?” Henry was fascinated. He recalled our desert crossing as well as any of us.

Pa shook his head. “I don’t see how they can, even with the best will in the world – not on land so hostile to everyone but poor naked Indians, living off crickets and grubs … no, nothing will come of their Deseret.”

I remembered this exchange most particularly – because it was one of the very few times that Pa was wrong.