EWING YOUNG AND His ESTATE 191
California to locate the mules and horses whose purchase was contemplated. Young with a party of thirty men was to do the trapping on the way and thus secure the wherewithal to pay for the droves selected. Young did not reach Los Angeles until April, 1832, and as his traps had been defective his beaver catch had not been satisfactory. Consequently a major portion of his force of thirty men were sent back with the horses and mules purchased. Young himself and those re- tained set out to retrieve his fortunes in the varied trapping and hunting trips, his course in which will be traced. It is to be noted first that a part even of the horses and mules the partners were able to obtain with their small beaver catch were lost on their way to New Mexico in fording the Colorado.
Young seems first with a small party to have tried otter hunting. He built two canoes at San Pedro near Los Angeles with the aid of a ship carpenter. With these and a yawl he cruised in the vicinity of Point Conception and the Channel Islands. By October of this year 1832 with a larger party he had started inland to trap on the Kings river in the direc- tion of the San Joaquin from Los Angeles. Thence he worked his way north through the California valleys until Klamath lake was reached. He noted as he proceeded a dense Indian population in the valleys. But on his return in the "following summer the country was strewn with the remains of the dead wherever a village had stood." Hundreds were lying dead in a single rancheria. One of the party later reported that from the headwaters of the Sacramento to the Kings river only five living Indians were seen. Abundant and revolting signs of this pestilence, supposed to have been the small pox, were still in evidence to the members of the Willamette Cattle Company when they passed through this region with their drove in 1837.
THROUGH HALL J. KELLEY EWING YOUNG GETS A VISION OF
THE OREGON SITUATION Returning to the vicinity of Los Angeles in the fall of 1833
