We earned one dollar and fifty cents per day all around to the man. Our hands were tender and soon became very sore. Some of our men were taken sick with chills and scurvy. While at dinner on the 27th [of September 1847], a man entered our quarters dressed in buckskin, and said Captain Sutter wanted four men from our company to go up into the mountains about thirty miles to help build a saw-mill on the south fork of the American River. He said that he and Sutter were partners in building the mill and that he had been up there with a few hands and had done a little work, but some of them were expecting to leave soon, hence they wanted more help. This man was Jams Wilson Marshall... Marshall took an ox team and wagon loaded with provisions, and a few tools. We arrived at the mill site in the evening of the 29th, where we found several of the battalion boys who, by the advice of Levi W. Hancock, had stopped at Sutter's at the time we passed their in August. To me the surrounding country looked wild and lonesome. We were surrounded by high mountains, more or less covered with a heavy growth of pine, balsam, redwood, pinion pine and oak timber. The place was infested with wolves, grizzly bears and Indians. Before our arrival at the mill site, Marshall and the brethren had built a nice double log cabin about one-fourth of a mile from the mill. In one part of the house lived a family. The man's name was Peter L. Wemer [Peter L. Wimmer], whose wife [Jennie Wimmer] was to be cook for the mill hands.