Going to the Sulphur Banks on a calm morning, I hired an Indian from a rancheria upon Mr. Alter’s farm to row for us, and my Indian proved to be a prize.  His name was Napoleon, and he was a philosopher.  Like his greater namesake, he had had two wives.  Of the first one he reported that “Jim catchee him,” by which I was to understand that he had tired of her, and had sold her to “Jim;” and he had now taken number two, a moderately pretty Digger girl, of whom he seemed to be uncommonly fond.  As he rowed he began to speak of his former life, when he had served a white farmer.

“Him die now,” said Napoleon; adding, in a musing tone, “he very good man, plenty money; give Injun money all time.  Him very good white man, that man; plenty money all a time.”

Napoleon dwelt upon the wealth of his favorite white man so persistently that presently it occurred to me to inquire a little further.

“Suppose a white man had no money,” said I, “what sort of a man would you think him?”

My philosopher’s countenance took on a fine expression of contempt.  “Suppose white man no got money?” he asked.  “Eh! suppose he no got money—­him dam fool!” And Napoleon glared upon us, his passengers, as though he wondered if either of us would venture to contradict so plain a proposition.

The sulphur bank is a remarkable deposit of decomposed volcanic rock and ashes, containing so large a quantity of sulphur that I am told that at the refining-works, which lie on the bank of the lake, the mass yields eighty per cent. of pure sulphur.  The works were not in operation when I was there.

Several large hot springs burst out from the bank, and gas and steam escape with some violence from numerous fissures.  The deposit looks very much like a similar one on the edge of the Kilauea crater, on the island of Hawaii, but is, I should think, richer in sulphur.  Near the sulphur bank, on the edge of the lake, is a hot borate spring, which is supposed to yield at times three hundred gallons per minute, and which Professor Whitney, the State Geologist, declares remarkable for the extraordinary amount of ammoniacal salts its waters contain—­more than any natural spring water that has ever been analyzed.

There is abundant evidence of volcanic action in all the country about Clear Lake.  A dozen miles from Lakeport, not far from the shore of the lake, the whole mountain side along which the stage-road runs is covered for several miles with splinters and fragments of obsidian or volcanic glass, so that it looks as though millions of bottles had been broken there in some prodigious revelry; and where the road cuts into the side of the mountain you see the osidian lying in huge masses and in boulders.  Joining this, and at one point interrupting it, is a tract of volcanic ashes stratified, and the strata thrown up vertically in some places, as though after the volcano had flung out the ashes there had come a terrific upheaval of the earth.