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Others became so ill they had to be sent to Sutter’s Fort to recuperate. Marshall fretted at the delay. He knew the Mormons would depart in the spring, leaving him to finish the sawmill with the Indians. He could probably do so if he had to, but it wasn’t a prospect he relished.
    A S WORRISOME AS the health of the men was the state of the weather. Autumn always came sooner to the mountains than to the foothills around Coloma, and sooner to the foothills than to the valley near the fort. The clouds off the Pacific typically overflew the valley before colliding with the mountains and releasing their load of moisture. In the autumn this fell as rain, which ran off the steep slopes and raised the rivers in the lower elevations weeks before those lower elevations themselves received much precipitation. As the season progressed, the moisture in the mountains fell as snow, which stuck to the slopes; by then, though, rain was falling in the foothills and the valley, greening the hillsides but making the roads difficult for men and horses, and nearly impassable for wheeled vehicles. Any provisions and equipment that didn’t get to Coloma by about the first of December probably wouldn’t get there till spring.
    In 1847 the initial autumn rains reached Coloma in early November. “We have had a good deal of rain,” Azariah Smith wrote, summarizing the week preceding November 10. Sutter accordingly accelerated his supplyschedule. “Started 5 wagons with provisions,” he jotted in his journal at the fort on Tuesday, November 16. The following Sunday, Smith at Coloma noted, “Yesterday there came five wagon loads of provisions, as the provision for the winter has to be brought before the rainy season commences.” December saw showers, succeeded, after the first of the year, by a drenching Pacific storm. “Sunday it began raining, and rained all day and night, and has rained off and on ever since,” Smith wrote on Tuesday, January 11.
    The rains did more than disrupt transport; they threatened the construction of the sawmill, now at a critical stage. Most of the dam was completed, and the millrace had been etched across the peninsula on the inside of the river’s bend. The foundation of the mill had been laid, and the timbers of the lower portion were in place. But the dam hadn’t withstood winter’s high water, and Marshall wasn’t sure it could. As things happened, the storm caught him at the fort, where he was supervising Sutter’s blacksmiths in the fabrication of the machinery for the mill. In Marshall’s absence, the men at Coloma watched the water rise and wondered if the flood would undo all their work of the previous months. Smith wrote of the storm’s effect on a crucial part of the construction: “It raised the river very high, and we expected to see the water go around the abutment almost every minute.”
    Marshall and Sutter worried about the danger upstream, but, realizing there was nothing they could do till the water fell, they decided Marshall should stay by the forge to see the ironwork finished. On January 14 he loaded the irons into a wagon, hitched up three yoke of oxen and, with the assistance of two Indian boys, set out for Coloma. The journey went slowly along the muddy road. After forty-eight hours they were only halfway there. But en route they encountered a party returning from a previous delivery; these men brought the welcome news that the dam had held. At Coloma, Henry Bigler recorded, “Clear as a bell and the water is a-falling and the mill safe.”
    B UT WINTER WAS JUST starting, and more storms would follow. Marshall was impatient to complete the work. His impatience increased,on reaching Coloma, at learning of the revolt against Jennie Wimmer and at having to grant the rebels’ demand of time to build their separate quarters. Meanwhile he examined what the crew had accomplished in his absence. The headrace—the portion of the race above the mill—met his approval, but the