At Independence Rock, Caldwell left the train and packed alone over the mountains and into California, beating the company by sixty days and thus escaping the cholera, which at that time was raging fiercely along the emigrant road.
For a time, he mined on the American River, near Folsom, CaliforniaFolsom, but in October he set out for Nevada County, arriving first at Rough and Ready, then the most lively camp in the state.
Here he remained during the ensuing winter, going in the early spring with a company of fifteen others to the North Yuba River, where they located a mining claim, calling it the Missouri Bar.
In December 1854, Caldwell was admitted as an attorney at law in the Supreme Court of California in Sacramento, and thus is one of the older practitioners of the state, and he has been counsel also in some of the most prominent cases in Nevada County.
B. Gregory and E. G. Waite (the place of the latter being later filled by E. F. Spence), shouldered the expense of erecting the building, this being afterward refunded by the people of Nevada City.