The main concern with the migration of any livestock, whether it was rustled from the San Joaquin plain, or rounded up in the marshlands that followed the river as it snaked down the middle of California, was water. Following gravity from the highest point, the Sierra mountains, to the lowest, which at that time was Tulare Lake, a body of water so enormous they used steamboats to ferry livestock on their way to the butcher shops in San Francisco where they had refrigerated cars that could transport sides of beef to Chicago, or Memphis. or Louisiana – The lake doesn’t exist anymore – funny how that is – making it difficult to imagine what it might have been like. You couldn’t see across it, it wasn’t deep, compared to great lakes, but its surface was bigger than Lake Tahoe; only different, it was marshland, where the Tule grass grew higher than a man and so thick you needed a machete – the long bladed knife that vaqueros carried as part of their gear – to clear the paths to where the feral mustang were rutting, and sometimes a Grizzly would forage through, hoping for an old mare too weak to keep up with the herd. Murrieta knew this craft from his early days in California, in Brentwood, where he was a mesteñero, at the rodeo grounds on Dr. Marsh’s land. And he also knew the value of water, not always accessible in California, the terrain, and where the springs were. He would pay attention to the water, his livelihood and that of his crew depended upon it. The Old Trail, more or less follows Highway 5 and skirts the Diablo Range to the west, La Vereda Viejo, Anza’a trail, passes places like Los Banos, and the San Luis Reservoir. Springs like this one, are marked by groves of sycamore, cottonwood, or eucalyptus. These were gathering places for herds migrating, domestic animals, cows and goats, sheep and horses, some not so domestic like the mustang. A pond like this at midnight in the middle of a hot summer would be teeming, eyes aglow, coyote’s yapping, a place to hunt if all you had was a bow, a place to roost in, keep an eye on, have your spies out, if you were looking for a stolen a herd coming through the canyons, up the Panoche Pass, or El Camino Diablo, to Horse Thief Canyon to Mustang Peak, where many tributaries, intersect with Murrieta’s trail – La Vereda del Monte.