So, after his recovery, he settled up, built a splendid grade, and no person was injured afterward. He was one of the roughest men in the state, and there were few who dared to oppose him or be so blunt as he. He neither drank nor smoked. But he could swear until everything looked blue. He was a gentle husband and father, but everybody and everything else, except Mrs. Foss, had to get out of his way. He could hold, direct, start, and stop, his team by his voice. I have sat on the box with him when he had a six-horse team on the canter, when he would shout, " Down!" and the whole team would come into a trot, and then he would say loudly, "Way down, now!" and every animal would come to a dead stop. Again, when his team would be approaching a nice long level stretch between his inn and Calistoga he would shout, "Shake'era up now!" and every horse would break into a run which I thought it impossible to check. But he would check them without touching the brake or reining them up, in less than a minute. Still he was generally considered an unsafe driver, and his business fell off so largely a few years before his death that he had to send for his son Charlie, who was driving over the Yosemite Road at the time.

Charlie Foss has no superior in the world probably, in his line. He grew up as a driver among the Coast Mountains, then spent several years in Southern California and Arizona, and graduated in the Sierra. He is nearly as tall as his father, being more than six feet, but only weighs 190 pounds. He is temperate in everything and one of the gentlest and most polite fellows I have ever known. He drives from the Geysers to Fossville and return thirty- five miles  every day of his life, and never had an accident or a breakdown. There is no prettier grade in America, and the entire drive is picturesque and beautiful. I have sat alongside of Charlie as he drove down the last grade into that Plutonian Paradise at a speed of ten miles an hour, where the curves were so short that many a time I could not see the leaders. He never stops at an inn that he does not minutely examine the harness and the brakes and other parts of the wagon. When he takes his seat he always asks: "Are you all ready, ladies and gentlemen?" or, "Is everybody ready?" He invariably halts at the summit, where may be seen a landscape that has few superiors. Mountains, valleys, orchards, and villas may be seen for a hundred miles when the atmosphere is clear and rare. Pines, redwood, oaks, laurel, spruce, fir, manzanita, and madrono stand up behind the lush grasses and herbs that embroider the enchanting way, and here and there are silvery streamlets that go gurgling away down to the sparkling Pacific, which may be seen at intervals sixty miles away; and all is enlivened by the notes of birds, and the scamper of game, and the ineffable fragrance of aromatic tree and bush and flower.

Buck Jones, a gray-headed old forty-niner, drove for many years in Sierra and Yuba Counties. He was an entertaining fellow and used to delight in telling how Governor F. F. Low once drove a dray in Marysville, and how ex-Lieutenant Governor Johnson and Creed Haymond tended bar in a mining camp on the South Fork of the Yuba, and where and why George C. Gorham and James G. Fair were called the two slippery gentlemen from Slipperyville. This old driver had once mined at Bidwell's Bar and had paid as high as seventy-five cents for an onion and a dollar for a pound of pork. "I saw a gambler take out his pistol and shoot down another gambler," he once said to me, "in cold blood, and then go and help hang a horse thief for the good of the camp." But Buck might have been drawing the long bow in this one instance.