Day By Day reports Mark Twain's departure for St. Louis on March 3, 1867 was snowy.  The date, time and railroad are confirmed in the Mark Twain Project explanatory notes for a letter to Charles Henry Webb on March 19, 1867. [ SLC to Charles Henry Webb, 19 March 1867., St. Louis, Mo. ]  That he returned to New York on the same route is confirmed in a letter to Jane Lampton Clemens on April 15, 1867.

Pioneer Stage Coach route.

Marysville and Yuba City intersect at the glassy blue Feather River. During the Wild West gold rush, many steamships, with their magnificent turning paddle wheels, traveled up and down Feather River between San Francisco, Sacramento, and Marysville.

The gold rush transformed Feather River from a yawning waterway of crude canoes, small sailboats, and whaleboats to a busy, bustling route of fast-moving, smoke puffing, passenger-filled, steam powered boats.

The first steamboat to travel down Feather River was a small sternwheel steamer, the Linda, in 1849.

Capital was built in San Francisco, by shipbuilder John Gunder North in his shipyard in the Potrero District. Launched in 1866, it was a 277 feet long, 1,989 ton, side-wheel paddle steamer. Capital, was the largest of the steamboats on the rivers in California and the last side-wheel steamer built for the California Steam Navigation Company for the run between Sacramento and San Francisco until it was put to use as a ferry by the railroad between Oakland and San Francisco in July 1876.