While the emigrants tried to bring as much food with them as their wagons would hold, the reality was it wasn't very much. Certainly not enough to last the entire trip. They could obtain food in two ways: 1) gather berries and fruit along the way. Many of the streams were lined with wild blackberries or raspberries. Some of the streams often had wild fruit trees such as apples, peaches, and sometimes apricots. Then, there was the game that could be hunted. This game was usually deer and antelope. In the mountain stretches of the trail, wild boar, moose, and bear. On the prairie, there were of course, buffalo. The second way the emigrant replenished supplies were at the various forts along the way. All of them had a store called a "Suttler's Store". Not all forts were equal. A fort like Laramie or Bridger had very large Suttler Stores with plenty of supplies. The other forts had much smaller stores with minimal supplies. The larger forts like Laramie and Bridger also had wainright shops where repairs to a wagon could be made.

At the end of the trail, Capt. Sutter built both a mill and a fort. The Fort was in what is now Sacramento and had everything imaginable for the arriving emigrant. He had a complete general store in the fort. There was also a bakery, a pharmacy with a doctor on call, wainwrights, a separate clothing store for men and women, and nursery with fruit trees and other plants a starting farmer would need. Sutter also had a lumber mill that not only sold lumber, but everything a person would need to build a home.

Sutter did something else. He mapped out and roughly surveyed many of the rivers in central and north eastern California mountains for homesteading. He also kept records of who homesteaded where even if they didn't use his pre-surveyed homestead sites. There was a method in his kindness and all the work he did. He wanted to be California's first territoral governor and perhaps the first state governor. He almost obtained his goal. He figured if he treated the arriving emigrants with kindness, they would vote for him. There was a little event he hadn't counted on that prevented him from reaching his goal. That event was the discovery of gold at his lumber mill and the following gold rush.