During that era, the only "records" were what appeared in newspapers. For Northern California, the primary newspapers were in San Francisco, Sacramento and Stockton and they often had articles covering events well outside of what you might think would be their "reader territory". A lot of extracts from these newspapers have been posted at URL:

http://www.newspaperabstracts.com/index.php

The website has a limited search capability which allows you to refine searches. For example, if you go initially select United States/California and enter Journey as the search criteria your not only going to get cases where Journey appears as a surname, but also where journey is appears as a trip. A quick look indicates this generates a long list of candidate editions with basic info about which newspaper the term appeared in and associated date of publication. At the bottom of the displayed page you will find a refine search feature. If you enter Andrew, you will get the cases where Andrew appears in the first list (i.e., it doesn't mean you've gotten hits for the sequence Andrew Journey). This list should be shorter. You can further refine, for example use Dorado (vice El Dorado) as a possible further refinement. Again this doesn't necessarily mean Andrew Journey in El Dorado county.

From this point on, you're pretty much stuck with opening each hit, possibly using the date of publication as the ones to look at first, to see if there's anything in a particular edition that's of interest. Depending on the uniqueness of the inputs, the process can be quite tedious but I've it is often fruitful.

Good luck

Vern D