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Title: Prentice Mulford's story: life by land and sea

Author: Prentice Mulford

Release date: September 2, 2023 [eBook #71549]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: F. J. Needham

Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PRENTICE MULFORD'S STORY: LIFE BY LAND AND SEA ***





                      _THE WHITE CROSS LIBRARY._


                       PRENTICE MULFORD’S STORY

                        _Life by Land and Sea._

                                  BY
                           PRENTICE MULFORD.


                               NEW YORK:
                       F. J. NEEDHAM, PUBLISHER,
                        52 WEST FOURTEENTH ST.
                                 1889.




                            COPYRIGHT, 1889
                           BY F. J. NEEDHAM.




CONTENTS.


CHAPTER                                                             PAGE

I. Shadows of Coming Events,                                           5

II. Going to Sea,                                                     14

III. Getting My Sea Legs On,                                          20

IV. Much Water and Mutiny,                                            31

V. San Francisco in 1856,                                             43

VI. As a Sea Cook,                                                    51

VII. Sights while Cooking,                                            61

VIII. Whaling in Marguerita Bay,                                      71

IX. Our Butter Fiends,                                                82

X. Guadalupe,                                                         86

XI. At the Gold Mines,                                                90

XII. Swett’s Bar,                                                     99

XIII. One Day’s Digging,                                             105

XIV. The Miner’s Rainy Day,                                          114

XV. The Miner’s Sunday,                                              122

XVI. The Cow Fever,                                                  129

XVII. Red Mountain Bar,                                              135

XVIII. My California School,                                         145

XIX. “Jimtown,”                                                      157

XX. Romance of Ah Sam and Hi Sing,                                   168

XXI. On a Jury,                                                      174

XXII. Some Culinary Reminiscences,                                   178

XXIII. The Copper Fever,                                             186

XXIV. Rise and Fall of Copperhead City,                              193

XXV. Prospecting,                                                    199

XXVI. High Life,                                                     207

XXVII. Leaving High Life,                                            217

XXVIII. The Last of High Life,                                       226

XXIX. On the Rostrum,                                                237

XXX. Running for Office,                                             246

XXXI. An Early California Canvass,                                   254

XXXII. Another Change,                                               262

XXXIII. Editing vs. Writing,                                         266

XXXIV. Opinions Journalistic,                                        275

XXXV. Recent Antiquity,                                              279

XXXVI. Going Home,                                                   287




PRENTICE MULFORD’S STORY.




CHAPTER I.

SHADOWS OF COMING EVENTS.


One June morning, when I was a boy, Captain Eben Latham came to our
house, and the first gossip he unloaded was, that “them stories about
finding gold in Californy was all true.” It was “wash day” and our folks
and some of the neighbors were gathered in the “wash house” while the
colored help soused her fat black arms in the suds of the wash tub.

That was the first report I heard from California. Old Eben had been a
man of the sea; was once captured by a pirate, and when he told the
story, which he did once a week, he concluded by rolling up his trousers
and showing the bullet-scars he had received.

California then was but a blotch of yellow on the schoolboy’s map of
1847. It was associated only with hides, tallow, and Dana’s “Two Years
Before the Mast.” It was thought of principally in connection with
long-horned savage cattle, lassoes, and Mexicans. Very near this in
general vacancy and mystery was the entire region west of the Rocky
Mountains. What was known as the Indian Territory covered an area now
occupied by half a dozen prosperous States. Texas was then the Mecca of
adventurers and people who found it advisable to leave home suddenly.
The phrase in those days, “Gone to Texas,” had a meaning almost
equivalent to “Gone to the ----.” Then California took its place.

The report slumbered during the summer in our village, but in the fall
it commenced kindling and by winter it was ablaze. The companies
commenced forming. It was not entirely a strange land to some of our
people.

Ours was a whaling village. Two-thirds of the male population were bred
to the sea. Every boy knew the ropes of a ship as soon if not sooner
than he did his multiplication table. Ours was a “travelled” community.
They went nearer the North and South Poles than most people of their
time and Behring Straits, the Kamschatkan coast, the sea of Japan, Rio
Janeiro, Valparaiso, the Sandwich Islands, the Azores and the names of
many other remote localities were words in every one’s mouth, and words,
too, which we were familiar with from childhood. Many of our whalers had
touched at San Francisco and Monterey. There had recently been a great
break down in the whale fishery. Whale ships for sale were plentiful.
Most of them were bought to carry the “’49” rush of merchandise and men
to California.

By November, 1848, California was the talk of the village, as it was all
that time of the whole country. The great gold fever raged all winter.

All the old retired whaling captains wanted to go, and most of them did
go. All the spruce young men of the place wanted to go. Companies were
formed, and there was much serious drawing up of constitutions and
by-laws for their regulation. In most cases the avowed object of the
companies, as set forth in these documents, was “Mining and trading with
the Indians.” Great profit was expected to be gotten out of the
California Indian. He was expected to give stores of gold and furs in
exchange for gilt watches, brass chains, beads, and glass marbles. The
companies bought safes, in which to keep their gold, and also strange
and complex gold-washing machines, of which numerous patterns suddenly
sprang up, invented by Yankees who never saw and never were to see a
gold mine. Curious ideas were entertained relative to California. The
Sacramento River was reported as abounding in alligators. Colored prints
represented the adventurer pursued by these reptiles. The general
opinion was that it was a fearfully hot country and full of snakes.

Of the companies formed in our vicinity, some had more standing and
weight than others, and membership in them was eagerly sought for. An
idea prevailed that when this moral weight and respectability was
launched on the shores of California it would entail fortune on all
belonging to the organization. People with the lightning glance and
divination of golden anticipation, saw themselves already in the mines
hauling over chunks of ore and returning home weighed down with them.
Five years was the longest period any one expected to stay. Five years
at most was to be given to rifling California of her treasures, and then
that country was to be thrown aside like a used-up newspaper and the
rich adventurers would spend the remainder of their days in wealth,
peace, and prosperity at their Eastern homes. No one talked then of
going out “to build up the glorious State of California.” No one then
ever took any pride in the thought that he might be called a
“Californian.” So they went.

People who could not go invested in men who could go, and paid half the
expense of their passage and outfit on condition that they should remit
back half the gold they dug. This description of Argonaut seldom paid
any dividends. I doubt if one ever sent back a dollar. Eastern
shareholders really got their money’s worth in gilded hopes, which with
them lasted for years. But people never put such brilliant anticipations
on the credit side of the account; and merely because that, at the last,
they are not realized.

As the winter of “’48” waned the companies, one after another, set sail
for the land of gold. The Sunday preceding they listened to farewell
sermons at church. I recollect seeing a score or two of the young
Argonauts thus preached to. They were admonished from the pulpit to
behave temperately, virtuously, wisely, and piously. How seriously they
listened. How soberly were their narrow-brimmed, straight-up-and-down,
little plug hats of that period piled one atop the other in front of
them. How glistened their hair with the village barber’s hair oil. How
pronounced the creak of their tight boots as they marched up the aisle.
How brilliant the hue of their neck-ties. How patiently and resignedly
they listened to the sad discourse of the minister, knowing it would be
the last they would hear for many months. How eager the glances they
cast up to the church choir, where sat the girls they were to marry on
their return. How few returned. How few married the girl of that
period’s choice. How little weighed the words of the minister a year
afterward in the hurry-scurry of the San Francisco life of ’49 and ’50.

What an innocent, unsophisticated, inexperienced lot were those forty
odd young Argonauts who sat in those pews. Not one of them then could
bake his own bread, turn a flapjack, re-seat his trousers, or wash his
shirt. Not one of them had dug even a post-hole. All had a vague sort of
impression that California was a nutshell of a country and that they
would see each other there frequently and eventually all return home at
or about the same time. How little they realized that one was to go to
the Northern and one to the Southern mines and one to remain in San
Francisco, and the three never to meet again! What glittering gold mines
existed in their brains even during the preaching of that sermon! Holes
where the gold was put out by the shovelful, from which an occasional
boulder or pebble was picked out and flung away.

The young Argonaut, church being dismissed, took his little stiff, shiny
plug and went home to the last Sunday tea. And that Sunday night, on
seeing her home from church for the last time, he was allowed to sit up
with her almost as long as he pleased. The light glimmered long from the
old homestead front parlor window. The cold north wind without roared
among the leafless sycamores and crashed the branches together. It was a
sad, sad pleasure. The old sofa they sat upon would be sat upon by them
no more for years. For years? Forever in many cases. To-day, old and
gray, gaunt and bent, somewhere in the gulches, “up North” somewhere,
hidden away in an obscure mining camp of the Tuolumne, Stanislaus, or
Mokelumne, up in Cariboo or down in Arizona, still he recollects that
night as a dream. And she? Oh, she dried her eyes and married the
stay-at-home five years after. A girl can’t wait forever. And besides,
bad reports after a time reached home about him. He drank. He gambled.
He found fair friends among the señoritas. And, worse than all, he made
no fortune.

By spring most of the Argonauts had departed. With them went the flower
of the village. Their absence made a big social gap, and that for many a
day. The girls they left behind tried for a time to live on hope, and
afterward “took up” and made the most of the younger generation of boys.
They remembered that after all they were not widows. Why should their
mourning be permanent? ’Twere selfish for the departed Argonaut to
demand it. And who knew how these Args might console themselves on
arriving in San Francisco?

After many months came the first letters from San Francisco, and then
specimens of gold dust and gold pieces. The gold dust came in quills or
in vials, mixed with black sand. But this dust was not always dug by the
moral Argonauts, from whom the most was expected. It was often the
gathering of some of the obscurer members of our community. Fortune was
democratic in her favors.

In the course of two years a few of the “boys” came straggling back. The
first of these arrivals, I remember, walked up our main street, wearing
on his shoulders a brilliant-hued Mexican serape. It created a
sensation. All the small boys of the village “tagged on behind him” a
sort of impromptu guard of honor. The serape was about all he did bring
home. He talked a great deal of gold and brought specimens, but not in
sufficient quantity to pay all outstanding bills. The next of the
returned was a long, gaunt, yellow case of Chagres fever. He brought
only gloom. Along in 1853-54 came a few of the more fortunate who had
made a “raise.” Two returned and paid up their creditors in full who had
been by creditors given over. But few came to remain. They “staid
around” home a few weeks, turned up their noses at the small prices
asked for drinks, cigars, and stews, treated everybody, grew restless
and were off again. Relatives of the not returned beset them with
inquiries which they found it difficult to answer, because there was an
idea prevalent in the village that a man in California ought to make
money, and why didn’t he?

Up to 1860 a “returned Californian” was an object of curiosity and of
some importance if he brought any money with him, or rather as long as
the money he brought with him lasted. But “the war” wiped them out in
this respect. The California fortune of that time was a mere pimple
compared with the fortunes made by the war. A generation now exists to
whom the whole Argonaut exodus is but an indifferent story.

Sometimes on visiting my native village I stand before one of those
old-fashioned houses, from whose front door thirty-four years ago there
went forth for the last time the young Argonaut on his way to the ship.
There is more than one such house in the village. The door is double,
the knocker is still upon it, the window panes are small, the front
gate is the same and up to the door the same stones lie upon the walk.
But within all are strangers. The father and mother are past anxious
inquiry of their son. The sisters are married and live or have died
elsewhere. A new generation is all about. They never heard of him. The
great event of that period, the sailing of that ship for California, is
sometimes recalled by a few--a few rapidly diminishing. His name is all
but forgotten. Some have a dim remembrance of him. In his time he was an
important young man in the village. He set the fashion in collars and
the newest style of plugs. Oh, fame, how fleeting! What is a generation?
A puff. A few old maids recollect him. What a pity, what a shame that we
do all fade as a leaf!

What a sad place; what a living grave is this for him to return to!
Where would he find the most familiar names? In the cemetery. Who would
he feel most like? Like “Rip Van Winkle.” Who are these bright and
blooming lasses passing by? They are her grown-up children--she with
whom he sat up that last Sunday night in the old-fashioned front parlor
on the old-fashioned sofa. Where is she? That is she, that stout,
middle-aged woman across the street. Is she thinking of him? No; she is
thinking whether there shall be cabbage or turnips for dinner. Who is
that codgery-looking man going up the street. That is the man she didn’t
wait for and married. Should the Argonaut return home if he could? No.
Let him stay where he is and dream on of her as she was, bright, gay,
lively, blooming, and possibly romantic. The dream is solid happiness
compared with the reality.

The recollections treated in this chapter are to me as a commencement
and an ending of the shadows of a series of coming events.




CHAPTER II.

GOING TO SEA.


Eight years later I shipped “before the mast” on the A 1 first-class
clipper _Wizard_ bound from New York to San Francisco.

When I made up my mind to become a sailor, I had tried several of this
world’s callings and seemed to find none suitable. I had asked counsel
of several elderly gentlemen in my native village as to the best way of
securing all things needful during my sojourn in this world. They said
many wise and good things. They looked wise and good. But really the
wordy help they offered was unsatisfactory. So I cut the knot myself and
said I would be a sailor. I explained to my male and female friends that
I felt myself destined for a maritime career. I needed more excitement
than could be got out of a shore humdrum life. The sea was the place for
enterprising youthful Americans. The American merchant marine needed
American officers and sailors. All heard me and agreed. No doubt it was
the best thing. And I talked on and they agreed with all my arguments.
How people will agree with you when it’s all one to them what you do! I
was eighteen and in most respects a fool, including this--that I did not
know it.

The _Wizard_, on which I shipped with five other boys from my native
town, was a first-class clipper. She was a fine thing to look at from a
distance, either as she lay at anchor, the tracery of her spars and
rigging in relief against the sky, or speeding along under studding
sails rigged out on both sides. But once on board and inside her
symmetrical lines, things were not so beautiful. Those white, cloud-like
sails tore men’s fingers as, hard and heavy with ice or snow, the
sailors tried to furl them. Those graceful tapering yards, supporting
the studding sails, strained and half-crushed men’s backs when lowered
and toted about the deck. There were wooden belaying-pins, iron
marline-spikes and other miscellaneous things to fling at men’s heads by
those in authority. Those cobweb-like ropes had hard, thick ends lying
coiled on deck to lash men’s bodies.

We, the six boys, were obliged to leave our native heaths because there
wasn’t room for us on them to earn our bread and clothes. We were not
clearly aware of this at the time, though an unspoken sentiment
prevailed there, as it does in most of the older settled States, that
the young man must move away to “seek his fortune.” Ten years previous
we should have entered the whaling service. But the whale fishery had
utterly failed. Once it was the outlet for nearly all the brawn and
muscle of our island.

The Captain of the _Wizard_ was from our native town. Therefore myself
and the five other boys had shipped under him, expecting special favors.
A mistake. Never sail under a Captain who knows your folks at home. You
have no business to expect favoritism; he has no business to grant it.

I was the last of the six young lubbers to leave the town for New York.
On the morning of my departure the mothers, sisters, and other female
relatives of the five who had gone before discovered many other things
which they deemed necessary for the urchins to carry on the voyage. So
they bore down on me with them, and I bade most of these good people an
earthly farewell, loaded down, in addition to my own traps, with an
assorted cargo of cakes, sweetmeats, bed quilts, Bibles, tracts, and one
copy of “Young’s Night Thoughts” for the boys.

I ate my last dinner as a free man at a Broadway restaurant, and then I
went to the wharf where the ship lay. Already the tug was alongside,
preparatory to hauling her out in the stream. I went up the plank and
over the side. A gentleman in authority asked me, as I stepped on deck,
if I belonged to the ship. I said I did. “Take off those togs, then, put
on your working duds and turn to, then,” he remarked. The togs went off.
I put on my canvas pants and flannel shirt, the garb of sea servitude.
Henceforth I was a slave. The ship just then was not a Sunday-school nor
a Society for Ethical Culture. It was a howling pandemonium of oaths and
orders. Fully one-third of the able seamen had not recovered from their
closing-out shore spree, and had tumbled into their berths or were
sprawled on deck drunk. Cargo in cases, bales, boxes, and barrels was
still rattled over the bulwarks and into the hold. Everybody seemed to
be swearing--first, each one on his own, private account, and secondly,
all in one general chorus for mutual purposes. Many people seemed in
command. I couldn’t distinguish the officers of the ship from the
stevedores. Still officers continued to turn up everywhere, and each
officer ordered me to some particular and separate duty.

The world looked pretty black to me then. I wished there was some way
out of it. On shore the period between the foremast hand and the
position of Captain was only the duration of a thought. Here it was an
eternity. Day dreams are short, real experience is long. But all this is
often in youth a difficult matter to realize.

There came along a short, stout man with a deeper voice and more
sonorous oath than anybody else. This was the fourth and last mate. It
was a relief to find at last the end of the mates and to know the exact
number of men legitimately entitled to swear at me. This gentleman for a
season concentrated himself entirely on me. He ordered me with a broom
and scraper into the ship’s pig-pen, which he argued needed cleaning.
This was my first well-defined maritime duty. It was a lower round of
the ladder than I had anticipated. It seemed in its nature an occupation
more bucolic than nautical. I would have preferred, also, that
compliance with the order had not been exacted until the ship had left
the wharf, because there were several shore visitors on board, and among
them two of my intimate friends who had come to see me off. There they
stood, in all the bravery of silk hats and fashionably-cut attire,
conversing on terms of equality with the first mate. They could talk
with him on the weather or any subject. I, by virtue of my inferior
position, was not at liberty to speak to this potentate at all.

I jumped into the pig-pen. Thus destiny, despite our inclinations,
forces down our throats these bitter pills. The fourth mate was not more
than a year my senior. He stood over me during the entire process and
scolded, cursed, and commanded. My shore friends looked on from afar and
grinned. Already they saw the great social chasm which yawned between me
and them, and governed their actions accordingly. Already did they
involuntarily patronize me. It requires a wise man to detect the
wickedness and deceit in his own nature. Probably I should have
similarly acted had our positions been reversed. The mate was very
particular. He made me sweep and scrape every corner with an elaborate
and painful accuracy. He sent me into the pig’s house to further perfect
the work. I was obliged to enter it in an almost recumbent position. The
pig ran out disgusted. I scraped his floor in a similar mood. Thus
commenced life on the ocean wave.

But I got even with the mate. Destiny made me my own involuntary avenger
of the indignity put upon me. By indignity I don’t mean the cleaning of
the pig-pen. That was an honorable, though menial occupation--at least
in theory. Cincinnatus on his farm may have done the same thing. But I
do mean the scurrility and abuse the young officer bestowed on me, while
I did my best to execute his bidding.

I hauled the young man overboard about three minutes afterward, but he
never knew I did it, and I never allowed myself to think of the
occurrence while on shipboard, for fear the powers of the air might
ventilate the matter. It came about in this way: A line was passed
through a hawse-hole forward to the tug, which was puffing, fretting,
fuming, and churning with her screw the mud-ooze and garbage floating in
the slip into a closer fusion. My friend the mate stood on the
fore-chains with the end of the heavy rope in both hands, trying to
pass it to those on the tug. This line running through the hawse-hole
aft was lying near where I stood. Some one called out: “Haul in on that
line!” I supposed that the order referred to me and the hawser lying at
my side. So I hauled with all my might. I felt at first some
resistance--something like a tugging at the other end. I hauled all the
harder. Then something seemed to give way. It hauled easier. I heard,
coincident with these sensations, a splash, loud cries, much swearing
and the yell of “Man overboard!” I raised my head over the bulwarks and
there was my mate, floundering amid dock ooze, rotten oranges, and salt
water. It was he who held the other end of the line, and my hauling had
caused the centre of gravity in his short body to shift beyond the base,
and in accordance with a natural law he had gone overboard. He was the
general cynosure of all eyes. They fished him out, wet and swearing.
There was a vigorous demand for the miscreant who had been hauling on
the line. I was as far as possible from the spot and kept myself very
busy. Bluster went below and changed his clothes. I was avenged.




CHAPTER III.

GETTING MY SEA LEGS ON.


We were towed into the stream and anchored for the night. To look at New
York City, with its many lights and its thousands amusing themselves in
various ways, from the ship’s deck, without the possibility of joining
them, was to feel for the first time the slavery of marine life.
Emerging very early next morning from the “boys’ house,” I found
everything in the bustle and confusion of getting under way. A long file
of men were tramping aft with a very wet hawser. As I stood looking at
them my ear was seized by our Dutch third mate, who accompanied the
action with the remark, “Cooms, I puts you to work.” He conducted me in
this manner to the rope and bade me lay hold of it. I did so. I could
have done so with a better heart and will had it not been for the
needless and degrading manner in which he enforced his command. Most men
do their work just as well for being treated with a certain courtesy of
command due from the superior to the inferior.

At noon the tug cast off. The Highlands of Navesink sank to a cloud in
the distance. The voyage had commenced. All hands were mustered aft. The
Captain appeared and made them a short speech. He hoped we would all do
our duty and that the voyage would be a pleasant one. It was not a
pleasant one at all. However, that was all in the future. The first and
second mates then chose the men for their respective watches, commencing
with the able seamen, then picking out the ordinary seamen, and finally
descending to the boys. Of course the best of all these grades were
picked off first. I think I was among the last of the boys who were
chosen.

The first night out was fine. The _Wizard_ slightly bowed to the ocean,
and the sails seemed great black patches, waving to and fro against the
sky. The six boys, so soon to be miserable, gathered in a cluster on
deck. Jed Coles proposed that we “spin yarns.” It was the nautically
correct way of passing the time. So we “spun yarns,” or at least Jed
did. He had a batch ready for the occasion. He sat on a tub, put an
enormous chew of tobacco in his mouth, hitched up his trousers and felt
every inch a sailor. I noticed the second mate, that incarnation of evil
and brutality, hovering about us, dark as it was. I saw his fiendish
grin and the glare of his greenish eye. A precious lot of young fools we
must have seemed to him. A little after our yarn spinning was
interrupted by shrieks and cries of distress proceeding from the forward
part of the ship. We had then our first exhibition of the manner of
enforcing American merchant-service discipline. The second mate was
beating Cummings, a simple being, who, having sailed only in
“fore-and-aft” coasting vessels, had made the mistake of shipping as an
ordinary seaman on a square-rigged craft, and was almost as much at sea
in his knowledge of the ropes as the “boys.” This officer had singled
out Cummings for his awkwardness as the proper man to “haze.” He was
showering upon him blows, thick and fast, with the end of one of the
fore braces. It was the first time I had ever seen a man beaten by one
in authority. The cringing attitude, the cries, sobs, and supplications
of a full-grown man, and the oaths and terrible ferocity of his
castigator, were inexpressibly shocking to me. The incident, which was
often repeated during the voyage, broke up our amateur yarning and made
us very thoughtful.

Jedediah Coles was not at all nautically loquacious the next night. Then
the Gulf Stream gave us a touch of its tantrums. All during the
afternoon the sky grew more and more threatening. By dark it was blowing
hard. The lighter sails one by one were stowed. Then it blew harder. The
mate swore the harder. The Captain came on deck and swore at everybody.
One of the “boys” asked him if he thought it would be stormy. He
considered himself privileged to ask the Captain that question. He was a
native of the same village. His father and the Captain were friends, and
his mother and the Captain’s wife visited each other. So he deemed it
advisable to establish himself on a sociable footing with the Captain at
the commencement of the voyage. Poor boy! Never again during the trip
did he consult the Captain meteorologically. He learned speedily the
great gulf which yawns between the cabin and the forecastle.

It grew dark, the waves became bigger and bigger, and the ship seemed
taxed to her utmost trying to clamber them one after another as they
presented themselves. The mates came out in their oilskins. The order
was given to reef topsails. Gangs of men ran hither and thither, pulling
here, hauling there, and running straight over us whenever we got in
their way, and it seemed impossible to get out of their way. Everything
became unsettled and uncomfortable. The ship would not keep still. New
complications of ropes and hauling-gear were developed. The capstan in
the waist was manned, and round and round went the sailors, while the
deck they trod was inclined in all manner of uncomfortable angles.
Tackle and great blocks were hooked to ringbolts, and a vast amount of
what seemed to me fruitless hauling went on. Barrels of water swashed
over the bulwarks, knocking us down and drenching us. Wet and shivering
we clung to belaying pins or anything within reach, of no earthly use to
anybody, thinking of the cheerfully lit, well-warmed rooms and
comfortable tea-tables even then set but so few miles away on the shores
of Long Island. When the order came to reef, and I saw the men
clambering up the fore and main rigging, I added myself to their number,
though I felt I should never come down again--at least in one piece. It
was my debut aloft off soundings. Many a time had I clambered about the
rigging of the old whalers as they lay at the village wharf, but they
were not roaring, kicking, and plunging like this vessel. Heavy seamen’s
boots kicked me in the face as I followed their wearers up this awful
ascent; other heavy boots trod on my fingers; they shook the ratlines,
too, in a most uncomfortable manner. The mast strained and groaned
fearfully. Somehow, after climbing over some awful chasms, I got on the
yard with the men. I dared not go out far. The foot rope wobbled,
jerked, and gave way under me at times with the weight and notion of the
men upon it. The great sail seemed in no humor to be furled. It hauled
away from us, bellied, puffed, and kept up a gigantic series of
thundering flaps. Laying over on the yard the men would gather in as
much of the hard, wet, wire-like canvas as possible and then together
haul back on it.

This I objected to. It was risky enough to lay out on an enormous stick
sixty feet in the air, while the wind tore our voices from us and seemed
to hurl the words far away ere they had well got out of our mouths, and
the white-topped waves, dimly seen below, seemed leaping up and
snatching at us. But at that height, and amid all that motion, to
balance one’s body on the stomach, grasp with outstretched arms a hard
roll of struggling, wet canvas, while the legs were as far extended the
other way and the feet resting only against a rope working and wobbling
and giving way here and there from the weight of fifteen hundred pounds
of men unequally distributed over it, was a task and seeming risk too
great for my courage. I dared do nothing but hold on. The conduct of the
maintopsail was desperate and outrageous. It seemed straining every
nerve--supposing, for the sake of forcible expression, that it had
nerves--to pull us off the yard and “into the great deep.” I found
myself between two old sailors, who lost no time in convincing me of my
complete and utter worthlessness aloft. I concurred. They bade me clear
out and get down on deck. I was glad to do so. Reefing topsails in
reality was very different from reefing them in books or in imagination.
On reaching the deck I concluded to lie down. All through the evening I
had experienced an uneasy sensation in the stomach. I argued with myself
it was not seasickness--something did not agree with me. But when I lay
down in the scuppers I admitted being seasick. Then I only cared to lie
there. Life was too miserable even to hope in. The tumult went on as
ever. The sailors trampled over me. Being in the way, they dragged me
aside. I cared not. Finally some one bawled in my ear, “Sick! go below.”
I went. The five other boys, all similarly affected, all caring naught
for life or living, lay in their bunks.

The boys’ house was about the size of a respectable pig pen--a single
pig pen. There was room in it for two boys to turn at once, providing
they turned slowly and carefully. On going on board we had bestowed such
of our outfit as could be brought into this pen in the manner in which
boys of sixteen bestow things generally on first commencing to “keep
house.” Everything was arranged on a _terra firma_ basis. We made no
calculation for the ship’s deviating from an even keel. When she did
commence to pitch everything fell down. Clothing fell on the floor;
plates, knives, forks, cups and bottles rolled from shelf and bunk;
bread, meat, and the molasses kegs fell; plum and sponge cake, pie and
sweetmeats fell; for each boy had a space in his sea-chest filled with
these articles, placed there by kind, dear relatives at home. It was
intended that we should not refer to them until the ship was far
advanced on her voyage. But we never had such large supplies of cake and
sweetmeats at hand before; so we went for these things immediately. The
house abounded with them the first night out. The roof leaked. We left
our sliding-door carelessly open, and a few barrels of the ocean slopped
over the bulwarks into the apartment. At midnight our combined clothing,
plates, mugs, knives, forks, bottles, water-kegs, combs, hair-brushes,
hats, pants, coats, meat, bread, pie, cake, sweetmeats, molasses, salt
water, and an occasional seasick and despairing boy, united to form a
wet, sodden mass on the floor two feet in depth. Above the storm howled
and swept through the rigging, with little sail to interrupt it. Six
sick and wretched boys in their berths lay “heads and pints,” as they
pack herring; that is, the toe of one rested on the pillow of the other,
for it was not possible to lie otherwise in those narrow receptacles for
the living. But the horrors of that second night are not to be related.

No solicitous stewards with basins and tenders of broth and champagne
attended us. We were not cabin passengers on an ocean steamer. Barely
had the next morning’s dawn appeared when our door was flung open. In it
stood that dreadful second mate of the greenish eyes, hard, brick-red
complexion, horny fists and raspy voice--a hard, rough, rude, unfeeling
man, who cried: “Come out of that! Oh, you’re young bears--your troubles
ain’t commenced yet!” Then his long, bony arm gripped us one after the
other and tore us from our bunks. How unlike getting up at home on a
cold winter’s morning, as, snuggling in our warm feather beds, we heard
our mothers call time after time at the foot of the stairs: “Come now,
get up! Breakfast is ready!” And with the delay prone to over-indulged
youth, we still lay abed until the aroma of buckwheat cakes and coffee
stealing to our bedrooms developed an appetite and induced us to rise.
Out, this dreadful morning, we tumbled, in the wet clothes wherein we
had lain all night, weak, sick, staggering, giddy. A long iron hook was
put in my hand and I was desired to go forward and assist in hauling
along length after length of the cable preparatory to stowing it away.
Sky and sea were all of dull, monotonous gray; the ship was still
clambering one great wave after an another with tiresome and laborious
monotony. All the canvas of the preceding day had disappeared, save a
much-diminished foretop-sail and storm staysail. The mates on duty were
alert and swearing. The men, not all fully recovered from their last
shore debauch, were grumbling and swearing also. The cook, a dark-hued
tropical mongrel, with glittering eyes, was swearing at something amiss
in his department. It was a miserable time. But a cure was quickly
effected. In thirty-six hours all seasickness had departed. With the
delicate petting process in vogue with wealthy cabin-passengers it would
have required a week. But we had no time in which to be seasick.

Life for us on board this ship was commenced on a new basis. We were
obliged to learn “manners.” Manners among modern youth have become
almost obsolete. The etiquette and formality required from the younger
to the elder, and common to the time of perukes and knee-breeches, has
now little place save on shipboard, where such traditions and customs
linger. We were surprised to find it our duty to say “Sir” to an
officer, and also to find it imperative to recognize every order
addressed us by the remark; “Aye, aye, sir!” The sullen, shambling
fashion of receiving words addressed us in silence, so that the speaker
was left in doubt as to whether he was heard or not, had no place off
soundings. In short, we were obliged to practice what is not common now
to many boys on shore--that is, an outward show of respect for
superiors. If business called us to the “West End” of a ship, the
quarter-deck, our place was to walk on the lee side of that deck and
leave the weather side the moment the duty was done. If sent for any
article by an officer, it was our business to find it without further
recourse to him.

Petted boys have little patience for hunting for things. At home two
minutes is about the limit of time spent in looking for a mislaid poker,
and then “Ma!” “Pa!” or “Aunt!” is called on to turn to and do this
disagreeable work. The second mate once ordered me to find a certain
iron hook, wherewith to draw the pump boxes, and when, after a short
search, I returned and asked him where it might be I was horrified by
the expression of astonished indignation spreading over his face as he
yelled: “Great Scott, _he_ expects _me_ to help him find it!” I saw the
point and all it involved, and never so wounded an officer’s dignity
again. It is a sailor’s, and especially a boy’s business on shipboard,
to find whatever he is ordered to. It must be produced--no matter
whether it’s in the ship or not. At all events that’s the sentiment
regarding the matter. But it is good discipline for boys over-nursed at
home and only physically weaned. The “cold, cold world” would not, in
some cases, be so cold to the newly-fledged youth first trying his
feeble wings outside the family nest, did parents judiciously establish
a little of this maritime usage at home.

We soon learned on the _Wizard_ how well we had lived at home. Our sea
fare of hard tack and salt junk taught us how to appreciate at their
true value the broiled streaks, hot cakes, and buttered toast of home
tables. The quart of very common molasses served out to us weekly soon
became a luxury, and when the steward occasionally brought us
“Benavlins” (the nautical term for the broken fragments from the cabin
table), we regarded it as very luxurious living, though a month previous
we should have deemed such food fit only for the swill-tub.

In about two weeks we had settled down into the routine of life at sea.
Sailors are apt to term theirs a “dog’s life.” I never did. It was a
peculiar life, and in some respects an unpleasant one--like many others
on land. But it was not a “dog’s life.” There was plenty to eat, and we
relished our “lobscouse,” hard tack, salt junk, beans, codfish, potatoes
and Sunday’s and Thursday’s duff. The hours for labor were not
exhausting. It was “watch and watch, four hours off and four hours on.”
Many a New York retail grocer’s clerk, who turns to at 5 in the morning
and never leaves off until 11 at night, would revel on such regulation
of time and labor. So would many a sewing-girl. We had plenty of time
for sleep. If called up at 4 every alternate morning, and obliged to
stand watch until 8 <small>A.M.</small>, we could “turn in” at that hour after
breakfast and sleep till noon. Apart from the alternate watches the work
or “jobs” occupied about six hours per day. True, there was at times
some heavy work, but it was only occasional. Sailor-work is not heavy as
compared with the incessant fagging, wearing, never-ending character of
some occupations on shore. Skill, agility, and quickness are in greater
demand than mere brute strength.

Lobscouse is a preparation of hard bread, first soaked and then stewed
with shredded salt beef. It looks somewhat like rations for a delicate
bear when served out by the panful. But it is very good. Salt beef is
wonderfully improved by streaks of fat through it. These serve the
foremast hands in place of butter. I know of no better relish than good
pilot bread and sliced salt junk, with plenty of clean white fat. On
shore that quart of boiling hot liquid, sweetened with molasses and
called tea, would have been pitched into the gutter. At sea, after an
afternoon’s work, it was good. With similar content and resignation, not
to say happiness, we drank in the morning the hot quart of black fluid
similarly sweetened and called coffee. It was not real coffee. I don’t
know what it was. I cared not to know. Of course we grumbled at it. But
we drank it. It was “filling,” and was far better than the cold,
brackish water, impregnated thickly with iron rust, a gallon of which
was served out daily. For the fresh water was kept below in an iron
tank, and, as the deck leaked, a small portion of the Atlantic had
somehow gained admission to it and slightly salted it. It resembled
chocolate to the eye, but not to the palate.




CHAPTER IV.

MUCH WATER AND MUTINY.


On the fourth day out the _Wizard_ was found to have four feet of water
in her hold. The ship was pumped dry in about four hours, when she
proceeded to fill up again. The Captain seemed a man of many minds for
the next two or three days. First the ship was put back for New York.
This course was altered and her bows pointed for Africa. Then the
foremast hands became worried, and going aft one morning in a body,
asked Captain S---- what he meant to do and where he meant to go,
because they had shipped for San Francisco and they did not intend going
anywhere else. The Captain answered, that his own safety and that of the
vessel were as dear to him as their lives were to them, and that he
intended doing the best for the general good. This answer was not very
satisfactory to the crew, who went grumbling back to their quarters.
Ultimately it turned out that we were to take the leak with us to San
Francisco. At the rate the water was running in it was judged that the
bone, muscle, and sinews of the crew could manage to keep it down. So we
pumped all the way round Cape Horn. We pumped during our respective
watches every two hours. In good weather and on an even keel it took
half an hour to “suck the pumps.” If the vessel was heeled to larboard
or starboard, it took much longer. In very rough weather we pumped all
the time that could be spared from other duties. There were two pumps at
the foot of the mainmast worked by levers, and these were furnished with
“bell ropes” to pull on. Half the watch worked at each lever, and these
were located exactly where on stormy nights the wild waves were in the
habit of flinging over the bulwarks a hogshead or two of water to drench
us and wash us off our feet.

The _Wizard_ was a very “wet ship.” She loved giving us moist surprises.
Sometimes on a fine day she would gracefully, but suddenly, poke her
nose under, and come up and out of the Atlantic or Pacific ocean with
fifteen or twenty tons of pea-green sea water foaming over the t’gallant
forecastle, cascading thence on the spar deck and washing everything
movable slam bang up and sometimes into the cabin. This took place once
on a washday. Sailors’ washday is often regulated by the supply of water
caught from the clouds. On this particular occasion the fore deck was
full of old salts up to their bared elbows in suds, vigorously
discoursing washtub and washboard. Then the flood came, and in a moment
the deck was filled with a great surge bearing on its crest all these
old salts struggling among their tubs, their washboards, their soap and
partly-washed garments. The cabin bulkhead partly stopped some, but the
door being open others were borne partly inside, and their woollen
shirts were afterward found stranded on the carpeted cabin floor. One
“duff day” we had gathered about our extra repast in the boys’ house.
The duff and New Orleans molasses had just commenced to disappear. Then
a shining, greenish, translucent cataract filled the doorway from top to
bottom. It struck boys, beef, bread, duff, and dishes. It scattered
them. It tumbled them in various heaps. It was a brief season of terror,
spitting, and sputtering salt water, and a scrambling for life, as we
thought. It washed under bunks and in remote corners duff, bread, beef,
plates, knives, forks, cups, spoons and molasses-bottles. The dinner was
lost. Going on deck we found a couple of feet of water swashing from
bulwark to bulwark with every roll, bearing with it heavy blocks and
everything movable which had been loosened by the shock, to the great
risk of legs and bodies. But these were trifles. At least we call them
trifles when they are over. I have noticed, however, that a man may
swear as hard at a jammed finger as a broken leg, and the most
efficacious means in the world to quickly develop a furious temper is to
lose one’s dinner when hungry, get wet through, then abused by a Dutch
mate for not stirring around quicker, and finally work all the afternoon
setting things to rights on an empty stomach, robbed and disappointed of
its duff. This is no trifle.

Learning the ropes isn’t all a boy’s first lessons at sea. He must learn
also to wash and mend his own clothes. At least he must try to learn and
go through the forms. I never could wash a flannel shirt, and how the
extraneous matter called dirt, which the washing process is intended to
disperse, is gotten rid of by soap and muscle at an equal average over
the entire surface of the garment is for me to-day one of earth’s
mysteries. I could wash a shirt in spots. When I tried to convince
myself that I had finished it I could still see where I had washed clean
and where I had not. There is a certain system in the proper
manipulation of a garment in a washtub which to me is incomprehensible.
An old sailor is usually a good washer. It’s part of his trade. Those on
the _Wizard_ would reprove the boys for their slipshod work. “Such a
slovenly washed shirt as that,” said Conner, an old man-of-war’s man,
“hung in the rigging is a disgrace to the ship.” He alluded to one of
mine. The failure was not from any lack of labor put on it. The trouble
lay in that I didn’t know where to put the labor on. It was easier to
tie a shirt to a line, fling it overboard and let it tow. This will wash
clothes--wash all the warp out of them in time. The practice was at last
forbidden the boys on the _Wizard_. It’s a lazy boy’s wash. The adage
“It’s never too late to mend” is not applicable on shipboard. It should
there read “It’s never too early to mend.” Of course a boy of sixteen,
whose mother has always stitched for him, will allow his clothes to go
until they fall off his body before using his needle. As I did. And I
sewed myself up only to rip asunder immediately. I went about decks a
thing of flaps, rips, rags, and abortive patches, until they called me
the ship’s scarecrow. And so would many another spruce young man under
similar discipline. It’s good once in one’s life to be brought thus low.

It was particularly disagreeable at midnight as we assembled at the bell
ropes to give her the last “shake-up,” and more asleep than awake pulled
wearily with monotonous clank. Sometimes at that hour, when our labors
were half through, the valves would get out of order. It was then
necessary to call the carpenter and have them repaired. This would keep
us on deck half an hour or more, for by mutual compact each watch was
obliged to “suck its own pumps.” Such delays made the men very angry.
They stopped singing at their work--always a bad sign--and became
silent, morose, and sullen. For the first six weeks all the “shanti
songs” known on the sea had been sung. Regularly at each pumping
exercise we had “Santy Anna,” “Bully in the Alley,” “Miranda Lee,”
“Storm Along, John,” and other operatic maritime gems, some of which
might have a place in our modern operas of _The Pinafore_ school.
There’s a good deal of rough melody when these airs are rolled out by
twenty or thirty strong lungs to the accompaniment of a windlass’ clank
and the wild, shrill sweep of the winds in the rigging above. But the
men would no longer sing. The fact was reported to the Captain. He put
on his spectacles, walked out on the quarter-deck and gazed at them
mournfully and reprovingly. The mates tried to incite them to renewed
melody. But the shipping articles did not compel them to sing unless
they felt like it. The pumps clanked gloomily without any enlivening
chorus. The Captain went sadly back to his cabin and renewed his novel.

One night the pumps broke down five minutes before 12 o’clock. Our watch
was at work on them. The carpenter was called as usual, and after the
usual bungling and fishing in the well for the broken valves, they were
put in order again. It was then nearly 1 <small>A.M.</small> Meanwhile all the able
seamen in our watch had at eight bells walked below. The watch newly
come on deck refused to pump the ship clear, alleging it was the
business of the others. The watch below were bidden to come on deck and
perform their neglected duty. They refused. This was mutiny. The four
mates got their pistols, entered the forecastle and stormed, ordered,
and threatened. It was of no avail. The fifteen able seamen who refused
constituted the main strength and effectiveness of that watch. They were
threatened with being put in irons. They preferred irons to pumping out
of their turn. They were put in irons, fifteen stout men, by the four
mates, who then returned and reported proceedings to the Captain. The
men remained shackled until the next morning. It was then discovered
that it was impossible to work the ship without their aid. Of course
they couldn’t handle the vessel in irons. In reality double the number
of able men were needed in both watches. The _Wizard_ rated over 3,000
tons, and many a frigate of her size would have been deemed poorly off
with less than one hundred men for handling the ship alone. We rarely
secured the lower sails properly in heavy weather, from the mere lack of
physical strength to handle them. So Captain S---- pored sadly at his
breakfast through his gold-bowed spectacles, and when the meal was over
issued orders for the release of the fifteen men in irons. In this
little affair the boys and ordinary seamen belonging to the mutinous
watch took no part. They were strictly neutral and waited to see which
side would win. I felt rather unpleasant and alarmed. Though not a
full-fledged mutiny and a conversion of a peaceful merchantman into a
pirate, it did look at one time as if the initiatory steps to such end
were being taken.

One of the great aims of existence at sea is that of keeping the decks
clean. The scrubbing, swishing, and swashing is performed by each watch
on alternate mornings, and commences at daylight. It was the one ordeal
which I regarded with horror and contempt. You are called up at four in
the morning, when the sleep of a growing youth is soundest. The maniacal
wretch of the other watch, who does the calling, does it with the glee
and screech of a fiend. He will not stop his “All Ha-a-a-nds!” until he
hears some responsive echo from the sleepers. He is noisy and joyous
because it is so near the time he can turn in. And these four hours of
sleep at sea are such luxuries as may rarely be realized on shore. But
the mate’s watch is calling us, screeching, howling, thumping on the
forecastle door, and making himself extremely pleasant. The old sailors
being called gradually rise to sitting postures in their berths with
yawns, oaths, and grumblings. If the hideous caller is seen, a boot or
other missile may be shied in that direction. Otherwise the prejudice
and disgust for his clamor on the part of those called expresses itself
in irritable sarcasms such as, “Oh, why don’t you make a little more
noise?” “Think yourself smart, don’t you?” “Say, don’t you s’pose we can
hear?” To-morrow morning at 12 or 4 these personalities and conditions
of mind will be reversed. The awakened irritable grumbler will be the
joyous caller, and the joyous caller of this early morn will be
searching about his bunk for some offensive implement to hurl at the
biped who thus performs the matutinal office of the early village cock.

We are called and on deck, and stumbling about, maybe with one boot half
on, and more asleep than awake and more dead than alive. We are in the
warm, enervating latitude of the tropics, with every sinew relaxed from
the steaming heat. Perhaps there is a light wind aft. We are carrying
studding-sails. Studding-sails are beautiful to look at from a distance.
But when once you have sailed in a ship carrying them from the royals
down and know something of the labor of rigging them out all on one
side, fore, main, and mizzen-masts, and then, if the breeze alters a
couple of points, taking the starboard sails all down and rigging out
the larboard, or perhaps on both sides--and this on a Sunday afternoon,
when there are no jobs and you’ve been expecting plenty of leisure to
eat your duff and molasses; or if you have ever helped carry those heavy
yards about the deck when the ship was rolling violently in a heavy
ground swell, and every time she brought up, sails, blocks, and
everything movable was bringing up also with a series of pistol-like
reports; or if you have ever laid out on a royal yard trying to pass a
heavy rope through the “jewel block,” at the extreme end thereof, while
the mast and yard were oscillating to and fro with you through the air
in a rapidly recurring series of gigantic arcs caused by the lazy swell,
in the trough of which your ship is rolling--and at the end of each roll
you find yourself holding on for dear life, lest at the termination of
each oscillation you be shot like an arrow into the sea from your
insecure perch--why in all these cases the beauty and picturesqueness of
a ship under studding-sails will be tempered by some sober realities.

It is 5:30 or 6 o’clock. The morning light has come. The cry of “Turn
to!” is heard. That is, “turn to” to wash down decks, an operation which
will tax the already exhausted resources of an empty stomach until
breakfast time at 8 o’clock. The mates have their fragrant “cabin
coffee” and biscuit served them on the brass capstan aft; we can smell
its aroma, but nothing warm can get into our stomachs for over two long
hours of work. The basic idea in this regular washing down decks at sea
seems to be that of keeping men busy for the sake of keeping them busy.
The top of every deck plank must be scrubbed with a care and scrutiny
befitting the labors of a diamond polisher on his gems, while the under
side may be dripping with foulness, as it sometimes is. I had the post
of honor in scrubbing the quarter-deck. That was the drawing of water in
a canvas bucket from the mizzen chains to wash over that deck. The
remaining five boys would push wearily about with their brooms,
hand-brushes, squabs, and squilgees, superintended by our extraordinary
fourth mate (always to me an object of interest, from the fact of the
secret carefully hoarded in my breast that I had pulled him into the New
York dock), who, with a microscopic eye inspected each crack and seam
after the boys’ labors, in search of atomic particles of dirt, and
called them back with all the dignity of command, and a small amount of
commanding personality behind it, whenever he deemed he had discovered
any. When this labor was finished I was generally so exhausted as to
have no appetite for breakfast. But a sailor’s stomach is not presumed
to be at all sensitive under any conditions. And above all a “boy”--a
boy belonging to a squad of boys who about once a day were encouraged
and enthused to exertion and maritime ambition by the assurance conveyed
them by one of the mates that they weren’t “worth their salt”--what
business had a boy’s stomach to put on airs at sea? Most landsmen if
called up at 4 o’clock on a muggy morning and worked like mules for a
couple of hours on a digestive vacuum, would probably at the breakfast
hour feel more the need of food than the appetite to partake of it.

Though I followed the sea nearly two years, I am no sailor. The net
result of my maritime experience is a capacity for tying a bow-line or a
square knot and a positive knowledge and conviction concerning which end
of the ship goes first. I also know enough not throw hot ashes to
windward.

But on a yard I could never do much else but hold on. The foolhardy men
about me would lie out flat on their stomachs amid the darkness and
storm, and expose themselves to the risk of pitching headlong into the
sea in the most reckless manner while trying to “spill the wind” out of
a t’gallant sail. But I never emulated them. I never lived up to the
maritime maxim of “one hand for yourself and the other for the owners.”
I kept both hands for myself, and that kept me from going overboard.
What would the owners have cared had I gone overboard? Nothing. Such an
occurrence twenty-five odd years ago would, weeks afterward, have been
reported in the marine news this way: “Common sailor, very common
sailor, fell from t’gallant yard off Cape Horn and lost.” The owner
would have secretly rejoiced, as he bought his Christmas toys for his
children, that the t’gallant yard had not gone with the sailor. No; on a
yard in a storm I believed and lived up to the maxim: “Hold fast to that
which is good.” The yard was good. Yet I was ambitious when a boy before
the mast on the clipper which brought me to California. I was quick to
get into the rigging when there was anything to do aloft. But once in
the rigging I was of little utility.

The first time I went up at night to loose one of the royals, I thought
I should never stop climbing. The deck soon vanished in the darkness of
a very black tropical night, the mastheads were likewise lost in a
Cimmerian obscurity--whatever that is. At last I found the yard. I
wasn’t quite sure whether it was the right one or not. I didn’t know
exactly what to do. I knew I had to untie something somewhere. But
where? Meantime the savage Scotch second mate was bellowing, as it then
seemed, a mile below me. I knew the bellow was for me. I had to do
something and I commenced doing. I did know, or rather guessed, enough
to cast off the lee and weather gaskets, or lines which bind the sail
when furled to the yard, and then I made them up into a most slovenly
knot. But the bunt-gasket (the line binding the middle and most bulky
portion of the sail), bothered me. I couldn’t untie it. I picked away at
it desperately, tore my nails and skinning my knuckles. The bellowing
from below continued as fiercely as ever, which, though not intelligible
as to words, was certainly exhorting me, and me only, to vigilance. Then
the watch got tired waiting for me. Thinking the sail loosed, they began
hoisting. They hoisted the yard to its proper place and me with it. I
clung on and went up higher. That, by the way, always comes of holding
fast to that which is good. Then a man’s head came bobbing up out of the
darkness. It was that of a good-natured Nantucket boy, whose name of
course was Coffin. He asked me the trouble. I went into a lengthy
explanation about the unmanageable knot. “Oh--the knot!” said he. “Cut
it!” and he cut it. I would never have cut it. In my then and even
present nautical ignorance I should have expected the mast or yard to
have fallen from cutting anything aloft. Only a few days previous I had
seen the Captain on the quarter-deck jumping up and down in his tracks
with rage because a common seamen had, by mistake, cut a mizzen brace,
and the second mate, as usual, had jumped up and down on the seaman when
he reached the deck. I feared to set a similar jumping process in
operation. Coming on deck after my lengthy and blundering sojourn
loosing a royal, I expected to be mauled to a pulp for my stupidity. But
both watch and bellowing mate had gone below and I heard no more of it.




CHAPTER V.

SAN FRANCISCO IN 1856.


The _Wizard_ sailed through a great bank of fog one August morning and
all at once the headlands of the Golden Gate came in sight. It was the
first land we had seen for four months. We sailed into the harbor,
anchored, and the San Francisco of 1856 lay before us.

The ship was tied up to the wharf. All but the officers and “boys” left
her. She seemed deserted, almost dead. We missed the ocean life of the
set sails, the ship bowing to the waves and all the stir of the elements
in the open ocean.

The captain called me one day into the cabin, paid me my scanty wages
and told me he did not think I “was cut out for a sailor,” I was not
handy enough about decks.

Considering that for two months I had been crippled by a felon on the
middle finger of my right hand, which on healing had left that finger
curved inward, with no power to straighten it, I thought the charge of
awkwardness somewhat unjust.

However, I accepted the Captain’s opinion regarding my maritime
capacities, as well as the hint that I was a superfluity on board.

I left the _Wizard_--left her for sixteen years of varied life in
California.

I had no plans, nor aims, nor purpose, save to exist from day to day and
take what the day might give me.

Let me say here never accept any person’s opinion of your qualifications
or capacities for any calling. If you feel that you are “cut out” for
any calling or that you desire to follow it, abide by that feeling, and
trust to it. It will carry you through in time.

I believe that thousands on thousands of lives have been blasted and
crippled through the discouragement thrown on them by relation, friend,
parent, or employer’s saying continually (or if not saying it verbally,
thinking it) “You are a dunce. You are stupid. You can’t do this or
that. It’s ridiculous for you to think of becoming this or that.”

The boy or girl goes off with this thought thrown on them by others. It
remains with them, becomes a part of them and chokes off aspiration and
effort.

Years afterward, I determined to find out for myself whether I was “cut
out for a sailor” or not. As a result I made myself master of a small
craft in all winds and weathers and proved to myself that if occasion
required, I could manage a bigger one.

San Francisco seemed to me then mostly fog in the morning, dust and wind
in the afternoon, and Vigilance Committee the remainder of the time.

San Francisco was then in the throes of the great “Vigilanteeism” of
1856. Companies of armed men were drilling in the streets at night. In
the city’s commercial centre stood “Fort Gunnybags”--the strong hold of
the Vigilantes--made, as its name implied, of sand-filled gunny sacks.
Carronades protruded from its port holes, sentinels paced the ramparts.
There was constant surging of men in and out of the building behind the
fort,--the headquarters and barracks of the Vigilantes. From its windows
a few days before our arrival they had hung Casey for the killing of
James King--one of the editors of the _Bulletin_. I saw two others hung
there on the sixth of August. Vigilanteeism was then the business and
talk of the town. The jail had just been captured from the “Law and
Order” men, who were not “orderly” at all, but who had captured the
city’s entire governmental and legal machinery and ran it to suit their
own purposes.

The local Munchausens of that era were busy; one day the U. S. ship of
war, _St. Mary’s_, was to open fire on Fort Gunnybags; the next,
Governor Johnson, backed by twenty thousand stalwart men, was to fall
upon the city and crush out the insurrection.

The up-country counties were arming or thought of arming to put down
this “rebellion.” The “Rebellion” was conducted by the respectability
and solidity of San Francisco, which had for a few years been so busily
engaged in money making as to allow their city government to drift into
rather irresponsible hands; many of the streets were unbridged, many not
lighted at night. Cause--lack of money to bridge and light. The money in
the hands of the city officials had gone more for private pleasure than
public good.

I speak of the streets being unbridged because at that time a large
portion of the streets were virtually bridges. One-fourth of the city at
least, was built over the water. You could row a boat far under the
town, and for miles in some directions. This amphibious part of the city
“bilged” like a ship’s hold, and white paint put on one day would be
lead colored the next, from the action on it of the gases let loose from
the ooze at low tide.

There were frequent holes in these bridges into which men frequently
tumbled, and occasionally a team and wagon. They were large enough for
either, and their only use was to show what the city officials had not
done with the city’s money.

Then Commercial street between Leidesdorff and Battery was full of Cheap
John auction stores, with all their clamor and attendant crowds at
night. Then the old Railroad Restaurant was in its prime, and the St.
Nicholas, on Sansome, was the crack hotel. Then, one saw sand-hills at
the further end of Montgomery street. To go to Long Bridge was a weary,
body-exhausting tramp. The Mission was reached by omnibus. Rows of old
hulks were moored off Market street wharf, maritime relics of “’49.”
That was “Rotten Row.” One by one they fell victims to Hare. Hare
purchased them, set Chinamen to picking their bones, broke them up, put
the shattered timbers in one pile, the iron bolts in another, the copper
in another, the cordage in another, and so in a short all time that
remained of these bluff-bowed, old-fashioned ships and brigs, that had
so often doubled the stormy corner of Cape Horn or smoked their try-pots
in the Arctic ocean was so many ghastly heaps of marine débris.

I had seen the _Niantic_, now entombed just below Clay street, leave my
native seaport, bound for the South Pacific to cruise for whale, years
ere the bars and gulches of California were turned up by pick and
shovel. The _Cadmus_, the vessel which brought Lafayette over in 1824,
was another of our “blubber hunters,” and afterward made her last
voyage with the rest to San Francisco.

Manners and customs still retained much of the old “’49” flavor. Women
were still scarce. Every river boat brought a shoal of miners in gray
shirts from “up country.” “Steamer Day,” twice a month, was an event. A
great crowd assembled on the wharf to witness the departure of those
“going East” and a lively orange bombardment from wharf to boat and
_vice versa_ was an inevitable feature of these occasions.

The Plaza was a bare, barren, unfenced spot. They fired salutes there on
Independence Day, and occasionally Chief Burke exhibited on its area
gangs of sneak thieves, tied two and two by their wrists to a rope--like
a string of onions.

There was a long low garret in my Commercial street lodgings. It was
filled with dust-covered sea-chests, trunks, valises, boxes, packages,
and bundles, many of which had been there unclaimed for years and whose
owners were quite forgotten. They were the belongings of lost and
strayed Long Islanders, ex-whaling captains, mates and others. For the
“Market” was the chief rendezvous. Every Long Islander coming from the
“States” made first for the “Market.” Storage then was very expensive.
It would soon “eat a trunk’s head off.” So on the score of old
acquaintance all this baggage accumulated in the Market loft and the
owners wandered off to the mines, to Oregon, to Arizona, to Nevada--to
all parts of the great territory lying east, north and south, both in
and out of California, and many never came back and some were never
heard of more. This baggage had been accumulating for years.

I used occasionally to go and wander about that garret alone. It was
like groping around your family vault. The shades of the forgotten dead
came there in the evening twilight and sat each one on his chest, his
trunk, his valise, his roll of blankets. In those dusty packages were
some of the closest ties, binding them to earth, Bibles, mother’s gifts,
tiny baby shoes, bits of blue ribbon, which years by-gone fluttered in
the tresses of some Long Island girl.

It was a sad, yet not a gloomy place. I could feel that the presence of
one, whose soul in sad memory met theirs, one who then and there
recalled familiar scenes, events and faces, one who again in memory
lived over their busy preparations for departure, their last adieux and
their bright anticipations of fortune, I could feel that even my
presence in that lone, seldom-visited garret, was for them a solace, a
comfort. Imagination? Yes, if you will. Even imagination, dreamy,
unprofitable imagination, may be a tangible and valuable something to
those who dwell in a world of thought.

One night--or, rather, one morning--I came home very late--or, rather,
very early. The doors of the Long Island House were locked. I wanted
rest. One of the window-panes in front, and a large window-pane at that,
was broken out. All the belated Long Islanders stopping at the place,
when locked out at night, used to crawl through that window-pane. So, I
crawled through it. Now, the sentinel on the ramparts of Fort Gunnybags,
having nothing better to do, had been watching me, and putting me up as
a suspicious midnight loiterer. And so, as he looked, he saw me by
degrees lose my physical identity, and vanish into the front of that
building; first, head, then shoulders, then chest, then diaphragm, then
legs, until naught but a pair of boot-soles were for a moment upturned
to his gaze, and they vanished, and darkness reigned supreme. The
sentinel deemed that the time for action had come. I had just got into
bed, congratulating myself on having thus entered that house without
disturbing the inmates, when there came loud and peremptory rappings at
the lower door. Luther and John, the proprietors, put their heads out of
the chamber windows. There was a squad of armed Vigilantes on the
sidewalk below; and, cried out one of them, “There’s a man just entered
your house!” Now I heard this, and said to myself, “Thou art the man!”
but it was so annoying to have to announce myself as the cause of all
this disturbance, that I concluded to wait and see how things would turn
out. John and Luther jumped from their beds, lit each a candle and
seized each a pistol; down-stairs they went and let the Vigilantes in.
All the Long Island captains, mates, coopers, cooks, and stewards then
resident in the house also turned out, lit each his candle, seized each
a pistol or a butcher-knife, of which there were plenty on the
meat-blocks below. John came rushing into my room where I lay,
pretending to be asleep. He shook me and exclaimed, “Get up! get up!
there’s a robber in the house secreted somewhere!” Then I arose, lit a
candle, seized a butcher-knife, and so all the Vigilantes with muskets,
and all the Long Island butchers, captains, mates, cooks, coopers, and
stewards went poking around, without any trousers on, and thrusting
their candles and knives and pistols into dark corners, and under beds
and behind beef barrels, after the robber. So did I; for the
disturbance had now assumed such immense proportions that I would not
have revealed myself for a hundred dollars. I never hunted for myself so
long before, and I did wish they would give up the search. I saw no use
in it; and besides, the night air felt raw and chill in our slim attire.
They kept it up for two hours.

Fort Gunnybags was on Sacramento Street; I slept directly opposite under
the deserted baggage referred to. The block between us and the fort was
vacant. About every fourth night a report would be circulated through
that house that an attack on Fort Gunnybags would be made by the Law and
Order men. Now, the guns of Fort Gunnybags bore directly on us, and as
they were loaded with hard iron balls, and as these balls,
notwithstanding whatever human Law and Order impediments they might meet
with while crossing the vacant block in front, were ultimately certain
to smash into our house, as well as into whatever stray Long Island
captains, mates, boat-steerers, cooks, and coopers might be lying in
their path, these reports resulted in great uneasiness to us, and both
watches used frequently to remain up all night, playing seven-up and
drinking rum and gum in Jo. Holland’s saloon below.

I became tired at last of assisting in this hunt for myself. I gave
myself up. I said, “I am the man, I am the bogus burglar, I did it.”
Then the crowd put up their knives and pistols, blew out their candles,
drew their tongues and fired reproaches at me. I felt that I deserved
them; I replied to none of their taunts, conducted myself like a
Christian, and went to bed weighted down with their reproof and
invective. The sentinel went back to his post and possibly slept. So did
I.




CHAPTER VI.

AS A SEA COOK.


I drifted around San Francisco for several months and finally shipped as
cook and steward of the schooner _Henry_, bound from San Francisco for a
whaling, sealing, abalone curing, and general “pick up” voyage along the
Lower Californian coast. My acceptance as cook was based on the
production of an Irish stew which I cooked for the captain and mate
while the _Henry_ was “hove down” on the beach at North point and
undergoing the process of cleaning her bottom of barnacles. I can’t
recollect at this lapse of time where I learned to cook an Irish stew. I
will add that it was all I could cook--positively all, and with this
astounding capital of culinary ignorance I ventured down upon the great
deep to do the maritime housework for twenty men.

When we were fairly afloat and the Farallones were out of sight my
fearful incapacity for the duties of the position became apparent.
Besides, I was dreadfully seasick, and so remained for two weeks. Yet I
cooked. It was purgatory, not only for myself but all hands. There was a
general howl of execration forward and aft at my bread, my lobscouse, my
tea, my coffee, my beef, my beans, my cake, my pies. Why the captain
continued me in the position, why they didn’t throw me overboard, why I
was not beaten to a jelly for my continued culinary failures, is for me
to this day one of the great mysteries of my existence. We were away
nearly ten months. I was three months learning my trade. The sufferings
of the crew during those three months were fearful. They had to eat my
failures or starve. Several times it was intimated to me by the under
officers that I had better resign and go “for’ard” as one of the crew. I
would not. I persevered at the expense of many a pound of good flour. I
conquered and returned a second-class sea cook.

The _Henry_ was a small vessel--the deck was a clutter of whaling gear.
Where my galley or sea-kitchen should have been, stood the try-works for
boiling blubber. They shoved me around anywhere. Sometimes I was moved
to the starboard side, sometimes to the larboard, sometimes when cutting
in a whale way astern. I expected eventually to be hoisted into one of
the tops and cook aloft. Any well regulated galley is placed amidships,
where there is the least motion. This is an important consideration for
a sea cook. At best he is often obliged to make his soup like an
acrobat, half on his head and half on his heels and with the roof of his
unsteady kitchen trying to become the floor. My stove was not a marine
stove. It had no rail around the edges to guard the pots and kettles
from falling off during extra lurches. The _Henry_ was a most uneasy
craft, and always getting up extra lurches or else trying to stand on
her head or stern. Therefore, as she flew up high astern when I was
located in that quarter, she has in more than one instance flung me
bodily, in an unguarded moment, out of that galley door and over that
quarter-deck while a host of kettles, covers, and other culinary
utensils, rushed with clang and clatter out after me and with me as
their commander at their head. We all eventually terminated in the
scuppers. I will not, as usual, say “lee scuppers.” Any scupper was a
lee scupper on that infernal vessel. I endeavored to remedy the lack of
a rail about this stove by a system of wires attaching both pots and
lids to the galley ceiling. I “guyed” my chief culinary utensils. Still
during furious oscillations of the boat the pots would roll off their
holes, and though prevented from falling, some of them as suspended by
these wires would swing like so many pendulums, around and to and fro
over the area of that stove.

That was the busiest year of my life. I was the first one up in the
morning, and the last save the watch to turn in at night. In this
dry-goods box of a kitchen I had daily to prepare a breakfast for seven
men in the cabin, and another for eleven in the forecastle; a dinner for
the cabin and another for the forecastle; likewise supper for the same.
It was my business to set the aristocratic cabin table, clear it off and
wash the dishes three times daily. I had to serve out the tea and coffee
to the eleven men forward. The cabin expected hot biscuit for breakfast,
and frequently pie and pudding for dinner. Above all men must the sea
cook not only have a place for everything and everything in its place,
but he must have everything chocked and wedged in its place. You must
wash up your tea things, sometimes holding on to the deck with your
toes, and the washtub with one hand, and wedging each plate, so soon as
wiped, into a corner, so that it slide not away and smash. And even then
the entire dish-washing apparatus, yourself included, slides gently
across the deck to leeward. You can’t leave a fork, or a stove-cover, or
lid-lifter lying about indifferently but what it slides and sneaks away
with the roll of the vessel to some secret crevice, and is long lost.
When your best dinner is cooked in rough weather, it is a time of trial,
terror, and tribulation to bestow it safely on the cabin table. You must
harbor your kindling and matches as sacredly as the ancients kept their
household gods, for if not, on stormy mornings, with the drift flying
over the deck and everything wet and clammy with the water-surcharged
air of the sea, your breakfast will be hours late through inability to
kindle a fire, whereat the cook catches it from that potentate of the
sea, “the old man,” and all the mates raise their voices and cry with
empty stomachs, “Let him be accursed.”

One great trial with me lay in the difficulty of distinguishing fresh
water from salt--I mean by the eye. We sea cooks use salt water to boil
beef and potatoes in: or rather to boil beef and pork and steam the
potatoes. So I usually had a pail of salt water and one of fresh
standing by the galley door. Sometimes these got mixed up. I always
found this out after making salt-water coffee, but then it was too late.
They were particular, especially in the cabin, and did not like
salt-water coffee. On any strictly disciplined vessel the cook for such
an offence would have been compelled to drink a quart or so of his own
coffee, but some merciful cherub aloft always interfered and got me out
of bad scrapes. Another annoyance was the loss of spoons and forks
thrown accidentally overboard as I flung away my soup and grease-clouded
dishwater. It was indeed bitter when, as occupied in these daily
washings I allowed my mind to drift to other and brighter scenes, to see
the glitter of a spoon or fork in the air or sinking in the deep blue
sea, and then to reflect that already there were not enough spoons to go
around, or forks either. Our storeroom was the cabin. Among other
articles there was a keg of molasses. One evening after draining a
quantity I neglected to close the faucet tightly. Molasses therefore
oozed over the cabin floor all night. The cabin was a freshet of
molasses. Very early in the morning the captain, getting out of his
bunk, jumped both stockinged feet into the saccharine deluge. Some men
will swear as vigorously in a foot-bath of molasses as they would in one
of coal-tar. He did. It was a very black day for me, and life generally
seemed joyless and uninviting; but I cooked on.

The _Henry_ was full of mice. These little creatures would obtrude
themselves in my dough wet up for fresh bread over night, become bemired
and die therein. Once a mouse thus dead was unconsciously rolled up in a
biscuit, baked with it, and served smoking hot for the morning’s meal
aft. It was as it were an involuntary meat-pie. Of course the cabin
grumbled; but they would grumble at anything. They were as particular
about their food as an habitué of Delmonico’s. I wish now at times I had
saved that biscuit to add to my collection of odds-and-endibles. Still
even the biscuit proved but an episode in my career. I cooked on, and
those I served stood aghast, not knowing what would come next.

After live months of self-training I graduated on pies. I studied and
wrought out the making of pies unassisted and untaught. Mine were sea
mince pies; material, salt-beef soaked to freshness and boiled tender,
dried apples and molasses. The cabin pronounced them good. This was one
of the few feathers in my culinary cap. Of course, their goodness was
relative. On shore such a pie would be scorned. But on a long sea-voyage
almost any combination of flour, dried fruit and sugar will pass.
Indeed, the appetite, rendered more vigorous and perhaps appreciative by
long deprivation from luxuries, will take not kindly to dried apples
alone. The changes in the weekly bill of fare at sea run something thus:
Sundays and Thursdays are “duff days”; Tuesday, bean day; Friday,
codfish and potato day; some vessels have one or two special days for
pork; salt beef, hardtack, tea and coffee are fluids and solids to fall
back on every day. I dreaded the making of duffs, or flour puddings, to
the end of the voyage. Rarely did I attain success with them. A duff is
a quantity of flour and yeast, or yeast-powder, mixed, tied up in a bag
and boiled until it is light. Plum-duff argues the insertion of a
quantity of raisins. Plain duff is duff without raisins. But the proper
cooking of a duff is rather a delicate matter. If it boils too long the
flour settles into a hard, putty-like mass whereunto there is neither
sponginess, lightness, nor that porousness which delights the heart of a
cook when he takes his duff from the seething caldron. If the duff does
not boil long enough, the interior is still a paste. If a duff stops
boiling for ever so few minutes, great damage results. And sometimes
duff won’t do properly, anyway. Mine were generally of the hardened
species, and the plums evinced a tendency to hold mass meetings at the
bottom. Twice the hands forward rebelled at my duffs, and their
Committee on Culinary Grievances bore them aft to the door of the cabin
and deposited them there unbroken and uneaten for the “Old Man’s”
inspection. Which public demonstration I witnessed from my galley door,
and when the duff deputation had retired, I emerged and swiftly and
silently bore that duff away before the Old Man had finished his dinner
below. It is a hard ordeal thus to feel one’s self the subject of such
an outbreak of popular indignation. But my sympathies now are all with
the sailors. A spoiled duff is a great misfortune in the forecastle of a
whaler, where neither pie nor cake nor any other delicacy, save boiled
flour and molasses sauce, come from month’s end to month’s end.

In St. Bartholomew’s or Turtle bay, as the whalers call it, where for
five months we lay, taking and curing abalones, our food was chiefly
turtle. This little harbor swarmed with them. After a few hours’ hunt
one of our whaleboats would return with five or six of these unwieldy
creatures in the bottom, some so large and heavy as to require hoisting
over the side. Often the green fat under the callipee, or under shell,
lay three inches in thickness. I served up turtle fried, turtle stewed,
quarters of turtle roasted and stuffed like loins of veal, turtle plain
boiled and turtles’ flippers, boiled to a jelly and pickled. A turtle is
a variously flavored being. Almost every portion has a distinct and
individual taste. After all, old Jake, our black boat-steerer, showed us
the most delicate part of the turtle, and one previously thrown away.
This was the tripe, cleansed of a thin inner skin. When the cabin table
had once feasted on stewed turtle tripe they called for it continuously.
After many trials and much advice and suggestion, I learned to cook
acceptably the abalone. The eatable part of this shellfish when fresh
is as large as a small tea saucer. There are two varieties, the white
and black. The white is the best. Cut up in pieces and stewed, as I
attempted at first, the abalone turned out stewed bits of gutta percha;
fried, it was fried gutta percha. Then a man from another vessel came on
board, who taught me to inclose a single abalone in a small canvas bag
and then pound it to a jelly with a wooden mallet. This process got the
honey out of the abalone. The remains of four or five abalones thus
pounded to a pulp, and then allowed to simmer for a couple of hours,
would make a big tureen of the most delicious soup man ever tasted,
every drop of which, on cooling, hardened to the consistency of
calves’-foot jelly. When my cabin boarders had once become infected with
abalone soup they wanted me to keep bringing it along. The Americans do
not know or use all the food in the sea which is good.

I was an experimental cook, and once or twice, while cutting-in whale,
tried them with whale meat. The flesh lying under the blubber somewhat
resembles beef in color, and is so tender as easily to be torn apart by
the hands. But whale meat is not docile under culinary treatment.
Gastronomically, it has an individuality of its own, which will keep on
asserting itself, no matter how much spice and pepper is put upon it. It
is a wild, untamed steed. I propounded it to my guests in the guise of
sausages, but when the meal was over the sausages were there still. It
can’t be done. Shark can. Shark’s is a sweet meat, much resembling that
of the swordfish, but no man will ever eat a whale, at least an old one.
The calves might conduct themselves better in the frying-pan. We had
many about us whose mothers we had killed, but we never thought of
frying them. When a whaler is trying out oil, she is blackened with the
greasy soot arising from the burning blubber scraps from stem to stern.
It falls like a storm of black snow-flakes. They sift into the tiniest
crevice. Of all this my cookery got its full share. It tinged my bread
and even my pies with a funereal tinge of blackness. The deck at such
times was covered with “horse pieces” up to the top of the bulwarks.
“Horse pieces” are chunks of blubber a foot or so in length, that being
one stage of their reduction to the size necessary for the try-pots. I
have introduced them here for the purpose of remarking that on my
passage to and fro, from galley to cabin, while engaged in laying the
cloth and arranging our services of gold plate and Sèvres ware, I had to
clamber, wade, climb, and sometimes, in my white necktie and
swallow-tail coat, actually crawl over the greasy mass with the silver
tureen full of “consommé” or “soup Julien,” while I held the gilt-edged
and enamelled menu between my teeth. Those were trying-out times for a
maritime head butler.

The cook socially does not rank high at sea. He stands very near the
bottom round of the ladder. He is the subject of many jests and low
comparisons. This should not be. The cook should rank next or near to
the captain. It is the cook who prepares the material which shall put
mental and physical strength into human bodies. He is, in fact, a
chemist, who carries on the last external processes with meat, flour,
and vegetables necessary to prepare them for their invisible and still
more wonderful treatment in the laboratory which every man and woman
possesses--the stomach--whereby these raw materials are converted not
only into blood, bone, nerve, sinew, and muscle, but into thoughts. A
good cook may help materially to make good poetry. An indigestible
beefsteak, fried in grease to leather, may, in the stomach of a General,
lose a battle on which shall depend the fate of nations. A good cook
might have won the battle. Of course, he would receive no credit
therefor, save the conviction in his own culinary soul, that his
beefsteak properly and quickly broiled was thus enabled to digest itself
properly in the stomach of the General, and thereby transmit to and
through the General’s organism that amount of nerve force and vigor,
which, acting upon the brain, caused all his intelligence and talent to
attain its maximum, and thereby conquer his adversary. That’s what a
cook may do. This would be a far better and happier world were there
more really good cooks on land and sea. And when all cooks are Blots or
Soyers, then will we have a society to be proud of.




CHAPTER VII.

SIGHTS WHILE COOKING.


St. Bartholomew or Turtle Bay is a small, almost circular, sheet of
water and surrounded by some of the dreariest territory in the world.
The mountains which stand about it seem the cooled and hardened deposit
of a volcano. Vegetation there is none, save cactus and other spined,
horned, and stinging growths. Of fresh water, whether in springs,
rivulets, or brooks, there is none. Close by our boat-landing was the
grave of a mother and child, landed a few years previous from a wreck,
who had perished of thirst. Coyotes, hares, and birds must have relieved
thirst somewhere, possibly from the dews, which are very copious. Our
decks and rigging in the morning looked as though soaked by a heavy
shower. Regularly at night the coyotes came down and howled over that
lone grave, and the bass to their fiend-like yelping were furnished by
the boom of the Pacific surges on the reef outside. To these gloomy
sounds in the night stillness and blackness, there used for a time to be
added the incessant groaning of a wretched Sandwich Islander, who, dying
of consumption, would drag himself at night on deck to avoid disturbing
the sleep of the crowded forecastle. Small hope for help is there for
any thus afflicted on a whaler. There is no physician but the Captain,
and his practice dares not go much beyond a dose of salts or
castor-oil. The poor fellow was at last found dead, early one evening,
in his bunk, while his countrymen were singing, talking, laughing, and
smoking about him. It was a relief to all, for his case was hopeless,
and such misery, so impossible to relieve, is terrible to witness on a
mere fishing-schooner so crowded as ours. The dead man was buried at sea
without any service, much to the disgust of one of our coopers, who,
although not a “professor,” believed that such affairs should be
conducted in an orthodox, ship-shape fashion. Some one, after the corpse
had slid overboard, remarked, “Well, he’s dead and buried,” whereat the
cooper muttered, “He’s dead, but he ain’t what I call buried.” I don’t
think the Captain omitted the burial service through any indifference,
but rather from a sensitiveness to officiate in any such semi-clerical
fashion.

Some rocks not far from our anchorage were seen covered at early dawn
every morning with thousands of large black sea-birds. They were thickly
crowded together and all silent and immovable, until apparently they had
finished some Quaker form of morning devotion, when they commenced
flying off, not all at once, but in series of long straggling flocks. In
similar silence and order they would return at night from some far-off
locality. Never during all the months of our stay did we hear a sound
from them. Morning after morning with the earliest light this
raven-colored host were ever on their chosen rocks, brooding as it were
ere their flight over some solemnity peculiar to their existence.

The silent birds gone, there came regularly before sunrise a wonderful
mirage. Far away and low down in the distant seaward horizon there
seemed vaguely shadowed forth long lines one above and behind the other
of towers, walls, battlements, spires and the irregular outline of some
weird ancient city. These shapes, seemingly motionless, in reality
changed from minute to minute, yet the movement was not perceptible. Now
it was a long level wall with an occasional watch-tower. Then the walls
grew higher and higher, and there towered a lofty, round, cone-shaped
structure, with a suggestion of a flight of circular steps on the
outside, as in the old-fashioned Sunday-school books was seen pictured
the tower of Babel. It would reveal itself in varying degrees of
distinctness. But when the eye, attracted by some other feature of the
spectacle, turned again in its direction it was gone. A haze of purple
covered as with a gauzy veil these beautiful morning panoramas. Gazed at
steadily it seemed as a dream realized in one’s waking moments. It was
sometimes for me a sight fraught with dangerous fascination, and often
as I looked upon it, forgetting all else for the moment, have I been
recalled disagreeably to my mundane sphere of slops, soot, smoke and
dish-rags, as I heard the ominous sizzle and splutter of the coffee
boiling over, or scented on the morning air that peculiar odor, full of
alarm to the culinary soul, the odor of burning bread in the oven. ’Tis
ever thus that the fondest illusions of life are rudely broken in upon
by the vulgar necessities and accidents of earthly existence.

There were ten Sandwich Islanders in the forecastle of the _Henry_, one
big Jamaica negro, who acted as a sort of leader for them, and no white
men. These Kanakas were docile, well-behaved, could read in their own
language, had in their possession many books printed in their own
tongue, and all seemed to invest their spare cash in clothes. They liked
fish, very slightly salted, which they would eat without further
cooking, plenty of bread, and, above all things, molasses. Molasses
would tempt any of these Islanders from the path of rectitude. When not
at work they were either talking or singing. Singly or in groups of two
or three they would sit about the deck at night performing a monotonous
chant of a few notes. This they would keep up for hours. That chant got
into my head thirty-three years ago and it has never got out since.
Change of scene, of life, of association, increase of weight, more
morality, more regular habits, marriage, all have made no difference.
That Kanaka chant, so many thousand times heard on the Southern
Californian coast, will sometimes strike up of its own accord, until it
tires me out with its imagined ceaseless repetition. It’s there, a
permanent fixture. Recollection will wake it up.

So unceasing was the gabble of these Kanakas that one day I asked Jake,
the negro boat-steerer, who understood their language, what they found
to talk so much about. “Oh, dey talk about anyting,” said he; “dey talk
a whole day ’bout a pin.” Whereat I retired to my maritime scrubbery and
kitchen and varied my usual occupation midst my pots, pans, and
undeveloped plum duffs with wondering if the simpler, or, as we term
them, the inferior races of men are not more inclined to express their
thoughts audibly than the superior. I do not think an idea could present
itself to a Kanaka without his talking it out to somebody.

But some of these simple children of the Pacific isles used to pilfer
hot biscuits from my galley when I was absent. In vain I set hot stove
covers in front of the door for them to step on and burn their bare
feet. I burned myself on the iron I had prepared for my recently
civilized, if not converted, heathen brother. Both the superior and
inferior races often went barefooted on the _Henry_ while in the lower
latitudes.

At times, leaving a portion of the crew at the St. Bartholomew’s bay
station to collect and cure abalone, the schooner cruised about the
coast for sea-elephant. Not far from the bay are the islands of Cedros
(or Cedars), Natividad and some others. The first we saw of Cedros was
her tree-covered mountain-tops floating, as it were, in the air above us
on a sea of fog. This lifting, we were boarded by a boat containing two
men. They proved to be two Robinson Crusoes, by name Miller and Whitney,
who had been alone on the island nearly six months. They, with others,
had fitted out in San Francisco a joint-stock vessel and were left with
a supply of provisions on Cedros to seal. Their vessel was long overdue,
their provisions down to the last pound of biscuits, and they were
living largely on fish and venison, for though Cedros is many miles from
the main land, deer have got there somehow, as well as rattlesnakes.
Their vessel never did return, for their Captain ran away with her and
sold her in some South American port. Miller and Whitney joined our crew
and made the remainder of the voyage with us. They brought on board all
their worldly goods in two small trunks; also, a kettleful of boiled
venison, a treat which they were very glad to exchange for some
long-coveted salt pork. They reported that a “stinker” was lying among
the rocks ashore. A “stinker” in whaleman’s parlance is a dead whale. In
giving things names a whaleman is largely influenced by their most
prominent traits or qualities, and the odorous activity of a dead whale
can be felt for miles. They told us, also, that they had nineteen
barrels of seal oil stored on the island of Natividad. Natividad is but
a bleached-topped, guano-covered rock. We sailed thither but found no
oil. The Captain who had stolen their vessel also included the oil.
Miller and Whitney proved very useful men. Whitney was a powerful
talker. Miller never spoke unless under compulsion. Whether in their six
months of Cedros isolation such a pair had been well mated is a matter
on which there may be variance of opinion. Perhaps from a colloquial
standpoint some if not many long-married men can best tell. Miller was a
Vermonter, and had spent seventeen years of his life roaming about among
seldom-visited South Sea islands. Could his tongue have been permanently
loosened and his brain stimulated to conversational activity, his might
have been a most interesting story. Once in a great while there came
from him a slight shower of sentences and facts which fell gratefully on
our parched ears, but as a rule the verbal drought was chronic. He had
an irritating fashion also of intonating the first portions of his
sentences in an audible key and then dying away almost to a whisper.
This, when the tale was interesting, proved maddening to his hearers. He
spoke once of living on an island whose natives were almost white, and
the women well formed and finer looking than any of the Polynesian race
he had ever seen. Polygamy was not practised; they were devoted to one
wife; and their life, cleanliness and manners, as he described them,
made, with the addition of a little of one’s own imagination, a pleasing
picture. Miller’s greatest use to mankind lay in his hands, in which all
his brainpower concentrated instead of his tongue. From splicing a cable
to skinning a seal, he was an ultra proficient. Others might tell how
and tell well, but Miller did it. Talking seemed to fatigue him. Every
sentence ere completed fell in a sort of a swoon.

In St. Bartholomew’s, alias Turtle, Bay, we lay four months, taking
abalones. All hands were called every morning at four o’clock. Breakfast
was quickly dispatched, their noon lunch prepared, and everybody save
myself was away from the vessel by five. That was the last I saw of them
until sunset, and I was very glad to be rid of the whole gang and be
left alone with my own thoughts, pots, pans, and kettles. The abalone
clings to the surf-washed rocks by suction. It has but one outer shell.
San Francisco is very familiar with their prismatic hues inside, and the
same outside when ground and polished. Heaps of those shells, three feet
in height and bleached to a dead white by the sun, lay on the beaches
about us. Of unbleached and lively-hued shells we took on board several
tons. They were sent to Europe, and there used for inlaid work. The live
abalone must be pried off the rock with stout iron chisels or wedges. It
was rough work collecting them from the rocky ledges in a heavy surf.
Carried to the curing depot on shore, the entrails were cut away and the
round, solid chunk of meat left was first boiled and then dried in the
sun. An inferior pearl is often found within the body of the abalone.
Our one Chinaman, Ah Sam, was _chef_ of the abalone-curing kitchen on
shore. He was shipped for that purpose. One live abalone will cling to
the back of another too tightly to be pulled off easily by hand, and you
may in this way pile them on top of one another, and thus erect a column
of abalone as many feet in height as you choose to build. These fish
were intended for the Chinese market, and the projectors of the voyage
expected to get forty cents per pound for them in San Francisco. When
some forty tons had been cured we heard from a passing steamer that the
English had instituted another of their Christian wars with China, for
which reason abalones in San Francisco brought only ten cents per pound.
Then we stopped cooking abalones, hauled up our anchor and hunted the
sea-lion and the whale.

But while in St. Bartholomew’s Bay I was left alone on the vessel all
day with no companions save the gulls in the air and the sharks in the
water. Both were plentiful. The gulls made themselves especially
sociable. They would come boldly on board and feast on the quarters of
turtle-meat hung up in the rigging. Once I found one in the cabin
pecking away at the crumbs on the table. His gullible mind got into a
terrible state on seeing me. I whacked him to my heart’s content with
the table-cloth. He experienced great trouble in flying up the cabin
stairway. In fact, he couldn’t steer himself straight up stairs. His aim
on starting himself was correct enough, like that of many a young man or
woman in commencing life; but instead of going the straight and narrow
path up the companionway he would bring up against a deck beam. There is
no limit to the feeding capacity of those Pacific-coast gulls. The
wonder is where it all goes to. I have experimentally cut up and thrown
in small pieces to a gull as much fat pork as would make a meal for two
men, and the gull has promptly swallowed it all, waited for more, and
visibly got no bigger. They never get fat. Sometimes I tied two bits of
meat to either end of a long string and flung it overboard. Barely had
it touched the water when the meat at either end was swallowed by two of
these bottomless scavengers, and they would fly away, each pulling hard
at the latest received contents of the other’s stomach. The picture
reminded me of some married lives. They pulled together, but they didn’t
pull the right way.

At low tide the shore would be lined with these birds vainly trying to
fill themselves with shellfish and such carrion as the waters had left.
It couldn’t be called feeding; a Pacific-coast gull does not feed, it
seeks simply to fill up the vast, unfathomable space within. Eternity
is, of course, without end, but the nearest approach to eternity must be
the inside of a gull; I would say stomach, but a stomach implies metes
and bounds, and there is no proof that there are any metes and bounds
inside of a gull. It was good entertainment to see the coyotes come down
and manœuvre to catch the gulls. There was a plain hard beach, perhaps a
quarter of a mile wide, between coyote and gull. Of course coyote
couldn’t walk across this and eat gull up. So he went to work to create
an impression in gull’s mind that he was thereon other business, and was
quite indifferent, if not oblivious, to all gulls. He would commence
making long straight laps of half a mile on the beach. At the end of
each lap he would turn and run back a few feet nearer gull; back another
lap, another turn, and so on. But he wasn’t looking for a gull. He
didn’t know there was a gull in the world. He had some business straight
ahead of him which banished all the gulls in the world from his mind. He
kept forgetting something and had to run back for it. And the gull on
the water’s edge, trying to fill its void where men imagined a stomach
to be, had no fears of that coyote. It realized the momentous and
all-absorbing character of coyote’s business. There was no danger. So
coyote, getting a little nearer and a little nearer at each turn,
suddenly shot out of his lap at a tangent, and another gull was forever
relieved of the impossible task of trying to fill itself.




CHAPTER VIII.

WHALING IN MARGUERITA BAY.


Marguerita Bay lies on the Mexican coast about 200 miles north of Cape
St. Lucas. On arriving the schooner was “kedged” up the lagoons running
parallel with the coast fully one hundred miles. This took two weeks. We
passed, as it were, through a succession of mill-ponds, filled with low,
green islands, whose dense shubbery extended to the water’s edge. The
trunks of a small umbrella-shaped tree were washed by the tides to the
height of several feet, and thickly incrusted with small oysters. When
we wanted oysters we went on shore and chopped down a boatload of trees.
Is it necessary to remark that the trees did not grow the oysters. The
oysters grew on the trees, and they were as palatable as so many copper
cents, whose taste they resembled. When cooked, the coppery taste
departed. The channel through these lagoons was very crooked. It was
necessary to stake out a portion at low water, when it ran a mere creek
through an expanse of hard sand, sometimes a mile from either shore. At
high water all this would be covered to a depth of six or seven feet.
The _Henry_ grounded at each ebb, and often keeled over at an angle of
forty-five. From our bulwarks it was often possible to jump on dry
ground. This keeling-over process, twice repeated every twenty-four
hours, was particularly hard on the cook, for the inconvenience
resulting from such a forty-five-degree angle of inclination extended to
all things within his province. My stove worked badly at the angle of
forty-five. The kettle could be but half-filled, and only boiled where
the water was shallowest inside. The cabin table could only be set at an
angle of forty-five. So that while the guests on the upper side had
great difficulty in preventing themselves from slipping off their seats
on and over that table, those on the lower side had equal difficulty in
keeping themselves up to a convenient feeding distance. Captain
Reynolds, at the head of the board, had a hard lot in the endeavor to
maintain his dignity and sitting perpendicularly at the same time on the
then permanent and not popular angle of forty-five. But I, steward,
butler, cook, and cabin boy, bore the hardest tribulation of all in
carrying my dishes across the deck, down the cabin stairs, and arranging
them on a table at an angle of forty-five. Of course, at this time the
rack used in rough weather to prevent plates and platters from slipping
off was brought into permanent use. Transit from galley to cabin was
accomplished by crawling on two legs and one arm, thus making of myself
a peripatetic human triangle, while the unoccupied hand with difficulty
bore aloft the soup-tureen. It was then I appreciated the great
advantages afforded in certain circumstances by the prehensile caudal
termination of our possible remote ancestors. With such a properly
equipped appendage, the steward might have taken a close hitch round an
eyebolt, and let all the rest of himself and his dishes safely down into
the little cabin. It is questionable whether man’s condition has been
physically improved by the process of evolution. He may have lost more
than he has gained. A monkey can well afford to scorn the relatively
clumsy evolutions of the most skilful human brother acrobat.

Marguerita Bay was the nursery of the female whales, or in whaler’s
parlance, “cows.” The long, quiet lagoons, fringed with green, their
waters warmed by the sun to a most agreeable temperature, were the
resort during the spring months of the mother whales to bring forth and
nurse their young. The bulls generally remained outside. The cows were
killed with tolerable ease in the shoal waters of the bay. Outside they
have, on being struck, the reputation of running out all the line a boat
can spare and then demanding more. Grant could never have fought it out
on one line with a “California Gray.” In the lagoons, so long as the
calf was uninjured, the mother would slow her own pace, so as to remain
by her young. Thus she became an easy sacrifice. If the calf was
wounded, woe to the boat’s crew. The cow seemed to smell the blood the
moment it was drawn from its offspring. The first time this
happened--the boat-steerer accidentally slipping his lance into the
calf--the cow turned and chased the boat ashore. The tables were turned.
The miserable pigmies, who dared strike Leviathan’s child, were saved
because their boat could float where Mrs. Whale couldn’t. She drew at
least seven feet of water. A whale is one of the few things read of that
is bigger than it looks. The pigmies hauled the boat upon the beach,
while the whale for full half an hour swam to and fro where her
soundings were safe, and embargoed them. It was, with her, “Come off if
you dare.” But they didn’t care to dare, and finally she went away
unkilled. She managed, at the start to give the boat one crack, enough
to fill it with water. But whaleboats are made to be broken. A few
hours’ work and the insertion of a few bits of wood in the light
clinker-built sides will restore a whaleboat which, to an inexperienced
eye, looks fit only for kindling-wood. A whale is much more of an animal
than people generally imagine. There’s a great deal of affection
somewhere in that big carcass. I have seen them close aboard from the
schooner’s deck play with their young and roll and thrash about in
mammoth gambols. They knew the doors to these lagoons leading out into
the ocean as well as men know the doors to their houses. When struck,
though miles distant, they made straight for that door, and if not
killed before reaching it they escaped, for no boat, when fast, could be
towed through the huge Pacific breakers. Pigmy man in such case sullenly
cut his line and sulkily rowed back to his crowded little schooner to
growl at the cook.

We filled up in six weeks. Our luck was the envy of the eleven other
vessels in Marguerita Bay. This luck was mainly due to “Black Jake,” a
huge Jamaica negro, with the face of a Caliban, the arm of a Hercules
and a stomach greater than an ostrich’s for rum. When we left San
Francisco he had a tier of twenty-five bottles, full, stored under his
bunk, and not a soul was ever the wiser for it until all were emptied.
He kept his own head level, his own counsel, and lying in his berth in
the early evening hours of his watch below, would roll over, turn his
back to the noisy, chattering Kanaka audience of the forecastle, and
put the bottle, but not to his neighbors’ lips. He was king of the
forecastle, king of the Kanaka crew, and king of the whaleboat when
after a “muscle-digger.” He could throw a harpoon twice as far as an
ordinary man, and it was to this force of muscle, added to a certain
knack of his own in working up to the “grayback,” before striking, and
managing the boat after, that we owed our successful voyage. Great was
his fame as a whale-killer in Marguerita Bay. Many were the offers made
by masters of other vessels to bribe him from us. He remained true to
us. Hard were the knocks the cows gave their boats and sometimes their
crews. One well-appointed schooner lying near us had her boats stove
twenty-six times during our stay. Twelve men out of the fleet were more
or less injured. “Dese yere whale,” Jake would remark to his audiences
in the night yarns when one or two other boats’ crews from other vessels
came on board, “dey aint’ like oder whales. Dar ways are ’culiar, and ye
got to mind sharp how ye get onto ’em.” But nobody ever solved Jake’s
“’culiar way o’ getting onto ’em.”

A harpoon was not a toasting-fork to throw in the days when men oftener
threw the iron by muscle instead of powder. It is a shod, with a heavy
wooden pole five or six feet in length fastened into the socket of the
iron barb. This, with the line attached, makes a weight requiring for
the cast the use of both arms, and strong arms at that. A man would not
care to carry a harpoon more than a mile in a hot day. Its own weight,
as much as the impelling force, is depended on to bury itself in the
floating mound of seemingly polished India-rubber which constitutes a
whale above water. And when it first buries itself, there is for a few
seconds some vicious splashing and ugly flirting of fluke or fin. A
whale’s tail is an instrument of offence of about one hundred horse
power, and well adapted to cutting through a boat as a table knife goes
through an egg shell. The two fins suggest members between paddles and
rudimentary arms. It is also a member very capable of striking out from
the right or left shoulder, and striking very hard. When a half-dozen
men are within six feet of these weapons, controlled by an enormous
black sunken mass, eighty or one hundred feet long, they are apt to look
a trifle wild and their eyes have a tendency to bulge. There are stories
among whalemen of boat-steerers who have had all the grit permanently
taken out of them by the perils and catastrophes of that moment. A New
Londoner once had the cap swept from his head by the sweep of the
whale’s tail over it, and he was too nervous for boat service ever
afterward. It is no skulking fight, like shooting lions and tigers from
the shelter of trees or rocks. It’s a fair standup combat between half a
dozen men in an egg-shell of a boat on the open sea, and sometimes on
heavy ocean billows, and 500 tons of flesh, bone, and muscles, which, if
only animated by a few more grains of sense, could ram the whaleship
herself as effectually as an ironclad. As a murderous spectacle the
capture and killing of a whale, as seen even by a sea-cook from the
galley window, is something ultra-exciting. It makes one’s hair stand
upon both ends.

There is the whaleboat, the men sitting motionless in their seats, the
long oars apeak, shooting through the water, towed by the whale unseen
underneath the surface. Sometimes two or three boats hitch on, for the
more the whale has to drag the sooner he becomes exhausted. Now they
haul in on him and carefully coil the wet line in the tubs. Closer and
closer they near him, the passage of the great mass under water being
marked by swirls and eddies on the surface. Our herculean king, “Black
Jake,” is at the bow, the round, razor-edged, long-handled lance lying
by him, his back to the crew, his eye on the eddies, his great bare
black arms, now the right, now the left--moving first in one direction,
then another, as thus he signals to the steersman the direction in which
to keep the boat’s head; for although we are being towed as a tug would
tow a skiff, we must be kept as near as possible in a line with the
submerged motive power, and then, with a swash and snort, out of the
water six feet ahead comes twenty, may be forty feet of that great black
mass! It is astonishing how much there is of him. And he is down and
under, with his great gulp of air, in less time than it takes to write
or even speak these last twenty words, but not before the lance is out
of Jake’s hands, driven three feet into his side, and hauled aboard
again by the light, strong line attached. Suddenly the whale line
slacks. The boat ceases its rush through the water. The eddy and swirl
ahead cease. Now look out for squalls. This is one of Mrs. Grayback’s
peculiar tricks. She is ambushed somewhere below. She designs coming up
under the boat’s bottom, and constituting herself into a submarine
island of flesh, bobbing up like a released cork. She is resolving
herself into a submarine earthquake, and proposes to send that boat and
crew ten feet into the air, or capsizing them off her India-rubber
back. One hundred or five hundred tons of wicked intelligence is thus
groping about in the unseen depths for the purpose of attaining the
proper position, and, as it were, exploding herself like an animated
torpedo. Every seat in the boat is an anxious seat. There is no talking,
but a great deal of unpleasant anticipation. Those who have seen the
thing done before, await in dread suspense the shock and upset. It’s
very much like being over a powder-magazine about to explode. To keep up
the interest let us leave his particular boat and situation _in statu
quo_. Your imagination may complete the catastrophe or not, as you
choose. Final consummations are not desirable in a thrilling tale, and
this tale is meant to be thrilling. Therefore, if you’ve got a thrill in
you, please thrill.

From the schooner’s deck, a mile and a half away, Captain, cook, and
cooper--the head, tail, and midriff of the ship’s company--we perceive
that the white puff of spray from the whale’s blowholes has changed to a
darker color. “Spouting blood,” we remark. The boat is lying quite near
by. At intervals of a few minutes a circular streak of white water is
seen breaking the smooth surface of the lagoon. He’s in his “flurry.” He
is dying. It is a mighty death, a wonderful escape of vitality and
power, affection, and intelligence, too, and all from the mere pin’s
prick of an implement in the hands of yon meddlesome, cruel, audacious,
greedy, unfeeling pigmies. Spouting blood, bleeding its huge life away,
shivering in great convulsions, means only for us forty barrels more of
grease, and a couple of hundred pounds of bone to manufacture
death-dealing, rib-compressing, liver-squeezing corsets from. And all
the while the calf lingers by the dying mother’s side, wondering what
it is all about. Dead and with laborious stroke towed to the vessel, the
calf swims in its wake. Made fast alongside, its beautifully symmetrical
bulk tapering from head to tail in lines which man copies in the mould
of his finest yachts, the body remains all night, and in the still hours
of the “anchor watch” we can hear the feeble “blow” of the poor calf, as
it swims to and fro.

In the morning the mass which last night was but a couple of feet out of
water, has swollen and risen almost to the level of the low bulwark’s
top, while the gas generated by the decomposition within escapes from
each lance puncture with a faint sizzle. With the earliest light the
crew are at work. Skin and fat are torn off in great strips and hoisted
on board. Round and round the carcass is slowly turned, with each turn
another coil of blubber is unwound and cut off. The sharks are busy,
too. Monsters (I use the term “monsters” merely for the sake of euphony,
not liking to repeat the word “shark” so often) fifteen and eighteen
feet long rush up to the carcass, tear off great pieces of the
beefy-looking flesh and then quarrel with each other for its possession,
flirting the water with nose and fin, and getting occasionally a gash
from a sharp whale-spade which would take a man’s head off. Amid all
this, men shouting, swearing, singing, the windlass clanking, fires
under the try-pots blazing, black smoke whirling off in clouds, sharks
grabbing and fighting and being fought, the motherless calf still swims
about the mutilated carcass, and when cast adrift, a whity-yellowish
mass of carrion, swept hither and thither by wind and tide, it still
keeps it company until dead of starvation or mercifully devoured by the
“monsters.” Madame, every bone in your corset groans with the guilt of
this double murder.

After a whale had been “cut in,” or stripped of his blubber, an
operation somewhat resembling the unwinding of a lot of tape from a long
bobbin, the whale answering for the bobbin as he is turned round and
round in the water, and the blubber for the tape as it is windlassed
off, the whity-yellowish, skin-stripped carcass was then cast adrift,
and it floated and swelled and smelled. Day after day it swelled bigger
and smelled bigger. It rose out of the water like an enormous bladder.
It would pass us in the morning with the ebb tide and come back with the
flood. A coal-oil refinery was a cologne factory compared to it.
Sometimes two or three of these gigantic masses would be floating to and
fro about us at once. Sometimes one would be carried against our bows
and lodge there, the rotten mass lying high out of the water, oozing and
pressing over our low bulwarks on deck. We had a fight with one of these
carcasses for half an afternoon trying to pry it off with poles, oars,
and handspikes. It was an unfavorable mass to pry against. Of course it
smelt. For a dead mass it was extremely lively in this respect. There
are no words in which to describe a powerful smell so closely as to
bring it to the appreciation of the senses. It is fortunate there are
none, for some talented idiot to make his work smell and sell would be
certain to use them. The gulls used to navigate these carcasses on their
regular trips up and down the lagoons. They served these birds as a sort
of edible ferry-boat. You might see forty or fifty feeding and sailing
on a single carcass. But they seemed downcast--the dead whale was too
much for them. Not that they ever got full of the carrion, but they
exhausted themselves in the effort. The supply was unlimited; ditto the
void within the gull, but there were limits to his strength.




CHAPTER IX.

OUR BUTTER FIENDS.


In former days while narrating the events of this voyage, which I have
done some thousands of times, I used to say “we whaled.” But I never
whaled, never went in the boats, never pulled an oar. I had other fish
to fry in the galley, and now that I commence to realize what a
conscience is, I mention this for truth’s sake as well as to give
variety to the story. We were boarded occasionally by a few Mexicans.
There was one melancholy-looking Don Somebody who seemed always in a
chronic state of corn-husk cigarette. When not smoking he was rolling
them; when not rolling or smoking he was lighting them. He and his
companions were persons of some importance, for which reason Captain
Reynolds tendered them the hospitalities of the _Henry_ and would ask
them to whatever meal was nearest ready. These two Mexicans had enormous
stowage for grub. They resembled the gulls. They also seemed
unfathomable. There was no filling them. What they did at table they did
with all their might, and when they finished, especially when eating by
themselves, as they frequently did, there was literally nothing left.
“Nothing” in this case meant something. It meant in addition to bread,
meat, and potatoes, every scrap of butter on the butter-plate and every
grain of sugar in the sugar-bowl. I didn’t take the hint the first time
they ate with us, deeming the entire absence of butter and sugar at the
end of the repast to be owing to my placing a small amount on the table.
The second time they came on board I remedied this. But on inspection
after they had finished I found left only an empty butter-plate and
sugar-bowl. It was so at the third trial. Butter and sugar seem to be
regarded as delicacies by the natives of Lower California. Nor do they
seem to comprehend the real mission and import of butter and sugar on
the table. They regarded both these articles as regular dishes and
scooped them in. On discovering this, after a consultation with the
Captain, I put them on allowance. These two men would have eaten up all
our butter and sugar in four weeks.

However it was comparatively a slight toll they levied on us for
carrying off their whale-oil, seal and abalone. We were miles within
their legal boundaries taking away the wealth of their waters. Twelve
other American whalers lay in Marguerita Bay that season. It was
practically an invasion; only the Mexicans didn’t seem to know they were
invaded or didn’t care if they did know. So long as they had plenty of
butter and sugar on coming on board and the blubber-stripped carcasses
which came on shore they seemed satisfied. These carcasses they cut open
when stranded and extracted the fat about the heart, which on being
tried out would yield from one to four barrels of oil and about three
miles of solid stench. They borrowed from us the vessels wherewith to
boil this fat. I was ordered to loan them all the pots, pans, and
kettles which could be spared from my culinary laboratory. They never
returned them, and I was very glad they did not. No amount of scouring
would ever have rid them of the odor of decomposed leviathan. We left
them a dozen or so iron vessels the richer. A Mexican, at least on that
coast, with a kettle is looked up to as a man of wealth. Beyond serapes,
cigarette-lighters, saddles and bridles, the gang of natives on shore
had few other possessions. They seemed brilliant examples of contented
poverty. The individual Mexican is a more independent being than the
citizen of our own boasted “independent” nation. His wants are ten times
less. Consequently, he is ten times as independent. Parties who use
horses’ skulls for parlor chairs, whose wooden bowl wherein they mix
flour for tortillas, flint, steel, and a small bonfire constitute their
entire kitchen range, won’t keep many furniture or stove manufacturers
alive.

Some mercantile hopes may hang on the señoras and señoritas. The few we
saw wanted calicoes of gay and diverse patterns. The men will eat butter
and sugar, but whether they will buy these articles remains to be
proved. Perhaps furniture sets of polished and painted horses’ skulls
might tempt some of the more æsthetic in the matter of household
adornment to purchase, if put at a reasonable rate. Such are the
conclusions drawn regarding the probabilities of trade with Mexico, at
least the fragment of Mexico I saw from my galley. If we wanted any
service of them they talked dollars at a very high figure. But they
never abated. They showed no anxiety to tempt a bargain or an
engagement. They went on just as ever, full to the brim of genuine
sang-froid, eternally rolling, lighting, and smoking their cigarettes,
and looking as if they felt themselves a superior race, and knew it
all, and didn’t want to know any more, until we asked them to eat. Then
they seemed in no hurry, but clambered lazily down the cabin stairs and
lazily set to work to find the bottom of every dish on the table,
including the sugar-dish and butter-plate. I learned on that voyage the
true signification of the term “greaser,” as I fearfully noted the
rapidly diminishing butter keg.




CHAPTER X.

GUADALUPE.


Two hundred miles from the Lower California coast lies the lone island
of Guadalupe. Guadalupe is one of the twelve or twenty names which for
centuries the Spaniards have been applying to the various geographical
divisions of the earth’s surface. Each Spanish navigator, explorer, and
discoverer, armed with these twelve or twenty “San Joses,” “Santa
Marias,” “Sacramentos,” etc., has gone on naming, taking each one in
regular order, and as the list was exhausted and more islands, capes,
etc., were found, starting again at the beginning of the list and using
it all over again. Whitney talked of the plentifulness of sea-elephant
on the Guadelupe beaches; I presume the sea-elephant is identical with
the sea-lion. They resemble a lion about as much as an elephant. So the
prow of the _Henry_ was turned toward Guadalupe. While on this trip one
morning before daylight I heard at intervals a strange noise, something
between a bellow and a creak. I thought it at first the creaking of
something aloft, but as it grew lighter I saw a strange-looking head
emerge momentarily from the water. It gave forth the same cry, dove, and
came up on the other side of the vessel. It was a seal pup, which the
sailors said had lost its mother and followed the vessel, mistaking the
hull for its maternal parent. I presume that seals have no recognized
fathers to look after them. The poor thing, uttering its plaintive but
discordant cry, must have followed us to sea forty or fifty miles. I
know not whether the sailors’ explanation of its conduct be correct.
Anyway, it makes the occurrence more pathetic, and were I utterly
unprincipled I should make an entire chapter describing how this pup
seal followed the _Henry_ during the voyage like a dog, being regularly
fed, and as it grew up came on board and was taught a number of
accomplishments, among the rest that of supplying us with fish. ’Tis
thus that a rigid adherence to veracity spoils many an interesting and
thrilling tale, and brings to him who practises it more poverty than
pence.

Guadalupe on the third day came in sight; a lone, wave-washed,
wind-swept isle about forty miles in length. It seemed the very
embodiment of loneliness. Some would also say of desolation, as man is
ever disposed to call any place he does not inhabit. But though
Guadalupe contained not a single representative of the most intelligent
animal on the planet, it sustained great herds of goats, sea birds, and
a little black and white land-bird, so tame and trustful as to perch and
eat from Miller’s and Whitney’s tin plates during their former visit to
the island. All these got along very well without the presence of the
talented biped who deems every place “desolate” unless he is there to
carry on a monopoly of all the killing of bird and animal deemed
necessary to his comfort and existence.

It was our business to murder all the mother sea-lions who had
established their nurseries at Guadalupe. A boat full of murderers was
quickly sent on shore. We did not see boat or crew again for three
days. Most of that period was spent by us in looking for the boat, and
by the boat’s crew in looking at us. They landed on the first day, found
no seal, put off at dusk, lost us in a fog, went ashore, swore at the
_Henry’s_ people for not sighting them, hauled their boat well up on the
beach at the mouth of a deep canyon, supped on hard bread and water,
and, turning their craft bottom-up, crawled under it for a bed-quilt and
went to sleep on the sands. During the night a semi-hurricane, called in
those latitudes a “willa wah,” came tearing and howling down the canyon.
Striking the boat, it rolled it over and over among the rocks, smashed
the frail sides, and rendered it unseaworthy. For two days the crew
roamed up and down the island, living on shellfish and the fresh water
left standing in pools, and trying to signal us by fires built on the
mountains. The Captain was in a state of great perplexity at this
disappearance. But, having left a portion of the crew at St.
Bartholomew’s Bay, he had not hands enough to send another boat ashore,
and work the vessel. Then he dare not come nearer the island than three
miles, fearing sunken rocks and currents setting in-shore. On the third
night one of their fires was seen from the _Henry_. Standing in for it,
by daylight the missing men were seen making for us in an old yawl.
Behind, full of water, was towed the shattered whaleboat. The yawl had
been found on the beach, probably left there by former sealers. By
stuffing all the clothes they could spare in its sun-warped cracks and
constant bailing they managed to keep afloat long enough to reach us.
They crawled on board--a pale, haggard, famished lot--and I was kept
very busy for a time ministering to their wants. They ate steadily for
an hour. Even with this rescue a greater catastrophe than all came near
happening. Becalmed and by means of a treacherous current we were being
rapidly carried toward an enormous rock, which towered sentinel-like
alone a mile or more from the north end of the island. It reached full
five hundred feet toward the clouds. Its perpendicular sides seemed
built up in artificial layers. Toward this the _Henry_ seemed helplessly
drifting, and the “Old Man,” under the influence of combined anger and
despair, jumped up and down in his tracks and howled on the quarter-deck
as he saw the voyage approaching such an unfortunate termination.
Fortunately a providential or accidental breeze came off the land just
in time to give us steerage-way. We trifled no more with Guadelupe, but
sailed straight away for our old harbor. As we passed the last of these
towering sentinel rocks at dusk, we heard from them the howling and
barking of what, judged by the sound, might have been ten thousand
seals. It was as the roaring of a dozen combined menageries. Had Virgil
of old ever sailed by such a sound, he would have pulled out his stylus
forthwith, and written of the Æneid an extra chapter about some
classical hell afloat. These seals were howling at our discomfiture. The
rock was half veiled in a mist in which we could indistinctly see their
countless forms seemingly writhing and tumbling about.




CHAPTER XI.

AT THE GOLD MINES.


After a ten months’ cruise we went back to San Francisco with 500
barrels of oil and ten tons of abalones. My share of the proceeds
amounted to $250, having shipped on a “lay.” Mine was the fifteenth lay,
which gave me one barrel of oil out of every fifty and a similar
proportion in abalones. Then I looked around for something to do, didn’t
find it, spent a great deal of my money unnecessarily in so looking for
a job, shipped at last as cook on a coasting schooner, was discharged
before she left the wharf, my grade of culinary work not reaching to the
level of the captain’s refined taste.

I resolved to go to the mines. I went. By boat and stage, I got over the
two hundred miles intervening ’twixt San Francisco and the “diggings.” I
had friends on Hawkins’ Bar on the Tuolumne River in Tuolumne County.
Thither I went. When I “struck” Hawkins’ in 1858, it was on its last
legs. Still it boasted a store and a dozen houses. Golden hopes were
still anchored in the bed of the river. Expensive river claims were then
being worked from Red Mountain down to French Bar. But a premature rain
and consequent freshet swept the river that season from end to end with
the bosom of destruction, and sent for the winter the miners back to
their two dollar per day bank diggings. And from that time henceforward
the Bar steadily declined. The store was kept open for two seasons with
great loss to its proprietor. He was a new man. When he came to the Bar
the “boys” held a consultation on a big drift log. They concluded they
could go through him in one season, provided he gave credit. But he was
a discriminating man as regarded giving credit. So it required two
seasons to get through him. Then he moved away forever, and with tears
in his eyes at his losses. The Bar lingered on for several years.
Steadily it lessened in houses and population. The store was torn down
and the lumber carted away. In 1864 I made a pilgrimage thither and
found remaining one house and one man. That man was Smith. Alex. Smith,
a ’49er, a Baltimorean and a soldier during the Mexican war. Smith’s
house was high up on the hillside and his back yard brought up against
the camp graveyard. A score of Smith’s old companions there lay buried.
And here this man lived alone with the dead and the memories of the last
eighteen years. I said to him: “Smith, how do you stand it here? Do you
never get lonesome?”

“Well, yes; once in a while I do,” replied Smith; “but when I feel that
way I go up the hill and bring down a log for firewood.”

Smith was a philosopher, and thought that the best remedy for melancholy
is physical exertion.

Smith was one of the first settlers at Hawkins’ Bar; Smith could
remember when it contained a voting population of nearly eight hundred
souls; Smith knew every point on the river which had yielded richly;
Smith could show you Gawley’s Point, where Gawley pitched his tent in
’49 and buried under it his pickle jars full of gold dust. The
tradition of Hawkins was that Gawley used to keep a barrel of whiskey on
free tap in his tent. And that in the fall of 1850 Gawley, warned by the
experience of the previous rainy season, determined to lay in a winter’s
stock of provisions. But Gawley’s ideas as to the proper quantities of
food were vague. He had never before been a purveyor or provider on a
larger scale than that of buying a week’s “grub” at the Bar store. He
went to the trader and told him what he wanted. “Make out your order,”
said the merchant. Gawley gave it to him verbally. “I guess,” said he,
“I’ll have a sack of flour, ten pounds of bacon, ten of sugar, five of
coffee, three of tea, a peck of beans, a bag of salt and--and--a barrel
of whiskey!”

In 1870 I made another pilgrimage to Hawkins’ Bar. Smith was gone.
Nobody lived there. The fence of the camp graveyard was broken down. The
wooden headboards were lying prone to the earth. Some were split in two
and most of the inscriptions were being rapidly erased through the
action of the sun and rain. But one house was standing. It was the cabin
wherein had lived one Morgan Davis, the former custodian of the Hawkins’
Bar library. For as early as 1854 or ’55 the Hawkins’ Bar “boys” had
clubbed their funds, sent down to San Francisco and there purchased a
very respectable library. It was a good solid library, too, based on a
full set of American Encyclopedias and Humboldt and Lyell, and from such
and the like dispensers of heavy and nutritious mental food, rising into
the lighter desserts of poetry and novels. As late as 1858 the “boys”
were in the habit of replenishing their library with the latest
published scientific works, novels, and magazines.

But in ’70, on my last visit, the library was gone. Morgan was dead. His
cabin door had fallen from its hinges: a young oak tree had sprung up
and blocked the entrance. The flooring had been torn up. The window
sashes had been taken out. A dinner-pot and broken stove were all that
remained of Morgan’s cooking utensils. Some of the roofing had
disappeared. It was a ghostly place. The trails leading to and from the
Bar were fading out. Here, they were overgrown with brush. There, the
river in some higher rise had swept away the lower bank and left nought
but a confusion of rough rock over which was no semblance of a track. It
was at Hawkins that I had first “buckled to the mines.” My first
“buckling,” however, was in the capacity of a meat peddler. I became the
agent of a firm of butchers up on the mountain for distributing their
tough steaks to the Hawkins’ Bar miners. Through the instrumentality of
a horse, over whose back was slung a couple of huge panniers, I
continued the agency for a week. Then one morning the horse kicked up
his heels and ran away. As he ran, at every kick a raw and bloody steak
would fly out of the boxes, flash in the brilliant morning sunshine, and
then fall in the fine red dust of the mountain trail. I followed hard
after, gathering up these steaks as they fell, and when the burden
became too heavy I piled them up by the roadside in little heaps of
dusty, very dusty meat. At last, dusty, perspiring and distressed beyond
measure, I managed to catch that villainous horse. For he, after having
ejected nearly the whole load of meat, concluded to stop and be caught.
I loaded the panniers again with the dusty, carnivorous deposits, led
the horse down the steep trail to the river, then muddy and of a rich
coffee-color from up country mining sediment. Herein I washed my steaks,
rinsed them as well as I could of dust, and, as was then the custom,
hung up piece after piece in the gauze-curtained meat-safes at the
miner’s cabins. I think Hawkins’ got its share of grit that day in its
beef. Shortly afterward I went out of the beefsteak-distributing bureau.

Then I went into the service of the man who kept the Bar store, saloon,
and boarding-house. I was errand boy, barkeeper, bookkeeper,
woodchopper, assistant cook and general maid of all work, and possibly
worthlessness. One day the storekeeper’s horse, packed with miners’
supplies, was given into my charge to lead three miles up the river to
the camp of the Split-Rock River claim. The load was strapped to a
“cross-jack” saddle. It consisted mostly of flour, potatoes, bacon and a
demijohn of whiskey. I was advised by the merchant, on setting out, not
to let that horse get ahead of me. If he did it was prophesised that he
would run away, “sure pop.” But I had not gone forty rods from the store
when the beast made a rush, got ahead of me, tore the leading halter out
of my grasp and set off along the narrow mountain trail at the rate of
twenty knots per hour. I followed on a run of about ten knots per hour.
Hence the distance between us soon increased. As he ran the motion burst
the bag of flour, ditto the potatoes, and then the whiskey demijohn
broke. It was a fine sight. The flour rose in the air like a white cloud
above the horse, out of and above which flew potatoes, and the whole was
interspersed with jets of whiskey. It looked like a snow squall
travelling on horseback. When the animal had spilt all the flour, all
the potatoes and all the whiskey, he slowed up and allowed himself to be
caught. His mission was accomplished. I found remaining the saddle and
the empty potato sack. The trail was white with flour for a mile, and so
it remained for months afterward. I led the animal back to the store. My
heart was heavy and his load was light. The store-keeper gave me his
blessing. I did not thereafter long remain in the service of that
transportation bureau.

After this I borrowed a rocker and started to washing some river-bank
gravel. It took me several days to become in any degree skilled in the
use of the rocker. I had no teacher, and was obliged to become
acquainted with all its peculiarities by myself. First I set it on a
dead level. As it had no “fall” the sand would not run out. But the
hardest work of all was to dip and pour water from the dipper on the
gravel in the sieve with one hand and rock the cradle with the other.
There was a constant tendency on the part of the hand and arm employed
in pouring to go through the motion of rocking, and _vice versa_. The
hand and arm that rocked were more inclined to go through the motion of
pouring. I seemed cut up in two individuals, between whom existed a
troublesome and perplexing difference of opinion as to their respective
duties and functions. Such a conflict, to all intents and purposes, of
two different minds inside of and acting on one body, shook it up
fearfully and tore it all to pieces. I was as a house divided against
itself and could not stand. However, at last the physical and mental
elements thus warring with each other inside of me made up their
differences, and the left hand rocked the cradle peacefully while the
right hand poured harmoniously, and the result was about $1.50 per day.
Soon after I found my first mining partner. He wandered to the Bar, a
melancholy-looking man, with three dogs accompanying, and was always in
a chronic state of red bandana and nose-wiping. He and I joined forces
and went up the river to “crevice” among the rocks near the Split Rock
claim. He had all the skill, all the experience, and all the dogs, and I
all the general ignorance and incapacity. I deemed it a great advantage
to have thus secured a real “old miner” for a partner, and felt that
such a man must turn up gold.

We built ourselves a rude brush house on a shelf of the rocky ledge in a
canyon whose sides sloped at an angle of forty-five degrees. Even this
shelf was not level. It pitched toward the river, and there was so
little of it that during the night’s repose our legs stuck out of the
house-entrance. We were obliged to “chock” all our supply of provisions
in their respective packages to prevent them from rolling out of our
wigwams over the brink and into the Tuolumne. If a potato got loose it
ran like a “thing possessed” over the rocks and down into the muddy,
raging current. We were obliged to peg ourselves at night while sleeping
to prevent a like catastrophe. It was a permanent and laborious
existence at an angle of forty-five. To stand erect for any length of
time was very tiresome. More frequently, like Nebuchadnezzar, we lived
on all fours. “Crevicing” did not prove very profitable. By day the bare
rocks become heated by the sun to a blistering capacity. With pick and
sledge and crowbar and bent bits of hoop-iron we pried and pounded and
scraped, and scraped and pounded and pried all the hot day long, or
else were doubled up in all sorts of back-aching, back-breaking,
body-tiring positions, drawing up at arm’s-length from some deeper
“pothole” or crevice spoonful after spoonful of yellow mould. It did
hold considerable gold, and heavy gold too. But it took so long to get
the mould. This was in the latter part of September. The termination of
the dry season was reached. The first rain came. It came at night. It
drizzled through our brush house. It sent tiny streams down the rocky
mountain-sides, and some of these streams found their way under us. We
had lain and endured the rain from above dripping on our faces and
wetting our clothes. In those times one’s day suit served for a
nightgown. But when the aqueous enemy undermined our position we had to
turn out.

It blew a gale. How the wind howled and tore up the canyon! We tried to
kindle a fire. Match after match was blown out. Finally a blaze was
attained. Then the rains descended heavier than ever and put it out. The
chief misery was, we could not at night find our way out of the canyon
to any place of shelter. Nor could we walk at all to keep warm. There
was “standing room only.” All about us were the steeply inclined rocks,
molded into every irregularity of shape. We were obliged all through the
night to “stand and take it” as it came, shivering in our thin summer
clothing. With daylight we made our way to the camp of the Split
Rockers. They gave us some gin. It was common gin--very common gin--but
the comfortable and soothing remembrance of that gin after such a night
exists for me even unto this day. I wore a black cloth cap. The rain had
washed out the dye, and this dye had coursed over my brow and cheeks in
tiny rivulets of jet. I noticed that I seemed to be more than a usual
object of interest to those about me, and wondered, until a friend
advised me to consult a mirror. I did so, and found my face marked like
a railroad route map. Such was my inauguration in mining at Hawkins’
Bar. What glorious old times they were! What independence! What freedom
from the trammels and conventionalities of fashion! Who cared or
commented if we did turn up the bottoms of our pantaloons, or wear, for
coolness’ sake, our flannel shirts outside the trousers? Who then was so
much better than anybody else, when any man might strike it rich
to-morrow? Who would beg for work or truckle and fawn and curry favor of
an employer for the mere sake of retaining a situation and help that
same man to make money, when he could shoulder pick, shovel, and rocker,
go down to the river’s edge and make his two or three dollars per day?
Though even at that time this reputed three dollars was oftener one
dollar and a half.

Even then reports of the paying capacities of claims were as apt to be
watered as are stocks nowadays.




CHAPTER XII.

SWETT’S BAR.


I think and hope that these attempts of mine to portray the history of
the camps on one California gold-bearing river will touch a responsive
chord in the hearts of some old Californian, for the life and incident
of the bars I describe reflect, in certain respects, the life, history,
and incident of hundreds and thousands of places settled in “’49,” and
perhaps abandoned by “’60,” which have now no name or place on the later
maps of the State. Your genuine old miner likes to revisit the camp
where first he dug for gold, in thought if not in person. It was no
common affection they entertained for these places. If the “boys” moved
away to other diggings, they had always to make a yearly pilgrimage
back, so long as the camp lasted. So, yearly from Vallecito, thirty
miles distant, used Jake Yager to revisit Swett’s, and he tramped the
whole distance, too. What was it that so drew them back? Perhaps the
memory of the new and exciting life they experienced from “’49” say till
“’58” or “’60,” with its “ups and downs,” its glittering surprises in
the shape of “strikes,” its comradeship so soon developed among men who,
meeting as strangers, so soon found out each other’s better qualities,
its freedom from the restraints of older communities, its honesty and
plainness in the expression of opinion, engendered by such freedom; all
these thought over and over again during absence brought about that
strong desire to see the old Bar again, the scene of so much experience
and private history. Then the visitor always met a hearty welcome. He
was an old “residenter.” Cabin-owners contended for the pleasure of
entertaining him. No wives or families were in the way. Conviviality was
uninterrupted.

If a black bottle could be produced it could be worshipped undisturbed
until long past midnight. And such was always produced on the return of
the old acquaintance. When the “boys” at last tumbled into their bunks
and smoked a night-cap pipe abed, there was no wife in special charge of
husband to molest or make them afraid or disturb their internal peace by
reason of her near presence. Those were the golden seasons of masculine
domestic tranquillity on the banks of the Tuolumne. Woman never
disturbed the Bar proper with her presence. It was always a masculine
Bar, at least on the right bank of the river. On the left, at a later
date, on a flat, where I enjoyed the privilege of digging for next to
nothing for two years, there did live for a time three foreign
households glorified by woman’s presence. But this was after the palmy
days of Swett’s Bar proper right bank. I have heard that Swett’s Bar was
named after John Swett, once Superintendent of Public Instruction in
California. If so, he never there left any relics or reminders of
himself--not even a grammar. Swett’s lies equidistant from Hawkins’ and
Indian Bars. When last I passed through it the floods had washed out
every trace of man’s presence on one side of the river, leaving there an
enormous heap of logs and brush-wood. The Bar proper had been smoothed
down by the flood, every hole or boulder heap, or heap of “headings” or
“tailings,” or the deep pits dug and laboriouly kept free of water by
machinery, or heavily rock-freighted crib of logs, the work of miners in
the river’s bed, had been planed away. The pebbles and boulders had all
been rearranged, the sands were smooth, white, and glistening as though
“fresh from the Creator’s hands;” and none save those conversant with
the river’s history could have guessed that every foot of the bank
adjoining the river had been turned over and over again in the search
for gold.

We elected one member of the Legislature from Swett’s. When he left the
Bar he distributed his cabin, blankets, and household effects among the
remaining miners. He confidently thought never to need these articles
again. That was as great a miscalculation as when a Swett’s Bar or any
other bar miner would resolve and swear violently that never again would
he “strike a pick” in the river. We came to regard such an oath with a
superstitious credulity that he certainly would strike such pick again,
for never did such a case occur in my recollection but that the mad
resolver was back next season, ignoring his vow and striking his pick on
some claim generally poorer than the one he worked the season previous.
So at the end of four months, after cumbering the law books of the State
of California with statutes, whose very existence was forgotten eight
months after their passage, our Swett’s Bar legislator was seen one
evening coming down the hill, bearing in one hand two whiskey bottles
tied together by one string--one being empty and the other full. “Silver
and gold have I none,” said he, as he came to my cabin door, “but what
I have give I unto thee,” which he did. Next day came his trunk. The
principal accession to the legislative wardrobe were three new shirts
and a blue coat with brass buttons. That, the session I think of 1859,
was known as the “Legislature of ten thousand drinks.” Our law-maker
said it had been the “Star Winter” of his existence, and he never
expected to see such another. Three days after his arrival at the Bar he
borrowed a pair of blankets, “cabined” with a chum and contentedly
resumed his pick and shovel. Did Cincinattus do more when he buckled
once more to the plough? But our Swett’s Bar Cincinattus was never
hunted for to save his country. There were too many other country savers
on hand, even in our immediate locality.

Generally speaking, Swett’s was divided in two portions. There was the
old bar on the right bank of the river, settled in “’49,” and there was
the flat on the other side, whose golden store was not discovered until
1859. Attempts were made to give this flat a distinct name. Various
settlers and miners craved the immortality which they supposed might
thus be conferred. For a time it was called “Frazier’s Flat,” from a
diabolical Scotchman of that name who lived there. Only one of these
names would stick, and finally everybody settled down on the old
appellation, “Swett’s.” I do not believe that John Swett, if he did
confer his name on this Bar, ever realized the local fame and reputation
of his name. When first we struck the diggings at Swett’s left bank, we
had great expectations. It was a later discovery, a “back river
channel.” Consequent on the discovery of pay ground 1,000 feet back of
the river, and the definite fixing of the boundary lines between the
various claimants, there ensued the usual series of disputes, rows, bad
blood, assaults, and threatened shootings. Nobody was shot. Not even a
mining law-suit came of it. A local capitalist threw a flume across the
river and brought to bear on the flat the upland muddy water, which came
down from Columbia diggings, twenty-five miles away, through Wood’s
Creek. That flume was being talked of, being planned, being hoped for
and very gradually being erected, during the years of “’59” and “’60,”
while the rest of the nation was agitated by “Bleeding Kansas,” “John
Brown,” “Squatter Sovereignty,” “The Douglas Party,” “The Little Giant”
and all that foreboding series of watchword and motto which preceded
“The War.” But the Swett’s Bar mind, the Swett’s Bar hope, the Swett’s
Bar expedition, was concentrated principally on a wire cable, two
uprights on either side of the river, and some 400 feet of rough wooden
flume thereby supported, all of which was to bring us water to wash out
the expected gold. At last the suspension flume was finished. We had
water. We commenced washing. The dirt did not pay as we expected. We
averaged week in and week out about three dollars per day, and one
dollar of this went for water money.

After the suspension flume was finished and water was on the Flat our
claim cleaned up for the first week’s work about fifty dollars a piece.
We used quicksilver plentifully in the sluices; and the amalgam was
taken to my cabin in a gold-pan and put on the hot coals to drive off
the mercury, which it did, and salivated the four of us besides. The
sublimated mineral covered walls, tables and chairs with a fine,
frost-like coating, and on rubbing one’s finger over any surface a
little globule of quicksilver would roll up before it. Then we went to
Chinese Camp and gave the doctor about half our individual week’s
dividends to get the mercury out of us. Three weeks of sore mouths and
loosened teeth followed this intelligent exposure. It was through such
experiences as these that we became in California practical
mineralogists. However, it’s an easy way of taking “blue mass.” The
claim from which great gains had been expected eventually settled down
to an average of two dollars and a half to three dollars per day.
Break-downs of the flume, failure of water from up country, very stormy
weather, building and repairing reservoirs, cutting tail races through
rock--all caused numerous delays, and every such delay lessened the
average per diem. It was necessary to build reservoirs, to store the
water for washing, and these reservoirs broke with the ease and facility
of a Bowery savings bank.




CHAPTER XIII.

ONE DAY’S DIGGING.


We got out of our blankets heavily. Legs and back were apt to be a
little stiff in the morning. Or if not stiff, they lacked action.
Working all the day previous, possibly in the water, or with it
splashing all about, tugging at heavy boulders, shouldering wet sluices,
to say nothing of the regular pick-and-shovel exercise, would make
itself felt even when the limbs and blood were younger than now.
Dressing was a short job. A pair of damp overalls, a pair of socks, a
pair of shoes, or possibly the heavy rubber mining boots. Flannel shirts
we slept in. A face-swabbing with cold water in the tin basin outside
and a “lick and a promise” for the hair with the comb. That was about
all for week days. Vanity of apparel there was little for the working
miner. Who was there to dress for? Woman? The nearest was half a mile,
fifty years of age, and married. Then breakfast. The fire kindled in the
contrary little stove. Possibly it was necessary to attack with a axe
that dried old stump near by and hack off a few chips to cook with. The
miner’s wood-pile was generally small. He got in fuel on rainy days, or
at the odd intervals to be spared from work. You put on the worn tin
teapot, lowered the gauze-covered meat safe from the tree, cut a steak
from the chunk of bull mahogany within called beef, slung a dab of lard
in the frying-pan, put therein the meat and let it sizzle. Two or three
boiled potatoes might be sliced, fried more or less brown in the gravy,
and this, with bread and tea, formed the breakfast. The bread was the
bread of your own laborious baking, the loaf of an irregular shape, the
crust very hard and thick, the color often “pied,” being black where it
had burned, brown where it had baked, and of a pallid whiteness where it
had not baked at all. Within the loaf might be close, heavy, and in
color either a creamy or a canary yellow, in proportion to the improper
amount of yeast powder used.

The table is a broad shelf against the wall. There is no table-cloth.
You did not always wash up after breakfast, for the dishes, as they
stood, were all in place for dinner. Some fastidious miners washed their
dishes after each meal; most of us did not. It was too much to expect of
hard-worked humanity. The cabin door is open while you eat and from it
you look forth on the claim. There lies the bank of red earth as you
left it yesterday after the “cave.” There is the reservoir full of
coffee-colored ditch water which had run in during the night after being
used for washing in a dozen claims “up country.” Then you draw on those
damp, clammy rubber boots, either to the knee or hip high, the outside
splashed with the dried reddish mud, and smelling disagreeably of rubber
as you pulled them on and smelling worse as you became heated and
perspiring. In these you waddle to the claim. I forgot. Breakfast over,
one of the most important acts of the day was next on the programme.
That was the filling, lighting, and smoking of your pipe. Nothing could
hurry you through this performance. The filling was cut in slivers with
a careful and solemn consideration; the weed was carefully bestowed in
the bowl; the match was applied with a deliberation savoring of a
religious act; the first puff rose in the air as incense to the early
morn, and smoking thus you waddled in your big boots to the claim. There
you met your three partners, all likewise smoking. There they stand on
the bank, looking into the ground-sluice. There is no “good morning” or
other greeting: if anything, grunts. There lay the tools--shovels,
picks, crowbar, and sluice-fork--helplessly about, as left last evening.
A little muddy water trickles through the line of sluices. One of us
goes to the reservoir, a few hundred yards off, and turns on the water.
Another goes to the tail of the sluices with the sluice-fork. Then is
heard the clicking of the pick and the grating of the shovel against the
red dirt; down comes the muddy water over the bank and the day’s work
has fairly commenced.

We stand in a row, allowing sufficient room between each for swinging
the pick. We are undermining the bank, the water running at our feet and
between us and the bottom of the bank. Each chunk of red dirt dislodged
by the pick falls into the running water, and if it be hard and will not
readily dissolve it must be broken up by pick or shovel to keep the
stream clear and unimpeded. The large boulders are picked out by hand
and thrown behind us--not in disordered fashion, either. Room in the cut
is scarce and must be economized, so the ever-accumulating bowlder pile
is “faced up” with a neat wall, laid without mortar, but with some care
and skill. The bed-rock is under our feet. We are undermining the bank
and keeping the stream turned in as much as possible to the part
undermined. The gravel for a foot or six inches is pretty hard and the
stones here are harder and closer packed than those nearer the surface.
There the gravel is lighter. Many of the stones are light and rotten; a
blow with the pick dashes them to pieces. This streak just above the
ledge and for a few inches in the crevices of the ledge is our “pay
streak” where ages on ages ago some stream ran, depositing, as all
streams do, the heavier gravel on the bottom and the lighter above.
Occasionally the pick strikes a firmly embedded boulder hard and square
on its point, in such a way as to send the vibration like a shock along
the iron, up the handle and into one’s arm and “crazy-bone.” Our bank of
dirt is about eight feet in height. A few inches of the top is a dark
mould, below that is three or four feet of “hard-pan,” below the
“hard-pan” light sandy gravel and rotten boulders, and near the ledge is
the pay streak. This order of formation has varied as we have worked up
and into the bank. At first, near the river’s edge, there was only mould
on a very light alluvial sand. This was readily washed off and paid four
dollars or five dollars per day. A little farther back we struck the
edge of the red gravel streak. This for a time paid better. Farther
still came the deposit of light sandy gravel, and lastly came in the
accursed “hard-pan.”

Our claim, on being first prospected, was reported to pay three cents to
the pan from the top down. We believed it at first, not having learned
that “three cents to the pan from the top down” means the biggest kind
of luck. If you get an average of half a cent a pan from the top down,
and the dirt would wash easily, we should make money. It was hard even
for an “honest miner” to give as the result of a prospect anything less
than “three cents to the pan.” But “hard-pan” is our foe. “Hard-pan” is
the essence of brickbats. Its consistency is about that of chalk. It
seems the finest kind of sand cemented and pressed together. It can be
carved into any form with a knife. It takes as much time to work off a
square foot of hard-pan as ten square feet of soft gravel. When, after
half a day’s labor, we succeed in getting down a cave, it goes into the
ground-sluice in a few great lumps, which must be battered to pieces
with our picks before the water will slowly dissolve them into mud. And
it doesn’t hold a “color” of gold. The work in the ground-sluice goes on
hour after hour. Pick and shovel and scrape, scrape and shovel and pick,
the water meantime tumbling and roaring over the bank and making it
difficult for us to hear each others’ voices. The sun climbs higher and
gets hotter. The water pail is frequently visited. The backs of the gray
shirts are wet with perspiration. In an easy, companionable claim, where
the partners are all good fellows and on good terms and not too insane
in the matter of getting an enormous quantity of dirt through the
sluices each day, there may be more or less brief suspensions from the
work, when all hands lean on their shovels and talk politics, or horses,
or last night’s poker game, or have a short service of tobacco smoke,
with the usual solemn preliminaries of cutting the plug and filling
pipes. But if the majority of the “company” are a mean, crabbed,
close-fisted lot, the misery goes on without cessation.

A queerly assorted group are we thus laboring together. Jack Gwin’s
impelling hope and life’s idea is to earn enough to pay his passage home
to Philadelphia and buy him a suit of clothes. A decent suit he has not
owned these five years. He would be the terror and distress of his
relatives if ever he got back, for with him five dollars in his pocket
over expenses and sobriety are an impossibility. McFadden dreams of a
cabin, a cow, some geese and goats, a horse and a wife, and is in a fair
way of realizing them all. He saves most of his earnings, gets drunk
wisely only on holidays, pays his debts regularly, hates the English,
lives in that little black, brownish cabin up yonder, does all his
cooking in two tin pots, sleeps in one pair of ancient blankets and a
most disreputable bed quilt, and three dollars will cover the cost of
all his domestic fittings and utensils. Bill Furnea, a French Canadian,
has drifted here into this hole in the foothills very much as he drifted
into the world--without aim or object in life save present enjoyment. He
is a good worker and works because he was brought up to it and can’t
help it. He is a good boatman, a good logger, a skilled woodcutter, a
devotee of poker and generally a successful one, an entertaining scamp,
full of wit and originality, quick to take in the peculiarities and
eccentricities of others, something of a dandy, as far as dandyism can
be indulged in this out-of-the-way place, and a born scamp, glib of
tongue, unreliable, and socially the best man of the crowd.

It is near eleven o’clock. There stands in a cool corner of the claim
and carefully shielded from any stray flying pebble, a black bottle. It
is nearly full of whiskey--very common corn whiskey. It is most welcome
at this hour. Poison it may be, but a draught from the tin cup
brightens up and makes all things new. The sunshine is more cheerful.
All Nature smiles. The picks descend with increased force and a host of
new day-dreams start into being. It revives hope. It quenches despair.
It gilds the monotony of our lives. It was ever thus, and possibly ever
shall be, world without end. It is high noon. The sun is over our heads
and the shadows are at their shortest length. One of our number trudges
wearily up to the reservoir to shut off the water. So soon as its flow
lessens we trudge off in wet overalls or heavy rubbers to our respective
cabins. We are now ground-sluicing at or about the year 1860, when
miners generally had abandoned “cabining” in squads and each man kept
house by himself. Cause--general incompatibility of temper, temperament,
disposition, and habit. The sober miner found it disagreeable to live
permanently with the spreeing miner, and the miner nice in his domestic
economy and particular about his food soon became tired of a companion
who never aired his blankets and didn’t care whether his bread was light
or heavy, sweet or sour. Trudging to our cabins, we pick up the dried
twigs in our path. These are to kindle the dinner fire. Dinner is very
much like breakfast, beef or bacon, bread, tea, dried-apple sauce. The
boots are kicked off and thumped into a corner. The temperature is up to
that notch that induces perspiration without any exertion at all and the
ugly little stove makes it hotter still. We sit down to the noon meal in
a melting condition and rise from it in the same state. Dinner is eaten,
the “nooning” is over, back again to the claim, turn on the water, pick,
shovel, scrape, pry, toss back boulders and prop up sluices slipped
from their supports. Between two and three o’clock a snowy-white cloud
rises over a distant peak to the eastward. It seems like a great bank of
snow against the blue sky and the longer we look at it the farther we
seem to peer into its translucent, clear-white depths. It rises over
that peak at almost the same hour every afternoon and is almost of the
same shape. It is the condensed vapor of the snow melting on the higher
Sierra summits eighty-six miles distant. It is imposing in its silent
imperceptible rising, its wonderful whiteness, its majesty, its
distance. It seems a fit bed of snowy splendor for fairies or some sort
of ethereal beings to bask and revel in. It seems to be looking down
half in scorn half in pity at us four weary, miserable worms of the
dust, feebly pecking at a bit of mother earth, muddy, wet, and feebly
squirming in and about this bank of dirt.

At four o’clock there are longer pauses in our labors. There is more
leaning on shovels and more frequent glances at our timepiece, the sun,
as he sinks in the western heavens. The shadow of the hill opposite
creeps slowly down its side. It is a cool, welcome shadow. The strongest
worker secretly welcomes it. Though he be a “horse of a man,” his
muscles also feel the effects of the long day’s labor. It is more his
strong will than his body which keeps him swinging the pick. We are in
duty bound to work till six o’clock. Everybody works till six o’clock.
Everybody is more or less tired at four o’clock, but it is not the
capacity of the body for labor that fixes the time. It is custom, stupid
custom. The gauge is the limit of physical strength, not for the
weakest, but the strongest. The great, brawny-armed, big-boned Hercules
of our company doesn’t feel it much. He may walk three miles after
supper to the Bar store, play cards and drink whiskey till nine o’clock
and then walk back again and be up fresh for work next morning by 5:30
o’clock. This is 1860. In 1870 he showed it, however, and in the marks
of age was ten years ahead of his time. You can’t keep up this sort of
thing--digging, tugging, lifting, wet to the skin day after day, summer
and winter, with no interval of rest, but a steady drag twelve months of
the year--without paying for it. There’s dissipation in the use of
muscle as well as in the use of whiskey. Every old miner knows it now
and feels it. Don’t you? How does the muscle of forty-five years in 1882
compare with that of twenty-five in 1862? Of course, man must live by
the sweat of his brow, or the sweat of his brain, but many of you sweat
too long in those days, and I hear you all saying, “That’s so!” Start
anew the fire in the little stove; thump the wet boots in the corner;
drag yourself down to the spring a few hundred yards distant for a pail
of fresh water; hack a few more chips from the dried stump; mix some
flour, water, and yeast powder for the day’s baking; set down a minute
on your flour-barrel chair and look on your earthly possessions. The
worn and scarred trunk you brought years ago from the States; it holds
your best suit of a forgotten fashion, two or three white shirts, a
bundle of letters from home, a few photographs, a Bible, not worn out
with use, a quartz crystal, a few gold “specimens,” a tarantula’s nest,
the tail of a rattlesnake and six vests. Do you remember how vests would
accumulate in the mines? Pants, coat, everything else would wear
out--vests never.




CHAPTER XIV.

THE MINER’S RAINY DAY.


No work on the claim to-day. It rains too hard. It is the winter rain of
California--a warm, steady, continuous drizzle. The red earth is soft
and soppy. It mires to the ankles. The dark green of the chaparral on
the hill sides seems to-day almost black. The hue of the river by my
cabin door is yellower than ever. The water-mark is three feet higher
than last night and it creeps upward every hour. Over the mountain crags
yonder white sheets of foam are tumbling where none has been seen before
for many months. This is an enforced day of rest. I have finished my
breakfast and sit down for a few minutes in a keen enjoyment of
idleness. There is a ceaseless patter of raindrops on the cabin roof.
The river roars louder than ever over the riffle close by. That roar is
the first sound I hear in the morning and the last at night. It has
roared thus for me these three years. In one sense of times’ duration
they seem as three hundred years; in another, they seem not much over
three months. It is three months when I think only of the date of my
arrival on Frazier’s flat. It is three hundred years as I attempt to
recall the daily round of experience and thought since I came here.
Outwardly it has been what many would consider a monotonous experience.
Weeks have been so much alike that they leave no distinguishing marks
in my memory. A big freshet or two, a mining lawsuit, an election, a few
weeks when the claim “came down rich,” a fight at the bar store, a
bigger spree than usual, a visit from county candidates travelling for
votes, a giving out of ditch water, a break in the reservoir, a man
drowned in the river--these are the great events on Frazier’s flat.

I wonder how many years more I shall spend here. I wonder if I must live
and die here. I am no nearer fortune than three years ago, not so near
by three years. I seem more and more chained down here by force of
habit. I seem fit for little else but to dig. I long to see something of
the great world beyond this lone foothill nook. Yet without money I feel
less and less capable of going out and “getting on” in that world. And
as for saving money--well, we call this a “three-dollar claim,” which
means an average daily profit, when all expenses are paid, of two
dollars more or less. These thought are making it as gloomy within as
the weather is without. I must get out of this. My gray flannel working
shirt needs mending. The right sleeve is ripped from wrist to elbow. It
has been so ripped for about six weeks. I have rolled that wet sleeve up
to the elbow about a hundred times a day, and at every tenth stroke of
the pick it has unrolled again and flapped in my face. I sew up the
sleeve with a very large needle and a very coarse thread doubled. This
is a good time to clean up a little. I will be domestic to-day. I will
bake a fresh batch of bread and make a pie. It shall be a mince pie. We
are ten miles from the nearest baker’s mince pie. It shall be made of
salt beef previously soaked to freshness, dried apples, molasses and
vinegar in lieu of cider. The crust I roll out with a junk bottle on a
smooth, flat board. I bake it on a shallow tin plate. It will be, when
done, a thin, wafery pie; but it will be a pie--the shadow of a pie at
least--such as I used to eat at home; only a shadow.

Rain, rain, rain. The wind is up and about too, tearing around among the
trees and shaking the cloth roof of my cabin. Here and there little
trickles of water are coming through and running down the logs. Mine is
a log cabin of the roughest make. Four logs piled atop of each other
form the sides. A mud chimney at one end; a door at the other. The logs
are very dry and very rotten and abound in those insects that delight in
rotten wood. I have found scorpions under the bark and occasionally an
earwig promenades over the table. I open the door and look out on the
river. It is rising. Wrecks are coming down--boards, logs, lumber and an
occasional sluice and pieces of fluming. There is an eddy around the
turn of the hill above, where much of this drift runs in. I repair
thither and make a few hauls. I secure a half-dozen good boards, some
pieces of joist, some driftwood for fuel, and pile it up on the bank out
of the swelling water’s reach. “Halloa!” That cry is from a couple of
men on the other side of the river, plodding down the trail in oilskins.
I know them. Two of the “boys” from Poverty Bar. They are going to
Price’s store two miles below--store, grogshop, boarding-house, polling
booth at election, ferry, etc. Being a rainy day they are going there to
get drunk. That is not their avowed purpose on setting out, but it’s as
near a certainty as anything can be in this world.

I return to my cabin. The pie has baked. It is browner than I intended
it should be. On one side it is almost black. It is ornamented about the
rim with a row of scollops made by pressure of the thumb. Now I put in
the bread, previously mixed and kneaded. I am not a good breadmaker. It
is always bread too much baked, or too little, or too sour, or too
yellow, or too heavy. But I don’t care. I bake only for myself and I am
unfortunately too easily pleased and probably too lazy to take that care
and elaborate preparation necessary for good bread. I never measure
accurately the proportions of flour, water, and yeast powder necessary
for good bread. I throw them together at random. It’s a “hit or
miss”--generally miss. It’s too much trouble to bother about these small
details. A particular friend of mine who stayed with me a few days
reproved me for the poor quality of my bread and the general
slovenliness apparent about my cooking utensils.

“You have no pride,” said he.

I owned up. What was the use of pride about a tin kettle. This friend
was my backer. He had set me up on this claim and put me, after a
fashion, on my feet. He had come to see how I was getting along. While
on this visit a man of some standing from a camp up the river came along
looking for a stray cow. My friend asked him to dinner--one of my
dinners--graced by about the worst baking of bread I ever accomplished.
My friend did not realize what he was about when he asked the future
Lieutenant-Governor of the State of California to that dinner. But when
he sat down to my board and when they tried to eat my bread, he sorrowed
in secret and gave me some good and forcible advice afterward relative
to culinary and domestic matters. In these matters he was a very
particular man. During his stay he inaugurated a reign of neatness and
for me one of terror and discomfort. He put his whole mind on cooking
and covered the stove with dishes. He was an animated bill of fare. He
scoured all the tinware brightly. I was quite surprised at the new,
fresh look of things, and in secret thought seriously of reform, and
hoped he wouldn’t stay long.

But the man didn’t enjoy eating his elaborately prepared meals so much
as I did. He worked too hard getting them up. He exhausted too much of
his force in planning, worrying, and cooking. He worked his mind in too
many channels at once. He lacked repose. There’s where I had the best of
him. I was reposeful, and if you please so to term it, lazy. He is
dead--I am alive. There’s the result of different mental conditions. It
is noon. I have no clock to tell the hours, but we acquire a faculty of
feeling when noon arrives. The rain has ceased temporarily, but it will
soon recommence, for which I am glad, as it will prevent work on the
claim during the afternoon. Having eaten dinner, finishing with a piece
of my mince pie, it occurs to me that this is a good time to write home.
It’s hard work writing home. I put it off for weeks and months. It lays
a load on my mind. I receive at times letters from people complaining of
my neglect. I know I ought to write, but what is there to write? Nothing
but the same old story “Hope soon to do well.” I have written in this
strain for the last six years until I am tired and sick of it. It is of
no use telling any more about the country. All that has been told. If
my people only knew how much I suffered in this endeavor to be dutiful,
perhaps they would not insist on my writing more than the line, “I am
still alive; yours truly.” Thousands more of letters from California
wanderers would have been received by anxious relatives had they been
content with this. But you were expected to write. Bricks without straw.

It is a hard thing to realize, and few will realize it, that no matter
how close the tie of relationship, in reality there can be a wider and
wider drifting apart. Interests are not the same; associations are not
the same; location, surrounding, environment are not the same. Through
some or all of these influences you are growing into another man;
another woman. You would hardly recognize yourself could you see your
own identity and individuality as it was ten years ago; you believe
differently, you are another individual. What is that cry from the old
home so far away? It is the longing for some expression from the being
of 1850 and not from the one of 1860, who, did he stand under the shadow
of that roof and sit at that well-remembered table, would still after a
few days show the change, proving in himself or herself the lack of
something which once existed, and so prove a disappointment. The ink in
my cabin is thick, the pen a bad one and my mind seems in this
epistolary effort thicker and rustier than ink or pen. “Dear ----” and
then a big blot, and then a long pause and the patter of the rain and
the roar of the river. I write about a page and a half, feeling as if
every stroke of the pen were encumbered with a ball and chain. I
accomplish half a dozen more blots and I finish in a wretched state of
mind and in a prickly heat. It is a barren, pithless, sapless effort. I
will go out and get a breath of fresh air and rain. It is four o’clock.
Still it rains. The heavens are dark and already the first shades of the
winter’s night are coming on. I revisit my haul of lumber from the
river. It is gone. The river has not reached the spot where I placed it.
It is the work of those thieving Chinamen on Chamber’s Bar, half a mile
above. There is no use in going after them. My lumber is deposited and
hidden amid the piles they have to-day dragged out of the river.

I spend about an hour getting in fuel. I have a woodyard on the hillside
yonder. Nature has kindly felled and seasoned there a few scrub oaks for
my use. I drag down a few branches. The land here is free--very free. No
fences, no boundary lines, no gates, no proprietors. It’s a pretty flat
when the sun shines. A dark background of mountain, in front a river,
with its curving and varied outline of tule and bank up and down stream,
and close about the oaks are so scattered as to give one the impression
of a park and an old mansion hidden somewhere in the background. What a
luxury would be this spot to thousands in crowded cities who haven’t
even the range of a back yard nor the shadow of a tree! Yet I am
discontented and would get away to these crowded cities. The early
darkness has come. I light my candle. My candelabra is of glass--dark
olive-green--a bottle. I did use a big potato with a hole therein
scooped. But the esthetic nature requires constant change and I adopted
a bottle. I spread the evening repast. I sit down alone. From the window
I see lights glimmering in the few other neighboring cabins.

McSkimmins drops in after tea. I know all that McSkimmins will say, for
I have often heard it before; but McSkimmins is better than nobody--or
rather better than one’s own thoughts, unrefreshed and unrelieved by
mixture with any other minds’ thought. McSkimmins goes. I take refuse in
the effort to repair my best and only pair of broadcloth pantaloons. I
brought these with me from the States. They show decided signs of wear.
I am putting in a patch. It is a job I take hold of at intervals. There
is about it a mystery and a complication I can’t fathom. I can’t get the
patch to fit, or, rather, to set. There is more in the tailor’s art than
I imagined. Every time I have put them on I find a difference and a
seeming division of action and sentiment between the new cloth I have
sewed inside and the old cloth outside. They won’t hold together. The
stitches rip apart and everything goes by the run. I seem to fail in
making the new cloth accommodate itself to the varying proportions of
this part of the garment. And so the dreary night wears on. Rain, rain,
rain; roar, roar, roar. Is this living?




CHAPTER XV.

THE MINER’S SUNDAY.


This is the Sunday sun that streams through the cabin window and through
the chinks of the cabin wall.

It is the same sunshine as that of the week day. Yet as the miner wakes
and realizes it is Sunday it has a different appearance and conveys a
different impression from that of the weekday sun. Everything seems more
quiet, more restful, and even more staid and serious. There belongs to
it and to the landscape as he looks out a flavor of far-away Eastern
Sabbath bells and Sunday morning’s hush and longer family prayer than
usual and Sunday-school. But there is not a church bell within ten miles
and there never will be one heard on this flat. There is not the least
approach to church society or religious organization or observance.
There is not, so far as known, so much as a man in the least religiously
inclined. We are a hard lot. No work on the claim to-day. The pick and
shovel will rest where thrown Saturday afternoon and only a trickle of
yellowish water from the reservoir will seep through the long line of
sluices instead of yesterday’s muddy surge rushing through--sand, gravel
and grating pebble and boulder.

But there is work of another sort to be done and a great deal of it.
After breakfast shaving. That small mirror of most imperfect glass,
whose reflection distorts the features, screwing up one side of the
face and enlarging the other in an unnatural fashion, is suitably
adjusted. A smell of soap pervades the air. He lathers and shaves and
relathers and reshaves with a tedious and painful precision, the while
making faces at himself in the glass as he brings one portion of his
countenance after another more directly under the sweep of the razor. In
some cases he comes off with a few scratches or leaves a hirsute oasis
here and there of uncut bristle. Black pantaloons, a white shirt, a felt
or straw hat, a linen duster and the Sunday boots. This is his dandy
outfit. In his pocket is a buckskin purse, once yellow, now faded to a
dull gray, holding gold dust, a few ounces more or less, perhaps five,
perhaps ten. It is the company dust and is to be sold and turned into
bright, yellow gold pieces. And why all this preparation? “To go to
camp.” Camp is three miles away over the mountain yonder. A group of
ramshackle cabins, alternating with saloons, three grocery stores, a
hotel, an express office and a Justice of the Peace, all in a hot gulch,
with hillsides long ago swept of trees, scarred with cuts and streaked
with patches of dry yellowish ledge. “Camp” to him has all the
importance and interest of a great metropolis. It is the centre of news.
The stage passes through it on the way to a larger camp. Two boss
gamblers reside there. There is a faro game on occasions, a billiard
table with a mountainous sort of bed, where the balls roll as they
please and after an eccentric fashion of their own.

The camp is for him the first nerve-centre of civilization and the only
outlet to the great world which he has left. You, fresh from the great
city, regard this dilapidated place as an out-of-the-way corner; but to
him, living on his remote flat, with but two cabins in sight for as many
miles, camp is a place of importance. The news is fresh here; the city
papers are here; the political candidates speak here; the one-horse show
comes here and all the minor lawsuits untried here. Camp is reached
after a long, hot walk. He suffers in his store clothes from the heat.
In his working every-day flannels he would not so much mind it, but the
restraint and chokiness of starched linen are fatiguing. It is laborious
even to be “dressed up” on a hot day. Of this he is not aware. He has
not yet so far analyzed into the depth and causes of sensations, yet it
is a labor in tropical weather to wear and bear good clothes--clothes
which cannot safely be perspired in; clothes which one can’t “lop down”
in; clothes which require care in the keeping, as well as dignity and
uprightness; I mean physical uprightness. He never so much suffered from
the heat on a week day as on Sundays and the cause was mainly the
difference between clothes which demanded consideration and respect and
those which did not.

He repairs first to the Magnolia. He has long in imagination seen it
from afar. How cool is the big barroom. The landlord keeps the floor
well wet down. That Magnolia floor is one of the few places where water,
unmixed with other fluid, is useful and grateful. How comforting and
soothing is the first drink. A long drink in a long tumbler, with plenty
of ice, soda water and whiskey. If heaven be anywhere as a material
locality it is in that first cool drink after a three-mile July tramp
over the kiln-dried hills and herbage of the California foothills. The
Magnolia is the social heart-centre of camp. There he finds the doctor.
The doctor drinks with him. The doctor drinks with everybody. There,
too, is the Justice of the Peace. The Justice drinks with him. The
Justice holds his Court at the Magnolia. The proprietor of the Magnolia
is the camp constable and between drinks during trials calls _viva voce_
the witnesses in the case. The Judge drinks with him. The Judge
generally drinks. The principal camp gambler is at the Magnolia. He
takes a light drink. He is a wise man and knows the advantage and profit
of keeping a cool head. The regular camp drunkard sits in the rear in
one of the arm-chairs back of the billiard table. He looks so humble, so
respectful--and so dry, that our miner’s heart moves to pity and he
“asks him up.” He complies, but not with undue haste. This treats of the
era between 1865 and 1870. The camp drunkard had not then so “lost his
grip” as to be unmindful of a certain slowness, deliberation and dignity
befitting a gentleman. But when he does arrive at the bar he takes a
“four-fingered” drink.

They stand in a row at the bar. The barkeeper is mixing the “long” and
the short drinks. Each man waits, says nothing and eyes every motion of
the bartender. The silence is impressive. All is ready. Each glass is
grasped and raised, and then from each to each, and more than all, from
all to the drink donor, there is a nod, that incantatory phrase is
uttered, “Well, here’s luck,” and the poison is down. As it rasps, they
call “Ahem!” with varied degrees of modulation. But this is a careful
and prudent miner and he now repairs to the store. There his dust is
weighed, sold, and the week’s provision ordered. His combined partners’
“divvys” are put aside in a lump and safely stored. Now the weight is
off his mind. He returns to the attractions of camp.

These are not numerous. There is the Magnolia, the Bella Union, the
Court Exchange, the post and express office. There are the “boys.” He
learns the news of the county or district. The Mount Vernon is paying
four dollars per day. Long Shortman has gone on another spree and hasn’t
done any work for the last ten days. Jimmy McNeil has sent for his
wife’s sister. She is unmarried. Sullivan has had another row with his
wife and she has complained to the authorities. Sam Gedney is going to
run for County Clerk on the Democratic ticket. Bob Delmame lost $200 at
the game the other night. A San Francisco company have bought the Crazy
gulch quartz lead and will put a ten-stamp mill on it. The schoolmaster
was drunk last Friday night. Ford shot at McGillis the other night, but
did not hit him. There is scandal and talk concerning the Frenchwoman
who keeps the peanut stand and the Justice of the Peace. The Wiley
girls, two sisters who have recently moved into camp, are making a
sensation, and their small parlor at times won’t hold the crowd of
semi-bald and unconsciously middle-aged miners and others who are
calling on them with possible matrimony in prospective. They may pass
along the street about the middle of the afternoon and such “ragging
out” was never seen before in this camp. The curious have investigated
the tracks made by their little gaiters in the red dust of the upper
road and report them the smallest feet ever seen in this section. Billy
Devins of the Blue-jay claim is thought to have the best show with the
eldest, and Goldberry of the lively stable with the youngest. No. He
won’t let his best horse and buggy to anybody now and takes her out
riding three times a week. But they’re snappy and uncertain, and nobody
can count on them for a certainty. So runs the week’s news, which he
picks up with sundry drinks.

He enjoys the luxury of a hotel dinner--a dinner he is not obliged to
prepare with his own hands--a decidedly plain dinner in metropolitan
estimation, but to him, commencing with soup and ending with pie, a
sumptuous repast. It is moonlight and he takes his way back by the old
trail home. Old not in years, but in association. It is but the track of
twenty years or so, yet for him how old is it in thought. How many, many
times he has travelled over it.

That poker game is going on in one corner of the Magnolia. The “hard
case” from over the hill is trying to beat it. He has been so trying
every Sunday night in that same saloon and in that same corner for the
last twenty years. He has grown old in trying. It has kept him poor, yet
he thinks he can play poker. He is encouraged in this impression by a
considerate few. He works for them. They “scoop him in” regularly. He
will go home to-morrow morning, and during the week wash out a couple of
ounces more for the benefit of “Scotty” and “Texas.” It is 11 o’clock
and time to go home. That three-mile walk is before him; he has taken as
many drinks as is prudent, possibly one or two more. The camp saloon
revelries are beginning to quiet down. Most of the prominent drunks have
fallen in the cause. The chronic drunk of the camp is talking at the
bar. But he will thus talk all night; he never stops talking--or
drinking. He has been here more or less drunk ever since 1852. He is
phenomenal and not a standard for ordinary intemperates. Almost every
camp has known such a drunkard. Some are alive yet. They are of the
immortal few not born to die. It would be madness to compete with such.

So he sets out on his lonely walk. Of how much has he thought while
plodding over it. Here the same big buckeye brushes against his face as
it did in the “spring of ’50,” when he was twenty years younger and had
a sweetheart in the “States,” whose memory was fresh and warm. It has
all died out since. The letters became less and less, the years more and
more, and then all came to a dead standstill and he received the village
paper, and there, appropriately below the column of deaths, he read of
her marriage, whereat he went to camp and plunged wildly into all the
concert saloon could give and made things howl and boldly challenged the
chronic poker game and won. The trail turns suddenly. It has run over
the rocks by the river, its trail at times for many feet almost
illegible, a vague smoothly-worn streak over ledge and loose boulders,
polished and strewn with new white sand and pebbles by some unusually
high freshet. But here the shelving bank suddenly ceases. It becomes a
precipice. Up the hard-worn path in the red earth he climbs forty,
fifty, sixty feet. It is closely hedged with chemisal. Now he emerges
near the brow of the high rocky bluff. In all its moonlit glory surges,
bubbles, and roars the river below. Its yellow muddiness of the day is
now changed to a dark shade of brown, with tremulous silver bars. Night
and the moon are the artists.




CHAPTER XVI.

THE COW FEVER.


About this time (1861) a cow fever began to rage throughout the State.
It got hold of people, and impressed them with a burning idea that the
road to fortune was a cow path, and that fortunes lay in keeping cattle.
The cow fever reached the seclusion of Swett’s Bar. We invested all our
spare cash in cows and waited for results. Cattle were spoken of as a
sure card for fortune. Keep cattle. Buy improved breeds. Raise them.
“Cross” them. Feed them for nothing on the native grass. Buy cows. Cows
give milk. People can live on milk. Milk then to us was a luxury. It
paid no milkman to travel up and down the rough and rocky ledges of the
Tuolumne ringing his bell at miners’ cabins half a mile apart. Indeed he
could not so travel without carrying his milk _à la_ panier on a
donkey’s back, and by the time it had reached its place of destination
it would have been agitated to butter. So all of us miners went in for
cows. Improved cows. We bought each an improved cow. We hauled this cow
by ropes across the raging, eddying, furious river to our side.
Frequently she arrived more dead than alive. Then came a season of hope
and expectation as to fortunes through cows. We arose at five in the
morning, built the fire for breakfast, went out and sought our cows,
generally feeding or reposing a mile or more from our cabins, caught
these cows, milked them, returned to the cabin, finished the cooking of
either a burned or cold breakfast, went forth and labored in the claim
till noon, came home, cooked dinner, went forth again, at 1 <small>P.M.</small>,
labored till six, went back to the cabins, chopped wood for fuel,
travelled 500 feet or yards to the spring for water, returned, mixed our
bread, put it in the oven, went out and milked the cow, then bent over
the hot stove for an hour until bread was baked, and then, heated,
flushed, perspiring, exhausted from the day’s labor, and with nerves
quivering by reason of such exhaustion, we arranged the miner’s table,
sat down to the meal, and wondered why we had so little appetite.

Keeping cows proved laborious work for miners. When, in addition to
kindling the fire in the morning, cooking your own breakfast, coming
home at night wet and tired after working all day in the ground-sluice,
then hacking away at some old stump to get wood enough to cook the
supper, travelling may be an eighth of a mile to the nearest spring for
a pail of water, and bending and bothering with meat-frying and
bread-making, you add, chasing night and morn, milk pail in hand, some
contrary cow all over the flat in order to milk her, you pile too heavy
a load on any man’s back. Because, in the matter of housekeeping, we had
ceased the co-operative system. We dwelt all apart, each a hermit in his
own cabin. We were diverse in habit, and could not get along with each
other’s peculiarities. The neat man couldn’t abide the slovenly man; the
economical man couldn’t sit patiently by and see his partner cut potato
parings a quarter of an inch in thickness; the nervous man was
exhausted by his partner’s whistling or snoring, and all these and
numberless other opposing peculiarities at last caused each man
hermit-like, to retire into his own cell.

We had other trouble with our cows, for they were ravenous after salt.
We neglected to “salt them.” Result: If any article containing the least
incrustation of salt was left outside our cabins, the entire herd would
gather about it at night, lick it, fight for its possession and keep up
a steady grunting, stamping, lowing, and bellowing. They would eat
clothing left out over night on the clothes-line to dry. In such manner
and for such reason also would they eat through the cotton walls of our
houses. Once, when away for three days attending a county convention at
Sonora, on returning to my lone cabin, I found it a scene of ruin and
desolation. A cow had eaten through the cloth wall on one side, and
eaten her way out at the other, and had stopped long enough inside to
eat up all my flour, rice and vegetables. Once, when moving my household
effects from one cabin to another, on a wheelbarrow, I left it near the
middle of the flat for a few minutes. On returning I saw a cow making
off with my best coat. She held it in her mouth by one sleeve. On seeing
me she started off on a run, still thus holding the sleeve in her mouth
and making violent efforts to eject it. The coat-sleeve was a ruin when
I did get it. She had chewed it for salt’s sake to the likeness of a
fish net. Keeping cows did not make our fortunes at Swett’s. Then
everybody said: “Keep hogs. They will feed on acorns and increase very
rapidly. In a few years the plains and hills will groan under the burden
of your pork.” So I bought hogs. I bought a sow and seven pigs. They
gave me much to think of. Before I had owned them a week complaints
concerning them came from neighboring miners, who owned no hogs. These
pigs of mine broke through the cloth walls of the cabins and would
consume the miner’s entire weekly stock of provisions in a few minutes.
Then they would go outside and root from out the hot coals--his “Dutch
oven,” wherein his bread was baking while he labored afar in his claim,
and this bread when cooled they would also devour. I had, on buying
these animals, engaged that they should “find themselves.”

There was no reasoning with the suffering miners in this matter. I
argued that my pigs had a right to run at large, and that they should
make their houses more secure. The miners argued that right or not
right, they would shoot my pigs even if found near their cabins. If that
was not sufficient, they might shoot me. Their positiveness in this
matter was of an intense and violent character. There was no such thing
as discussion with them on legal or equitable grounds. I think now that
I and the pigs had law and right on our side, but the miners were in the
majority and had might. Nor was this all. These pigs, seemingly
recognizing my ownership, came home at night to sleep. They slept in a
pile just outside my cabin door, and as the night air wafted down from
the higher Sierra summits became cooler, the pigs on the outside of the
pile became uncomfortable. Being uncomfortable they tried to get inside
the pile. This the warm pigs inside resisted. The resistance was
accompanied with squealing and grunting, which lasted all night long and
disturbed my sleep. This pig pile consisted of a rind of cold and
uncomfortable pigs and a core of warm and comfortable pigs, and there
was a continual effort on the part of the cold porcine rind to usurp the
places of the warm and comfortable porcine core. They gave me no rest,
for when, with the warm morning sun, this uproar ceased, there came the
season of complaint and threat from my plundered neighbors. Finally a
cold storm chilled half of these pigs to death. I sold the remainder as
quickly as possible to a ranchman who better understood the hog
business.

During the receding of the waters after one of the annual spring
freshets, I saw several hundred dollars in gold dust washed out near the
base of a pine tree on the river’s bank, between Hawkins’ and Swett’s
Bar, where probably it had years before been buried by some unknown
miner. That is, I saw it after it had been washed out and found by
another more fortunate miner. In all probability there are many
thousands of dollars in dust so dug by hard-working hands and so buried
in California, there to remain until the Last Day perhaps longer.
Where’s the utility of resurrecting the “Root of all Evil” on the Last
Day, just at the time when people in heaven or elsewhere are presumed to
be able to get along without it? Yet it is a mysterious Providence that
impels any poor fellow to dig his pile bury it for safekeeping, and then
go off and die in some out-of-the-way place without being able to leave
any will and testament as to the exact hole where his savings lay.
Regarding buried treasure, there is a hill near Jamestown concerning
which, years ago, there hovered a legend that it held somewhere
thousands of dollars in dust, buried in the early days by a lone miner,
who was, for his money’s sake, murdered in his cabin. They said that by
the roots of many trees on that hillside it had been unsuccessfully dug
for. Anyway, the miner left a memory and a hope behind him. That’s more
than many do. If you want to leave a lasting recollection of yourself
behind drop a hint from time to time ere you depart for “The Bright and
Shining Shore” that you have interred $10,000 somewhere in a quarter
section of land, you will then long be remembered and your money dug
for.




CHAPTER XVII.

RED MOUNTAIN BAR.


The California mining camp was ephemeral. Often it was founded, built
up, flourished, decayed, and had weeds and herbage growing over its site
and hiding all of man’s work inside of ten years. Yet to one witnessing
these changes it seemed the life of a whole generation. Of such
settlements, Red Mountain Bar was one. Red Mountain lay three miles
above Swett’s Bar, “up river.” I lived “off and on” at the “Bar” in its
dying days. I saw it decay gently and peacefully. I saw the grass,
trees, and herbage gradually creep in and resume their sway all over its
site as they had done ere man’s interruption.

I lived there when the few “boys” left used daily, after the close of an
unsuccessful river season, to sit in a row on a log by the river’s edge,
and there, surveying their broken dam, would chant curses on their luck.
The Bar store was then still in existence. Thompson was its proprietor.
The stock on hand had dwindled down to whiskey. The bar and one filled
bottle alone survived. On rainy nights, when the few miners left would
gather about the stove Thompson would take down his fiddle, and fiddle
and sing, “What can’t be cured must be endured,” or, “The King into his
garden came; the spices smelt about the same”--a quotation of unknown
authorship. Of neighbors, living in their cabins strung along the banks
for half a mile above the store, there was Keen Fann, an aged mercantile
and mining Chinaman, with a colony about him of lesser and facially
indistinguishable countrymen of varying numbers. Second, “Old Harry,” an
aged negro, a skilled performer on the bugle and a singer, who offered
at times to favor us with what he termed a “little ditto.” He was the
Ethiopic king of a knot of Kanakas gathered about him. Third, “Bloody
Bill,” so-called from his frequent use of the sanguinary adjective, and,
as may be guessed, an Englishman. Fourth, an old Scotchman, one of the
Bar’s oldest inhabitants, who would come to the store with the little
bit of gold dust, gathered after a hard day’s “crevicing” complaining
that gold was getting as scarce as “the grace of God in the Heelands of
Scotland.” Fifth, McFarlane, a white-bearded old fellow, another
pioneer, who after a yearly venture into some strange and distant
locality to “change his luck,” was certain eventually to drift back
again to the Bar, which he regarded as home. Down the river, nestled
high up in a steep and picturesque gulch, stood the buckeye-embowered
cabin of old Jonathan Brown, the ditch tender, a great reader of weekly
“story papers,” who lived like a boy in the literature of the _Western
Frontier Penny Awful_, and who, coming to the store and perching himself
on the counter, would sometimes break out in remarks about how “Them
thar Indians got the better of ’em at last,” to the astonishment of the
“boys,” who imagined at first that he referred to Indians in the
locality, suggesting possibilities of a repetition of the great Oak Flat
uprising of 1850.

At the “top of the hill,” a mile and a half away, stood the “Yankee
Ranch,” kept by a bustling, uneasy, and rather uncomfortable man from
Massachusetts, aided by his good-natured, easy-going son-in-law. One
rainy winter’s day the “boys” congregated about Thompson’s store became
seized with a whim for the manufacture of little pasteboard men turning
grindstones, which, fastened to the stove, were impelled to action by
the ascending current of hot air. So they smoked their pipes, and
wrought all day until the area of stovepipe became thickly covered with
little pasteboard men busily turning pasteboard grindstones. Then,
George M. G., the son-in-law of the Yankee Ranch, came down the hill to
borrow an axe. George was of that temperament and inclination to be of
all things charmed with a warm stove on a cold, rainy day, a knot of
good fellows about it, a frequent pipe of tobacco, maybe an occasional
punch and the pleasing manufacture of hot-air-driven little pasteboard
men turning pasteboard grindstones. He forgot his axe--sat down and
began with the rest the manufacture of pasteboard men and grindstones.
And he kept on till a late hour of the night, and stayed at the Bar all
night and all the next day and that next night, until the stovepipe was
covered to its very top with little men, all working away for dear life
turning grindstones; and on the second day of his stay the exasperated
father-in-law suddenly appeared and delivered himself in impatient
invective with regard to such conduct on the part of a son-in-law sent
forty-eight hours previously to borrow an axe. Such was the circle oft
gathered on the long, rainy winter’s eve about the Thompson store stove.
All smoked. Keen Fann frequently dropped in. He stood respectfully, as
a heathen should in such a Christian assemblage, on its outer edge, or
humbly appropriated some unoccupied keg, and for the rest--grinned. From
his little piggy eyes to his double chin Keen’s face was a permanently
settled grin.

Keen Fann had learned about twenty words of English and would learn no
more. In his estimation, these twenty words, variously used, after a
sort of grammatical kaleidoscopic fashion, seemed adequate to convey
everything required. One of his presumed English expressions long
puzzled the boys. Asking the price of articles at the store he would
say: “Too muchee pollyfoot.” At last the riddle was correctly guessed.
He meant: “Too much profit.”

For protection Keen Fann built his house opposite the store. The
Mexicans were then attacking and robbing isolated bands of Chinamen. At
one bar a few miles below, then deserted by the whites, the Chinese had
inclosed their camp with a high stockade of logs. Yet one night they
were attacked. The Mexicans besieged their fortress for hours, peppering
them from the hillside with revolvers, and at last they broke through
the Mongolian works and bore off all their dust and a dozen or more
revolvers. Keen Fann’s castle was in dimensions not more than 12x15
feet, and in height two stories. Within it was partitioned off into
rooms not much larger than dry-goods boxes. The hallways were just wide
enough to squeeze through, and very dark. It was intensely labyrinthian,
and Keen was always making it more so by devising new additions. No
white man ever did know exactly where the structure began or ended. Keen
was a merchant, dealing principally in gin, fish, and opium. His store
was involved in this curious dwelling, all of his own construction. In
the store was a counter. Behind it there was just room for Keen to sit
down, and in front there was just room enough for the customer to turn
around. When Keen was the merchant he looked imposing in an immense pair
of Chinese spectacles. When he shook his rocker in the bank he took off
these spectacles. He was a large consumer of his own gin. I once asked
him the amount of his weekly allowance. “Me tink,” said he, “one gallun,
hap (half).” From the upper story of the castle protruded a huge
spear-head. It was made by the local blacksmith, and intended as a
menace to the Mexican bandits. As they grew bolder and more threatening,
Keen sent down to San Francisco and purchased a lot of old pawn-shop
revolvers. These being received, military preparation and drill went on
for several weeks by Keen and his forces. He practised at
target-shooting, aimed at the mark with both eyes shut, and for those in
its immediate vicinity with a most ominous and threatening waver of the
arm holding the weapon. It was prophesied that Keen would kill somebody
with that pistol. None ever expected that he would kill the proper
person. Yet he did. One night an alarm was given. Keen’s castle was
attacked. The “boys,” hearing the disturbance, grabbed their rifles and
pistols, and sallied from the store. The robbers, finding themselves in
a hornets’ nest, ran. By the uncertain light of a waning moon the Bar
was seen covered with Chinamen gabbling and wildly gesticulating. Over
the river two men were swimming. Keen, from the bank, pointed his
revolver at one, shut his eyes and fired. One of the men crawled out of
the water and tumbled in a heap among the boulders. The “boys” crossed,
and found there a strange white man, with Keen’s bullet through his
backbone.

I experienced about the narrowest escape of my life in a boat during a
freshet on the Tuolumne crossing. I counted myself a good river boatman,
and had just ferried over a Swett’s Bar miner. He had come to purchase a
gallon of the native juice of the grape, which was then grown, pressed
and sold at Red Mountain Bar. When he crossed with me he was loaded with
it. Some of it was outside of him in a demijohn and some of it was
inside. Indeed it was inside of us both. I set him across all right. On
returning, by taking advantage of a certain eddy, one could be rushed up
stream counter to the current coming down for a quarter of a mile, and
at a very rapid rate. It was very exciting thus to be carried in an
opposite direction, within ten feet of the great billowy swell coming
down. It was a sort of sliding down hill without the trouble of drawing
one’s sled up again. So I went up and down the stream. The Red Mountain
wine meantime was working. Night came on, a glorious moon arose over the
mountain tops, and I kept sliding up and down the Tuolumne. I became
more daring and careless. So that suddenly in the very fury of the
mid-stream billows I slipped off the stern sheets at a sudden dip of the
boat and fell into the river. I was heavily clad in flannels and mining
boots. Of my stay under water I recollect only the thought, “You’re in
for it this time. This is no common baptism.” The next I knew I was
clinging to a rock half a mile below the scene of the submergence. I
had been swept under water through the Willow Bar, the walls of whose
rocky channel, chiselled by the current of centuries, were narrower at
the top than on the river-bed, and through which the waters swept in a
succession of boils and whirlpools. Wet and dripping, I tramped to the
nearest cabin, a mile and a half distant, and stayed there that night.
Red Mountain Bar, on seeing the mishap, gave me up for lost--all but one
man, who was negative on that point for the reason, as he alleged, that
I was not destined to make the final exit by water. I reappeared the
next morning at the Bar. When I told the boys that I had been swept
through the Willow Bar they instituted comparisons of similarity in the
matter of veracity betwixt myself and Ananias of old. It was the current
impressions that no man could pass through the Willow Bar alive.

Chinese Camp, five miles distant, stood as the metropolis for Red
Mountain Bar. It contained but a few hundred people. Yet, in our
estimation at that time it bore the same relative importance that New
York does to some agricultural village a hundred miles way. Chinese Camp
meant restaurants, where we could revel in the luxury of eating a meal
we were not obliged to prepare ourselves, a luxury none can fully
appreciate save those who have served for years as their own cooks.
Chinese Camp meant saloons, palatial as compared with the Bar groggery;
it meant a daily mail and communication with the great world without; it
meant hotels, where strange faces might be seen daily; it meant,
perhaps, above all, the nightly fandango. When living for months and
years in such out-of-the-way nooks and corners as Red Mountain Bar, and
as were thousands of now forgotten and nameless flats, gulches, and bars
in California, cut off from all regular communication with the world,
where the occasional passage of some stranger is an event, the limited
stir and bustle of such a place as Chinese Camp assumed an increased
importance and interest. Chinese Camp Justice presided at our lawsuits.
Chinese Camp was the Mecca to which all hands resorted for the grand
blow-out at the close of the river mining season. With all their hard
work what independent times were those after all! True, claims were
uncertain as to yield; hopes of making fortunes had been given over. But
so long as $1.50 or $2 pickings remained on the banks men were
comparatively their own masters. There was none of the inexorable demand
of business consequent on situation and employment in the great city,
where, sick or well, the toilers must hie with machine-like regularity
at the early morning hour to their posts of labor. If the Red
Mountaineer didn’t “feel like work” in the morning he didn’t work. If he
preferred to commence digging and washing at ten in the morning instead
of seven, who should prevent him? If, after the morning labor, he
desired a _siesta_ till two in the afternoon, it was his to take.

Of what Nature could give there was much at the Bar to make pleasant
man’s stay on earth, save a great deal of cash. We enjoyed a mild
climate--no long, hard winters to provide against; a soil that would
raise almost any vegetable, a necessity or luxury, with very little
labor; grapes or figs, apples or potatoes; land to be had for the
asking; water for irrigation accessible on every hand; plenty of
pasture room; no crowding. A quarter of a section of such soil and
climate, within forty miles of New York City, would be worth millions.
Contrast such a land with the bleak hills about Boston, where half the
year is spent in a struggle to provide for the other half. Yet we were
all anxious to get away. Our heaven was not at Red Mountain. Fortunes
could not be digged there. We spent time and strength in a scramble for
a few ounces of yellow metal, while in the spring time the vales and
hillsides covered with flowers argued in vain that they had the greatest
rewards for our picks and shovels. But none listened. We grovelled in
the mud and stones of the oft-worked bank. Yearly it responded less and
less to our labors. One by one the “old-timers” left. The boarding-house
of Dutch Bill at the farther end of the Bar long stood empty, and the
meek-eyed and subtle Chinaman stole from its sides board after board;
the sides skinned off, they took joist after joist from the framework.
None ever saw them so doing. Thus silently and mysteriously, like a
melting snowbank, the great, ramshackle boarding house disappeared,
until naught was left save the chimney. And that also vanished brick by
brick. All of which material entered into the composition and
construction of that irregularly built, smoke-tanned Conglomerate of
Chinese huts clustered near the Keen Fann castle.

“Old Grizzly” McFarlane went away. So did Bloody Bill. So the Bar’s
population dwindled. Fewer travellers, dot-like, were seen climbing the
steep trail o’er Red Mountain. Miller, the Chinese Camp news-agent, who,
with mailbags well filled with the New York papers, had for years
cantered from Red Mountain to Morgan’s Bar, emptying his sack as he
went at the rate of fifty and twenty-five cents per sheet, paid the Bar
his last visit and closed out the newspaper business there forever. Then
the County Supervisors abolished it as an election precinct, and its
name no longer figured in the returns. No more after the vote was polled
and the result known did the active and ambitious partisan mount his
horse and gallop over the mountain to Sonora, the county seat, twenty
miles away, to deliver the official count, signed, sealed and attested
by the local Red Mountain Election Inspectors. Finally the Bar dwindled
to Thompson, Keen Fann and his Mongolian band. Then Thompson left. Keen
Fann grieved at losing his friend and protector. He came on the eve of
departure to the dismantled store. Tears were in his eyes. He presented
Thompson with a basket of tea and a silver half-dollar, and bade him
farewell in incoherent and intranslatable words of lamenting polyglot
English.




CHAPTER XVIII.

MY CALIFORNIA SCHOOL.


I was not confident of my ability to teach even a “common school” when
the situation was offered me in a little Tuolumne County mining camp. I
said so to my old friend, Pete H., who had secured me the position.
“Well,” said he, after a reflective pause, “do you retain a clear
recollection of the twenty-six letters of the alphabet? For if you do,
you are equal to any educational demand this camp will make on you.”

It was a reckless “camp.” No phase of life was viewed or treated
seriously. They did walk their horses to the grave slowly at a funeral,
but how they did race back!

It was legally necessary, however, that I should be examined as to my
ability by the school trustees. These were Dr. D., Bill K., a
saloon-keeper, and Tom J., a miner. I met them in the Justice’s office.
The doctor was an important appearing man, rotund, pompous,
well-dressed, and spectacled. He glared at me with an expression betwixt
sadness and severity. I saw he was to be the chief inquisitor. I
expected from him a searching examination, and trembled. It was years
since I had seen a school-book. I knew that in geography I was rusty and
in mathematics musty.

Before the doctor lay one thin book. It turned out to be a spelling
book. The doctor opened it, glared on me leisurely, and finally said:
“Spell cat.” I did so. “Spell hat.” I spelled. “Rat,” said the doctor,
with a look of explosive fierceness and in a tone an octave higher. I
spelled, and then remarked: “But, doctor, you surely must know that I
can spell words of one syllable?” “I don’t,” he shouted, and propounded
“mat” for me to spell, with an increase of energy in his voice, and so
went on until I had so spelled long enough to amuse him and the other
two trustee triflers. Then he shut the book, saying: “Young man, you’ll
do for our camp. I wouldn’t teach that school for $5,000 a year; and
there are two boys you’ll have for scholars that I advise you to kill,
if possible, the first week. Let’s all go over and take a drink.”

My school house was the church, built and paid for partly by the
gamblers and partly by the good people of Jimtown “for the use of all
sects” on Sundays, and for educational purposes on week days.

I was shut up in that little church six hours a day with sixty children
and youths, ranging from four to eighteen years of age. In summer it was
a fiercely hot little church. The mercury was always near 90 by noon,
and sometimes over 100, and you could at times hear the shingles split
and crack on the roof of the cathedral. A few years of interior
California summers’ suns will turn unpainted boards and shingles almost
as black as charcoal.

The majority of my pupils’ parents being from New England and North
America, they brought and carried into effect all their North American
ideas of education. The California summer heat is, I think, unfit for
educational purposes. It is too hot to herd sixty restless children
together six hours a day. They proved this in several cases. Some fell
sick suddenly. Some fainted. But this made no difference. The school
went on in all its misery. I sent a fainting child home one day, and the
father returned with it an hour afterward. He was fierce, and said he
wanted his child kept in school when he sent it to school.

This was in California’s early days. My scholars were the children of
the Argonauts, and in some cases had come out with them. There was then
no regular system of text-books. Publishers had not commenced making
fortunes by getting out a new school-book system every three years.

My scholars came, bringing a great variety of school-books. They brought
“Pike’s Arithmetic,” which had come over the plains, and “Smith’s
Geography,” which had sailed around Cape Horn. Seldom were two alike.
But the greatest variety lay in grammars. There was a regular museum of
English grammars, whose authors fought each other with different rules
and called the various parts of speech by different names. I accounted
for the great variety of grammars on the supposition that it is or was
the ambition of a large proportion of schoolmasters to write a work on
grammar before they died and say: “I have left another grammar to bless
and confuse posterity.”

Besides bringing grammars, most of the boys brought dogs. Dogs of many
breeds and sizes hovered around the school-house. They wanted frequently
to come in, and did often come in, to sneak under the seats and lay
themselves at their masters’ feet. I had frequently to kick or order
them out, and I noticed that whenever a dog was chased out he would
take the longest road to get out and under as many seats as possible,
in order to receive as many kicks as possible from the youthful owners
of the other dogs.

I could not so organize a battalion of ten different grammars as to act
in concert on my grammar class of twenty pupils. So I put them all on
the retired list and tried to teach this so-called “science” orally. I
chalked the rules on the blackboard, as well as the names of the
different parts of speech. I made my scholars commit these to memory,
standing, although I will not argue that memory takes any stronger grip
on a thing while the pupil stands. At last I taught a few with good
memories to “parse.” I worked hard with that grammar class, and was very
proud of their proficiency until I found that after months of this
drilling they neither spoke nor wrote any better English than before.
However, I lost nothing by this experience, for it helped me to the
conviction I have held to ever since, that the entire grammar system and
method does very little to make one habitually use correct language, and
that a taste for reading and constant association with correct
English-speaking people does a great deal. As for spending time in
“parsing,” I think it would be better to use that force in learning the
boy to shoe horses and the girl to make bread, or let the girl shoe the
horses if she wants to and the boy make the bread.

The labor of teaching the alphabet to ten infants, calling them up once
an hour “to say their letters,” is, in my estimation, greater than that
of swinging a pick in the surface gold “diggings.” I have tried both,
and infinitely prefer the pick. It is not so much work when you are
employed with them as when you are occupied with the other pupils. Then
these poor little alphabetical cherubs can do nothing but squirm on
their low benches, catch flies, pinch each other, make and project
spit-balls and hold up their hands for another drink of water. I could
not let them out of doors to play in the sand, where they should have
been, because the North American parent would have considered himself as
defrauded of a part of his infant’s schooling were they not imprisoned
the whole six hours.

Neither can you set a child to studying A or M or any other letter.
There is not an idea in A or B. During the two years of my
administration I wrought with one child who never could get successfully
beyond F. Her parents questioned my ability as a teacher. Some days she
would repeat the whole alphabet correctly. I would go home with a load
off my mind. The next day her mind would relapse into an alphabetical
blank after F. She grew to be an eyesore to me. The sight of her at last
made me sick.

I held public examinations every six months, and was careful to do all
the examining myself. An interloper among the audience I invited did me
great damage on one of these memorized performances by asking a simple
arithmetical question of the show-off geographical boy. The urchin was
brilliant in dealing with boundary lines, capes, and islands, but his
head was one that mathematics could not readily be injected into. On the
other hand, my specimen grammarian was as likely to describe an island
as a body of land surrounded--by land as by water. I had no heart to
find fault with this poor barefooted urchin who, when in class, was
always trying to stand on one leg like a crane, and sending his right
big toe on exploring scratching expeditions up his left trouser. He had
been born and brought up in an inland country, where no body of water
was to be seen save an occasional fleeting mud puddle; and what earthly
conception could he form of the ocean and its islands?

But the parents who attended these exhibitions of stuffed memories were
struck at the proficiency of the progeny, and retired with the
impression that their children knew a great deal because they had
parroted off so much that was all Greek to them; and after I had been in
this occupation a year I would sit in my empty theological school-house
when they had gone and try and convict myself as a profound humbug, and
one, too, compelled, in order to get a living, to encourage and foster a
system which had so much humbug in it.

The California schools were not then “graded.” They were conducted on
the “go-as-you-please” plan, sometimes going as the teachers pleased,
sometimes as the parents pleased, sometimes as the pupils pleased. The
parents of the youthful brains I was trying to develop into future
statesmen and presidents wanted me to teach many things. One father
wished his son taught Latin. It is bringing extremes pretty near each
other to teach Latin and A B C’s. But I “taught” the young man Latin as
I was “taught” many things at school. I started him committing to memory
the Latin declensions and conjugations, and then heard him “say his
lesson.” If he got anything out of it I didn’t know what it was, except
tough work. He never reached any translations of the classics, for
several reasons.

Another father was annoyed because I exercised his son mathematically in
what, in those days, were called “vulgar fractions.” “I don’t want,”
said he, “my son to have anything to do with fractions, anyway. They’re
no use in bizness. Ennything over half a cent we call a cent on the
books, and ennything under it we don’t call nothin’. But I want Thomas
to be well grounded in ‘tare and tret.’”

So I grounded Thomas in ‘tare and tret.’ He grew up, took to evil ways,
and was hung by a vigilance committee somewhere in Southern California.
A boy who stammered very badly was sent me. I was expected to cure him.
Five or six of my pupils were Mexicans, and spoke very little English.

One of my hardest trials was a great stout boy, so full of vitality that
he could not remain quiet at his desk. I could not blame him. He had
force enough inside of him to run a steam engine. It would have vent in
some direction. But it would not expend itself in “learning lessons.” He
would work his books into a mass of dog’s ears. His writing book was
ever in mourning with ink stains. His face was generally inky. His
inkstand was generally upset. He would hold a pen as he would a
pitchfork. He seemed also to give out his vitality when he came to
school and infect all the others with it. He was not a regular scholar.
He was sent only when it was an “off day” on his father’s “ranch.” In
the scholastic sense he learned nothing.

But that boy at the age of fifteen would drive his father’s two-horse
wagon, loaded with fruit and vegetables, 150 miles from California to
Nevada over the rough mountain roads of the Sierras, sell the produce
to the silver miners of Aurora and adjacent camps, and return safely
home. He was obliged in places to camp out at night, cook for himself,
look out for his stock, repair harness or wagon and keep an eye out for
skulking Indians, who, if not “hostile,” were not saints. When it came
to using the hand and the head together he had in him “go,” “gumption”
and executive ability, and none of my “teaching” put it where it was in
him, either. He may have grown up “unpolished,” but he is one of the
kind who are at this moment hiring polished and scholarly men to do work
for them on very small wages.

I do not despise “polish” and “culture” but is there not an education
now necessary which shall give the child some clearer idea of the manner
in which it must cope with the world in a few years? The land to-day is
full of “culture” at ten dollars a week. Culture gives polish to the
blade. But it is not the process which makes the hard, well-tempered
steel.

The “smartest” boy in my school gave me even more trouble than the son
of the rancher. He could commit to memory as much in ten minutes as the
others could in an hour, and the balance of the time he was working off
the Satanism with which he was filled. His memory was an omnivorous maw.
It would take in anything and everything with the smallest amount of
application. It would have required two-thirds of my time to feed this
voracious and mischievous little monster with books for his memory to
devour.

But he was not the boy to drive a team through a wild country and
dispose of the load in Nevada, though he could on such a trip have
committed to memory several hundred words per day on any subject,
whether he understood it or not.

My young lady pupils also gave me a great deal of trouble. They were
very independent, and for this reason: Girls, even of fifteen, were very
scarce then in the mines. So were women of any marriageable age. There
were ten men to one woman. The result was that anything humanly feminine
was very valuable, much sought after and made much of by men of all
ages. My girls of fifteen, as to life and association, were grown-up
women. Young miners and middle-aged, semi-baldheaded miners, who did not
realize how many of their years had slipped away since they came out
from the “States,” took these girls to balls and whirled them by night
over the dusty roads of Tuolumne County in dusty buggies.

It was difficult for one lone man, and he only a schoolmaster, to
enforce discipline with these prematurely matured children, who had an
average of two chances a month to marry, and who felt like any other
woman their power and influence with the other sex. Half of them did
have a prospective husband in some brawny pick-slinger, who never went
abroad without a battery of portable small artillery slung at his waist,
and who was half-jealous, half-envious of the schoolmaster for what he
considered the privilege of being in the same room with his future wife
six hours a day.

One needs to live in a country where there is a dearth of women to
realize these situations. When my school was dismissed at four o’clock
<small>P.M.</small>, all the unemployed chivalry of “Jimtown” massed on the street
corner at the Bella Union saloon to see this coveted bevy of California
rosebuds pass on their way home. The Bella Union, by the way, was only
a few yards from the church. Extremes got very close together in these
mining camps. But the frequenters of the Bella Union, who gambled all
night on the arid green baize of the monte table, had more than half
paid for that church, and, I infer, wanted it in sight so that no other
persuasion should run off with it. I was glad when these girls got
married and entered another school of life, where I knew within a year’s
time they were likely to have a master.

I was once “barred out” at the close of a summer term. This was a
fashion imported from the extreme southwestern part of what some call
“Our Beloved Union.” Returning from dinner I found the doors and windows
of the university closed against me. I parleyed at one of the windows a
few feet from the ground. I was met by a delegation of the two biggest
boys. They informed me I could get in by coming out with a disbursement
of $2.50, to treat the school to nuts, candies, and cakes. I did not
accede, smashed the window and went in. Most of the undergraduates went
suddenly out. I clinched with the biggest boy. The other, like a coward,
ran away. The two together could easily have mastered me. Order was
restored. The mutiny did not hang well together. It was not a good
“combine.” The Northern-bred scholars did not quite understand this
move, and did not really enter heartily into it. Their backing had been
forced by the two big boys, and therefore had not good stuff in it.

The big boy had a cut face. So had I. His still bigger brother met me a
few days after and wanted to pick a quarrel with me about the affair. A
quarrel with his class always lay within easy approach of knife or
pistol. Besides, I was a Yankee. He was a Texan. And this was in 1862,
when the two sections in California were neighbors, but not very warm
friends, and about equal in numbers.

I was discreet with this gentleman, if not valorous, and think under the
same circumstances now I should take the same course. I do not believe
in taking great risks with a ruffian because he abuses you.

My successor, poor fellow, did not get off as easily as I did. He
corrected the son of another gentleman from the South. The gentleman
called at the school-house the next day, asked him to the door and
cracked his skull with the butt of his revolver. The risks then of
imparting knowledge to the young were great. School teaching now in the
mines is, I imagine, a tame affair compared with that past, so full of
golden dreams and leaden realities.

If I could have taken that portion of my scholars who were beyond the A,
B, C business to a shady grove of live oaks near by and talked to them
for an hour or two a day, devoting each day to some special subject, at
the same time encouraging questions from them, I believe I could have
woke up more that was sleeping in their minds in a week than I did in a
month by the cut-and-dried system I was obliged to follow. I would have
taken them out of sight of the school-house, the desks and all thereunto
appertaining, which to most children suggests a species of imprisonment.
I think that amount of time and effort is enough in one day for both
teacher and pupil. It would not be trifling work if one’s heart was in
it, short as the time employed may seem, because a teacher must teach
himself to teach. Knowing a thing is not always being able to make it
plain to others. The gifted dunderhead who tried to teach me to play
whist commenced by saying: “Now that’s a heart, and hearts is trumps,
you know,” and went on with the game, deeming he had made things clear
enough for anybody.

Would not one topic to talk about be enough for one day? Take the motive
power of steam the first day, the cause of rain the second, the flight
of birds and their structure for flying the third, the making of soil
and its removal from mountain to plain the fourth, a talk on coal or
some other kind of mining the fifth, and so on. Would not subjects
continually suggest themselves to the interested teacher? And if you do
get one idea or suggestion per day in the scholar’s mind, is not that a
good day’s work? How many of us wise, grown-up people can retire at
night saying, “I have learned a new thing to-day?”

But I am theorizing. I have placed myself in the ranks of those
disagreeable, meddlesome people who are never satisfied with present
methods. So I will say that I do not imagine that my suggestions will
revolutionize our educational system, based rather heavily on the idea
that youth is the time, and the only time, to learn everything, and also
to learn a great many things at a time. In after years, when we settle
down to our work, we try, as a rule, to learn but one thing at a time.
How would a man stagger along if it was required of him five days out of
seven to learn a bit of painting, then of horseshoeing, then of
printing, and top off with a slice of elocution? It seems to me like an
overcrowding of the upper intellectual story.




CHAPTER XIX.

“JIMTOWN.”


On those hot July and August afternoons, when the air simmered all along
the heated earth, and I was trying to keep awake in my seminary on the
hill, and wrestling with the mercury at 100 deg. and my sixty polyglot
pupils, the grown up “boys” would be tilted back in their chairs under
the portico and against the cool brick wall of the Bella Union. They did
not work, but they spun yarns. How half the boys lived was a mystery--as
much a mystery, I do believe, to themselves as any one else. Some owned
quartz claims, some horses, and all ran regularly for office. They
belonged to the stamp of men who worked and mined in earlier times, but
come what might, they had resolved to work in that way no longer. And
when such resolve is accompanied by determination and an active,
planning, inventive brain, the man gets along somehow. It is speculation
that makes fortunes, and plan, calculation, and forethought for
speculation, require leisure of body. A hard-working, ten-hour-per-day
digging, delving miner works all his brains out through his fingers’
ends. He has none left to speculate with. When I was mining at Swett’s
Bar, there came one day to my cabin a long, lean, lank man looking for a
lost cow. The cow and the man belonged near Jacksonville, twelve miles
up the Tuolumne. I dined that man principally off some bread of my own
making, and I had the name then of making the best bread of any one in
the house, where I lived alone. After dinner the man sat himself down on
one boulder and I on another, and I asked him if he had a good claim.
That roused him to wrath. He had, it seems, just reached the last point
of his disgust for hard work and mining. Said he: “Don’t talk to me of a
good claim; don’t. It sounds like speaking of a good guillotine, or a
beautiful halter, or an elegant rack you’re about to be stretched on.”
He had gone through his probation of hard work with his hands and had
just resolved to let them rest and give his head a chance to speculate.
So he did. I don’t know that he ever met the cow again, but eight or
nine years after I met him in the Legislature of California. He sat in
the biggest chair there, and was Lieutenant-Governor of the State.

In 1860 the certain class of men of whom I speak were in a transition
state. They had left off working with their hands and they were waiting
for something to turn up on which to commence working with their heads.
While thus waiting they became boys and played. The climate and
surroundings were eminently favorable to this languid, loafing condition
of existence, no long, sharp winters forcing people to bestir themselves
and provide against its severities; little style to keep up; few
families to maintain; no disgrace for a man to cook his own victuals;
houses dropping to pieces; little new paint anywhere to make one’s eyes
smart; gates dropping from their hinges; few municipal improvements,
with accompanying heavy taxes, and that bright summer sun for months and
months shining over all and tempting everybody to be permanently tired
and seek the shade. The boys forgot their years; they dreamed away their
days; they gossipped all the cool night; they shook off dignity; they
played; they built waterwheels in the ditch running by the Bella Union
door; they instituted ridiculous fictions and converted them into
realities; they instituted a company for the importation of smoke in
pound packages into Jamestown; Muldoon was President and the “Doctor”
Secretary. It was brought by a steamer up Wood’s Creek; the steamer was
wrecked on a dam a mile below town; the company met day after day in old
Nielsen’s saloon to consult; the smoke was finally taken to Jamestown
and sold; the proceeds were stored in sacks at the express office; there
was an embezzlement consequent on the settlement; the money, all in
ten-cent pieces, was finally deposited in the big wooden mortar over
Baker’s drug store; this the “Doctor” was accused of embezzling, having
time after time climbed up the mortar and abstracted the funds dime
after dime and spent them for whiskey. Then came a lawsuit. Two mule
teams freighted with lawyers for the plaintiff and defendant were coming
from Stockton, and the Pound Package Smoke Company met day after day in
preparation for the great trial. This fiction lasted about four months,
and amused everybody except Captain James S----, an ex-Sheriff of the
county, who, being a little deaf, and catching from time to time words
of great financial import regarding the Pound Package Jamestown Smoke
Company, as they dropped from Muldoon’s and the “Doctor’s” mouths, and
being thereby time after time misled into a temporary belief that this
fiction was a reality, and so often becoming irritated at finding
himself ridiculously mistaken, burst out upon these two worthies one
day with all the wrath becoming the dignity of a Virginia gentleman, and
denounced them profanely and otherwise for their frivolity and
puerility.

Another specimen thinker and speculator of that era was Carroll. He,
too, had forever thrown aside pick and shovel, and when I met him he was
a confirmed “tilter-back” under the Bella Union portico. Carroll was the
theorist of Jamestown. He broached new ones daily; he talked them to
everybody in Jamestown, and after making clean work of that hamlet would
go up to Sonora and talk there, and lastly published them in the _Union
Democrat_. Said Carroll one Monday morning to the Presbyterian domine:
“Mr. H----, I heard your sermon yesterday on ‘Heaven.’ You argue, I
think, that heaven is really a place. I think it ought to be a place,
too. I’ve been thinking about it all night. I’m satisfied not only that
it is a place, but that I’ve got at the locality, or at least have
approximated to it. I’ve reasoned this out on purely scientific data,
and here they are. We have an atmosphere, and they say it is from
thirty-three to forty-five miles high. Angels only live in heaven, and
angels have wings. If angels have wings, it’s proof that they must have
an atmosphere to fly in. Now, the only atmosphere we are sure of is that
around the earth. Therefore, putting all these facts and conclusions
together, I’ve proved to myself that heaven must be from thirty-three to
forty-five miles from the ground we stand on.”

On commencing my pedagogical career, I rented a room of Carroll. He
owned at that time a quantity of real estate in Jamestown, some of
which, including the premises I occupied, was falling rapidly and
literally on his hands. The house I lived in was propped up several
feet from the ground. The neighbors’ chickens fed under this house from
the crumbs swept through the cracks in the floor. It was an easy house
to sweep clean. Rumor said that during my landlord’s occupancy of these
rooms many chickens had strangely disappeared, and that pistol shots had
been heard from the interior of the house. The floor cracks did show
powder marks, and there was an unaccountable quantity of feathers
blowing about the yard. In a conversation with my landlord he admitted
that his boomerang could beat a six-shooter in fetching a chicken. Then
he showed me his boomerang, which was of accidental construction, being
the only remaining leg and round of an oaken arm-chair. Properly shied,
he said, it would kill a chicken at twenty yards. French Joe, who kept
the grocery next to Keefe’s saloon, and it was in Jimtown a current
report that Carroll and Joe had once invited the Catholic priest, Father
A----, from Sonora to dinner; that the backbone of this dinner was a
duck; that at or about this time Mrs. Hale, five doors down the street,
had missed one of her flock of ducks; that on the morning of the dinner
in question a strong savor of parboiling duck permeated all that part of
Jamestown lying between Joe’s and Mrs. Hale’s; that Mrs. Hale smelt it;
that putting two and two--cause and effect and her own
suspicions--together, she armed herself with her bun-tormentor fork and
going from her back yard to the little outdoor kitchen in Joe’s back
yard found a pot over a fire and her presumed duck parboiling in it; and
that, transfixing this duck on her tormentor, she bore it home, and the
priest got no duck for dinner.

Carroll’s mortal aversion was the hog. His favorite occupation for ten
days in the early spring was gardening, and his front fence was illy
secured against hogs, for Carroll, though a man of much speculative
enterprise, was not one whose hands always seconded the work of his
head. There was not a completed thing on his premises, including a well
which he had dug to the depth of twelve feet and which he had then
abandoned forever. The hogs would break through his fence and root up
his roses, and the well caving in about the edges became a yawning gulf
in his garden, and during the rainy season it partly filled up with
water, and a hog fell in one night and, to Carroll’s joy, was drowned.

Men did their best in the dead of a rainy night to get the poor animal
out, but a hog is not a being possessed of any capacity for seconding or
furthering human attempts at his own rescue. So he drowned, and was
found the morning after a grand New Year’s ball at the Bella Union Hall
hanging by Joyce’s clothes-line over the middle of the street between
the Bella Union and the Magnolia. The next night they put him secretly
in the cart of a fish-peddler who had come up with salmon from the lower
San Joaquin, and this man unwittingly hauled the hog out of town.

About four weeks after this transaction, coming home one dark, rainy
night, I heard a great splashing in the well, and called out to Carroll
that he had probably caught another hog. He came out with a lantern and
both of us peering over the brink of the cavity saw, not as we expected,
a hog, but a man, a friend of Carroll’s, up to his chest in the water.
He was a miner from Campo Seco, who, on visiting Jimtown on one of his
three months periodical sprees, had called on Carroll, and on leaving
had mistaken the route to the gate and walked into the well. We fished
him out with much difficulty, and on gaining the brink he came near
precipitating us and himself into the unfinished chasm through the
unsteadiness of his perpendicular. As we turned to leave, looking down
the well by the lantern’s flash I saw what appeared to be another man
half floating on the surface. There was a coat and at the end of it a
hat, and I remarked, “Carroll, there is another man down your well.” The
rescued miner looked down also, and chattered as he shivered with cold,
“Why, s-s-so there is!” We were really horrified until we discovered the
supposed corpse to be only Lewellyn’s coat with his hat floating at the
end of it, which he had taken off in his endeavor to clamber out.

Carroll, unfortunately, allowed his mind to wander and stray overmuch in
the maze of theological mysteries and its (to him) apparent
contradictions. He instituted a private and personal quarrel between
himself and his Creator, and for years he obtruded his quarrel into all
manner of places and assemblages. He arrived at last at that point where
many do under similar circumstances--a belief in total annihilation
after death, and this serving to make him more miserable than ever, his
only relief was to convert others to the same opinion and make them as
wretched as himself. Occasionally he succeeded. He came to me one day
and on his face was the grin of a fiend. “I’ve got Cummings,” said he.
“Cummings thought this morning he was a good Methodist, but I’ve been
laboring with him for weeks. I’ve convinced him of the falsity of it
all. I knocked his last plank of faith from under him to-day. He hasn’t
now a straw to cling to, and he’s as miserable as I am.”

“But with Mullins,” he remarked afterward, “I’ve slipped up on him. I
wrought three weeks with Mullins; took him through the Bible, step by
step--unconverted him steadily as we went along--got him down to the
last leaf in the last chapter of the last book of Revelations, and
there, fool like, I let up on him to go home to supper. And do you know
when I tackled him next morning, to close out Mullins’ faith in the
religion of his fathers, I found Mullins, in my absence, had got scared.
He’d galloped in belief way back to Genesis, and now, I’ve got all that
job to do over again.”

There was a great deal of life in those little mining camps in Tuolumne
County like Jamestown. They might not have the population of a single
block in New York City, but there was a far greater average of mental
activity, quickness, and intelligence to the man, at least so far as
getting the spice out of life was concerned.

The social life of a great city may be much more monotonous through that
solitude imposed by great numbers living together. Everybody at these
camps knew us, and we knew everybody, and were pretty sure of meeting
everybody we knew. In the town one is not sure of meeting an
acquaintance socially, save by appointment. There are few loafing or
lounging resorts; people meet in a hurry and part in a hurry. Here in
New York I cross night and morning on a ferry with five hundred people,
and of these 495 do not speak or know each other.

Four hundred of these people will sit and stare at each other for half
an hour, and all the time wish they could talk with some one. And many
of these people are so meeting, so crossing, so staring, and so longing
to talk year in and year out. There is no doctor’s shop where the
impromptu symposium meets daily in the back room, as ours did at Doc
Lampson’s in Montezuma, or Baker’s in Jamestown, or Dr. Walker’s in
Sonora. There’s no reception every evening at the Camp grocery as there
used to be at “Bill Brown’s” in Montezuma. There’s no lawyer’s office,
when he feels privileged to drop in as we did at Judge Preston’s in
Jamestown, or Judge Quint’s in Sonora. There’s no printing office and
editorial room all in one on the ground floor whereinto the “Camp
Senate,” lawyer, Judge, doctor, merchant and other citizens may daily
repair in the summer’s twilight, tilted back in the old hacked arm
chairs on the front portico, and discuss the situation as we used to
with A. N. Francisco of the _Union Democrat_ in Sonora, and as I presume
the relics of antiquity and “’49” do at that same office to-day. These
are a few of the features which made “Camp” attractive. These furnished
the social anticipations which lightened our footsteps over those miles
of mountain, gulch, and flat. Miles are nothing, distance is nothing,
houses a mile apart and “Camps” five miles apart are nothing when people
you know and like live in those camps and houses at the end of those
miles. An evening at the Bella Union saloon in “Jimtown” was a circus.
Because men of individuality, character, and originality met there. They
had something to say. Many of them had little to do, and, perhaps, for
that very reason their minds the quicker took note of so many of those
little peculiarities of human nature, which when told, or hinted, or
suggested prove the sauce piquant to conversation.

When Brown, the lawyer, was studying French and read his Telemaque aloud
by his open office window in such a stentorian voice as to be heard over
a third of the “camp,” and with never a Frenchman at hand to correct his
pronunciation, which he manufactured to suit himself as he went along,
it was a part of the Bella Union circus to hear “Yank” imitate him. When
old Broche, the long, thin, bald-headed French baker, who never would
learn one word of English, put on his swallow-tailed Sunday coat, which
he had brought over from La Belle France, and lifted up those coat tails
when he tripped over the mud-puddles as a lady would her skirts, it was
a part of the Bella Union circus to see “Scotty” mimic him. When John
S----, the Virginian, impressively and loudly swore that a Jack-rabbit
he had killed that day leaped twenty-five feet in the air on being shot,
and would then look around the room as if he longed to find somebody who
dared dispute his assertion, while his elder brother, always at his
elbow in supporting distance, also glared into the eyes of the company,
as though he also longed to fight the somebody who should dare discredit
“Brother John’s” “whopper,” it was a part of the circus to see the
“boys” wink at each other when they had a chance. When one heard and saw
so many of every other man’s peculiarities, oddities, and mannerisms,
save his own, set off and illustrated while the man was absent, and knew
also that his own, under like circumstances, had been or would be
brought out on exhibition, it made him feel that it was somewhat
dangerous to feel safe on the slim and slippery ice of
self-satisfaction and self-conceit. People in great cities haven’t so
much time to make their own fun and amusement, as did the residents of
so many of those lazy, lounging, tumbling-down, ramshackle “camps” of
the era of “1863” or thereabouts.

People in the city have more of their fun manufactured for them at the
theatres of high and low degree. Yet it was wonderful how in “camp” they
managed to dig so many choice bits and specimens out of the vein of
varied human nature which lay so near them. Whenever I visited “Jimtown”
my old friend Dixon would take me into his private corner to tell me
“the last” concerning a character who was working hard on an unabridged
copy of Webster’s Dictionary in the endeavor to make amends for a woeful
lack of grammatical knowledge, the result of a neglected education.
“He’s running now on two words,” Dixon would say, “and these are
‘perseverance’ and ‘assiduity.’ We hear them forty times a day, for he
lugs them in at every possible opportunity, and, indeed, at times when
there is no opportunity. He came to business the other morning a little
unwell, and alluded to his stomach as being ‘in a chaotic state.’ And,
sir, he can spell the word ‘particularly’ with six i’s. How he does it I
can’t tell; but he can.”




CHAPTER XX.

THE ROMANCE OF AH SAM AND HI SING.


The culminating events of the following tale occurred in “Jimtown”
during my pedagogical career, and I was an indefatigable assistant in
the details as below stated.

Ah Sam loved Miss Hi Sing. Ah Sam was by profession a cook in a
California miners’ boarding house and trading post combined, at a little
mining camp on the Tuolumne River. Following minutely the culinary
teachings of his employer, having no conception of cooking, save as a
mere mechanical operation--dead to the pernicious mental and physical
effect which his ill-dressed dishes might have on the minds and stomachs
of those he served--Ah Sam, while dreaming of Hi Sing, fried tough beef
still tougher in hot lard, poisoned flour with saleratus, and boiled
potatoes to the last extreme of soddenness, all of which culinary
outrages promoted indigestion among those who ate; and this indigestion
fomented a general irritability of temper--from whence Swett’s Camp
became noted for its frequent sanguinary moods, its battles by midnight
in street and bar-room, with knife and six-shooter, and, above all, for
its burying ground, of which the inhabitants truthfully boasted that not
an inmate had died a natural death.

Hi Sing was the handmaid of old Ching Loo. Her face was broad, her nose
flat, her girth extensive, her gait a waddle, her attire a blue sacque
reaching from neck to knee, blue trousers, brass rings on wrist and
ankle, and wooden shoes, whose clattering heels betrayed their owner’s
presence, even as the shaken tail of the angry rattlesnake doth his
unpleasant proximity. She had no education, no manners, no
accomplishments, no beauty, no grace, no religion, no morality; and for
this and more Ah Sam loved her. Hi Sing was virtually a slave, having
several years previously, with many other fair and fragile sisters, been
imported to California by Ching Loo; and not until meeting Ah Sam did
she learn that it was her right and privilege in this land of occasional
laws and universal liberty to set up for herself, become her own
mistress and marry and unmarry whenever opportunity offered.

But Ching Loo had noticed, with a suspicious eye, the growing intimacy
between Ah Sam and Hi Sing; and arguing therefrom results unprofitable
to himself, he contrived one night to have the damsel packed off to
another town, which happened at that time to be my place of residence;
and it is for this reason that the woof of my existence temporarily
crossed that of Ah Sam and Hi Sing.

Ah Sam following up his love, and discovering in me an old friend, who
had endured and survived a whole winter of his cookery at Swett’s Bar,
told me his troubles; and I, resolving to repay evil with good,
communicated the distressed Mongolian’s story to my chosen and
particular companion, a lean and cadaverous attorney, with whom fees had
ceased to be angels’ visits, and who was then oscillating and hovering
between two plans--one to run for the next State Legislature; the other
to migrate to Central America, and found a new republic. Attorney, Spoke
on hearing Ah Sam’s case, offered to find the maid, rescue her from her
captors, and marry her to him permanently and forever in consideration
of thirty American dollars; to which terms the Mongolian assenting,
Spoke and myself, buckling on our arms and armor, proceeded to beat up
the filthy purlieus of “Chinatown;” and about midnight we found the
passive Hi Sing hidden away in a hen-coop, whither she had been conveyed
by the confederates of Ching Loo.

We bore Hi Sing--who was considerably alarmed, neither understanding our
language nor our purpose--to Spoke’s office, and then it being necessary
to secure the services of a magistrate in uniting the couple, I departed
to seek the Justice of the Peace, who was still awake--for Justice
rarely slept in camp at that hour, but was commonly engaged at the Bella
Union playing poker, whilst Spoke sought after the groom, Ah Sam, whom
he found in a Chinese den stupidly drunk from smoking opium, having
taken such means to wear the edge off his suspense while we were
rescuing his affianced. Not only was he stupidly but perversely drunk;
but he declared in imperfect English that he had concluded not to marry
that night, to which observation Attorney Spoke, becoming profane,
jerked him from the cot whereon he lay, and grasping him about the neck
with a strangulating hold, bore him into the street and toward his
office, intimating loudly that this business had been proceeded with too
far to be receded from, and that the marriage must be consummated that
night with or without the consent of the principals. Ah Sam resigned
himself to matrimony. The office was reached, the door opened and out in
the darkness bolted the bride, for she knew not what these preparations
meant, or whether she had fallen among friends or enemies. After a
lively chase we cornered and caught her; and having thus at last brought
this refractory couple together we placed them in position, and the
Justice commenced the ceremony by asking Hi Sing if she took that man
for her lawful wedded husband, which interrogatory being Chaldaic to
her, she replied only by an unmeaning and unspeculative stare. Spoke,
who seemed destined to be the soul and mainspring of this whole affair,
now threw light on the Mongolian intellect by bringing into play his
stock of Chinese English, and translating to her the language of the
Justice thus: “You like ’um he, pretty good?” Upon which her face
brightened, and she nodded assent. Then turning to the groom, he called
in a tone fierce and threatening, “You like ’um she?” and Ah Sam--who
was now only a passive object in the hands of Spoke, forced and
galvanized into matrimony--dared not do otherwise than give in his
adhesion, upon which the Justice pronounced them man and wife; whereupon
two Virginians present with their violins (all Virginians fiddle and
shoot well) struck up the “Arkansas Traveller;” and the audience--which
was now large, every bar-room in Jamestown having emptied itself to
witness our Chinese wedding--inspired by one common impulse, arose and
marched seven times about the couple. Ah Sam was now informed that he
was married “American fashion,” and that he was free to depart with his
wedded encumbrance. But Ah Sam, whose intoxication had broken out in
full acquiescence with these proceedings, now insisted on making a
midnight tour of all the saloons in camp, and treating everybody to the
deathly whiskey vended by them, to which the crowd--who never objected
to the driving of this sort of nails in their own coffins--assented, and
the result of it was (Ah Sam spending his money very freely) that when
daylight peeped over the eastern hills the Bella Union saloon was still
in full blast; and while the Justice of the Peace was winning Spoke’s
thirty hard-earned dollars in one corner, and the two Virginians still
kept the “Arkansas Traveller” going on their violins in another, Stephen
Scott (afterward elected to Congress) was weeping profusely over the
bar, and on being interrogated as to the cause of his sadness by General
Wyatt, ex-member of the State Senate, Scott replied that he could never
hear played the air of “Home, Sweet Home” without shedding tears.

Ah Sam departed with his bride in the morning, and never were a man’s
prospects brighter for a happy honeymoon until the succeeding night,
when he was waylaid by a band of disguised white men in the temporary
service and pay of old Ching Loo; and he and Hi Sing were forced so far
apart that they never saw each other again.

Ah Sam returned to the attorney, apparently deeming that some help might
be obtained in that quarter; but Spoke intimated that he could no longer
assist him, since it was every man’s special and particular mission to
keep his own wife after being married; although he added, for Ah Sam’s
comfort, that this was not such an easy matter for the Americans
themselves, especially in California.

Upon this Ah Sam apparently determined to be satisfied with his brief
and turbulent career in matrimony; and betaking himself again to Swett’s
Bar cooked in such a villainous fashion and desperate vigor, finding
thereby a balm for an aching heart, that in a twelvemonth several
stalwart miners gave up their ghosts through indigestion, and the little
graveyard on the red hill thereby lost forever its distinctive character
of affording a final resting place only to those who had died violent
deaths.




CHAPTER XXI.

ON A JURY.


Year after year, and term after term, the great case of Table Mountain
Tunnel vs. New York Tunnel, used to be called in the Court held at
Sonora, Tuolumne County. The opposing claims were on opposite sides of
the great mountain wall, which here described a semicircle. When these
two claims were taken up, it was supposed the pay streak followed the
Mountain’s course; but it had here taken a freak to shoot straight
across a flat formed by the curve. Into this ground, at first deemed
worthless, both parties were tunnelling. The farther they tunnelled, the
richer grew the pay streak. Every foot was worth a fortune. Both claimed
it. The law was called upon to settle the difficulty. The law was glad,
for it had then many children in the county who needed fees. Our lawyers
ran their tunnels into both of these rich claims, nor did they stop
boring until they had exhausted the cream of that pay streak. Year after
year, Table Mountain vs. New York Tunnel Company was tried, judgment
rendered first for one side and then for the other, then appealed to the
Supreme Court, sent back, and tried over, until, at last, it had become
so encumbered with legal barnacles, parasites, and cobwebs, that none
other than the lawyers knew or pretended to know aught of the rights of
the matter. Meantime, the two rival companies kept hard at work, day
and night. Every ounce over the necessary expense of working their
claims and feeding and clothing their bodies, went to maintain lawyers.
The case became one of the institutions of the county. It outlived
several judges and attorneys. It grew plethoric with affidavits and
other documentary evidence. Men died, and with their last breath left
some word still further to confuse the great Table Mountain vs. New York
Tunnel case. The county town throve during this yearly trial. Each side
brought a small army of witnesses, who could swear and fill up any and
every gap in their respective chains of evidence. It involved the
history, also, of all the mining laws made since “’49.” Eventually,
jurors competent to try this case became very scarce. Nearly every one
had “sat on it,” or had read or heard or formed an opinion concerning
it, or said they had. The Sheriff and his deputies ransacked the hills
and gulches of Tuolumne for new Table Mountain vs. New York Tunnel
jurors. At last, buried in an out-of-the-way gulch, they found me. I was
presented with a paper commanding my appearance at the county town, with
various pains and penalties affixed, in case of refusal. I obeyed. I had
never before formed the twelfth of a jury. In my own estimation, I rated
only as the twenty-fourth. We were sworn in: sworn to try the case to
the best of our ability; it was ridiculous that I should swear to this,
for internally I owned I had no ability at all as a juror. We were put
in twelve arm-chairs. The great case was called. The lawyers, as usual,
on either side, opened by declaring their intentions to prove themselves
all right and their opponents all wrong. I did not know which was the
plaintiff, which the defendant. Twenty-four witnesses on one side swore
to something, to anything, to everything; thirty-six on the other swore
it all down again. They thus swore against each other for two days and a
half. The Court was noted for being an eternal sitter. He sat fourteen
hours per day. The trial lasted five days. Opposing counsel, rival
claimants, even witnesses, all had maps, long, brilliant, parti-colored
maps of their claims, which they unrolled and held before us and swung
defiantly at each other. The sixty witnesses testified from 1849 up to
1864. After days of such testimony, as to ancient boundary lines and
ancient mining laws, the lawyers on either side, still more to mystify
the case, caucused the matter over and concluded to throw out about half
of such testimony as being irrelevant. But they could not throw it out
of our memories. The “summing up” lasted two days more. By this time, I
was a mere idiot in the matter. I had, at the start, endeavored to keep
some track of the evidence, but they managed to snatch every clue away
as fast as one got hold of it. We were “charged” by the judge and sent
to the jury room. I felt like both a fool and a criminal. I knew I had
not the shadow of an opinion or a conclusion in the matter. However, I
found myself not alone. We were out all night. There was a stormy time
between the three or four jurymen who knew or pretended to know
something of the matter. The rest of us watched the controversy, and, of
course, sided with the majority. And, at last, a verdict was agreed
upon. It has made so little impression on my mind that I forget now whom
it favored. It did not matter. Both claims were then paying well, and
this was a sure indication that the case would go to the Supreme Court.
It did. This was in 1860. I think it made these yearly trips up to 1867.
Then some of the more obstinate and combative members of either claim
died, and the remainder concluded to keep some of the gold they were
digging instead of paying it out to fee lawyers. The Table Mountain vs.
New York Tunnel case stopped. All the lawyers, save two or three,
emigrated to San Francisco or went to Congress. I gained but one thing
from my experience in the matter--an opinion. It may or may not be
right. It is that juries in most cases are humbugs.




CHAPTER XXII.

SOME CULINARY REMINISCENCES.


I lived once with an unbalanced cook. Culinarily he was not self-poised.
He lacked judgment. He was always taking too large cooking contracts. He
was for a time my partner. He was a lover of good living and willing to
work hard for it over a cook stove. He would for a single Sunday’s
dinner plan more dishes than his mind could eventually grasp or his
hands handle. And when he had exhausted the whole of the limited
gastronomical repertoire within our reach he would be suddenly inspired
with a troublesome propensity to add hash to the programme. In cooking,
as I have said, he lost his balance. His imagination pictured more
possibilities than his body had strength to carry out. So busied in
getting up a varied meal, he would in a few minutes’ leisure attempt to
shave himself or sew on shirt or pantaloon buttons. This put too many
irons in the fire. A man who attempts to shave while a pot is boiling
over or a roast requiring careful watching is in the oven, will neither
shave nor cook well. He will be apt to leave lather where it is not
desirable, as he sometimes did. Trousers-buttons are not good in soup. I
do not like to see a wet shaving brush near a roast ready to go into the
oven. The æsthetic taste repudiates these hints at combination. Then
sometimes, in the very crisis of a meal, he became flurried. He rushed
about in haste overmuch, with a big spoon in one hand and a giant fork
in the other, looking for missing stove-covers and pot-lids, seldom
found until the next day, and then in strange places. Nothing is well
done which is done in a hurry, especially cooking. Some argue that men
and women put their magnetic and sympathetic influences in the food they
prepare. If a man kneading bread be in a bad temper he puts bad temper
in the bread, and that bad temper goes into the person who eats it. Or
if he be dyspeptic he kneads dyspepsia in his dough. It is awful to
think what we may be eating. I think the unbalanced cook puts flurries
in his stews, for I felt sometimes as if trying to digest a whirlwind
after eating this man’s dinners. He ruled the house. I was his
assistant. I was his victim. I was the slave of the spit, and the peon
of the frying-pan. When his energies culminated and settled on hash,
when already the stove-top was full of dishes in preparation, I was
selected as the proper person to chop the necessary ingredients. We had
neither chopping-knife nor tray. The mining stores then did not contain
such luxuries. This to him made no difference. He was a man who rose
superior to obstacles, circumstances, and chopping trays. He said that
hash could be chopped with a hatchet on a flat board. He planned; I
executed. He theorized and invented; I put his inventions in practice.
But never successfully could I chop a mass of beef and boiled potatoes
with a hatchet on a flat board. The ingredients during the operation
would expand and fall over the edge of the board. Or the finer particles
would violently fly off at each cut of the hatchet, and lodge on the
beds or other unseemly places.

I do not favor a dinner of many courses, especially if it falls to my
lot to prepare these courses. Few cooks enjoy their own dinners. For two
reasons: First--They eat them in anticipation. This nullifies the flavor
of the reality. Second--The labor of preparation fatigues the body and
takes the keen edge from the appetite. You are heated, flushed,
exhausted, and the nerves in a twitter. The expected relish palls and
proves a myth. Ladies who cook will corroborate my testimony on this
point. It is a great, merciful and useful vent for a woman that a man
can come forward able and willing to sympathize with her in regard to
this and other trials of domestic life. Having kept my own house for
years I know whereof I speak. Two hours’ work about a hot stove exhausts
more than four hours’ work out of doors. Americans in Europe are shocked
or pretend to be at sight of women doing men’s work in the fields. They
are much better off than the American woman, five-sixths of whose life
is spent in the kitchen. The outdoor woman shows some blood through the
tan on her cheeks. The American kitchen housewife is sallow and bleached
out. I have in Vienna seen women mixing mortar and carrying bricks to
the sixth story of an unfinished house, and laying bricks, too. These
women were bare-legged to the knee, and their arms and legs were
muscular. They mixed their mortar with an energy suggestive of fearful
consequences to an ordinary man of sedentary occupations. They could
with ease have taken such a man and mixed him with their mortar. Coarse,
were they? Yes, of course they were. But if I am to choose between a
coarse woman, physically speaking, and one hot-housed and enervated to
that extent that she cannot walk half a mile in the open air, but
requires to be hauled, I choose the coarse-grained fibre.

I once lived near a literary cook. It was to him by a sort of natural
heritage that fell the keeping of the Hawkins Bar Library, purchased by
the “boys” way back in the <small>A.D.</small> eighteen hundred and fifties. The
library occupied two sides of a very small cabin, and the man who kept
it lived on or near the other two sides. There, during nights and rainy
days, he read and ate. His table, a mere flap or shelf projecting from
the wall, was two-thirds covered with books and papers, and the other
third with a never-cleared-off array of table furniture, to wit: A tin
plate, knife, fork, tin cup, yeast-powder can, pepper-box, ditto full of
sugar, ditto full of salt, a butter-plate, a bottle of vinegar and
another of molasses, and may be, on occasions, one of whiskey. On every
book and paper were more or less of the imprint of greasy fingers, or
streaks of molasses. The plate, owing to the almost entire absence of
the cleansing process, was even imbedded in a brownish, unctuous
deposit, the congealed oleaginous overflow of months of meals. There he
devoured beef and lard, bacon and beans and encyclopedias, Humboldt’s
“Cosmos” and dried apples, novels and physical nourishment at one and
the same time. He went long since where the weary cease from troubling,
and the wicked, let us hope, are at rest. Years ago, passing through the
deserted Bar, I peeped in at Morgan’s cabin. A young oak almost barred
the door, part of the roof was gone, the books and shelves had vanished;
naught remained but the old miner’s stove and a few battered cooking
utensils. I had some thought at the time of camping for the night on
the Bar, but this desolate cabin and its associations of former days
contrasted with the loneliness and solitude of the present proved too
much for me. I feared the possible ghost of the dead librarian, and left
for a populated camp. Poor fellow! While living, dyspepsia and he were
in close embrace. A long course of combined reading and eating ruined
his digestion. One thing at a time; what a man does he wants to do with
all his might.

Eggs in the early days were great luxuries. Eggs then filled the place
of oysters. A dish of ham and eggs was one of the brilliant
anticipations of the miner resident in some lonesome gulch when footing
it to the nearest large camp. A few enterprising and luxurious miners
kept hens and raised chickens. The coons, coyotes, and foxes were
inclined to “raise” those chickens too. There was one character on
Hawkins Bar whose coop was large and well stocked. Eggs were regularly
on his breakfast-table, and he was the envy of many. Generous in
disposition, oft he made holiday presents of eggs to his friends. Such a
gift was equivalent to that of a turkey in older communities. One foe to
this gentleman’s peace and the security of his chickens alone existed.
That foe was whiskey. For whenever elevated and cheered by the cup which
does inebriate, he would in the excess of his royal nature call his
friends about him, even after midnight, and slay and eat his tenderest
chickens. Almost so certain as Kip got on a spree there came a feast and
consequent midnight depletion of his chicken-coop--a depletion that was
mourned over in vain when soberer and wiser counsels prevailed. The
pioneer beefsteaks of California were in most cases cut from bulls
which had fought bull-fights all the way up from Mexico. Firm in fibre
as they were, they were generally made firmer still by being fried in
lard. The meat was brought to the table in a dish covered with the
dripping in which it had hardened. To a certain extent the ferocity and
combativeness of human nature peculiar to the days of “’49” were owing
to obstacles thrown in the way of easy digestion by bull beef fried to
leather in lard. Bad bread and bull beef did it. The powers of the human
system were taxed to the uttermost to assimilate these articles. The
assimilation of the raw material into bone, blood, nerve, muscle, sinew
and brain was necessarily imperfect. Bad whiskey was then called upon
for relief. This completed the ruin. Of course men would murder each
other with such warring elements inside of them.

The ideas of our pioneer cooks and housekeepers regarding quantities,
kinds, and qualities of provisions necessary to be procured for longer
or shorter periods, were at first vague. There was an Argonaut who
resided at Truetts’ Bar, and, in the fall of 1850, warned by the dollar
a pound for flour experience of the past winter, he resolved to lay in a
few months’ provisions. He was a lucky miner. Were there now existing on
that bar any pioneers who lived there in ’49, they would tell you how he
kept a barrel of whiskey in his tent on free tap. Such men are scarce
and win name and fame. Said he to the Bar trader when the November
clouds began to signal the coming rains, “I want to lay in three months’
provisions.” “Well, make out your order,” said the storekeeper. This
troubled G----. At length he gave it verbally thus: “I guess I’ll have
two sacks of flour, a side of bacon, ten pounds of sugar, two pounds of
coffee, a pound of tea, and--and--a barrel of whiskey.”

My own experience taught me some things unconsidered before. Once, while
housekeeping, I bought an entire sack of rice. I had no idea then of the
elastic and durable properties of rice. A sack looked small. The rice
surprised me by its elasticity when put on to boil. Rice swells
amazingly. My first pot swelled up, forced off the lid and oozed over.
Then I shoveled rice by the big spoonful into everything empty which I
could find in the cabin. Still it swelled and oozed. Even the washbasin
was full of half-boiled rice. Still it kept on. I saw then that I had
put in too much--far too much. The next time I tried half the quantity.
That swelled, boiled up, boiled over and also oozed. I never saw such a
remarkable grain. The third time I put far less to cook. Even then it
arose and filled the pot. The seeds looked minute and harmless enough
before being soaked. At last I became disgusted with rice. I looked at
the sack. There was the merest excavation made in it by the quantity
taken out. This alarmed me. With my gradually decreasing appetite for
rice, I reflected and calculated that it would take seven years on that
Bar ere I could eat all the rice in that sack. I saw it in imagination
all boiled at once and filling the entire cabin. This determined my
resolution. I shouldered the sack, carried it back to the store and
said: “See here! I want you to exchange this cereal for something that
won’t swell so in the cooking. I want to exchange it for something which
I can eat up in a reasonable length of time.”

The storekeeper was a kind and obliging man. He took it back. But the
reputation, the sting of buying an entire sack of rice remained. The
“boys” had “spotted” the transaction. The merchant had told them of it.
I was reminded of that sack of rice years afterward.




CHAPTER XXIII.

THE COPPER FEVER.


In 1862-63 a copper fever raged in California. A rich vein had been
found in Stanislaus County. A “city” sprung up around it and was called
Copperopolis. The city came and went inside of ten years. When first I
visited Copperopolis, it contained 3,000 people. When I last saw the
place, one hundred would cover its entire population.

But the copper fever raged in the beginning. Gold was temporarily thrown
in the shade. Miners became speedily learned in surface copper
indications. The talk far and wide was of copper “carbonates,” oxides,
“sulphurets,” “gosson.” Great was the demand for scientific works on
copper. From many a miner’s cabin was heard the clink of mortar and
pestle pounding copper rock, preparatory to testing it. The pulverized
rock placed in a solution of diluted nitric acid, a knife blade plunged
therein and coming out coated with a precipitation of copper was
exhibited triumphantly as a prognosticator of coming fortune from the
newly found lead. The fever flew from one remote camp to another. A
green verdigris stain on the rocks would set the neighborhood copper
crazy. On the strength of that one “surface indication” claims would be
staked out for miles, companies formed, shafts in flinty rock sunk and
cities planned. Nitric acid came in great demand. It was upset. It
yellowed our fingers, and burned holes in our clothes. But we loved it
for what it might prove to us. A swarm of men learned in copper soon
came from San Francisco. They told all about it, where the leads should
commence, in what direction they should run, how they should “dip,” what
would be the character of the ore, and what it would yield. We, common
miners, bowed to their superior knowledge. We worshipped them. We
followed them. We watched their faces as they surveyed the ground
wherein had been found a bit of sulphuret or a green stained ledge, to
get at the secret of their superior right under ground. It took many
months, even years for the knowledge slowly to filter through our brains
that of these men nine-tenths had no practical knowledge of copper or
any other mining. The normal calling of one of the most learned of them
all, I found out afterward to be that of a music teacher. Old S----, the
local geologist of Sonora, who had that peculiar universal genius for
tinkering at anything and everything from a broken wheelbarrow to a
clock and whose shop was a museum of stones, bones and minerals
collected from the vicinity, “classified,” and named, some correctly and
some possibly otherwise, took immediately on himself the mantle of a
copper prophet, and saw the whole land resting on a basis of rich copper
ore. He advised in season and out of season, in his shop and in the
street, that all men, and especially young men, betake themselves to
copper mining. It was, he said, a sure thing. It needed only pluck,
patience, and perseverance. “Sink,” he said, “sink for copper. Sink
shafts wherever indications are found. Sink deep. Don’t be discouraged
if the vein does not appear at twenty, thirty, sixty or an hundred
feet.”

And they did sink. For several years they sunk shafts all over our
county and in many another counties. In remote gulches and cañons they
sunk and blasted and lived on pork and beans week in and week out and
remained all day underground, till the darkness bleached their faces.
They sunk and sunk and saw seldom the faces of others of their kind, and
no womankind at all. They lived coarsely, dressed coarsely, and no
matter what they might have been, felt coarsely and in accordance, acted
coarsely. They sunk time and money and years and even health and
strength, and in nineteen cases out of twenty found nothing but barren
rock or rock bearing just enough mineral not to pay.

I took the copper fever with the rest. In a few weeks I became an
“expert” in copper. I found two veins on my former gold claim at Swett’s
Bar. I found veins everywhere. I really did imagine that I knew a great
deal about copper-mining, and being an honest enthusiast was all the
more dangerous. The banks of the Tuolumne became at last too limited as
my field for copper exploration and discovery. I left for the more
thickly populated portion of the county, where there being more people,
there was liable to be more copper, and where the Halsey Claim was
located. The “Halsey” was having its day then as the King claim of the
county. It had really produced a few sacks of ore, which was more than
any other Tuolumne copper claim had done, and on the strength of this,
its value was for a few months pushed far up into high and airy realms
of finance.

I told some of my acquaintances in Sonora that I could find the
“continuation” of the Halsey lead. They “staked” me with a few dollars,
in consideration of which I was to make them shareholders in whatever I
might find. Then I went forth into the chapparal to “prospect.” The
Halsey claim lay about a mile east of Table Mountain near Montezuma, a
mining camp then far in its decline. Table Mountain is one of the
geological curiosities, if not wonders of Tuolumne and California. As a
well-defined wall it is forty miles long. Through Tuolumne it is a
veritable wall, from 250 to 600 feet in height, flat as a floor on the
top. That top has an average width of 300 yards. The “table” is composed
of what we miners call “lava.” It is a honey-combed, metallic-looking
rock, which on being struck with a sledge emits a sulphurous smell. The
sides to the ungeological eye seem of a different kind of rock. But
parts of the sides are not of rock at all--they are of gravel. On the
eastern slope you may see from the old Sonora stage road two parallel
lines, perhaps 200 feet apart, running along the mountain side. Mile
after mile do these marks run, as level and exact as if laid there by
the surveyor. Climb up to them and you find these lines enlarged to a
sort of shelf or wave-washed and indented bank of hard cement, like
gravel. You may crawl under and sit in the shade of an overhanging roof
of gravel, apparently in some former age scooped out by the action of
waves. Not only on the Table Mountain sides do you find these lines, but
where Table Mountain merges into the plains about Knight’s Ferry will
you see these same water marks running around the many low conical
hills.

A geological supposition. That’s what water seems to have done outside
of Table Mountain. Were I a geologist I should say that here had been a
lake--maybe a great lake--which at some other time had suddenly from the
first mark been drained down to the level of the second, and from that
had drained off altogether. Perhaps there was a rise in the Sierra
Nevada, and everything rising with it, the lake went up too suddenly on
one side and so the waters went down on the other. Inside of Table
Mountain there is an old river bed, smoothly washed by the currents of
perhaps as many if not more centuries than any river now on earth has
seen, and this forms a layer or core of gold-bearing gravel. In some
places it has paid richly: in more places it has not paid at all.

I said to myself: “This Halsey lead, like all the leads of this section,
runs northeast and southwest.” (N. B.--Three years afterward we found
there were no leads at all in that section.) “The Halsey lead must run
under Table Mountain and come out somewhere on the other side.” So I
took the bearings of the Halsey lead, or what I then supposed were the
bearings, for there wasn’t any lead anyway, with a compass. I aimed my
compass at a point on the ledge of the flat summit of Table Mountain. I
hit it. Then I climbed up over the two water shelves or banks to that
point. This was on the honey-combed lava crags. From these crags one
could see afar north and south. South, over Tuolumne into Mariposa the
eye following the great white quartz outcrop of the Mother or Mariposa
lead. North was Bear Mountain, the Stanislaus River and Stanislaus
County. This view always reminded me of the place where one very great
and very bad historical personage of the past as well as the present
showed another still greater and much better Being all the kingdoms of
the earth. For the earth wasn’t all laid out, pre-empted and fenced in
those days, and its kingdoms were small. Then I ran my lines over the
flat top of Table Mountain, southeast and northwest. So they said ran
all the copper leads, commencing at Copperopolis. So then we believed,
while tossing with the copper fever. Certainly they ran somewhere, and
ran fast too, for we never caught any paying copper vein in Tuolumne
County, at least any that paid--except to sell.

I aimed my compass down the other side of the mountain. There, when the
perpendicular lava rock stopped pitching straight up and down, sometimes
fifty, sometimes two hundred feet, was a dense growth of chaparral--the
kind of chaparral we called “chemisal.” I got into the chemisal. Here
the compass was of no more use than would be a certificate of Copperhead
copper stock to pay a board bill. It was a furry, prickly, blinding,
bewildering, blundering, irritating growth, which sent a pang through a
man’s heart and a pricker into his skin at every step. At last, crawling
down it on all-fours, for I could not walk, dirty, dusty, thirsty, and
perspiring, I lit on a rock, an outcrop of ledge. It was gray and moss
grown. It hid and guarded faithfully the treasure it concealed. Like
Moses, I struck the rock with my little hatchet. The broken piece
revealed underneath a rotten, sandy-like, spongy formation of crumbling,
bluish, greenish hue. It was copper! I had struck it! I rained down more
blows! Red oxides, green carbonates, gray and blue sulphurets! I had
found the Copperhead lead! I was rich. I got upon that rock and danced!
Not a graceful, but an enthusiastic _pas seul_. I deemed my fortune
made. I was at last out of the wilderness! But I wasn’t.




CHAPTER XXIV.

RISE AND FALL OF COPPERHEAD CITY.


I trudged back nine miles to Sonora, my pockets full of “specimens” from
the newly discovered claim, my head a cyclone of copper-hued air
castles. I saw the “boys.” I was mysterious. I beckoned them to retired
spots. I showed them the ores. I told them of the find. They were wild
with excitement. They were half crazed with delight. And in ten minutes
some of them went just as far into the domains of unrest and unhappiness
for fear some one might find and jump the claim ere I got back to guard
it. The Copperhead Company was organized that night. The “Enthusiast,” a
man who lived in the very top loft of copper insanity, was sent down
with me to superintend the sinking of the shaft. The secret was soon
out. Shares in the vein were eagerly coveted. I sold a few feet for $500
and deemed I had conferred a great favor on the buyer in letting it go
so cheaply. I lived up, way up, in tens of thousands and hundreds of
thousands of dollars. The “company” in Sonora met almost every night to
push things while the Enthusiast and myself blasted and burrowed in the
rock. By day they exhausted their spare cash in horse hire, riding down
to the claim in hope of being on hand when the next blast should reveal
a bed of ore, immense in breadth and unfathomable in depth.

My Company was made up chiefly of lawyers, doctors, politicians, and
editors. They never realized how much they were indebted to me. For four
months I made them feel rich,--and if a man feels rich, what more should
he want? For a millionaire can do no more than feel rich.

Feeling certain that the Copperhead was a very rich claim, and that
other rich claims would be developed from the “extensions,” and that a
bustling town would be the result, I pre-empted a section of the land
which I deemed most valuable, on which it was intended that “Copperhead
City” should be built. This “city” I partly laid out. I think this was
the third city I had laid out in California. There is a sepulchral and
post-mortem suggestion in the term “laid out” which is peculiarly
applicable to all the “cities” which I attempted to found, and which
“cities” invariably foundered. Actuated, also, at that time, by those
business principles so largely prevalent in most Christian communities,
I “claimed” the only spring of good drinking water in the neighborhood
of my “city.” My intent in this was in time to realize a profit from the
indirect sale of this water to such of the future “city’s” population as
might want water--not to sell it by the glass or gallon, of course; but
if there was to be a “city” it would need water-works. The water-works
would necessarily lie on my land. I would not be guilty of the
inhumanity of selling water to parch-tongued people, but I proposed that
the “city” should buy of me the ground out of which came the water.

But one house was ever erected in Copperhead City proper, and that had
but one room. But three men ever lived in it. Yet the city was thickly
populated. It was located in a regular jungle, so far as a jungle is
ever attained in California, and seemed the head-centre and
trysting-place of all the rattlesnakes, coons, skunks, owls, and foxes
on the west side of Table Mountain. When the winter wore off and the
warm California spring wore on and merged into the summer heat of May,
and the pools made by the winter rains dried up, I think all the
rattlesnakes and copperheads for miles around went for my pre-empted
spring of pure water. The “city,” I mean the house, was located within a
few feet of the spring. Returning thither at noon for dinner, I have
started half a dozen snakes from the purlieus and suburbs of that
spring. Snakes get dry like human beings. Snakes love water. Snakes,
poor things, can’t get anything else to drink, and must fill up on
water. These were sociable snakes. When startled at our approach they
would not run away from our society. No. They preferred to remain in the
“city,” and so, in many instances they ran under the house. It is not
pleasant at night to feel that you are sleeping over a veteran rattler
four feet long, with a crown of glory on his tail in the shape of
fourteen or fifteen rattles. You won’t crawl under your house to evict
such a rattlesnake, either. Skunks inhabited our “city,” also. Skunks
know their power--their peculiar power.

The evening gloaming seems the favorite time for the skunk to go abroad.
He or she loves the twilight. There must be a vein of sentiment in these
far-smelling creatures. I have in the early evening travelled up the
only street our “city” ever laid out--a trail--and ahead of me on that
trail I have seen a skunk. I was willing he should precede me. In the
matter of rankness I was perfectly willing to fall a long way behind
him. Now, if you have studied skunks you will know that it is far safer
to remain in the skunk’s rear than to get ahead of him, because when he
attacks with his favorite aromatic means of offensive defence he
projects himself forward (as it were). I have then, in my city, had a
skunk keep the trail about fifty feet ahead of me at a pace which
indicated little alarm at my presence, and, do my best, I could not
frighten the animal, nor could I get ahead of him or her. If I ran he
ran; if I walked he concurred in rapidity of pace. I dared not approach
too near the animal. I would rather break in upon the “sacred divinity”
which, they say, “doth hedge a king” than transgress the proper bounds
to be observed with reference to a skunk. Let a king do his best, and he
cannot punish an intruder as can a skunk.

The skunk is really a pretty creature. Its tail droops over its back,
like the plumes of the Knight of Navarre. It is an object which can
really be admired visually at a distance. Do not be allured by him to
too near approach. “Beware! he’s fooling thee!”

At last it dawned upon the collective mind of the Copperhead Company
that their Superintendent, the Enthusiast, was digging too much and
getting down too little. They accepted his resignation. It mattered
little to him, for by this time his mind was overwhelmed by another
stupendous mining scheme, to which the Copperhead was barely a priming.
He had the happy talent of living in these golden visions which, to
him, were perfect realities. He held the philosophy that the idea, the
hope, the anticipation of a thing is sometimes more “the thing” than the
thing itself. The Enthusiast’s rich mines lay principally in his head,
but his belief in them gave him as much pleasure as if they really
existed. It was like marrying, sometimes. The long-sought-for,
longed-for, wished-for wife, or husband, turns out, as a reality, a very
different being from what he or she was deemed while in process of being
longed and sought for. The long-longed-for may have been estimated an
angel. The angel, after wedlock, may prove to have been a myth. The
reality may be a devil, or within a few shades or degrees of a devil.

So the shaft was sunk, as they said, properly and scientifically, by the
new Superintendent. The rock got harder as we went down, the ore less,
the vein narrower, the quantity of water greater, the progress slower,
the weekly expenses first doubled and then trebled, the stock became
less coveted, and as to reputed value, reached that fatal dead level
which really means that it is on its downward descent. The shareholders’
faces became longer and longer at their weekly Sunday afternoon meetings
in the Sonora Court-house.

The Copperhead Claim and Copperhead City subsided quietly. The
shareholders became tired of mining for coin to pay assessments out of
their own pockets. They came at last to doubt the ever-glowing hopeful
assertion of the Enthusiast that from indications he knew the “ore was
forming.” The inevitable came. Copperhead City was deserted by its human
inhabitants. The skunk, the snake, the squirrel, the woodpecker, and
the buzzard came again into full possession, and I bitterly regretted
that I had not sold more at ten dollars a foot when I found the stock a
drug at ten cents.




CHAPTER XXV.

PROSPECTING.


The failure of the Copperhead Claim and the collapse of Copperhead City
did not discourage me. The flame only burned the brighter to go forth
and unearth the veins of mineral wealth which imagination showed me
lying far and near in this land still of such recent settlement.

This was in 1863-64. The great silver leads of Nevada had but recently
been discovered. The silver excitement was at its height. People were
thinking that barely the threshold of the mineral richness of the
Pacific slope had been reached and that untold treasure underground
awaited the prospector’s exploration north, south, and east, so far as
he could go.

Fired with this all-pervading thought I projected one of the grandest of
my failures. I organized the “Mulford Mining, Prospecting, and Land
Company,” whose intent was to take up and hold all the mineral veins I
found and secure all desirable locations I might come upon for farms,
town sites, and other purposes.

“Holding” a mineral vein, or whatever I might imagine to be a mineral
vein, could be done after the proper notices were put up, by performing
on such veins one day’s work a month, and such “day’s work” was supposed
to be done by turning up a few shovelfuls of dirt on the property.

My Company consisted of thirty members, who lived at varying distances
apart, within and without the county of Tuolumne. For my services as
general prospector, discoverer, and holder of all properties accumulated
(by myself) I was to receive from each member three dollars per month.

I fixed this princely stipend myself, being then ever in fear that I
should overcharge others for services rendered.

By dint of great exertion, I succeeded in getting one-third of the
members together one hot summer afternoon in a Montezuma grocery. I
unfolded then the Company’s Constitution and By-Laws, written by myself
at great length on several sheets of foolscap pasted together. I read
the document. It provided for the Company a President, Secretary,
Treasurer, and Board of Directors. It set forth their duties and my
duties as “General Prospector.” I was particularly stringent and rigid
regarding myself and my responsibilities to the Company.

The fragment of the new Company present assented to everything, paid in
their first installment of three dollars, and bade me go forth and
“strike something rich” as quickly as possible.

I went forth at first afoot with the few dollars paid me. I subsisted in
a hap-hazard--indeed I must say beggarly fashion, stopping with mining
friends and dependent to great extent on their hospitality, while I
“held” the few claims I had already found and found others in their
neighborhood.

At last I found a man who subscribed the use of a horse for the summer
in consideration of being enrolled as a shareholder. On similar terms I
gained a saddle, a shot-gun, a dog, and some provisions. This put the
“Company” on a more stable footing, for I was now no longer dependent on
house or hospitality, and could stop wherever night overtook me, and
wood, water, and grass were at hand.

My horse I think was the slowest of his kind in the Great West, and my
gun kicked so vigorously when discharged that I frequently sustained
more injury than the game aimed at.

My field of operations extended over 150 miles of country, from the foot
hills of the Sierras to their summits and beyond in the Territory of
Nevada. Land, wood, water, grass, and game, if found, were free in every
direction. The country was not fenced in, the meaning of “trespassing”
on land was unknown--in fact it was then really a free country--a term
also not altogether understood in the older States, where if you build a
camp-fire in a wood lot you run some risk from the farmer who owns it,
and his bulldog.

Sometimes, I would be a week or ten days without seeing a human face. A
roof rarely covered me. I would camp one day near a mountain summit
looking over fifty or sixty miles of territory and the next at its base
with a view bounded by a wall of rock a few hundred yards distant.
Sometimes I was very lonesome and uneasy at night in these mountain
solitudes. I longed generally about sundown for some one to talk to.
Anything human would answer such purpose then. In the bright clear
morning the lonesome feeling was all gone. There was companionship then
in the trees, the clouds, the mountain peaks, far and near, yet there
were times when the veriest clod was better than all of these.
Sometimes nothing but another human tongue will answer our needs, though
it be a very poor one.

The first evening I spent alone in the forest, I left my dog “Put” to
guard the camp. He wanted to follow me. I drove him back. He went back
like a good dog and ate up most of my bacon which I had not hung high
enough on the tree. By this experience I learned to hang my bacon
higher. Wisdom must always be paid for.

I journeyed in the primeval forests of the Sierras. The primeval forest
is dismal and inconvenient to travel through with fallen and rotten tree
trunks interlacing each other in every direction. I have travelled half
a day and found myself farther than ever from the place I wanted to
reach. I have made at eve a comfortable camp under a great tree and when
all arrangements were completed scrabbled out of it precipitately and
packed my baggage elsewhere on looking up and seeing directly above me a
huge dead limb hanging by a mere splinter, ready to fall at any moment
and impale me. I think I know just how Damocles felt in that sword and
hair business. Wolves sometimes frightened me at night exceedingly with
their howlings. Bands of then unwarlike Indians also scared me. They
were Utes fishing in the Walker River. Five years previous they had been
hostile. Once I stumbled on one of their camps on the river bank. Before
I could sneak off unseen one of them came up to me, announcing himself
as the chief. He wanted to know who I was, where I came from, and where
I was going. I answered all the questions this potentate asked me,
acceded to his request for some “hoggadi” (tobacco), and when I found
myself half a mile distant from His Majesty with a whole skin and all of
my worldly goods intact, believed more firmly than ever in a kind and
protecting Providence. I don’t suppose I stood in any real danger, but a
lone man in a lone country with an average of one white settler to every
five square miles of territory won’t naturally feel as easy in such
circumstances as at his own breakfast table.

I learned never to pass a spot having wood, water, and grass after four
o’clock in the afternoon, but make my camp for the night there. I
learned on staking my horse out, not to give him pasture too near my
camp-fire, for more than once in changing his base for a better mouthful
of grass, has he dragged the lariat over my temporary possessions,
upsetting coffee-pot and frying-pan and knocking the whole camp endways.
I learned to camp away from the main road or trail leading over the
mountains to Nevada, for it was beset by hungry, ragged men who had
started afoot for the silver mines with barely a cent in their pockets,
trusting to luck to get through, and who stumbling on my camp must be
fed. You can’t sit and eat in your own out-door kitchen and see your
fellow-beings eye you in hunger. But they ate me at times out of house
and home, and the provision laid in for a week would not last three days
with such guests. An old Frenchman so found me one day at dinner. He was
starved. I kept my fresh meat in a bag. I handed him the bag and told
him to broil for himself over the coals. Then I hauled off in the bush a
little while to look at some rock. When I returned the bag was empty;
two pounds of beef were inside the Frenchman and he didn’t seem at all
abashed or uneasy. These experiences taught me that charity and sympathy
for others must be kept under some government or our own meal bags,
bread bags, and stomachs may go empty.

Grizzlies were common in those mountain solitudes, but I never saw one
nor the track of one, nor even thought of them near as much as I would
now, if poking about in the chaparral as I did then. I was camped near a
sheep herder one evening, when, seeing my fire about a quarter of a mile
from his cabin, he came to me and said, “Young man, this isn’t a good
place to stop in over night. You’re right in the track of the grizzlies.
They’ve killed twenty-six of my sheep inside of three weeks. You’d
better sleep in my barn.” I did so.

I learned never to broil a steak on a green pitch-pine branch till I got
accustomed to the flavor of the turpentine which the heat would distil
and the meat absorb.

I learned that when you have nothing for breakfast and must kill the
only robin in sight or go without him, that robin will be ten times
shyer and harder to coax within gunshot than when you don’t hunger for
him.

I was not strong physically, and indeed far from being a well man. It
was only the strong desire of finding a fortune in a mineral vein, that
gave me strength at all. Once I was sick for three days, camped near a
mountain top, and though it was June, every day brought a snow squall. A
prospector from Silver City stumbled on my camp one day and declared he
would not stay in such a place for all the silver in Nevada. The wind
blew from a different quarter about every hour, and no matter where I
built my fire, managed matters so as always to drive the smoke in my
face. It converted me for a time into a belief of the total depravity of
inanimate things.

I pre-empted in the name of the Company some of the grandest scenery in
the world--valleys seldom trodden by man, with clear mountain streams
flowing through them--lakes, still unnamed, reflecting the mountain
walls surrounding them a thousand or more feet in height, and beautiful
miniature mountain parks. In pre-empting them their commercial value
entered little into my calculations. Sentiment and the picturesque, did.
Claimants stronger than I, had firmer possession of these gems of the
Sierras. The chief was snow, under which they were buried to the depth
of ten or fifteen feet, seven months at least out of the twelve.

When once a month I came out of the mountains and put in an appearance
among my shareholders, my horse burdened with blankets, provisions,
tools, the frying-pan and tin coffee-pot atop of the heap, I was
generally greeted with the remark, “Well, struck anything yet?” When I
told my patrons of the land sites I had gained for them so advantageous
for summer pasturages, they did not seem to catch my enthusiasm. They
wanted gold, bright yellow gold or silver, very rich and extending deep
in the ground, more than they did these Occidental Vales of Cashmere, or
Californian Lakes of Como. They were sordid and sensible. I was romantic
and ragged. They were after what paid. I was after what pleased.

The monthly three-dollar assessment from each shareholder came harder
and harder. I dreaded to ask for it. Besides, two-thirds of my company
were scattered over so much country that the time and expense of
collecting ate up the amount received, a contingency I had not foreseen
when I fixed my tax rate.

At last the end came. The man who subscribed the use of his horse,
wanted him back. I gave him up. This dismounted the Company. Operations
could not be carried on afoot over a territory larger than the State of
Connecticut. I had indeed found several mineral veins, but they were in
that numerous catalogue of “needing capital to develop them.” The
General Prospector also needed capital to buy a whole suit of clothes.

I was obliged to suspend operations. When I stopped the Company stopped.
Indeed I did not find out till then, that I was virtually the whole
“Company.”




CHAPTER XXVI.

HIGH LIFE.


The “Company” died its peaceful death where I brought up when the horse
was demanded of me in Eureka Valley, some 8,000 feet above the sea
level, at Dave Hays’ mountain ranch and tavern on the Sonora and Mono
road. This was a new road built by the counties of Stanislaus, Tuolumne
and Mono to rival the Placerville route, then crowded with teams
carrying merchandise to Virginia City. The Mono road cost three years of
labor, and was a fine piece of work. It ran along steep mountain sides,
was walled in many places fifteen or twenty feet in height for hundreds
of yards, crossed creeks and rivers on a number of substantial bridges,
and proved, like many another enterprise undertaken in California, a
failure. In Eureka Valley I spent the winter of 1864-65. I had the
company of two men, Dave Hays and Jack Welch, both good mountaineers,
good hunters, good miners, ranchmen, hotel-keepers, good men and true at
anything they chose to turn their hands to. Both are deserving of a fair
share of immortal fame. Hays had most of his toes frozen off at the
second joint a winter or two afterward, as he had become over-confident
and thought he could risk anything in the mountains. He was belated one
winter night crossing the “Mountain Brow,” distant some forty miles
east of Eureka Valley. Over the “Brow” swept the coldest of winds, and
Hays betook himself for shelter to a sort of cave, and when he emerged
in the morning he was as good as toeless. In point of weather the Sierra
summits are fearfully deceitful. You may cross and find it as fair as an
October day in New England. In two hours a storm may come up, the air be
filled with fine minute particles of snow blown from the surrounding
peaks, and these striking against you like millions on millions of fine
needle-points will carry the heat from your body much faster than the
body can generate it. I was once nearly frozen to death in one of these
snow-driving gales when less than three miles from our house. Hays built
the house we lived in and it would have been a credit to any architect.
It was fifty feet in length by eighteen in width, and made of logs,
squared and dovetailed at the ends. It was intended for a “road house.”
Hays was landlord, cook, chambermaid, and barkeeper. I have known him to
cook a supper for a dozen guests and when they were bestowed in their
blankets, there being no flour for breakfast, he would jump on horseback
and ride to Niagara creek, twelve miles distant, supply himself and ride
back to cook the breakfast.

When the winter set in at Eureka Valley, and it set in very early, it
commenced snowing. It never really stopped snowing until the next
spring. There were intervals of more or less hours when it did not snow,
but there was always snow in the air; always somewhere in the heavens
that grayish-whitey look of the snow cloud; always that peculiar chill
and smell, too, which betoken snow. It snowed when we went to bed; it
was snowing when we got up; it snowed all day, or at intervals during
the day; it was ever monotonously busy, busy; sometimes big flakes,
sometimes little flakes coming down, down, down; coming deliberately
straight down, or driving furiously in our faces, or crossing and
recrossing in zigzag lines. The snow heavens seemed but a few feet above
the mountain-tops; they looked heavy and full of snow, and gave one a
crushing sensation. We seemed just between two great bodies of snow, one
above our heads, one lying on the ground.

Our house, whose ridge-pole was full eighteen feet from the ground,
began gradually to disappear. At intervals of three or four days it was
necessary to shovel the snow from the roof, which would otherwise have
been crushed in. This added to the accumulation about us. Snow covered
up the windows and mounted to the eaves. The path to the spring was
through a cut high above our heads. That to the barn was through another
similar. Snow all about us lay at an average depth of eight feet. Only
the sloping roof of the house was visible, and so much in color did it
assimilate with the surrounding rocks, pines, and snow that one
unacquainted with the locality might have passed within a few feet of it
without recognizing it as a human residence.

December, January, February, and March passed, and we heard nothing from
the great world outside of and below us. We arose in the morning,
cooked, ate our breakfast, got out fencing stuff till dinner time, going
and returning from our work on snowshoes, and digging in the snow a pit
large enough to work in. We ate our noon beans, returned to work, skated
back to the house by half-past two to get in firewood for the night,
and at half-past three or four the dark winter’s day was over, and we
had fifteen hours to live through before getting the next day’s meagre
allowance of light, for Eureka Valley is a narrow cleft in the mountains
not over a quarter of a mile in width, and lined on either side by
ridges 1,500 to 2,000 feet in height. The sun merely looked in at the
eastern end about nine <small>A.M.</small>, said “good day,” and was off again. We
rolled in sufficient firewood every night to supply any civilized family
for a week. Two-thirds of the caloric generated went up our chimney. It
did not have far to go, either. The chimney was very wide and very low.
At night a person unacquainted with the country might have tumbled into
the house through that chimney. The winds of heaven did tumble into it
frequently, scattering ashes and sometimes cinders throughout the
domicil. Sometimes they thus assailed us while getting breakfast. We
consumed ashes plentifully in our breakfasts; we drank small charcoal in
our coffee; we found it in the bread. On cold mornings the flapjacks
would cool on one side ere they were baked on the other. A warm meal was
enjoyed only by placing the tin coffee-cup on the hot coals after
drinking, and a similar process was necessary with the other viands. The
“other viands” were generally bread, bacon, beans, and beef. It was
peculiar beef. It was beef fattened on oak leaves and bark. Perhaps some
of you California ancients may recollect the two consecutive rainless
summers of “’63” and “’64,” when tens of thousands of cattle were driven
from the totally dried-up plains into the mountains for feed.

During those years, at the Rock River ranch in Stanislaus County, where
the plains meet the first hummocks of the Nevada foothills, I have seen
that long, lean line of staggering, starving, dying kine stretching away
as far as the eye could reach, and at every hundred yards lay a dead or
dying animal. So they went for days, urged forward by the vaquero’s lash
and their own agony for something to eat. Even when they gained the
grass of the mountains it was only to find it all eaten off and the
ground trodden to a dry, red, powdery dust by the hungry legions which
had preceded them. It was a dreadful sight, for those poor brutes are as
human in their sufferings through deprivation of food and water, when at
night they lay down and moaned on the parched red earth, as men, women,
and children would be. Well, the strongest survived and a portion
reached the country about Eureka Valley. They came in, fed well during
the summer, and one-third at least never went out again. The vaqueros
could not keep them together in that rough country. They wandered about,
climbed miles of mountain-sides, found little plateaus or valleys hidden
away here or there, where they feasted on the rich “bunch grass.” They
gained, by devious windings, high mountain-tops and little nooks quite
hidden from their keepers’ eyes and quite past finding out. The herdsmen
could not collect or drive them all out in the fall. They were left
behind. All went well with them until the first snows of winter. Then
instinctively those cattle sought to make their way out of the mountain
fastnesses. Instinctively, too, they travelled westward toward the
plains. And at the same time the first fall of snow was covered with
tracks of deer, bear and Indians, all going down to the warmer regions.
But the cattle were too late. Their progress was slow. More and more
snow came and they were stopped. Some thus impeded trod down the snow
into a corral, round which they tramped and tramped until they froze to
death. Some of these cattle were thus embayed along the track of the
Sonora and Mono road, and the white man making his way out was obliged
to turn aside, for the wide, sharp-horned beast “held the fort” and
threatened impalement to all that entered. Others, finding the south and
sunny sides of the mountains, lived there until February, browsing on
the oak leaves and bark. These we killed occasionally and buried the
meat in the snow about our house. But it was beef quite juiceless,
tasteless, tough and stringy. It was literally starvation beef for those
who ate it, and the soup we made from it was in color and consistency a
thin and almost transparent fluid.

Foxes in abundance were about us, and they stayed all winter. They were
of all shades of color from red to grayish black. Now a story was
current in the mountains that black-fox skins commanded very high
prices, say from $80 to $100 each, and that “silvery-grays” would bring
$25 or $30. So we bought strychnine, powdered bits of beef therewith,
scattered them judiciously about the valley, and were rewarded with
twenty or thirty dead foxes by spring. It required many hours’ labor to
dress a skin properly, for the meat and fat must be carefully scraped
away with a bit of glass, and if that happened to cut through the hide
your skin is good for nothing. Certainly, at very moderate wages, each
skin cost $7 or $8 in the labor required to trap, or poison it, if you
please, and to cure and dress it afterward. When the gentle spring-time
came and access was obtained to certain opulent San Francisco furriers,
we were offered $1.50 for the choicest skins and 37-1/2 cents for the
ordinary ones. Whereat the mountaineer got on his independence, refused
to sell his hard-earned peltries at such beggarly prices, and kept them
for his own use and adornment.

Then our dogs too would wander off, eat the strychnined fox bait, and
become dead dogs. We had five when the winter commenced, which number in
the spring was reduced to one--the most worthless of all, and the very
one which we prayed might get poisoned. These dogs had plenty of
oak-bark fattened beef at home. They were never stinted in this respect.
What we could not eat--and the most of the beef we cooked we couldn’t
eat--we gave freely to our dogs. But that wouldn’t content the dog. Like
man, he had the hunting instinct in his nature. He wanted something new;
something rich, rare, racy, with a spice of adventure in it; something
he couldn’t get at home. He wanted to find a bit of frozen beef in some
far-off romantic spot a mile or two from the house and this on finding
he would devour, under the impression that stolen waters are sweet, and
poisoned beef eaten in secret is pleasant. And then he would lay himself
down by the frozen brookside and gently breathe his life away; or come
staggering, shaking, trembling home, under the action of the drug, and
thus dashing in our domestic circle scatter us to the four corners of
the big log house, thinking him a mad dog. I lost thus my own dog,
“Put,” named briefly after General Israel Putnam of the Revolution, a
most intelligent animal of some hybrid species; a dog that while alone
in the mountains I could leave to guard my camp, with a certainty that
he would devour every eatable thing left within his reach ere my return,
and meet me afterward wagging his tail and licking his chops, with that
truthful, companionable expression in his eye, which said plainer than
words: “I’ve done it again, but it was so good.” I shall never own
another dog like “Put,” and I never want to. He would climb a tree as
far as one could hang a bit of bacon upon it. He would in lonesome
places keep me awake all night, growling and barking at imaginary
beasts, and then fraternize with the coyotes and invite them home to
breakfast. Near the Big Meadows, in Mono County, a disreputable female
coyote came down from a mountain side and followed “Put,” one morning as
I journeyed by on my borrowed steed, howling, yelping, and filling the
surrounding air with a viragoish clamor. I presume it was another case
of abandonment.

It was a winter of deathly quiet in Eureka Valley. Enveloped in snow, it
lay in a shroud. Occasionally a tempest would find its way into the
gorge and rampage around for a while, roaring through the pines and
dislodging the frozen lumps of snow in their branches, which whirled
down, bang! bang! bang! like so many rocks on our housetop. Sometimes we
heard the rumble of rocks or snowslides tumbling from the mountains. But
usually a dead, awful quiet prevailed. It wore on one worse than any
uproar. No sound from day to day of rumble or rattle of cart or wagon,
no church bells, no milkman’s bell, no gossip or chatter of inhabitants,
no street for them to walk down or gossip in, none of the daily clamor
of civilized life save what we made ourselves. It was a curious
sensation to see one or both of my two companions at a distance from
the house. They looked such insignificant specks in the whitened valley.
And to meet the same man after four or five hours of absence and to know
that he had nothing new to tell, that he hadn’t been anywhere in a
certain sense, since without neighbors’ houses or neighboring villages
there was “nowhere” to get that sort of bracing-up that one derives from
any sort of companionship.

We were very cozy and comfortable during those long winter nights,
seated in the red glare of our rudely-built, wide-mouthed fireplace. But
sometimes, on a clear moonlight night, I have, for the sake of change,
put on the snowshoes and glided a few hundred yards away from the house.
In that intense and icy silence the beating of one’s heart could be
distinctly heard, and the crunching of the snow under foot sounded harsh
and disagreeable. All about the myriads of tall pines in the valley and
on the mountain-side were pointing straight to the heavens, and the
crags in black shadow above and behind them maintained also the same
stern, unyielding silence. The faintest whisper of a breeze would have
been a relief. If you gained an elevation it was but to see and feel
more miles on miles of snow, pines, peaks, and silence. Very grand, but
a trifle awful; it seemed as if everything must have stopped. In such
isolation it was difficult to realize that miles away were crowded,
babbling, bustling, rallying, roaring cities, full of men and women, all
absorbed and intent on such miserably trifling things as boots and
shoes, pantaloons and breakfasts, suppers, beds, corsets, and cucumbers.
We were outside of creation. We had stepped off. We seemed in the dread,
dreary outer regions of space, where the sun had not warmed things into
life. It was an awful sort of church and a cold one. It might not make a
sceptic devotional; it would certainly cause him to wonder where he came
from or where he was going to. A half-hour of this cold, silent Sierran
winter morning was quite enough of the sublime. It sent one back to the
fireside with an increased thankfulness for such comforts as coffee,
tobacco, and warm blankets.




CHAPTER XXVII.

LEAVING HIGH LIFE.


Near the end of March I resolved to leave Eureka Valley. Sonora,
Tuolumne County, was fifty-six miles distant. That was my goal. Thirty
miles of the way lay over deep snow, and was to be travelled over on
snowshoes. The Norwegian snowshoe is a long wooden skate or runner,
turned up at the forward end, greased on the lower side, with a strap in
the middle to hold the foot. The Indian snowshoe is a flat network,
fastened to a frame, in shape something like an enlarged tennis racket.
It is like locomotion shod with a couple of market-baskets. The
principal use of the pole, carried in the hands with the Norwegian shoe,
is to serve as a brake and helm while going downhill. Some put it under
the arm and others straddle it while making a descent. The arm position
is the most dignified. The legs must be kept straddled at a ridiculous
distance apart, and the first few days’ practice seems to split a person
nearly in two. If, with the Indian snowshoe, you tumble down on a
hillside it is almost impossible to get up again, and the unfortunate
must remain in a recumbent position very much like that assumed by the
heathen when they go down on all fours before their god, until some one
unstraps his shoes. I preferred the Norwegian shoe. The first pair I
ever used I made one evening about dusk. I was going toward Eureka
Valley from Sonora, and had met the first fallen snow. From a mere
crisp it grew deeper and deeper. I found a pile of “shakes”--long, rough
shingles used in the mountains--and made my shoes from two of them. They
were not more than a quarter the proper length. They kept me busy the
rest of the night picking myself up. I think I must have fallen down
some four hundred times. When we came to a down grade they went of their
own accord and ran away with me. Sometimes but one shoe would slip off
and glide down a bank, sometimes two, sometimes all of us went together,
balance-pole included, and a bag I had lashed to my back would swing
over my head and bang me in the face. It was a lively night’s
entertainment for only one man in the heart of the wilderness. There was
no monotony about it; nothing tedious or depressing. Just as fast as I
recovered from one fall and started I got the next. I swore a good deal.
There was not anything else to be said. One couldn’t argue with--things.
It was the only recreation afforded by that phase of the trip. To have
kept one’s temper and remained expletiveless would have been to burst. I
avoided the superior and more expensive epithets as much as possible and
confined myself to second-rate strong language. But when I started for
my final trip out of the mountains, I had become a tolerable snowshoe
amateur. A pack was lashed to my back. It held a blanket, some meat,
bread, coffee, sugar, one fox skin and my worldly wardrobe. The morning
light had not dawned when I started.

After a couple of miles’ advance my feet felt like lumps of ice. I
examined my boots. The leather was frozen hard and stiff. The pain was
too great for endurance. I made my way back to the house, found Hays
and Welch at breakfast, removed my boots and stockings, and saw three
waxy-looking toes, the right big one included. They were frozen. The
heat of the fire produced additional twinges, like boring with red-hot
knitting-needles. I wrapped some thicknesses of flannel around both
boots, put them on again, and made another start. Eureka Valley soon
disappeared behind me. I never saw it again, and probably never shall.
But its picture is indelibly graven on my memory. We lived in the gem of
the locality. All the landscape gardening skill in the world could
produce nothing to equal it. A clear crystal stream ran by the door. The
grove was a natural park, level as a floor, with pines all about, 150
feet high. We had a cascade and little miniature mountains of rock, with
oak and pines springing from their crevices. No tame tree could be
coaxed to grow as did these wild ones of the mountains. Some were
independent of soil altogether, and flourished vigorously rooted in
rocky fissures. We had the tiniest of meadows concealed behind these
little mountains of our domain. Other grassy plateaus were perched sixty
or eighty feet over our heads on the mountain. Nor was this all at once
revealed. It required half a day to get over all the labyrinth of
meadow, mount, and dale within half a mile of our house. All this was
set in a gigantic frame--the dark green, thickly-wooded mountain-sides
running up 2,000 feet above our heads, while to the eastward through the
narrow gorge rose bare peaks twenty and thirty miles away, from whose
tops, on sunshiny, breezy mornings, the snow could be seen driving in
immense vapor-like clouds and tinged a roseate hue. People who visit
the Yosemite have seen but one of the thousand pictures set in the
Sierras.

It was my calculation to get to Hulse’s empty log-house, twelve miles
distant, and camp there that night; but my progress was very slow. The
road for miles ran along a steep mountain-side. It was buried many feet
in snow. It was all a sheet of snow inclined at an angle most difficult
to travel. In places acres of snow had slipped in a body from above,
covering the ordinary level five or six feet in depth. These
accumulations, while coming down, would have brushed a human being away
with the facility with which a cart-load of sand dumped on your
cellar-door would overwhelm a fly. I saw whole groves of pines whose
trunks had been cut off by these slips ten or twelve feet from the
roots. I felt small and insignificant, and speculated whether, after
all, I was of any more importance than a fly or any other bug in the sum
total of things generally. I thought of how much more importance a man
was in a newspaper office than in the solitude of these mountains. Then
the sun hurried toward the west and the cold blue and brassy tints of
the winter’s eve merged together. The route along the “River Hill” side
became steeper and steeper, the snow more hummocky from successive
slides and the way more disorganized. It was very slippery. The snow had
an ice finish on the surface like a hard coating of enamel. I took off
the snowshoes and bore them and the balancing-pole on my shoulders,
picking my way laboriously, step by step. Below me extended a very long,
smooth, steep slide, like a white Mansard roof, several hundred feet in
height. Finally I was obliged to stamp an indentation in the enamelled
surface at every step, with my heels, to secure footing. The slippery
and regularly graded descent below broke off occasionally into
precipices of fifty or sixty feet in height. A person slipping here
would, of course, accomplish portions of the descent on mere empty air.
The trouble was not so much in getting through the air as in bringing up
after going through. A fall never hurts anybody. It’s the sudden
stoppage when you’re through. I expected momentarily to slip. The sun
was rapidly going down and I felt a tendency to follow suit. At the
point where I did slip the view was magnificent. Over full thirty miles
of peak and pine the setting sun was shedding. I saw these peaks
disappear like a flash. The grand curtain of Nature was not rung down at
the call of night. It was I who fell before the curtain. I went down
perhaps three hundred feet of the incline, generally in a sitting
position. My long Norwegian snowshoes, jerked from my grasp, sailed down
ahead of me, one diverging a little to the right, the other to the left,
and the balancing pole scooting straight ahead. All of us went together
with a beautiful uniformity and regularity of formation. The whole
descent of 300 feet did not occupy more than six seconds, yet in that
brief space of time my mind appeared to photograph on itself at least a
dozen phases of the situation and as many past memories and future
possibilities. I saw the stumps seeming to rush past me uphill, while I
was really rushing past them downhill, and the reflection came to me
that if I collided with even one of them the result would be worse for
me than the stump. This did not comfort me. As each successive stump
hurried up the mountain I said, by the unspoken operation of thought,
“There goes another stump. A miss is as good as a mile. I may bring up
in one piece yet, though, if I go off one of these precipices, I may
make my last appearance on any stage in several pieces.” I remember,
also, the sensation caused by the seat of my outside pantaloons tearing
out through the excessive friction. I had on two pairs of pantaloons
when I started. I thought, also, during all these risks and
lightning-like escapades of my far-away Eastern home, of the girls I had
left behind years before, of the dear old cool stone door-steps on the
sycamore-embowered Main street of our village, on which the girls used
to sit on warm summer and Sunday nights. Yes, in this inappreciable
space of time and under such extraordinary conditions I thought of this,
and even wondered if the other fellow sat there now with his arm hidden
in the darkness of the hall, where they kept no lamp in summer for fear
of drawing mosquitoes, trying to reach round that girl. The human mind
is certainly a wonderful piece of business. I think the more it is
shocked, agitated, and stirred up at certain intervals the faster it
works and the more it takes cognizance of. The man who month in and
month out moves backward and forward in a groove of habit is apt to
think the same old thoughts over and over again in the same old way. The
man who is beaten and banged about from pillar to post and Dan to
Beersheba, who is continually tumbling into new events and situations,
is liable to think a great many new things and think of them in many new
ways. From a mundane consideration of time on this slide I soon reached
my destination. Regarding my own mental sensations, the trip seemed one
of many minutes. It was not the bottom of the hill where I stopped. The
bottom of that hill terminated in the Stanislaus River, and was preceded
by a precipice 200 feet high. Had I gone off that my journey downward
would have been accomplished on a basis of three of the four elements
known to the ancients, namely, earth, air, and water, and from all
accounts, and my own impressions of my deserts at that period, it might
have ultimately terminated in fire. The snow was soft where I brought
up. I stopped. “It is good for me to be here,” I said; “here will I pass
the night.” I possessed a little mountain wisdom, and foresaw the
impossibility and inutility of making the ascent that night. I had
belted to my waist a sharp hatchet. Around me were many dead pine limbs,
projecting from the snow. The mountain-side exposure was southern. About
the roots of a great pine on the little plateau where I had brought up
the snow had partly melted away. I enlarged the cavity, using the
hatchet as pick and shovel. I made my home for the night in this cavity.
Kindling a fire with my dead branches, I chopped directly into it the
thick dry bark of the pine. This supply of fuel alone was plentiful and
lasted me the entire night. I disclaim here all intent of posing in
print as a hero, for on many occasions I am disgusted by my mental and
physical cowardice. But on this particular night, and it was a very long
one, I felt no fear; I spent it very pleasantly. I cooked and ate, and
drank my coffee with a relish, born of mountain air and exercise. My
coffee-pot was another peripatetic appurtenance belted to my waist.
Culinarily, I was for myself a travelling boarding-house, being guest,
landlord and chambermaid all in one. The fire blazed cheerfully, and
the fully-seasoned oak branches soon made a bed of solid live coals. My
snow hole at the tree’s base slowly enlarged as it melted away. The
hillside being inclined carried away all the moisture. After supper I
sang. I felt that here I could sing in safety and without damage to
other ears, because no one could hear me. Music hath charms to soothe,
and all that, but it must not be savage music. Mine at that time was
savage. It is now. If I feel a tendency to inflict any vocal misery on
mankind, I go forth into solitude, and commit the outrage on inanimate
defenseless objects which cannot strike back. After singing, I spoke all
the pieces of my schoolboy days. I quoted Shakespeare, and really
admired myself in Hamlet’s soliloquy. I never heard a more satisfactory
rendition. This was another piece of consideration for my fellow-beings.
Others, less sensitive to the ill they may do, rush on the stage and
torture audiences. After the dramatic performance I rehearsed my
political speech. I was even coming from the mountains with full intent
to stand, or rather run, for the Legislature from Tuolumne County, which
I did, greatly to the misery of the party. The speech was impromptu. So
the long night wore away. The day became overcast. The winds
occasionally stirred and moaned through the lofty pines above me. Then
they sank to soft mournful whispering music and ceased. The snapping of
the fire sounded sharply in the solitude. From the river far below came
a confused, murmuring, babbling sound like the clamor of some vast,
distant multitude, and this seemed varied at times by cries weird and
louder. Lumps of frozen snow fell from treetops far and near, and as
they struck branch after branch sounded like the plunging of horses in
the drifts. I dozed fitfully and awoke with the red coals staring me in
the face and the startling realization that the elements were preparing
for a heavy storm.




CHAPTER XXVIII.

THE LAST OF HIGH LIFE.


In writing this experience I disdain all intent of making myself out a
first-class sufferer or adventurer. Other men by hundreds on our
frontiers have endured far more, suffered far more, passed through many
more perils and combated them more courageously. Mine as compared to
theirs is a mere priming, a rush-light candle to an electric lamp. Our
mountains and lone valleys hold many a skeleton whose unburied,
unrecorded bones are the only relics and proofs of a live, lingering
death, preceded by hours of pain and misery. Mine was the merest
foretaste of their hardships and sufferings, and it is my chief desire
that this story shall help to a clearer realization of the perils,
hardships, and sufferings of our unknown pioneers. I passed a very
comfortable night at the foot of my snowslide, save sundry aches in my
three frozen toes. I have passed very many nights far more uncomfortably
when surrounded by all the so-called comforts of civilization, in
insect-infested beds at slovenly taverns, in rooms stifling with the
midsummer heat of New York; in cold, fireless chambers with damp beds.
Some of our civilization doesn’t civilize in the matter of comfort. Down
there in my snow hole I was better off in regard to artificial heat than
one-third the population of France, who, in their damp stone houses,
shiver over a pot of coals from November till April, while thousands
have not even this luxury. I had any amount of fuel about me, provisions
for days, powder and shot, and if more snow came I had but to let it
fall, build up the walls of my hole and protect me from the blasts. I
knew of a man caught thus in a storm on the Summit, who made a hole for
himself by kindling a fire on the snow, allowing it to melt, and going
downward with it as it melted. When the storm ended his cavity was twice
the size of a hogshead, and he emerged from it and came to our house in
Eureka Valley. Snow rightly applied, will prove man’s greatest protector
from cold, providing it is deep enough. It is the intensely cold blast
sweeping over hard, frozen ground, that kills both animal and vegetable
life.

I looked up at dawn, after finishing my breakfast, or rather the remains
of the banquet which had continued at intervals all night--for there is
nothing like eating and drinking to keep up one’s spirits and keep out
the cold, and one strong cup of coffee under such conditions is worth a
pint of whiskey, since it gives a renewal of vigor which doesn’t flash
up and then out like alcohol. I looked on the contract before me. I had
that three hundred feet of steep icy incline to climb. There was no
getting round it by gradual or zigzag upward approaches. The way to the
right and left broke off in ugly precipices. A little exploration to
find an easier route satisfied me and sent me back frightened to my
camp. For crossing on what I deemed snows with a firm foundation
underneath, I was startled to find my pole running through this surface
in an empty void beneath. Then the entire area for twenty feet square
suddenly settled down an inch or two with an ominous scrunch! which
sent my heart seemingly up in my mouth and my hair up on its various
ends. I was walking on a frail crust of snow which had formed over the
deep gorges ploughed by the rains and torrents of ages down the mountain
side. Some of these were fifteen or twenty feet deep, with rocky sides
almost perpendicular, and such pits, blocked up at either end with snow,
were regular man-traps. I hauled myself up to the place from whence I
had slipped the previous evening. The job occupied the entire morning.
There were the two snowshoes, the pole and my pack to manage, besides my
own earthly organization. In places the descent was so steep that I was
obliged to drag myself and cargo upward a foot at a time, and then chock
my feet with a knife to prevent slipping back. The moral of which is, it
is easier to go down than to go up, and easier to fall than to rise in
many ways. It does seem singular that these coincidences should be so
coincident between the world of materiality and that of morality. It was
a very laborious task, and when about noon I reached the top, I was sick
from exhaustion, and lay down for some minutes on the ledge of snow
hardly wide enough to hold me. Then, with shaky knees, I picked my way
very slowly over another dangerous mile around the mountain-side, where
every step was furnished with extra accommodation for slipping, and in
many spots where, had I slipped, I should have gone farther and fared
much worse than on the evening before. I wished I was a goose, for a
goose could in four minutes have accomplished a distance which took me
all day. We pride ourselves on our powers and the ways and means we have
devised for transporting our clumsy carcases, but after all, in point
of locomotion, we are individually miserably inferior to a goose, and
all our ingenuity and mind has not been able only to lift us from the
inferior position wherein nature has in this respect placed us, as
compared with a goose.

I arrived at Hulse’s empty cabin about an hour before dark. The place
looked melancholy, murderous, and cold. The locality was higher than
ours in Eureka Valley, and not so well protected. Of the house little
was visible save the ridgepole. Five feet of snow lay on the kitchen
roof, which could easily be walked on. I gained entrance with some
difficulty through the upper sash of a front window. The door was
permanently barred for the winter by snow. I was no sooner in the house
than the requirements of the situation drove me out again to collect
fuel for the night. There was no rest for the wicked. It is only when
man is entirely alone that he realizes how many things are necessary not
only to his comfort but his very existence. A bear could have lain
during the night in comfort at that house on a bed of straw. The
assertion that “man wants but little here below” is not true, and should
no longer pass uncontradicted. Here was I, at that time, a dweller in
the wilderness with the foxes--a tramp, standing almost within the
threshhold of beggary, owner neither of house nor lands, and a cipher
“on change.” Yet I couldn’t get along without iron and steel, phosphorus
and sulphur, or my matches, coffee from the tropics, sugar from the
Indies, salt from somewhere, pepper from pepperland, grain ground to
flour, chemicals to “raise it,” tea from China, and utensils of tin to
keep it in. It is good to be so alone once in one’s life to realize how
much man’s present development is due to the numberless articles he
brings from all the ends of the earth for his subsistence and comfort,
and what an endless amount of labor is necessary to keep him up to his
present standard of development.

My fuel was pine bark, stripped from the surrounding trees. It came off
easily in great sheets, making an imposing-looking pile as heaped in the
kitchen, and burned like shavings. The night passed in alternate cat
naps and firing up. I would doze, to wake up shivering, finding the room
dark and the fire nearly out. Throwing on more bark, the flames leaped
up. I dozed again, to wake up in cold and darkness as before. It was a
gloomier camp than the one of the night previous. An empty house always
has a tomb-like atmosphere about it, and, when alone, I prefer a bivouac
under the trees. With morning came a heavy snowstorm, or rather a
continuation of the snow that had been falling all winter. I started
out. The pine boughs along the road brushed my face, where, in summer,
they would have been many feet over my head. The strap of one of my
snowshoes tore out of the wood, and left me crippled as to further
progress until I repaired it. The snow was soft, and to get off the
shoes was to sink in it to the middle. I was literally afloat on a sea
of snow, and to get overboard was to founder and flounder--another proof
of man’s miserable helplessness as compared with the goose. It began to
occur to me that this storm was one of unusual severity. It blew
violently, and the snow at times came in such whirls that I could not
open my eyes for several seconds. If I had not in this story
determined, in point of detail, to reduce everything to a rigid
mathematical accuracy of statement, I might say that the snow blinded me
for minutes, since seconds seem very long under these circumstances.
Time seems to be a quality or a something, which, in point of length or
shortness, is largely dependent on one’s condition and sensations. A
good time is always short--a bad time always long.

The aim on starting that morning was to reach Strawberry Flat, fourteen
miles distant. There is no road over the Sierras without its Strawberry
Flat, generally so called because no strawberries are ever found there.
This Strawberry Flat, then, contained a population of four men, and was
regarded by us in Eureka valley as a bustling place. In two hours I gave
up all idea of reaching Strawberry Flat, and I concentrated my hopes on
an empty house four miles below Hulse’s. Given good weather and a crust
on the snow, I could with tolerable ease have made the fourteen miles
between Hulse’s and Strawberry. But the wind was ahead, the snow
constantly blinded me, and as it came much more horizontally as driven
by the blast than perpendicularly, and being of a sleety nature, formed
at intervals of every few minutes a slim film of ice on my face, which,
as with my hand I swept it off, fell to the ground in broken ice casts
of my ordinary countenance. The empty house was at last reached. It was
past noon. The empty house was not there. Where it once stood was more
empty than ever. The weight of the snow had crushed the shanty. A few
timbers and splinters sticking out told the story. There was but one
thing to do--return to Hulse’s. To go forward was impossible, and so I
fought my way back. It was a hard fight, for the wind and the snow at
times seemed as if inspired by the demons of the air or some spirit
cause or effect which is expressed by such term. They beat and buffeted
and blinded me, so that twice I lost my way, blundered about in circles,
and got back to Hulse’s about three in the afternoon only through the
wandering of sheer stupidity or the guidance of some special
providence--perhaps both. Tired as I was it was necessary to go
straightway to work and get in more pine bark for the night. There was
no lack of business on this trip. I never had a moment to spare from
morning till night. One’s body is an imperious master, and, unsupported
by civilization or the help of one’s fellow-beings, it keeps one on the
keen jump to supply it with food, fuel, and cover.

As I lay stretched in my blankets before the blaze that night I heard
from time to time a sharp crack overhead. I gazed upward and made a most
unpleasant discovery. It was another form of Damocles’ sword over me.
The rafters were bent like bows from the great pressure of the snow on
the roof. The cracking was a notice that they might not stand the strain
much longer. The roof might at any time tumble in with several tons of
snow upon me. This weight was steadily increasing. I could not go out in
the storm, nor could I remove the snow from the roof. The situation kept
my mind busy while the body was at rest, and anxiety and suspense are
about as wearing as toting in pine bark after snow-shoeing all day in a
snowstorm. Hulse’s was my home and anxious seat for two days. The sword
of Damocles hung and cracked, but did not fall. I found Hulse’s store
of provision under the boards of the front room floor. The boards were
weighted down by a great pile of shingles. It was this monument of
shingles in the parlor which caused me to suspect the existence of the
cache. Taking from the big box I found underneath a renewed supply of
flour and pork, and breaking the face of Hulse’s family clock, also
packed therein, a matter never revealed until this present writing, I
re-closed it, buried it, boarded it over and re-piled the shingles over
it.

On the fourth morning of this excursion the storm was over, the sky
clear, the heavens brightly blue, and the newly fallen snow had dressed
the pines all in new suits. For the second time I bade Hulse’s lone
house a doubtful farewell, for after travelling all day I had before
succeeded only in bringing up there at night, and knew not but that I
might do so again. The newly fallen snow being very light and feathery,
I made slow progress. A frozen crust grants the best track for
snowshoes. As the sun got higher it melted this feathery top snow,
fusing it into a close, sodden mass, which stuck and bunched on the
bottoms of the shoe runners. This delayed me still more. Other
troublesome obstacles were the little rivulets and brooks, which,
cutting through the snow, left banks on either side six or seven feet in
height. To climb these was difficult. The snow gave way, and one could
only flounder through and up to the top. Besides, it was necessary to
wade the creeks. This wet my feet and caused more snow to bunch and
freeze on them. Night came, and with it an increase of cold, which,
causing the snow to freeze to a crust on top, iced and smoothed the
track anew for me. But with one additional facility for making
progress, I lacked another. That was the strength and freshness with
which I had started at morn.

My day had been one of most laborious progress, wading creeks,
floundering through their soft snowbanks, and stopping every ten minutes
to clean my shoes of damp snow. I had no other grease for their bottoms
save a bit of pork, which I wore out upon them. Snowshoes won’t run well
unless frequently greased. Then there was no rest for my body. The
supply of pines from about whose roots the snow had melted away had
given out; to step off the shoes was to sink to the middle; to rest at
all was to rest squatting; a few minutes’ trial of this position under
the most favorable circumstances will convince any reader of its
back-aching tendencies. Man is a lying animal; I mean he must lie down
to recuperate. My meals I cooked on the snow. The regular _menu_ was
coffee, bread, and pork. The base of the kitchen was a big piece of dry
pine bark, always at hand. On this the fire was kindled. The evolution
of coffee under these conditions was slow, because the water for making
it had first to be melted from snow in the coffee-pot, and snow under
these circumstances melts with an exasperating slowness. The quantity
required to make a single pint of water is something remarkable. I think
I was obliged to fill that vessel four or five times with snow to get
the suitable quantity of water. Then it must be remembered that the
water would not proceed to boil until all the snow was melted. “A
watched pot never boils,” but a watched pot of plain water is velocity
itself when compared with a pot of snow and water watched by a tired and
hungry being in the wilderness. Night found me twelve miles from
Strawberry Flat. About one in the morning I found another empty cabin.
This was four miles from the desired haven. It was desolation inside and
out--the windows gone, the door torn from its hinges, the inside a
litter of snow and rubbish, and one dead cow in the kitchen. The
cooking-stove remained. I cleared the grate of snow and attempted a
fire. It wouldn’t draw. Of course it wouldn’t draw, for the stovepipe
was full of snow. Then I kindled the fire on the top of the stove and
gradually burned up a portion of the house. Like Sherman and Napoleon, I
lived on the country invaded. The firelight cast its ruddy glow on the
surrounding domestic desolation and the red dead cow, which, being
frozen hard as a rock, served for a seat. I waited for the morn; but the
morn would not come. I saw from the sashless windows the preliminary
streaks of dawn ever so faintly lighting up the eastern horizon full
forty times, and found they were only in my imagination, so covetous for
the coming day. When the sun did rise he came up in the opposite
direction.

Impatient of waiting longer, and converting myself to the false belief
that the light was really coming in what turned out to be the west, I
did battle in the dark with the last four miles of the journey. All went
well until I reached a certain point in the road, which was now well
defined through the trees. There every time I brought up in a clump of
bushes and lost the track. Back, time after time, I went, seeking with
careful calculation to make a fresh and truer start, only to bring up
again in brambles and briers. When the light did come, I had, for two
hundred yards, in this going and coming, beaten a path in the snow
which looked as if travelled over for a week. Daylight showed what a
ridiculously trifling turn had caused me thus to miss the route. The
moral of which is that man’s welfare is often wrecked on some trifling
error. A failure to say, “Good morning” to an acquaintance, a long,
gloomy countenance or putting one’s knife in the mouth, or guzzling down
soup or coffee with undue noise, has repelled one man from another, and
such repulsion has sent our fortunes on the wrong track altogether. I
was welcomed at the Strawberry House by six hounds, who, in the still
faint light, made at me as they would at another beast, and the first
few moments of my arrival on this outpost of civilization was occupied
in energetic attempts to keep what was left of me from being eaten by
the dogs. Indeed, the way of the transgressor is hard. I had never
injured these dogs. However, the hospitality I experienced at Palmer’s
stood out in bold relief against the churlishness of their brute
creation.




CHAPTER XXIX.

ON THE ROSTRUM.


On reaching Sonora, Tuolumne County, with the frozen toes alluded to in
the great slide down the mountain, I went to work and dug post-holes for
a living. Inspired by the posts or the holes, I wrote what I called a
lecture. This I learned by heart. Next I practised its delivery in the
woods, behind barns, and sometimes at early morn in the empty
Court-house--for the Temple of Justice in Sonora stood open night and
day, and he that would might enter and sleep on the benches, or even in
the bar itself, as many did in those days. Many weeks I drilled and
disciplined this lecture, addressing it to rocks, trees, barns, and
sometimes to unseen auditors wandering about, whose sudden appearance
would cover me with confusion and send me blushing home. But I dreaded
bringing it to an engagement with the enemy--the audience. The glories
and triumphs of oratory I eagerly coveted, but the preliminary labor,
the pangs and the terrible chances of speaking in public I dreaded and
avoided as long as possible. But Destiny, despite all our backwardness,
steadily pushes us on to the most painful experiences. I required yet
feared the living audience. Rocks, trees, and barn doors will not do for
a speaker the specific work of a few listening human beings. Listening
ears sooner or later teach a man who would speak to multitudes to
modulate his voice or increase it to a volume, or spend more time and
strength in accentuating each syllable; and above all, to take things
coolly and not get hurried. At last I concluded to risk myself on an
experimental audience. I borrowed one for the occasion. Going into the
main street of Sonora one evening, I collected half a dozen appreciative
souls and said, “Follow me to the Court-house; I would have a few words
with you.” There was a County Clerk, his deputy, a popular physician and
saloon-keeper, and an enterprising carpenter. They followed me
wonderingly. Arrived at the Court-house I seated them, marched myself to
the Judge’s bench, stuck two candles in two bottles, lit them, and then
informed the crowd that I had brought them hither to serve as an
experimental audience to a lecture I proposed delivering. After which I
plunged into the subject, and found that portion of the brain which with
a speaker always acts independent of the rest wondering that I should be
really talking to live auditors. There is a section of a man’s
faculties, during the operation of speaking in public, which will always
go wandering around on its own hook, picking up all manner of unpleasant
thoughts and impressions. Apparently it is ever on the watch to find
something which shall annoy the other half. It seems to me that no one
can become a very successful speaker or actor until this idle, vagrant
part of the mind is put down altogether, total forgetfulness of all else
save the work in hand be established, and self-consciousness abolished.
However, I spoke half the piece to my borrowed audience, and then,
feeling that I could really stand fire, told them they could go home.
But Dr. ----, constituting himself spokesman, rose and declared that
having served as hearers for half the lecture they thought they were
entitled to the other half. Being thus encored, I gave them the other
half. A great apprehension was now taken from my mind. I could speak to
a crowd without forgetting my lines, and deemed myself already a
lecturer if not an orator. I did not then realize how vast is the
difference between mere speaking and the properly delivering of words
and sentences to a multitude, be it large or small; how unfit are the
tone, pitch, and manner of ordinary converse to public speaking; how a
brake must be put on every word and syllable, to slow down its
accentuation and make it audible in a hall; how great the necessity for
deliberation in delivery; how the force and meaning of entire sentences
may be lost by a gabbling, imperfect, and too rapid enunciation; how the
trained speaker keeps perfect control of himself, not only as to his
delivery, but the mood underneath it; which should prompt how much
depends on the establishment of a certain chain of sympathy betwixt
speaker and audience, and how much the establishment of such chain
depends on the speaker’s versatility to accommodate himself to the
character, intelligence, moods, and requirements of different audiences.
I state this, having since my debut in the Sonora Court-house learned
these things, and learned also that Nature has not given me the power to
surmount all these difficulties. I am not a good speaker, as many
doubtless discovered before I did. However, my friends whom I consulted
said by all means give the lecture in public, knowing, of course, that I
wanted them to encourage me, and feeling this to be the best way of
getting rid of me. So I had posters printed and commenced public life on
a small field. I hired a hall; admittance twenty-five cents. I felt
guilty as I read this on the bills. I read one alone furtively by
moonlight, because after they were posted and the plunge taken I was
ashamed to appear by daylight on the streets. It seemed so presumptuous
to ask respectable, God-fearing citizens of that town to sit and hear
_me_. This was a result of the regular oscillations of my mental and
temperamental seesaw.

I was always too far above the proper scale of self-esteem one day and
too far below it the next. The real debut was not so easy as the
preliminary, borrowed, bogus one. There were the hard, stern, practical
people present, who counted on receiving their regular “two bits” worth
of genuine, solid fact, knowledge and profitable information, who
discounted all nonsense, didn’t approve of it and didn’t understand it.
I felt their cold and withering influence as soon as I mounted the
platform. Not many of such hearers were present, but that was enough to
poison. I saw their judgment of my effort in their faces. I weakly
allowed those faces, and the opinions I deemed shadowed forth on them,
to paralyze, psychologize and conquer me. I allowed my eyes, numberless
times, to wander and meet their stony, cynical gaze, and, at each time,
the basilisk orbs withered up my self-assertion and self-esteem.
Becoming more and more demoralized, I sometimes cowardly omitted or
forgot what I deemed my boldest matter and best hits. However, the large
majority of the audience being kindly disposed toward me, heard,
applauded and pronounced the lecture a “success.” Some ventured, when
it was over, to advise me that the subject-matter was much better than
the manner of its delivery. Of that there was not the least doubt. In
speaking, I had concentrated matter enough for two hours’ proper
delivery into one, and a part of the mental strain and anxiety during
the lecture was to race my words so as to finish within the limits of an
hour on time. I feared wearying the audience, and so took one of the
best methods of doing so. The next day self-esteem, going up to
fever-heat, and my comparative failure not being so bad as the one I had
anticipated when my estimates of myself were at zero, I determine on
pressing my newly-found vocation and “starring” Tuolumne County. Carried
by this transient gleam of self-conceit beyond the bounds of good
judgment, and overwhelmed with another torrent of composition, I wrote
still another lecture, and advertised that. The curiosity, complaisance,
and good-nature of my friends I mistook for admiration. Indeed, during
the fever, I planned a course, or rather a constant succession of
lectures which might, if unchecked, have extended to the present time.
But, on the second attempt, I talked largely to empty benches. A
character of audience I have since become accustomed to, and with whom I
am on terms of that friendship and sympathy only begotten of long
acquaintance. The benches were relieved here and there by a
discouraged-looking hearer who had come in on a free ticket, and who, I
felt, wanted to get out again as quickly as possible. Then, I knew that
my friends did not care to hear me any more. This was bitter, but
necessary and useful. People will go often to church and hear dull
sermons because of custom, of conventionality, and of religious faith
and training. They will attend political meetings during an exciting
campaign and hear equally dull political speeches because of patriotic
or partisan sympathy or fealty. They will go also to hear noted people
because of curiosity, but they will not hear more than once a mere man
unbolstered by any of these outside influences. I next gave the lecture
at Columbia. Columbia, though but four miles distant, was then the rival
of Sonora as the metropolis of Tuolumne County, and it was necessary to
secure a Columbian indorsement before attempting to star it through the
provincial cities of Jimtown, Chinese Camp, Don Pedro’s, and Pine Log. I
billed Columbia, hired the theatre for two dollars and a half, and,
after my effort, had the satisfaction of hearing from a friend that the
appreciative and critical magnates of the town had concluded to vote me
a “success.” Then I spoke at Jamestown, Coulterville, Mariposa,
Snelling’s and other places, with very moderate success. Perhaps I might
have arisen to greater distinction or notoriety than that realized on
the Tuolumne field had I better known that talent of any sort must be
handled by its possessor with a certain dignity to insure respect. Now,
I travelled from town to town on foot. I was met, dusty and perspiring,
tramping on the road, by people who knew me as the newly-arisen local
lecturer. I should have travelled in a carriage. I posted my own bills.
I should have employed the local bill-sticker. I lectured for ten cents
per head, when I should have charged fifty. Sometimes I dispensed with
an admittance fee altogether and took up contributions. In Coulterville,
the trouser-buttons of Coultervillians came back in the hat, mixed with
dimes. Looking back now on that experience, I can sincerely say to such
as may follow me in any modification of such a career, “Never hold
yourself cheap.” If you put a good picture in a poor frame, it is only
the few who will recognize its merit. Don’t let your light shine in a
battered, greasy lamp. It’s all wrong. We all know the dread that genius
inspires when clad in a seedy coat. Lecturing frequently tries a man’s
soul; especially when the lecturer’s career is not a very successful
one. If his path be strewn with roses and success, there may not be much
of a story to tell. But it is different when his path is strewn with
thorns and he steps on them. It is sad to hire a hall in a strange
village and wait for an audience which never comes. It is ominous to
hear your landlord, just before supper, remark, “Our people don’t go
much on lecters. But they’ll pile into a circus or menagerie or anything
else that isn’t improvin’.” They say this all over the land. It is
sadder when you offer him a handful of your free tickets for himself and
family to hear him, “Guess the folks hain’t got time to go to-night.
There is a ball over to Pappooseville, and everybody’s goin’.” I never
did bill myself yet in a village for a lecture, but that I happened to
pitch on the night of all nights when some great local event was to take
place. Or else it rained. It is sad to speak to thirty-two people in a
hall large enough to hold a thousand and try to address those thirty-two
people scattered about at the thirty-two points of the mariner’s
compass. Once in New York I spoke to a fair audience in a hall on the
ground floor. Things went on beautifully till 9 o’clock, when a big
brass band struck up in the bigger hall over my head and some fifty
couples commenced waltzing. It was an earthquake reversed. It ruined me
for the night. None can realize until they enter the lecture field what
trivial occurrences may transpire to upset the unfortunate on the
platform and divert and distract the attention of an audience. On one
occasion a cat got into a church where I was speaking, and trotted up
and down a course she had laid out for herself before the pulpit. She
did this with an erect tail, and at times made short remarks. It is
singular that a single cat acting in this manner is more effective in
interesting and amusing an “intelligent audience” than any speaker.
Under such conditions Cicero himself would have to knock under to the
cat. He might go on talking, but the cat would capture the house. And
then the awful sensation of being obliged to keep on as though nothing
had disturbed you; to pretend you don’t see such a cat; that you are not
thinking of it; and knowing all the while that your audience are getting
their money’s worth out of the cat and not out of you! On another
fearful occasion I was speaking at Bridgehampton, Long Island, on the
subject of temperance. I lectured on temperance occasionally, though I
never professed teetotalism--for any length of time. One can lecture on
temperance just as well without bring a total abstainer--and perhaps
better. Now, I was born and they attempted to bring me up properly near
Bridgehampton. Every one knew me and my ancestors, immediate and remote.
I had not spoken over ten minutes when a man well-known in the
neighborhood and much moved by the whiskey he had been drinking all day,
arose and propounded some not very intelligible queries. I answered him
as well as I could. Then he put more. Nay, he took possession of the
meeting. No one ventured to silence him. They are a very quiet, orderly
people in Bridgehampton. Such an interruption of a meeting had never
before been heard of there, and the people seemed totally unable to cope
with the emergency. The wretch delivered himself of a great variety of
remarks, but ever and anon recurred to the assertion that “he’d vouch
for my character, because he not only knew me, but my parents before
me.” “He was present,” he said, “at their wedding, which he remembered
well from the fact of wine being served there, as well as rum, gin, and
brandy.” That for me was a laborious evening. Sometimes I spoke, and
then the inebriate would get the floor and keep it. He rambled about the
aisles, allayed a cutaneous disturbance in his back by rubbing himself
against one of the fluted pillars, and, when I had at last finished,
made his way up to the choir and, interpolating himself between two
damsels, sang everything and everybody out of tune from a temperance
hymn-book.




CHAPTER XXX.

RUNNING FOR OFFICE.


This is the confession of a political villain; not, however, a perjured
political villain. I never swore to run for office for my country’s
good. I did run once for an office for my own good. I was unsuccessful.
Virtue has its own reward; so has vice. The wicked do not always
flourish like green bay trees. Indeed, judging from a home experience, I
am not prepared to say that they flourish at all. The fall political
campaign of 1866-67 came on while I was carrying my comic lecture about
the camps of Tuolumne, Stanislaus, and Mariposa. A thought one day took
possession of me, “Why not run for the Legislature?” I belonged to a
political party. My frozen toes troubled me a good deal and the lecture
did not pay much over expenses. I consulted with one of the pillars of
our party. He belonged in Oak Flat. I took the pillar behind Dan Munn’s
store on Rattlesnake Creek and avowed my intention. The pillar took a
big chew of tobacco, stared, grinned, and said: “Why not?” I consulted
with another pillar behind Bob Love’s store in Montezuma. He was
throwing dirt from a prospect-hole with a long-handled shovel. He leaned
on the shovel, blew his nose _au natural_ without artificial aid,
grinned, and after some deliberation said: “Why not?” I found another
pillar of our party slumming out a reservoir near Jamestown. He was
enveloped in yellow mud to his waist, and smaller bodies of mud
plastered him upward. A short pipe was in his mouth and a slumgullion
shovel in his hand. He said: “Go in for it and win.”

With less assurance and more fear and trembling I consulted with other
and more influential party pillars in Sonora, the county town. Some
hesitated; some were dignified; some cheered me on; some said, “Why
not?” I made the same remark to myself, and replied, “Why not?” The
Assembly was a good gate for entering the political field. My ideas of
its duties were vague. Of my own qualifications for the post I dared not
think. They may have been about equal to those with which I entered the
_Henry’s_ galley as a sea cook. But what matter? Other men no better
qualified than I had gone to Sacramento, received their $10 per diem and
came back alive. I could do that. They seemed to stand as well as ever
in the estimation of their constituents. Then “Why not?” The die was
cast. I announced myself in the county paper as a candidate for the
State Assembly. The County Convention assembled at Sonora. It was a body
distinguished for wisdom and jurisprudence. Judge Ferral of our city was
there. He was then a bright-eyed, active, curly-haired youth, and had
already given much promise of his successful career. Judge Leander Quint
was there. H. P. Barber presided. Tuolumne County had not then been
shorn of its brightest lights by the necessities of the rest of the
State and the world. Somebody nominated me. I arose and paid somebody
else five dollars. This was the first price of ambition. Then I found
myself making my nominating speech. It was a very successful speech. I
left out politics altogether, made no pledges, discussed no principles
and talked no sense. At first the audience stared. Then they laughed
immoderately. So did I. Then they nominated me by acclamation. It was
one of the proudest moments of my life, although I did not know it at
the time. Taken for all in all, it was no wonder they laughed. I was
obliged to laugh myself at the whole affair behind the Court-house when
the Convention adjourned. And “Why not?”

It was the laugh of a fiend! I wanted the position for the per diem. I
was buried in turpitude. My colleagues were all running on principle to
save the country. It is singular that the motive of such a wolf in
sheep’s clothing as I was at that time was not detected. The great and
good men, secure in their own rectitude and purity of purpose, by whom I
was surrounded, never once guessed at the presence of the snake in their
grass. Looking back at this occurrence after the lapse of nearly
twenty-five years, I am more and more astonished that the party should
have risked taking such a load as myself on its shoulders. I had no
position, no standing, next to no reputation, no property, no good
clothes, no whole shoes, no fixed habitation and three sore toes. I had
not nor did not realize the responsibilities of a citizen. I had no
family and could not realize the duties and responsibilities of those
who were rearing young citizens for the great Republic. Should such a
man be sent to the State Legislature? Of course not. Are such men ever
sent? Of course not. I do not think now that at the period spoken of I
was even incorruptible. Should a person who seldom saw over ten dollars
in his possession at any one time be sent where he might be “approached”
by designing men? Of course not. Was such an one ever sent? Never! The
commonwealth of California ran a fearful risk in my nomination.

Few, probably none, suspected the mental misery I endured during this
campaign. Because I knew and felt my turpitude. I knew my unfitness for
the position to which I aspired. I knew where lay the snake in the
grass. Could I meet daily a trusting, credulous constituency, who
believed that my mind was full of projects for the relief of the State
and nation, without remorse? Of course not. I had remorse--bad, but I
dared not back out and off the track. So I kept on, and the vultures
gnawed my vitals. Those who think the wicked have such a good time are
sadly mistaken. Our party was firmly grounded on one grand belief. It
was that nothing the other party could do was right, and nothing that we
did was wrong. This at that time I did not believe. But I pretended to.
Or rather I stifled all thought on the subject. This was the first great
sin. Unlike my colleagues, I was untrue to my own convictions. They----but
how I wished for their faith. It could move mountains of doubt. Mine
couldn’t. How I hated my conscience. It tormented me worse than a
chronic colic. There I was standing shoulder to shoulder with
patriots--battling bravely for a cause, a principle, while I--I cared
for naught save a seat in the Assembly at $10 a day.

It was a stirring campaign, that of 1866, in and about Tuolumne County.
The antagonism was of the bitterest character. Political opponents
reviled each other in print and sometimes peppered each other with
pistols. Bullets flew about night and day. It was dangerous in Sonora to
sleep in a clapboarded house in the average line of aim. The papers left
nothing unsaid which could taunt and irritate. Editors went about the
streets weighed down by masked batteries. It was calculated that 500
pounds of iron were daily packed about the streets in the shape of
derringers, knives, and revolvers. The champions of the opposing parties
never met on the highway but that people peered and squinted from door
and window for the bombardment to commence. Knives were bathed in gore.
Barroom floors showed bloody stains. Men died with their boots on.
Loaded shotguns lay in ambush behind front and back doors. The
atmosphere smelt of blood and possible killing. Saloon plate-glass
mirrors showed the track of pistol bullets. Mass meetings were
assemblages of men from town and country, secretly armed. People spent
most of their time hating each other. Ministers went behind the orthodox
returns and preached sectional and partisan politics. The more vital
tenets of religion were suspended for the time being with the writ of
habeas corpus. I canvassed the county with my comic lecture. It took. It
was popular with both parties. It was a pleasant relief from the heavier
logic and argument used by heavier and more solid speakers. It was like
the farce after the tragedy. It sent assemblies and mass meetings home
in good humor. Nobody asked if such a candidate was fit to make laws.
But there Tuolumne showed wisdom.

They didn’t want any more laws made. Everybody who had been sent to the
Legislature since California was created a State had been busy putting
more laws on the statute books. There was an overplus. People couldn’t
keep count of the laws already made. Tuolumne then showed wisdom in its
endeavor to send one man to the Legislature of 1866-67 who, not being
able to draw up a bill, could not have added a single new law to the
mass already made. I gave my party a great deal of trouble. Once in a
private conversation with one I deemed a friend, although he belonged to
the opposition, I committed myself in favor of greenbacks as a legal
tender. Our party did not approve of greenbacks. Ours was the
old-fashioned hardmoney dollar of our dad’s party. I was hardly aware of
this, through a lamentable ignorance of what we really did advocate. The
County Central Committee, hearing of my treason, sent after me a
messenger with a missive calling on me to explain. I saw then the
horrible blunder I had made, and wished the earth would open and swallow
me. Then I concluded to resign or to run away. But a man bolstered me up
and advised me to deny the report, which I did in an open mass meeting.
The use of paper then would have doubled the amount of money in
circulation, and that seemed to me just what the people needed. Every
mother’s son of them on being questioned said they wanted more money,
and here seemed a means of relieving that want. But the party refused to
put in a plank which might have doubled the dollars in everybody’s
pockets.

Feeling that I had not done justice to the party in making an active
canvass of the county, principally because I had no money to make a
canvass with, by treating long lines of ever-ready patriots at every
bar in Tuolumne, I concluded I would hold a series of private mass
meetings in the day time on horseback. I would do this on election day.
I would gallop from poll to poll and make a speech at each poll. I had a
route laid out embracing half the county. I made the initial equestrian
speech at Jamestown. Thence I galloped to Shaw’s Flat. Shaw’s Flat upset
me. The pillar of our party there, at whose saloon the polls were held,
came to his door while I was speaking, took one look at me and walked
off in disgust. I saw the disgust on his face an inch thick. It smote
me. It threw a wet blanket over all this newly-roused enthusiasm. I
started for Columbia, but all the way that man’s face peered into mine.
It robbed me of all courage and confidence. I had no further heart to
continue the work. It was not at all the regular thing. It was an
innovation on old party usages. The country even then was too old for
such politico-equestrian heroics. I rode back to Jamestown, put the
horse in his stable, and hid myself. The people did not agree to send me
to Sacramento. Perhaps it was fortunate for them they did not. Probably
it was for me. Whatever happens to a man in this life is probably the
best thing for him, inasmuch as nothing else can happen to him. I had
the profit of an experience in making a semi-political debut, and the
people profited by sending another man.

Could the past but be recalled, with all its conditions, contingencies,
and accessories; could I once more renew this episode with the advantage
of years of experience and accumulated wisdom, I might succeed and fill
the post of legislator. But the future is apt to come too late. To be
sure it was for me a period of folly and weakness. My soul even now
squirms with shame to think of it. “And it should,” I hear my
fellow-human judges saying. Of course it should. Man’s first duty to
himself is to hide his follies and bear himself as though he never
committed any. Only I can afford to tell what a wretch I have been. Were
I a candidate for office I could not. Some day, when the world is wiser,
will men cease strutting about in their masks of propriety and wisdom,
and publish their own past errors as freely as now they do those of
their fellows? Is it a good preliminary previous to entrance into that
world where “all things shall be revealed,” where each action lies in
its true nature, and where each one of us must “even to the teeth and
forehead of our faults give in evidence.” “Why not?”




CHAPTER XXXI.

AN EARLY CALIFORNIA CANVASS.


Previous to this election which did not elect me, Williams and I
canvassed the county together. He aspired to the office of Sheriff. We
mounted our horses, and with long linen dusters on our backs and bottles
of whiskey in our pockets, rode first to Spring Gulch, consisting of two
groceries, six saloons, an empty hotel, twenty miners’ cabins, a seedy
school-house, a seedier church, the hillsides around denuded of earth,
torn and scarred by years of hydraulic washing, and showing great
patches of bare yellow ledge covered with heaps of boulders. The few men
met were in coarse, ragged, gray shirts and mud-stained duck pants, had
a worn, worked-out look; over all shining the hot afternoon sun, the
heated atmosphere quivering and rising, behind the hill-bounded horizon,
a snow-white mass of cloud which, at precisely the same hour every
afternoon, attains the same altitude, then gradually sinks. The eye
gazes steadily upon it; there are seen great hollows and depths of
shining whiteness. It is the vapor coming from the melting snow on the
Sierra peaks eighty miles away. The few loungers about the Washington
Saloon see William Saunders and myself riding down the hill. Our dusters
and clean linen proclaim us as “candidates.” Candidates means drinks.
There is a gradual concentration of unemployed seediness at the
Washington. We dismount; soon the coveted and cheering bottle is placed
on the bar; a line of tumblers in skirmishing order form behind it;
every one within sight and hearing is called up; a pause of glad
anticipation ensues while the glasses are being filled; the precision of
bar-room etiquette is strictly observed, that not a drop be swallowed
until all are ready; then the dozen tumblers are simultaneously raised;
the standing toast “Here’s luck,” and the reviving alcohol fulfils its
mission. This is electioneering.

Sam White is the Bismarck of our interests in Spring Gulch. He is the
standing delegate to the County Convention from this precinct. He goes
by virtue of a paying claim, a capacity for venturing among the rocks
and shoals of saloons, gaming tables and innumerable calls to drink,
without losing his head. He can drink deeply, quietly, and fearfully; he
can drink himself into noise and turbulence and still keep a set of
sober faculties in reserve underneath. We hold a short cabinet meeting
with Sam behind the barn. He sees clearly the political complexion of
Spring Gulch. Bob O’Leary is doubtful, but may be bought; Jack Shear and
Tom Mead must be braced up to allegiance by whiskey; Miles and O’Gorman
are mad because a favorite of theirs could not get the nomination for
Supervisor last year, and won’t vote anyhow; Bob Jones is favorable to
us, but wants to leave before the primary meeting comes off; the rest
are sure for us or sure against us.

We visit the Franklin House just opposite. The political candidate’s
money must not all be spent in one house. This is one of the fundamental
principles in electioneering. Every saloon controls a few votes, or
rather a few whiskey-sodden organizations, who are voted like machines.
The solemn ordeal of an American treat is again witnessed. Jim Brown
becomes affectionately and patriotically drunk, and as we ride away
loudly proclaims himself a “white man and in favor of a white man’s
government.”

We feel that Spring Gulch is secure. We carry it in our pocket. We ride
a couple of miles over the ridge to Six-Bit Gulch. Red crags tower
upward for hundreds of feet; a rivulet flows along, and on a little flat
under a spreading live-oak is an old log cabin. In front is a bit of
vegetable garden inclosed by old sluice lumber. High up in the branches
overhead a gauze-covered meat-safe; on the trunk is nailed a
coffee-mill; under it hangs a frying-pan; close by the washtub and
wash-board a few fowl peck about; the quail in a clump of chaparral near
by are querously twittering, scolding and fluttering, and making the
preliminary arrangements for their night’s rest.

Sam Lugar, gray and worn, resident in this gulch for the last sixteen
years, sits outside the door smoking his evening pipe.

A hundred yards above is the residence of the “Judge,” another
hard-working, whiskey-drinking hermit. A glance within shows the Judge
eating his evening meal. A child is playing about on the mud floor,
whose creamy complexion and bright bead-like eyes indicate its Indian
origin. Hanging above the fire-place are a gun, an Indian bow, a quiver
full of glass-tipped arrows; on the shelf bits of gold-studded quartz, a
bunch of crystals, petrifactions, and curiously-shaped stones found by
the “Judge” from time to time in his diggings. There are boxes full of
old magazines and newspapers; on the rude window-sill a coverless,
well-worn copy of Shakespeare. The Judge is tall, straight, and sallow
in complexion. He has lived on this spot since 1849. Six-Bit Gulch was
very rich. He has torn up virgin gold in the grass roots. He lives now
on recollections of the flush times. Present failures and long past
successes form the staple of his conversation. His mining is merely
secondary to another occupation, the great aspiration of his life--to
beat a poker game over in Spring Gulch. He has been unsuccessfully
trying this for the last seven years. A bundle of aboriginal duskiness
enveloped in a bright calico gown, hanging about her adipose
proportions, stirs as we enter. That is the Judge’s wife--a squaw. Her
family down to the third generation, are camped in the brush hard by.
They visit the Judge at stated intervals, and at such times the family
expenses are trebled. The gray shirt and duck pants tied at the waist
with a string constitute the Judge’s only dress-suit. On the floor near
him is a shapeless, wet mass of India rubber boots, shirt and pants,
drenched and splashed with yellow mud. This man was once a spruce clerk
in a New England store. At seventeen, the set and whiteness of his
collars, the fit of his boots, the arrangement of hair and neck-tie were
subjects of long and painful consideration before the mirror. He had his
chosen one among the village girls; he saw her regularly home from the
Sunday-evening prayer-meetings. The great gold fever of 1848 seized him.
He saw a vision: A few months picking up nuggets in California; a
triumphant return home; a wedding; a stylish mansion; a fast horse; a
front pew; termination, a marble monument in the Terryville cemetery:
“Beloved and respected by all who knew him, he sleeps in hope of a still
brighter immortality.”

We stop at the “Judge’s” for the night. Wife and child are sent off to
the Indian camp in the chaparral. Sam Lugar drops in after supper. The
Judge is an incessant talker. The bottles and glasses are placed on the
table. The Judge becomes fatherly as to counsel and admonition against
excess in drink. Also against gambling. He has peculiar theological
views. Moses, he says, was a keen old miner. He and Aaron put up a plan
to gain all the gold in the Israelites’ possession. While Moses was on
Mount Sinai receiving the stone tables, Aaron was counselling the making
and worship of the golden calf. By such means did he concentrate in a
lump all the Jews’ jewelry. What then? Moses comes down, sees the calf,
gets angry, breaks into pieces, burns it up. But what becomes of the
gold? Didn’t Moses and Aaron sneak around that night and “pan it out” of
the ashes?

The Judge is his own theologian.

We visit Price, of Hawkins’ Bar. Price is now the sole constituency of
Hawkins’. He ran this bar in its golden infancy; he saw it in its youth;
he is steadfast to it in its decay. Thirty-four years ago, eight hundred
men lived here; the Tuolumne banks were lined with them, shaking their
cradles. From the top of yonder red hill the combined grating of the
pebbles shaken in hundreds of rocker-sieves sounded like the crash of
machinery in a cotton mill.

Old Hawkins first discovered gold here. Price tells of the pickle-jars
full he had buried under the floor of his cabin. The secret could not be
kept. They came trooping down the steep Red Mountain trail, blankets
and tools on their backs, footsore, weary, thirsty, hungry--but hungrier
still for gold. They put up tents and brush houses, or crept, slept and
cooked under projecting rocks; they stood all day in ice-cold water;
they overworked bodies hitherto unused to manual labor; they blistered
delicate hands; they lived on bacon and heavy bread of their own making;
they drank raw whiskey by the quart; they died, and were buried almost
where they died, in nameless graves. Up yonder, but a few yards in the
rear of Price’s cabin, is the old camp graveyard. The fence is rotting
away and stands at various angles. The inscriptions on the headboards
are half effaced by time and the elements. Some are split and have
fallen down. Read “Jacob Peiser, æt. 27.” He died close by in the gulch
hard by, with a pistol-bullet through him. A dispute over a claim.
“Samuel Purdy, 31.” Drowned trying to cross the river during a freshet.
“John Wilkins, æt. 35.” Killed by a cave in the bank claim about a
hundred yards away. “Samuel Johnson, æt. 25.” He dove with a sand bag to
stop a great leak in the Ford Chann’s head wall, and he stopped the leak
in part with his own body, for the stream sucked him in the crevice and
he never came up alive. “John Weddell, 35.” Blown up by the premature
explosion of a blast in the Split Rock quartz claim. “Abram Hewison,
45.” Delirium tremens, stark mad at midnight, jumped into the river from
the point yonder, where the stream whirls round the bend with tremendous
force and then rushes down toward the long deep cañon a mile away in a
succession of great white crested billows, whose sad, never-ceasing
murmur seems an eternal requiem for those lying here.

Price has seen all this. That was the climax of his life. Price’s heaven
is not in the future. It is in the past. It is embraced in a period
about twenty-five years ago, when he made “an ounce per day.” Those, he
remarks, were times worth living for. Eight hundred souls then at
Hawkins’; five gambling houses in full blast every night; music,
dancing, and fandangos at either end of the bar.

The river roars unvexed toward the sea. It has burst through its dams
and choked the races with sand. The scars and furrows on the hill sides
are quite hidden by the thickly growing vegetation; young oaks and pines
are coming up in the place of the old. Trail and road are overgrown with
brush. Among the rank weeds we stumble on traces of man’s former
presence--the top of a saloon counter, the mahogany leg and faded green
cushion of a billiard table, rusty tin ware, broken picks and shovels, a
few rude stone chimneys, about whose blackened fire-places years ago
gathered the hopeful, sanguine men of “’49.” It is so still. The
declining afternoon sun is throwing long shadows from the mountains on
the other bank. Slowly they creep up and shade the steeps on our side.
Every moan and babble of the Tuolumne falls distinctly on the ear.

“Civilization” here put in a transient appearance. It scarred the hill
sides with pits and furrows dug for gold. It cut down the wide-spreading
symmetrical oaks. It forced the Tuolumne through race and flume from its
channels. It built gaudy temples dedicated to the worship of Bacchus,
resplendent with mirrors, pictures, and cut-glassware, located on the
very site where a few months previous stood the Indian’s smoking
wigwam. It brought toiling men, hard-fisted, awkward, ungainly, clumsy,
with all grace and suppleness worked out of them and strong only to lift
and dig. It brought all manner of men, educated and ignorant, cultivated
and coarse, yet for whom Christian training, Christian Church, Christian
Bible, Christian spire in city, town, and village pointing heavenward,
had failed to convince that gold was not the chief aim and end of all
human effort. By day there was labor drudging, labor spasmodic, a few
prizes, many blanks, some hope, much more discouragement. By night,
revelry, carousal, gambling, oaths, recklessness, pistol shots, knife
thrusts, bloodshed, death. Bird and beast fled affrighted to lonelier
and more secure retreats before the advent of the raging, cruel animal
man.

But now civilization has flown and nature seems easier and somewhat
improved by its absence. Price is ours. He will walk nine miles on
election day to Chinese Camp, the nearest precinct, to deposit a ballot
for us. An order on the proprietor of the Phœnix Saloon for a generous
supply of whiskey stimulates his devotion to his country. What a
glorious land of liberty is this! See in the clear azure sky above us,
floating a mere speck, the eagle, the bird of freedom! He poises himself
for a swoop. He comes rushing down on quivering pinion. Nearer! nearer!
It is a turkey buzzard, who has scented a dead horse.

Constituencies can only be found where civilization rages.




CHAPTER XXXII.

ANOTHER CHANGE.


The world seemed coming to an end, I mean my world. I had “ran for
office” and was not elected, I had lectured and the people did not call
for more, my mines and all they contained were still under ground. The
cities I had planned were still unbuilt, I had written for our county
paper and gained a small county, but cashless reputation. The fall of
1866 was at hand, and I was saying “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,”
when one day I received an unexpected letter from the publisher of a San
Francisco weekly paper (_The Golden Era_). He said in substance, “Come
to San Francisco and try your chances on the _Era_. We will do the best
we can for you.”

I went and was met by the good and great-hearted Joseph Lawrence, the
principal publisher, and up to that time an entire stranger to me.

The transformation in my life was sudden and startling. It was from the
mountain solitudes to the bustle of a great city, from the miner’s cabin
to the elegancies of the first-class hotel in which my friend positioned
me; from the society of the “boys” to that of artists, actors, editors,
and writers, some since of world-wide reputation.

It was the sharpest corner I had ever turned in my life. It led into a
new road, a new life, new associations, new scenes, and eventually new
countries.

And this change came sudden, unexpected at the “darkest hour” and like
“a thief in the night.”

San Francisco had changed greatly since I had left it eight years
previous. Much of the old “’49” characteristic had disappeared or was
disappearing. The roughness in garb and manner had abated, the high silk
hat topped more masculine heads, the afternoon feminine promenade on the
main shopping streets was more elegantly attired, “society” was
classifying itself into sets and “circles” more or less pretentious,
many more men had homes to rest in at night, the glare and splendor of
the openly public gambling house had gone, the revolver as an outside
garniture of apparel had disappeared.

I could write with some facility. In other respects, I was awkward,
unassimilative with the new element about me, and what is called “shy
and retiring” which really implies a kind of vanity demanding that the
world shall come and pet you without your having the courage to boldly
face it and assert your place in it or whatever you may think your
place. I was afraid of being quizzed or made a mark of ridicule by
others, and any pretentious fop could with ease make me take a back seat
and make me keep my mouth shut. One night Mr. Lawrence invited me to
call with him on a noted actress. I refused out of pure dread. Dread of
what? Of an opinion I had previously manufactured in my own mind of what
the actress might think of me; when I should probably have been of about
as much importance to her as a house fly. The consequence which we shy
and retiring people attach to ourselves in our secret mind is
ridiculously appalling.

Mr. Lawrence remained in San Francisco but a few months after my advent
on the _Era_. While he stayed he did all in his power to give me,
socially and otherwise, a good “send off.” He introduced me to aspiring
and successful people, placed me in good material surroundings and
opened for me the door to a successful element. That was all he could
do, and in my estimation about all one person can do to really advance
the fortunes of another.

But when he left I descended, hired the cheapest lodgings, lived on the
cheese-paring plan, and was thereby brought mainly into contact with
that cheap element in human nature which longs for the best things in
the world, is willing even in some way to beg for them, looks on the
prosperous with envy and aversion and expends most of its force in
anxiety or grumbling, instead of devising ways and means to push
forward.

So for the most part I did. I accepted the lowest remuneration for my
services, deeming it the inevitable, went figuratively hat in hand to
those who bought my articles, and brought my mind at last to think they
had done me a great favor on paying me my just dues. I was always
expecting starvation or failure of some sort and for that very reason
got a near approach to it. My cheap lodgings brought me a sneak thief
who stole the first decent suit of clothes I had worn for years in less
than forty-eight hours after I had put them on. My associations brought
me people who were always moaning over their luck, living mentally in
the poorhouse, and therefore we mutually strengthened and supported each
other on the road to what was little better than the poorhouse.

Like them, I never thought of being else than a worker for wages, and
ran away mentally at any idea of taking responsibilities. Like them I
regarded the class who did, as living in a world I never could reach.
Like them I regarded the only sure and safe haven was a “job,” or
situation at steady, regular wages.

So, for years I had indifferent luck, and lived a good deal on the
threadbare side of life. The cause and the fault lay entirely in myself.
Industriously, though unconsciously I sat down on myself, punched myself
into corners; as I in mind accepted the bottom of the heap as the
inevitable I stayed near the bottom.

If I should live that and previous portions of my life over again, I
should probably do the same thing. Because I believe there is a truth in
predestination. In other words, when you are in a certain mental
condition your physical life and fortune will be an exact correspondence
or material reflection of that condition. When you grow out of that
condition and get a different mind your surroundings, fortunes, and
associations will be in accordance with that state of mind. Thank
Heaven, we can grow. But the I that existed twenty-five years ago was
predestined to meet the fortunes it did twenty-five years ago, and those
fortunes could only change as the mind of that “I” changed.




CHAPTER XXXIII.

EDITING VS. WRITING.


In course of time I came temporarily to the occupancy of an editorial
chair. I became a “We.” Because on becoming an editor you cease to be an
“I,” you are more. You are several persons rolled into one. You are then
the publisher, the proprietor, the paper’s biggest paying advertisers,
the political party you represent, and the rest of your brother editors.
Under these circumstances it is impossible for you to say what “I”
think. Because in some cases you may not know what your own private
opinions really are, or if they should assert themselves strongly you
might not want to know them. You are a “we,” one advantage of which is
that as in a sense you have ceased to exist as a personality. You are no
longer personally responsible for what you say in print. The
responsibility of the “we” can be distributed among so many that it need
not stick anywhere and the bigger the paper the larger the area over
which it can be distributed.

I knew there was a difference between “editing” a paper and writing for
one, but how much of a difference I did not realize until my destiny
placed me temporarily in charge of the Sunday supplement of a city
daily, which, in accordance with the regulations, or rather exactions,
of modern journalism, published a Sunday paper, or rather magazine, of
sixteen pages. I had about forty-six columns to “edit.”

To “edit” is not to write. I speak thus plainly for the benefit of the
many young men and maidens who are to swell the ranks of the great army
now industriously engaged in sending contributions to the editor’s waste
basket, and who still imagine that the editor does nothing but write for
the paper.

I pause here a moment to ask where, at the present increase of size and
amount of matter published, are our Sunday papers to stop. Already the
contents of some Sunday issues amount to more than that of the average
monthly magazine.

While this competition is going on at such a lively and increasing rate
between newspaper publishers to give the most reading matter for the
least money, I wonder if the idea may not in due course of time strike
them that they may be giving to those who read more than they can really
read and digest.

Our business men to-day do not read one-half the contents of the daily
paper. They have only time to glance at them. They would really be much
better suited could some device of journalism give them their news in
readable print in the compass of a handkerchief, and give them no more.

I entered on my duties in a blissful ignorance of the trials that
awaited me. I did not know how to “put a head” on an article or a
selected “reprint.” I know nothing of the hieroglyphics necessary to let
the printer know the various kinds of typo in which my headings should
be set up. I did not realize that the writer’s manuscript must be, in a
sense, ground through the editor’s mill and go through a certain process
before being put in the printer’s hands. I did know that something was
to be done, but the extent of that something I did not know. Of the
signs to be placed on manuscript to show whether the type used should be
“brevier” or “minion” or “agate,” or those to designate “full-face caps”
for my upper headings and “full-face lower case” for my lower headings,
of a “display heading,” of “balancing the columns,” nor that the
headings on a page should not be jammed up together or too far apart. I
was in that condition of ignorance that the smallest part of a printer
was justified in looking down on me with contempt.

       *       *       *       *       *

N. B.--In the composing room a printer is a much larger-sized Indian
than a mere writer.

       *       *       *       *       *

You who read the instructive and entertaining columns of ghastliness,
accident, and crime in your morning paper--you who are unfortunately or
otherwise neither writers nor printers, you think you could easily write
one of those staring sensational headings over the article which tell
all about it before you read it and whet your appetite for reading it.
But you might not. It is not so much the literary ability needed. It is
the printer who stands in the way. It is the printer who must have just
so many words for one kind of “head” and so many for another. You must
get your sense, sensation, and information condensed into say
twenty-four or twenty-six words for one part of the “head” and ten or
twelve for another part, and these must neither run over nor run under
these numbers. If they do and the spaces are uneven that issue of the
paper would, in that printer’s estimation, be ruined. If you, the
editor, do not “make up” your pages so that the columns “balance,” the
paper, for him, would be a wreck. The foreman of the composing room
values a newspaper for its typographical appearance. This is right. A
paper, like a house, should look neat. Only the foreman need not forget
that there is something in the articles besides types. The magnate of
our composing room called all written matter “stuff.” “What are you
going to do with this stuff?” he would remark, and he used to put such
an inflection of contempt on that word “stuff” that it would have made
any but an old tough writer sick to hear him. Poems literally perspiring
with inspiration, beautiful descriptive articles reeking with soul and
sentiment, lively humor, manuscript written and re-written so lovingly
and carefully--children of many a brilliant brain--all with him was but
“stuff”!

During all the years that I had been writing I had bestowed no attention
on the “making up” of a paper. I had a vague idea that the paper made up
itself. I had passed in my articles, and had seen them in their places a
few hours later, and never dreamt that the placing of these, so that the
columns should end evenly or that the page should not look like a
tiresome expanse of unbroken type, required study, taste, and
experience.

I was aroused from this dream when first called on to “make up” my
eight-page supplement. Of course, the foreman expected me to go right on
like an old hand, and lay out in the printed form where the continued
story should be and how many columns it should fill, where the foreign
correspondence and illustrated articles should appear, where the paste
pot and scissored matter, shorter articles, and paragraphs should be,
so that the printer could place his galleys in the form as marked out
per schedule.

I was confronted within a single week with all this mass of my own
editorial and typographical ignorance, and even more than can here be
told. It had not before dawned upon me that an editor should be--well,
we will say, the skeleton of a printer. I was not even the ghost of one.
I was not before aware that in the recesses of editorial dens and
composing rooms the printer stood higher than the writer. “Everybody”
writes nowadays. But “everybody” does not set type or “make up” papers.

I saw then what I had done. I saw that I had rashly assumed to govern a
realm of which I was entirely ignorant. I made a full and free
confession to our foreman. I put myself before him as an accomplished
ignoramus. He was a good fellow and helped me through. It was tough
work, however, for several weeks. As Sunday came nearer and nearer, my
spasms of dread and anxiety increased. I was seized in the dead of night
with fears lest I had not sent up sufficient “stuff” to fill my
forty-six columns. Then I would be taken with counter fears lest I had
sent up too much, and so run up an overplus on the week’s composing
bill. I worried and fretted so that by Saturday night I had no clear
idea at all or judgment in the matter, and let things take their own
course.

But the hardest task of all was dealing with the mourners--I mean the
manuscript bearers. I found myself suddenly inside of the place, where I
had so often stood outside. I was the man in the editorial chair, the
arbiter of manuscript destiny, the despot who could accept or reject the
writer’s article. But I was very uncomfortable. I hated to reject
anybody’s writings, I felt so keenly for them. I had so many times been
there myself. I wished I could take and pay for everybody’s manuscript.
But I could not. The requirements of the paper stood like a wall ’twixt
my duty and my sympathy. The commands from the management allowed only a
certain amount to be expended weekly for original articles. I felt like
a fiend--an unwilling one--as I said “No” time after time and sent men
and women away with heavy hearts. In cases I tried even to get from the
rejected a little sympathy for myself. I told them how hard it was for
me to say “No.” I tried to convince them that mine was a much harder lot
than theirs, and that mine was by far the greater misery.

And how many times after I had suffered and rejected the MSS. did I try
to answer in a manner satisfactory to them this question: “Did I know of
any newspaper or magazine that would be likely to accept their matter?”
How I tried to say that I did not, in a cheerful, consoling, and
encouraging manner, in a manner which would convey to them and fill them
with the idea that the town was full of places yawning and gaping for
their articles, until they were outside of my office themselves, when I
was willing that the cold unwelcome truth should freeze them.

Then I received letters asking for the return of manuscript. On entering
on my duties I found the shelves piled with them--legacies left me by
various predecessors--whether read, accepted, or rejected, I could not
find out. But there they lay roll on roll--silent, dust covered. It
seemed a literary receiving vault, full of corpses.

It was a suggestive and solemn spectacle for a young writer to look
upon. Those many pounds of manuscript--articles which might make a
sensation if printed--truths, maybe, which had not yet dawned on the
world--all lying unread, dead, cold and unpublished.

Lone, lorn ladies came to me with the children of their brains. I
referred them at times to the editor of the daily up-stairs. He referred
them to me back again. Sometimes this shuttlecock process was reversed.
The daily editor fired the applicant down at me. I fired him up again.
The trouble in all these cases lay in the inability of these people to
recognize a rejection when it was mildly and sympathetically applied. It
was necessary in some cases for us to fire these people up and down at
each other a dozen times before their weary legs gave them a hint of the
true state of the case.

I saw more than once the man who thought to clinch an acceptance of his
matter by giving me a long explanation of his article, and its value to
this or that interest. I had the traveller from distant lands, who
wanted to tell in print over again what he had seen. I received copies
of verses, accompanied by modest notes from the senders that they might
find a place “in some corner” of the paper. I was beset by a delusionist
who had a theory for doing away with death, and who left me, as he said
to “prefer death” and die in my sins, because I told him I had really no
desire to obtain information on the subject.

Then I had the “space grabber” to deal with--the poor fellow who writes
to live at so much per column, who tries to write as many columns as
possible, and half of whose mind while writing is working more to fill
up his columns with words rather than ideas. But our modern system of
elephantine journalism is in a measure responsible for the “space
grabbing” tendency, since our daily and weekly journalistic mammoths and
megatheriums gape ever for more and more matter. There is so much space
which must be filled, and if not filled stuffed. Every demand brings
some sort of supply, and as the paper must be stuffed, the “space
grabber” is developed to stuff it.

I had also to cope and meet with the literary rehasher. The rehasher is
another journalistic brother who writes the same story, experience,
description, etc., over and over again in different ways. He wrote it
years ago. It proved a success. He has been writing it ever since. He
serves it up roast, baked, boiled, broiled, fried, stewed.

These processes may endure for several years. Then he shoves it on your
table, covered with a thin disguise--a gravy, so to speak--of his more
recent opinion or experience. But it is about the same dish. The older
and more experienced journalistic nose detects it by the same old smell.
Finally it comes up as hash, plain hash, dry hash, wet hash, baked hash,
but after all the same old hash.

Our papers and magazines even to-day abound with the work of the
rehasher. It is just as good for the young readers. Every ten years a
generation comes along for whom the rehash is quite new. They do not
know that it is the same old hash written and read years and years ago
by people dead and gone. The pretentious magazines dish up more or less
of this hash. It is served up in style, garnished with sprigs of fine
language and sentiment and has often a “dressing” of elegant
illustrations poured over it. But it’s the same old hash for all that.
If you look over the magazines for a period say of twenty years, you
will find these rehashes--articles descriptive of Rome, Egypt, London,
the Bayeaux tapestry, travels in countries worn footsore by travellers
for generations, the essay on Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe. As for the
frontier romance and “Wild Injun” story, that has been ground and
reground into hash so fine that it has become “spoon victuals,” and is
eaten only by the young and callow of the reading brood.

A literary colleague, who commands an editorial chair, says that he
allows his rehashers to serve him the same article four times, providing
the garnishing and dressing of the dish show artistic cookery. But he
shuts down after that. This is not only charitable on his part, but
possibly a great benefit to the rehasher, for if he is allowed to go on
unchecked, the mental rehashing process will become automatic, the
result of which will be the unconscious rehashing of the same article
through all eternity.

This experience gave me, in certain respects, an entire change of heart.
I will never think hard again of an editor though he does not return my
manuscript even if I send stamps. I will still continue to think kindly
of him though he “declines with thanks.” For I realize now that the
“editor” who would do his duty must have nerves of steel and a heart of
stone.




CHAPTER XXXIV.

OPINIONS JOURNALISTIC.


For five years I wrote for many papers in San Francisco and wrote some
things good, some bad, some indifferent. I attacked and ridiculed the
errors and foibles of others with the miraculous confidence and inferred
self-righteousness of a man who had not as yet begun to realize his own
shortcomings. I assailed abuses and was sometimes disgusted at what then
I deemed the timidity and lack of nerve on the part of newspaper
publishers, when they refused to print my tirades, reproofs, and
sarcasms. As a champion I was very brave to speak on paper in the
privacy of my own room. As a man with no capital at stake, I was very
wise in showing others where to put their money.

I was rated in San Francisco as a “Bohemian” and deserved the name. I
was largely in sympathy with the idea that life being short should be
worked at a rapid pace for all that could be got out of it, and that we
the dwellers on the top floor of intellect were justified in regarding
with a certain scorn the duller and generally wealthier plodders on the
lower floors of business. We were as proud of our comparative poverty
and disregard of money because we held in some way we never could
explain that such poverty argued for us the possession of more brains,
though we were very glad to receive our money from people we deemed
ourselves so far above. I think this is all nonsense.

I think now that the ability to express ideas well on paper is a vastly
over-rated and over-praised talent. A man may write well and not have
sufficient executive ability to build a hen coop or govern one after it
is built, and brains play a very important part in any kind of
managerial ability, be the field large or small.

Bohemianism as it existed thirty years ago is nearly dead. It has been
discovered that late hours, gin, and nocturnal out-pourings of wit,
brain, and brilliancy, do not increase the writer’s originality, or
fertility of idea, and that a great deal of force is wasted at such
times which should be turned into dollars and cents.

A man or woman to-day who succeeds permanently with the pen will not
only live well-ordered lives, but possess a business ability outside of
the pen, in order to get their ideas before the public. Never before
were there so many writers, and never before so many able writers. The
literary mediocrity of to-day would have made a brilliant reputation
sixty years ago. But of those who are merely writers, even if good
writers, three-fourths as regards compensation are almost on the same
relative plane as the type-writer. The supply is greater than the
demand. People must write even if not paid for the pleasure of seeing
their ideas in print, and for this reason to-day do we find country
weeklies furnished regularly free of expense with interesting
correspondence from abroad by the editor’s travelling friends.

As a newspaper man and correspondent, I was not always very particular
in writing about people, and dragging their personality before the
public. I wanted subjects and something or somebody to write about.
These were my capital stock in trade.

I don’t wonder that a certain unpopularity with a class attaches itself
to “newspaper men,” “correspondents” and reporters. The tendency and
temptation is to become social Paul Pry’s, especially when family or
individual secrets will swell a column and bring dollars. Of all this I
did my share, and regard myself now with small favor for so doing.

The freedom of the Press has developed Press freebooters male and
female, and the Press has now all the freedom of the village gossip.

On the other hand a great many people like to see their names in print.
The remark “don’t put my name in the paper” often means “do put my name
in the paper,” with little care as to the accompanying comment.

Many people have a terrible and I think needless fear of what the
newspaper can do and say to make or unmake them, to give a book or a
play a reputation or kill it outright. I notice that a play often
becomes very popular when its first critics condemned it, and the same
can be said of books. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad,
Helper’s Irrepressible Conflict and Bret Harte’s Heathen Chinee were not
advertised into notice by the Press. Their force made the Press
advertise them.

The Press, which so often claims to “mould popular opinion” is in
reality moulded by popular opinion and follows it, while sometimes
claiming to lead it. There is a power which brings men and movements for
greater or lesser periods into public notice, which the Press does not
manufacture.

The Press which claims indirectly to have so much of the public morals
and the public good in its care and keeping--this “lever of
civilization” which will deluge its columns for days and weeks with the
preliminaries of a prize fight or parades for a similar time the details
of a scandal, places a great deal before the eyes of every boy and girl
which seems to me neither civilized nor civilizing.

I object here neither to the prize fight nor its publication. But I
can’t think the man who spreads it all broadcast day after day before
the community as a promoter of the highest refinement or civilization.

The Press of to-day is either ridiculing ideas or ignoring them
entirely, which the Press of a near Future will treat as most important
realities, just as fifty years ago, nine-tenths of the American
newspapers treated the subject of human slavery. Did the Press of
America mould public opinion in this respect or was it the idea that
moulded public opinion first and as a necessary consequence the Press
followed. Not that I advocate the idea that the editor should express
himself far in advance of public opinion or rather of public knowledge.
It is a very unwise thing to do. The inevitable result is the kick
instead of the copper. Martyrdom is not the business of a newspaper.
Many a leading editor of to-day deemed conservative and old fogyish is
really more liberal and progressive than those who rail at him. But he
is wiser than they and has learned that ideas which may be accepted and
in full sway a century hence, cannot be argued as if in full fruition
to-day. He may know also how to pave the way for a new idea, and is
often doing it while his readers never realize his intent.




CHAPTER XXXV.

RECENT ANTIQUITY.


I was soon to leave for the Eastern States. When I realized that I was
going, I found to my surprise that I had made a home in California, that
it was an old home and about it clung all the memories and associations
of an old home.

I wanted to visit the mines and take a farewell look at the camps where
I had lived and worked in a period now fast becoming “old times,” and I
went.

The term antiquity is relative in its character. Twenty years may
involve an antiquity as much as 200 or 2,000. Indeed, as regards
sensation and emotion, the more recent antiquity is the more strongly is
it realized and more keenly felt. Standing to-day on the hillside and
looking down on the site of the camp where you mined twenty-five years
ago, and then going down that hill and treading over that site, now
silent and deserted, and you realize, so to speak, a live antiquity. So
far as ancient Greece or Rome are concerned, their histories would make
no different impression on us if dated 600 years ago or 6,000. We are
imposed upon by these rows of ciphers. They convey really no sense of
time’s duration. They are but mathematical sounds. We know only that
these nations and these men and women lived, ate, slept, drank,
quarrelled, coveted, loved, hated, and died a long time ere we were
born and that of it all we have but fragments of their history, or
rather fragments of the history of a few prominent individuals.

But when you stand alone at Dry Bar, where you mined when it was a
lively camp in 1857, with its score of muddy sluice streams coursing
hither and thither, its stores, its saloons, its hotel and its express
office, and see now but one rotting pine-log cabin, whose roof has
tumbled in and whose sides have tumbled out; where all about is a silent
waste of long-worked-off banks or bare ledge and piles of boulders in
which the herbage has taken root; where every mark of the former houses
and cabins has disappeared, save a mound here, or a pile of stone
indicating a former chimney there, you have a lively realization of
antiquity, though it be a recent one. You knew the men who lived here;
you worked with them; you know the sites of the houses in which they
lived; you have an event and a memory for every acre of territory
hereabout. Down there, where the river narrows between those two high
points of rock, once stood a rickety bridge. It became more and more
shaky and dangerous, until one day Tom Wharton, the Justice of the
Peace, fired by a desire _pro bono publico_ and rather more than his
ordinary quantity of whiskey, cut the bridge away with his axe and it
floated down stream. Over yonder, on that sandy point, was the richest
claim on the bar.

Will you go down to Pot-Hole Bar, two miles below? The trail ran by the
river. But freshet after freshet has rushed over the bank and wiped out
the track made by the footprints of a few years. There is no trace of
the trail. The chaparral has grown over and quite closed it up. Here
and there is a faint trace, and then it brings up short against a young
pine or a buckeye, the growth of the last ten years. Yet in former days
this path ranked in your mind of the importance of a town street. You
had no idea how quickly nature, if left alone, will restore things to
what we term “primitive conditions.” If a great city was deserted in
these foothills, within twenty years’ time the native growths would
creep down and in upon it, start plantations of chaparral in the
streets, festoon the houses with vines, while winged seeds would fill
the gutters and cornices with verdure. It is a hard struggle through the
undergrowth to Pot-Hole Bar. No man lives there now. No man goes there.
Even the boulder piles and bare ledges of fifteen years ago, marking the
scarifying work of your race on mother earth’s face, are now mounds
overgrown with weeds. What solitude of ancient ruined cities equals
this? Their former thousands are nothing to you as individuals; but you
knew all the boys at Pot-Hole. It was a favorite after-supper trip from
Dry Bar to Pot-Hole to see how the “boys” were getting on, and vice
versa from Pot-Hole to Dry Bar.

A cotton-tail rabbit sends a flash of white through the bushes. His
family now inhabits Pot-Hole. They came back after all of your
troublesome race had left, and very glad were the “cotton-tails” of the
riddance. There is a broken shovel at your feet and near by in the long
grass you see the fragment of a sluice’s false bottom, bored through
with anger holes to catch the gold and worn quite thin by the attrition
of pebble and boulder along its upper surface. This is about the only
vestige of the miner’s former work. Stop! On the hillside yonder is a
mound-like elevation and beyond that a long green raised line. One marks
the reservoir and the other the ditch. It was the Pot-Hole Company’s
reservoir, built after they had concluded to take water from the ditch
and wash off a point of gravel jutting toward the river. They had washed
it all off by 1856, and then the company disbanded and went their
respective ways. Pot-Hole lay very quiet for a couple of years, but
little doing there save rocker washing for grub and whiskey by four or
five men who had concluded that “grub and whiskey” was about all in life
worth living for. A “slouchy” crowd, prone to bits of rope to tie up
their suspenders, unshaven faces, and not a Sunday suit among them.

They pottered about the bar and the bank, working sometimes in concert
and then quarrelling, and every man betaking himself to his private
rocker, pick, and shovel for a few days or weeks and coming together
again, as compelled by necessity. One of them commenced picking into a
slim streak of gravel at the base of the red hard-pan bank left by the
pot-holers. It paid to the pan first two cents and a little farther in
three, and a little farther seven, and then the gold became coarser and
heavier and it yielded a bit to the pan. The blue ledge “pitched in,”
the gravel streak grew wider and richer, the crowd took up the whole
face of the bank, 150 feet to the man, and found they had struck
fortunes. And then they worked at short intervals and “went it” at long
ones, and all save four drank themselves to death within four years.

They have all long since gone. They are scattered for the most part you
know not where. Two are living in San Francisco and are now men of
might and mark. Another you have heard of far away in the Eastern
States, living in a remote village, whose name is never heard of outside
the county bounds. One has been reported to you as “up North somewhere;”
another down in Arizona “somewhere,” and three you can locate in the
county. That is but seven out of the one hundred who once dwelt here and
roundabout. Now that recollection concentrates herself you do call to
mind two others--one died in the county almshouse and another became
insane and was sent to Stockton. That is all. Nine out of the one
hundred that once resided at Dry Bar. It is mournful. The river
monotonously drones, gurgles, and murmurs over the riffle. The sound is
the same as in ’58. A bird on the opposite bank gives forth, at regular
intervals, a loud querulous cry. It was a bird of the same species whose
note so wore on the nerves of Mike McDonald as he lay dying of
consumption in a big house which stood yonder, that, after
anathematizing it, he would beseech his watcher to take a gun and blow
the “cussed” thing’s head off. Perhaps it is the same bird. The
afternoon shadows are creeping down the mountain side. The outline of
the hills opposite has not at all changed, and there, down by the bank,
is the enormous fragment of broken rock against which Dick Childs built
his brush shelter for the summer and out of which he was chased by a
sudden fall rise of the river. But it is very lonesome with all these
people here so vivid in memory, yet all gone, and never, never to come
back.

You wonder if any of the “old crowd” now living, live over as you do the
past life here; if a single one within the last ten years has ever
revisited the spot; or if any of them have any desire to revisit it.
Some of them did so once. There was Jake Bennett. As late as ’62, Jake,
who had removed to the next county, would come every summer on a
pilgrimage to “see the boys,” and the boys at Dry Bar were even then
sadly reduced in number, for the camp ran down very quickly within the
four years dating from ’58. But Jake was faithful to old memories and
associations, and proved it by the ten-miles’ walk he was obliged to
take to reach Dry Bar. Dry Bar was never on a regular stage route. Jake
was an ex-Philadelphian and called rest “west” and violin “wiolin.” But
no one comes here now, at least on any such errand. It’s a troublesome
and rather expensive locality to reach and mere sentiment does not pay.
The nearest resident is a Missouri hog-rancher, whose house is above on
the hill a couple of miles away. He neither knows nor cares for Dry
Bar’s former history. He came here but ten years ago. His half-wild
swine are ambushed about in the shelter of the elder and buckeye bushes,
and frightened at your approach plunge snorting into the deeper
thickets.

Here it is. The remains of your own cabin chimney, a pile of
smoke-blackened stones in the tall grass. Of the cabin every vestige has
disappeared. You built that chimney yourself. It was an awkward affair,
but it served to carry out the smoke, and when finished you surveyed it
with pleasure and some pride, for it was your chimney. Have you ever
felt “snugger” and more cozy and comfortable since than you did on the
long, rainy winter nights, when, the supper finished and the crockery
washed, you and your “pard” sat by the glowing coals and prepared your
pipes for the evening smoke? There were great hopes and some great
strikes on Dry Bar in those days; that was in ’52. Mining was still in
the pan, rocker and long tom era; sluices were just coming in.
Hydraulicking 100-foot banks and washing hills off the face of the earth
had not been thought of. The dispute as to the respective merits of the
long vs. the short-handled shovel was still going on. A gray or red
shirt was a badge of honor. The deep river-beds were held to contain
enormous store of golden nuggets. River mining was in its wing and
coffer-dam phase.

Perhaps the world then seemed younger to you than now? Perhaps your mind
then set little store on this picturesque spot, so wrapped were you in
visions of the future? Perhaps then you wrote regularly to that girl in
the States--your first heart’s-trouble--and your anticipation was fixed
entirely on the home to be built up there on the gold you were to dig
here? Perhaps the girl never married you, the home was never built and
nothing approaching the amount of _oro_ expected dug out. You held,
then, Dry Bar in light estimation. It was for you only a temporary
stopping place, from which you wished to get its gold as quickly as you
could and get away from as soon as possible. You never expected Dry Bar,
its memories and associations thus to make for themselves a “local
habitation and a name” in your mind. We live sometimes in homes we do
not realize until much of their material part has passed away. A horned
toad scuttles along the dry grass and inflates himself to terrify you as
you approach. Those rat-like ground squirrels are running from hole to
hole, like gossiping neighbors, and “chipping” shrilly at each other.
These are old summer acquaintances at Dry Bar.

Is it with a feeling of curiosity you take up one of those stones
handled by you thirty-one years ago and wonder how like or unlike you
may be to yourself at that time? Are you the same man? Not the same
young man, certainly. The face is worn; the eyes deeper set; the hair
more or less gray and there are lines and wrinkles where none existed
then. But that is only the outside of your “soul case.” Suppose that
you, the John Doe of 1883, could and should meet the John Doe of 1853?
Would you know him? Would you agree on all points with him? Could you
“get” along with him? Could you “cabin” with him? Could you “summer and
winter” with him? Would the friends of the John Doe of ’53, who piled up
that chimney, be the friends of the present John Doe, who stands
regarding its ruins? Are the beliefs and convictions of that J. Doe
those of this J. Doe? Are the jokes deemed so clever by that J. Doe
clever to this J. Doe? Are the men great to that J. Doe great to the
present J. Doe? Does he now see the filmly, frothy fragments of scores
of pricked bubbles sailing away and vanishing in air? If a man die shall
he live again? But how much of a man’s mind may die out and be
supplanted by other ideas ere his body goes back to dust? How much of
this J. Doe belongs to that J. Doe, and how much of the same man is
there standing here?




CHAPTER XXXVI.

GOING HOME.


After sixteen years of exile in California, I found myself rolling
seaward and homeward through the Golden Gate in the Panama steamer
Sacramento. The parting gun had been fired, the captain, naval cloak,
cap, eye-glass and all, had descended from his perch of command on the
paddle-box, the engine settled steadily to its work, Telegraph Hill,
Meigg’s Wharf, Black Point, Alcatraz, Lime Point, Fort Point, one by one
receded and crept into the depressing gloomy fog, the mantle in which
San Francisco loves so well to wrap herself. The heave of the Pacific
began to be plainly felt, and with it the customary misery.

The first two days out are devoted to sea and homesickness. Everybody is
wretched about something. No sooner is the steamer a mile beyond the
Heads than we, who for years have been awaiting a blessed deliverance
from California, are seized with unutterable longings to return. All at
once we discover how pleasant is the land and its people. We review its
associations, its life, its peculiar excitements, and the warm
friendships we have made there. And now it is all fading in the fog: the
Cliff House is disappearing, it is going, it is gone. Heart and stomach
are contemporaneously wretched: we bury ourselves in our berths; we
call upon the steward and stewardess; we wish ardently that some
accident may befall the ship and oblige her to put back. No! Not more
inexorable, certain and inevitable is the earth in its revolution, the
moon in its orbit, or one’s landlord when the rent is overdue, than is
the course of the stately vessel south. South, day after day, she
plunges; the North Star sinks, the sky becomes fairer, the air milder,
the ocean of a softer blue; the sunsets develop the tints of Fairyland;
the sunrise mocks all human ornamentation in its gorgeousness. Light
coats and muslin dresses blossom on the promenade-deck; the colored
waiters develop white linen suits and faultless neckties. The sea air on
the northern edge of the tropic zone is a balm for every wound, and
forces us into content against our perverse wills.

We had a medley on board. There was a batch of sea-captains going East,
some with wives, some without; one of the maritime madams, they said,
could navigate a vessel as well as her husband; she certainly had a
sailor balance in walking the deck in rough weather. There was a tall
Mephistophelic-looking German youth, who daily took up a position on
deck, fortified by a novel, a cigar, and a field-glass, never spoke a
word to any one, and was reported to be a baron. There were a dogmatic
young Englishman with a heavy burr in his voice, who seemed making a
business of seeing the world; a stocky young fellow, one of Morgan’s men
during the war, and another who had seen his term of service on the
Federal side; a stout lady, dissatisfied with everything, sick of
travelling, dragging about with her a thin-legged husband well stricken
in years, who interfered feebly with her tantrums; and a young man who
at the commencement of the trip started out with amazing celerity and
success in making himself popular. This last was a cheery, chippery
young fellow; his stock in trade was small, but he knew how to display
it to the best advantage. It gave out in about ten days, and everybody
voted him a bore. He took seriously to drinking brandy ere we arrived in
New York. And then came the rank and file, without sufficient
individuality as yet developed to be even disagreeable.

But there was one other, a well-to-do Dutchess County farmer, who had
travelled across the continent to see “Californy,” and concluded to take
the steamer on his way home to observe as much as he might of Central
America; a man who had served the Empire State in her legislature; a man
mighty in reading. Such a walking encyclopædia of facts, figures,
history, poetry, metaphysics and philosophy I never met before. He could
quote Seward, Bancroft, Carl Schurz, Clay, and Webster by the hour. His
voice was of the sonorous, nasal order, with a genuine Yankee twang. I
tried in vain to spring on him some subject whereof he should appear
ignorant. One might as well have endeavored to show Noah Webster a new
word in the English language. And all this knowledge during the trip he
ground out in lots to order. It fell from his lips dry and dusty. It
lacked soul. It smelt overmuch of histories, biographies, and political
pamphlets. He turned it all out in that mechanical way, as though it
were ground through a coffee-mill. Even his admiration was dry and
lifeless. So was his enthusiasm. He kept both measured out for
occasions. It is a pleasant sail along the Central American coast, to
see the shores lined with forests so green, with palms and cocoanuts,
and in the background dark voltanic cones; and this man, in a
respectable black suit, a standing collar and a beaver hat, would gaze
thereon by the hour and grind out his dusty admiration. Among the
steerage passengers was a bugler who every night gave a free
entertainment. He played with taste and feeling, and when once we had
all allowed our souls to drift away in “The Last Rose of Summer,” the
Grinder in the midst of the beautiful strain brought us plump to earth
by turning out the remark that “a bewgle made abeout as nice music as
any instrument goin’, ef it was well played.” Had he been thrown
overboard he would have drifted ashore, and bored the natives to death
with a long and lifeless story of his escape from drowning.

Dames Rumor and Gossip are at home on the high seas. They commence
operations as soon as their stomachs are on sea-legs. Everybody then
undergoes an inspection from everybody else, and we report to each
other. Mrs. Bluster! Mrs. Bluster’s conduct is perfectly scandalous
before we have been out a week: she nibbling around young men of
one-half--ay, one-fourth--her age! The young miss who came on board in
charge of an elderly couple has seceded from them; promenades the
hurricane-deck very late with a dashing young Californian; but then
birds of a feather, male and female, will flock together. Mr. Bleareye
is full of brandy every morning before ten o’clock; and the “catamaran”
with the thin-legged and subjected husband does nothing but talk of her
home in ----. We know the color and pattern of her carpets, the number
of her servants, the quality of her plate, and yesterday she brought out
her jewelry and made thereof a public exhibition in the saloon. All this
is faithfully and promptly borne per rail over the Isthmus, and goes
over to the Atlantic steamer. I am conscientious in this matter of
gossip: I had made resolutions. There was a lady likewise conscientious
on board, and one night upon the quarter-deck, when we had talked
propriety threadbare, when we were both bursting with our fill of
observation, we met each other halfway and confessed that unless we
indulged ourselves also in a little scandal we should die, and then, the
flood-gates being opened, how we riddled them! But there is a difference
between criticism of character and downright scandal, you know; in that
way did we poultice our bruised consciences.

On a voyage everybody has confidences to make, private griefs to
disclose, to everybody else. This is especially the case during the
first few days out. We feel so lone and lorn; we have all undergone the
misery of parting, the breaking of tender ties; we seem a huddle of
human units shaken by chance into the same box, yet scarcely are we
therein settled when we begin putting forth feelers of sympathy and
recognition. There was one young man who seemed to me a master in the
art of making desirable acquaintances for the trip. He entered upon his
work ere the Golden Gate had sunk below the horizon. He had a friendly
word for all. His approach and address were prepossessing. He spoke to
me kindly. I was miserable and flung myself upon him for sympathy. The
wretch was merely testing me as a _compagnon de voyage_. He found me
unsuitable. He flung me from him with easy but cold politeness, and
consorted with an “educated German gentleman.” I revenged myself by
playing the same tactics on a sea-and love-sick German carriage-maker.
“An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” you know.

We touched at Magdalena Bay and Punta Arenas. We expected to stay at
Punta Arenas twelve hours to discharge a quantity of flour. Four times
twelve hours we remained there. Everybody became very tired of Costa
Rica. The Costa Rican is not hurried in his movements. He took his own
time in sending the necessary lighters for that flour. A boat load went
off once in four hours. The Costa Ricans came on board, men and women,
great and small, inspected the _Sacramento_, enjoyed themselves, went on
shore again, lay down in the shade of their cocoanut palms, smoked their
cigarettes and slept soundly, while the restless, uneasy load of
humanity on the American steamer fretted, fumed, perspired, scolded at
Costa Rican laziness and ridiculed the Costa Rican government, which
revolutionizes once in six months, changes its flag once a year, taxes
all improvements, and acts up to the principle that government was made
for the benefit of those who govern. Many of the passengers went on
shore. Some came back laden with tropical flowers, others full of
brandy. The blossoms filled the vessel the whole night with perfume,
while the brandy produced noise and badly-sung popular melodies.

The Grinder went on shore with the rest. On returning he expressed
disgust at the Costa Ricans. He thought that “nothing could ever be made
of them.” He had no desire that the United States should ever assimilate
with any portion of the Torrid Zone. He predicted that such a fusion
would prove destructive to American energy and intelligence. We had
enough southern territory and torpor already. The man has no
appreciation of the indolence and repose of the tropics. He knows not
that the most delicious of enjoyments is the waking dream under the
feathery palm, care and restlessness flung aside, while the soul through
the eye loses itself in the blue depths above. He would doom us to an
eternal rack of civilization and Progress-work--grind, jerk, hurry,
twist and strain, until our nerves, by exhaustion unstrung and
shattered, allow no repose of mind or body; and even when we die our
bones are so infected by restlessness and goaheaditiveness that they
rattle uneasily in our coffins.

Panama sums up thus: An ancient, walled, red-tiled city, full of
convents and churches; the ramparts half ruined; weeds springing atop
the steeples and belfries; a fleet of small boats in front of the city;
Progress a little on one side in the guise of the Isthmus Railroad
depot, cars, engines, ferry-boat, and red, iron lighters; a straggling
guard of parti-colored, tawdry and most slovenly-uniformed soldiers,
with French muskets and sabre bayonets, drawn up at the landing,
commanded by an officer smartly dressed in blue, gold, kepi, brass
buttons and stripes, with a villainous squint eye, smoking a cigar.
About the car windows a chattering crowd of blacks, half blacks, quarter
blacks, coffee, molasses, brown, nankeen and straw colored natives,
thrusting skinny arms in at the windows, and at the end of those arms
parrots, large and small, in cages and out, monkeys, shells, oranges,
bananas, carved work, and pearls in various kinds of gold setting; all
of which were sorely tempting to some of the ladies, but ere many
bargains were concluded the train clattered off, and we were crossing
the continent.

The Isthmus is a panorama of tropical jungle; it seems an excess, a
dissipation of vegetation. It is a place favorable also for the study of
external black anatomy. The natives kept undressing more and more as we
rolled on. For a mile or two after leaving Panama they did affect the
shirt. Beyond this, that garment seemed to have become unfashionable,
and they stood at their open doors with the same unclothed dignity that
characterized Adam in the Garden of Eden before his matrimonial troubles
commenced. Several young ladies in our care first looked up, then down,
then across, then sideways: then they looked very grave, and finally all
looked at each other and unanimously tittered.

Aspinwall! The cars stop; a black-and-tan battalion charge among us,
offering to carry baggage. They pursue us to the gate of the P. M. S. S.
depot; there they stop; we pass through one more cluster of orange,
banana, and cigar selling women; we push and jam into the depot, show
our tickets, and are on board the _Ocean Queen_. We are on the Atlantic
side! It comes over us half in awe, half in wonder, that this boat will,
if she do not reach the bottom first, carry us straight to a dock in New
York. The anticipation of years is developing into tangibility.

We cross the Caribbean. It is a stormy sea. Our second day thereon was
one of general nausea and depression. You have perhaps heard the air,
“Sister, what are the wild waves saying?” On that black Friday many of
our passengers seemed to be earnestly saying something over the _Ocean
Queen’s_ side to the “wild, wild waves.” The Grinder went down with the
rest. I gazed triumphantly over his prostrate form laid out at full
length on a cabin settee. Seward, Bancroft, politics, metaphysics,
poetry, and philosophy were hushed at last. Both enthusiasm and
patriotism find an uneasy perch on a nauseated stomach.

But steam has not robbed navigation of all its romance. We find some
poetry in smoke, smoke stacks, pipes, funnels, and paddles, as well as
in the “bellying sails” and the “white-winged messengers of commerce.” I
have a sort of worship for our ponderous walking-beam, which swings its
many tons of iron upon its axis as lightly as a lady’s parasol held
’twixt thumb and finger. It is an embodiment of strength, grace, and
faithfulness. Night and day, mid rain and sunshine, be the sea smooth or
tempestuous, still that giant arm is at its work, not swerving the
fractional part of an inch from its appointed sphere of revolution. It
is no dead metallic thing: it is a something rejoicing in power and use.
It crunches the ocean ’neath its wheels with that pride and pleasure of
power which a strong man feels when he fights his way through some
ignoble crowd. The milder powers of upper air more feebly impel yon
ship; in our hold are the powers of earth, the gnomes and goblins, the
subjects of Pluto and Vulcan, begrimed with soot and sweat, and the
elements for millions and millions of years imprisoned in the coal are
being steadily set free. Every shovelful generates a monster born of
flame. As he flies sighing and groaning through the wide-mouthed
smokestack into the upper air, he gives our hull a parting shove
forward.

A death in the steerage--a passenger taken on board sick at Aspinwall.
All day long an inanimate shape wrapped in the American flag lies near
the gangway. At four <small>P.M.</small> an assemblage from cabin and steerage gather
with uncovered heads. The surgeon reads the service for the dead; a
plank is lifted up; with a last shrill whirl that which was once a man
is shot into the blue waters; in an instant it is out of sight and far
behind, and we retire to our state-rooms, thinking and solemnly
wondering about that body sinking, sinking, sinking in the depths of the
Caribbean; of the sea monsters that curiously approach and examine it;
of the gradual decay of the corpse’s canvas envelope; and far into the
night, as the _Ocean Queen_ shoots ahead, our thoughts wander back in
the blackness to the buried yet unburied dead.

The Torrid Zone is no more. This morning a blast from the north sweeps
down upon us. Cold, brassy clouds are in the sky; the ocean’s blue has
turned to a dark, angry brown, flecked with white caps and swept by
blasts fresh from the home of the northern floe and iceberg. The
majority of the passengers gather about the cabin-registers, like the
house-flies benumbed by the first cold snap of autumn in our northern
kitchens. Light coats, pumps and other summer apparel have given way to
heavy boots, over-coats, fur caps and pea-jackets. A home look settles
on the faces of the North Americans. They snuff their native atmosphere:
they feel its bracing influence. But the tawny-skinned Central Americans
who have gradually accumulated on board from the Pacific ports and
Aspinwall, settle inactively into corners or remain ensconced in their
berths. The air which kindles our energies wilts theirs. The
hurricane-deck is shorn of its awnings. Only a few old “shell-back”
passengers maintain their place upon it, and yet five days ago we sat
there in midsummer moonlit evenings.

We are now about one hundred miles from Cape Hatteras. Old Mr. Poddle
and his wife are travelling for pleasure. Came to California by rail,
concluded to return by the Isthmus. Ever since we started Cape Hatteras
has loomed up fearfully in their imaginations. Old Mr. Poddle looks
knowingly at passing vessels through his field-glass, but doesn’t know a
fore-and-aft schooner from a man-of-war. Mrs. Poddle once a day inquires
if there’s any danger. Mr. Poddle does not talk so much, but evidently
in private meditates largely on hurricanes, gales, cyclones, sinking and
burning vessels. Last night we came in the neighborhood of the Gulf
Stream. There were flashes of lightning, “mare’s tails” in the sky, a
freshening breeze and an increasing sea. About eleven old Mr. Poddle
came on deck. Mrs. Poddle, haunted by Hatteras, had sent him out to see
if “there was any danger;” for it is evident that Mrs. Poddle is
dictatress of the domestic empire. Mr. Poddle ascended to the
hurricane-deck, looked nervously to leeward, and just then an old
passenger salt standing by, who had during the entire passage
comprehended and enjoyed the Poddletonian dreads, remarked, “This is
nothing to what we shall have by morning.” This shot sent Poddle below.
This morning at breakfast the pair looked harassed and fatigued.

The great question now agitating the mind of this floating community is,
“Shall we reach the New York pier at the foot of Canal street by
Saturday noon?” If we do, there is for us all long life, prosperity and
happiness: if we do not, it is desolation and misery. For Monday is New
Year’s Day. On Sunday we may not be able to leave the city: to be forced
to stay in New York over Sunday is a dreadful thought for solitary
contemplation. We study and turn it over in our minds for hours as we
pace the deck. We live over and over again the land-journey to our
hearthstones at Boston, Syracuse, and Cincinnati. We meet in thought our
long-expectant relatives, so that at last our air-castles become stale
and monotonous, and we fear that the reality may be robbed of half its
anticipated pleasure from being so often lived over in imagination.

Nine o’clock, Friday evening. The excitement increases. Barnegat Light
is in sight. Half the cabin passengers are up all night, indulging in
unprofitable talk and weariness, merely because we are so near home.
Four o’clock, and the faithful engine stops, the cable rattles
overboard, and everything is still. We are at anchor off Staten Island.
By the first laggard streak of winter’s dawn I am on the hurricane-deck.
I am curious to see my native North. It comes by degrees out of the cold
blue fog on either side of the bay. Miles of houses, spotted with
patches of bushy-looking woodland--bushy in appearance to a Californian,
whose oaks grow large and widely apart from each other, as in an English
park. There comes a shrieking and groaning and bellowing of
steam-whistles from the monster city nine miles away. Soon we weigh
anchor and move up toward it. Tugs dart fiercely about, or laboriously
puff with heavilyladen vessels in tow. Stately ocean steamers surge
past, outward bound. We become a mere fragment of the mass of floating
life. We near the foot of Canal street. There is a great deal of
shouting and bawling and counter-shouting and counter-bawling, with
expectant faces on the wharf, and recognitions from shore to steamer and
from steamer to shore. The young woman who flirted so ardently with the
young Californian turns out to be married, and that business-looking,
middle-aged man on the pier is her husband. Well, I never! Why, you are
slow, my friend, says inward reflection. You are not versed in the
customs of the East. At last the gangway plank is flung out. We walk on
shore. It is now eighteen years since that little floating world society
cemented by a month’s association scattered forever from each other’s
sight at the Canal street pier.

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_No._ 1--_You travel when you sleep._
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  “   31.--_The uses of sickness._
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Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:

so may ghastly heaps=> so many ghastly heaps {pg 46}

Is is ornamented=> It is ornamented {pg 117}

Theyr’e no use in bizness=> They’re no use in bizness {pg 151}

envied of many=> envy of many {pg 182}

many another county=> many another counties {pg 188}

as general propector=> as general prospector {pg 200}

succedeed in getting=> succeeded in getting {pg 200}

their first instalment=> their first installment {pg 200}

an aceptance of=> an acceptance of {pg 272}

well have endeavroed=> well have endeavored {pg 289}

came on broad=> came on board {pg 290}

fleecked with white caps=> flecked with white caps {pg 296}





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