On we jogged and jolted, till we lost sight of the American dead sea and of its lovely valley, and got into a canyon floored with huge boulders and slabs of roughened rock, where I expected each minute to undergo the fate of that Indian traveler who received such a jolt that he bit off the tip of his own tongue, or of Horace Greeley, whose head was bumped, it is said, through the roof of his conveyance. Here, as upon the eastern side of the Wasatch, the track was marked by never-ending lines of skeletons of mules and oxen.
On the first evening from Salt Lake, we escaped once more from man at Stockton, a Gentile mining settlement in Rush Valley, too small to be called a village, though possessed of a municipality, and claiming the title of “city.” By night we crossed by Reynolds’ Pass the Parolom or Cedar Range, in a two-horse “jerky,” to which we had been shifted for speed and safety. Upon the heights the frost was bitter; and when we stopped at 3A.M.for “supper,” in which breakfast was combined, we crawled into the stable like flies in autumn, half killed by the sudden chill. My miner spoke but once all night. “It‘s right cold,” he said; but fifty times at least he sang “The Wearing of the Green.” It was his only tune.
Soon after light, we passed the spot where Captain Gunnison of the Federal Engineers, who had been in 1853 the first explorer of the Smoky Hill route, was killed “by the Ute Indians.” Gunnison was an old enemy of the Mormons, and the spot is ominously near to Rockwell‘s home. Here we came out once more into the alkali, and our troubles from dust began. Forhours we were in a desert white as snow; but for reward we gained a glorious view of the Goshoot Range, which we crossed by night, climbing silently on foot for hours in the moonlight. The walking saved us from the cold.
The third day—a Sunday morning—we were at the foot of the Waroja Mountains, with Egan Canyon for our pass, hewn by nature through the living rock. You dare swear you see the chisel-marks upon the stone. A gold-mill had years ago been erected here, and failed. The heavy machinery was lost upon the road; but the four stone walls contained between them the wreck of the lighter “plant.”
[larger view][largest view]
As we jolted and journeyed on across the succeeding plain, we spied in the far distance a group of black dots upon the alkali. Man seems very small in the infinite expanse of the Grand Plateau—the roof, as it were, of the world. At the end of an hour we were upon them—a company of “overlanders” “tracking” across the continent with mules. First came two mounted men, well armed with Deringers in the belt, and Ballard breech-loaders on the thigh, prepared for ambush—ready for action against elk or red-skin. About fifty yards behind these scowling fellows came the main band of bearded, red-shirted diggers, in huge boots and felt hats, each man riding one mule, and driving another laden with packs and buckets. As we came up, the main body halted, and an interchange of compliments began. “Say, mister, thet‘s a slim horse of yourn.” “Guess not—guess he‘s all sorts of a horse, he air. And how far might it be to the State of Varmount?” “Wall, guess the boys down to hum will be kinder joyed to see us, howsomever that may be.” Just at this moment a rattlesnake was spied, and every revolver discharged with a shout, all hailing the successful shotwith a “Bully for you; thet hit him whar he lives.” And on, without more ado, they went.
Even the roughest of these overlanders has in him something more than roughness. As far as appearance goes, every woman of the far West is a duchess, each man a Coriolanus. The royal gait, the imperial glance and frown, belong to every ranchman in Nevada. Every fellow that you meet upon the track near Stockton or Austin City, walks as though he were defying lightning, yet this without silly strut or braggadocio. Nothing can be more complete than the ranchman‘s self-command, save in the one point of oaths; the strongest, freshest, however, of their moral features is a grand enthusiasm, amounting sometimes to insanity. As for their oaths, they tell you it is nothing unless the air is “blue with cusses.” At one of the ranches where there was a woman, she said quietly to me, in the middle of an awful burst of swearing, “Guess Bill swears steep;” to which I replied, “Guess so”—the only allusion I ever heard or hazarded to Western swearing.
Leaving to our north a snowy range—nameless here, but marked on European maps as the East Humboldt—we reached the foot of the Ruby Valley Mountains on the Sunday afternoon in glowing sunshine, and crossed them in a snow-storm. In the night we journeyed up and down the Diamond or Quartz Range, and morning found us at the foot of the Pond Chain. At the ranch—where, in the absence of elk, we ate “bacon,” and dreamt we breakfasted—I chatted with an agent of the Mail Company on the position of the ranchmen, divisible, as he told me, into “cooks and hostlers.” The cooks, my experience had taught me, were the aptest scholars, the greatest politicians; the hostlers, men of war andcompletest masters of the art of Western swearing. The cooks had a New England cut; the hostlers, like Southerners, wore their hair all down their backs. I begged an explanation of the reason for the marked distinction. “They are picked,” he said, “from different classes. When a boy comes to me and asks for something to do, I give him a look, and see what kind of stuff he‘s made of. If he‘s a gay duck out for a six-weeks’ spree, I send him down here, or to Bitter Wells; but if he‘s a clerk or a poet, or any such sorter fool as that, why then I set him cooking; and plaguy good cooks they make, as you must find.”
The drivers on this portion of the route are as odd fellows as are the ranchmen. Wearing huge jack-boots, flannel shirts tucked into their trowsers, but no coat or vest, and hats with enormous brims, they have their hair long, and their beards untrimmed. Their oaths, I need hardly say, are fearful. At night they wrap themselves in an enormous cloak, drink as much whisky as their passengers can spare them, crack their whips, and yell strange yells. They are quarrelsome and overbearing, honest probably, but eccentric in their ways of showing it. They belong chiefly to the mixed Irish and German race, and have all been in Australia during the gold rush, and in California before deep sinking replaced the surface diggings. They will tell you how they often washed out and gambled away a thousand ounces in a month, living like Roman emperors, then started in digging-life again upon the charity of their wealthier friends. They hate men dressed in “biled shirts,” or in “store clothes,” and show their aversion in strange ways. I had no objection myself to build fires and fetch wood; but I drew the line at going into the sage-brush to catch the mules, that not being a business which Ifelt competent to undertake. The season was advanced, the snows had not yet reached the valleys, which were parched by the drought of all the summer, feed for the mules was scarce, and they wandered a long way. Time after time we would drive into a station, the driver saying, with strange oaths, “Guess them mules is clared out from this here ranch; guess they is into this sage-brush;” and it would be an hour before the mules would be discovered feeding in some forgotten valley. Meanwhile the miner and myself would have revolver practice at the skeletons and telegraph-posts when sage fowl failed us, and rattlesnakes grew scarce.
After all, it is easy to speak of the eccentricities of dress and manner displayed by Western men, but Eastern men and Europeans upon the plateau are not the prim creatures of Fifth Avenue or Pall Mall. From San Francisco I sent home an excellent photograph of myself in the clothes in which I had crossed the plateau, those being the only ones I had to wear till my baggage came round from Panama. The result was, that my oldest friends failed to recognize the portrait. At the foot I had written “A Border Ruffian:” they believed not the likeness, but the legend.
The difficulties of dress upon these mountain ranges are great indeed. To sit one night exposed to keen frost and biting wind, and the next day to toil for hours up a mountain-side, beneath a blazing sun, are very opposite conditions. I found my dress no bad one. At night I wore a Canadian fox-fur cap, Mormon ’coon-skin gloves, two coats, and the whole of my light silk shirts. By day I took off the coats, the gloves, and cap, and walked in my shirts, adding but a Panama hat to my “fit-out.”
As we began the ascent of the Pond River Range,we caught up a bullock-train, which there was not room to pass. The miner and myself turned out from the jerky, and for hours climbed alongside the wagons. I was struck by the freemasonry of this mountain travel: Bryant, the miner, had come to the end of his “solace,” as the most famed chewing tobacco in these parts is called. Going up to the nearest teamster, he asked for some, and was at once presented with a huge cake—enough, I should have thought, to have lasted a Channel pilot for ten years.
The climb was long enough to give me deep insight into the inner mysteries of bullock-driving. Each of the great two-storied Californian wagons was drawn by twelve stout oxen; still, the pace was not a mile an hour, accomplished, as it seemed to me, not so much by the aid as in spite of tremendous flogging. Each teamster carried a short-handled whip with a twelve-foot leathern lash, which was wielded with two hands, and, after many a whirl, brought down along the whole length of the back of each bullock of the team in turn, the stroke being accompanied by a shout of the bullock‘s name, and followed, as it was preceded, by a string of the most explosive oaths. The favorite names for bullocks were those of noted public characters and of Mormon elders, and cries were frequent of “Ho, Brígham!” “Ho, Jóseph!” “Ho, Gránt!”—the blow falling with the accented syllable. The London Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals would find at Pond River ranch an excellent opening for a mission. The appointed officer should be supplied with two Deringers and a well-filled whisky-barrel.
Through a gap in the mountain crest we sighted the West Humboldt Range, across an open country dotted here and there with stunted cedar, and, crossing Smoky Valley, we plunged into a deep pass in the Toi AbbéRange, and reached Austin—a mining town of importance, rising two years old—in the afternoon of the fourth day from Salt Lake City.
After dining at an Italian digger‘s restaurant with an amount of luxury that recalled our feasts at Salt Lake City, I started on a stroll, in which I was stopped at once by a shout from an open bar-room of “Say, mister!” Pulling up sharply, I was surrounded by an eager crowd, asking from all sides the one question: “Might you be Professor Muller?” Although flattered to find that I looked less disreputable and ruffianly than I felt, I nevertheless explained as best I could that I was no professor—only to be assured that if I was any professor at all, Muller or other, I should do just as well: a mule was ready for me to ride to the mine, and “Jess kinder fix us up about this new lode.” If my new-found friends had not carried an overwhelming force of pistols, I might have gone to the mine as Professor Muller, and given my opinion for what it was worth: as it was, I escaped only by “liquoring up” over the error. Cases of mistaken identity are not always so pleasant in Austin. They told me that, a few weeks before, a man riding down the street heard a shot, saw his hat fall into the mud, and, picking it up, found a small round hole on each side. Looking up, he saw a tall miner, revolver smoking in hand, who smiled grimly, and said: “Guess thet‘s my muel.” Having politely explained when and where the mule was bought, the miner professed himself satisfied with a “Guess I was wrong—let‘s liquor.”
In the course of my walk through Austin I came upon a row of neat huts, each with a board on which was painted, “Sam Sing, washing and ironing,” or “Mangling by Ah Low.” A few paces farther on was a shop painted red, but adorned with cabalistic scrawlsin black ink; and farther still was a tiny joss house. Yellow men, in spotless clothes of dark-green and blue, were busy at buying and selling, at cooking, at washing. Some, at a short trot, were carrying burdens at the end of a long bamboo pole. All were quiet, quick, orderly, and clean. I had at last come thoroughly among the Chinese people, not to lose sight of them again until I left Geelong, or even Suez.
Returning to the room where I had dined, I parted with Pat Bryant, quitting him, in Western fashion, after a good “trade” or “swop.” He had taken a fancy to the bigger of my two revolvers. He was going to breed cattle in Oregon, he told me, and thought it might be useful for shooting his wildest beasts by riding in the Indian manner, side by side with them, and shooting at the heart. I answered by guessing that I “was on the sell;” and traded the weapon against one of his that matched my smaller tool. When I reached Virginia City, I inquired prices, and was almost disappointed to find that I had not been cheated in the “trade.”
A few minutes after leaving the “hotel” at Austin, and calling at the post-office for the mails, I again found myself in the desert—indeed, Austin itself can hardly be styled an oasis: it may have gold, but it has no green thing within its limits. It is in canyons and on plains like these, with the skeletons of oxen every few yards along the track, that one comes to comprehend the full significance of the terrible entry in the army route-books—“No grass; no water.”
Descending a succession of tremendous “grades,” as inclines upon roads and railroads are called out West, we came on to the lava-covered plain of Reese‘s River Valley, a wall of snowy mountain rising grandly in our front. Close to the stream were a ranch or two,and a double camp, of miners and of a company of Federal troops. The diggers were playing with their glistening knives as diggers only can; the soldiers—their huge sombreros worn loosely on one side—were lounging idly in the sun.
Within an hour, we were again in snow and ice upon the summit of another nameless range.
This evening, after five sleepless nights, I felt most terribly the peculiar form of fatigue that we had experienced after six days and nights upon the plains. Again the brain seemed divided into two parts, thinking independently, and one side putting questions while the other answered them; but this time there was also a sort of half insanity, a not altogether disagreeable wandering of the mind, a replacing of the actual by an imagined ideal scene.
On and on we journeyed, avoiding the Shoshoné and West Humboldt Mountains, but picking our way along the most fearful ledges that it has been my fate to cross, and traversing from end to end the dreadful Mirage Plains. At nightfall we sighted Mount Davidson and the Washoe Range, and at 3A.M.I was in bed once more—in Virginia City.
“GUESSthe governor‘s consid‘rable skeert.”
“You bet, he‘s mad.”
My sitting down to breakfast at the same small table seemed to end the talk; but I had not been out West for nothing, so explaining that I was only four hours in Virginia City, I inquired what had occurred to fill the governor of Nevada with vexation and alarm.
“D‘you tell now! only four hours in this great young city. Wall, guess it‘s a bully business. You see, some time back the governor pardoned a road agent after the citizens had voted him a rope. Yes, sir! But that ain‘t all: yesterday, cuss me if he didn‘t refuse ter pardon one of the boys who had jess shot another in play like. Guess he thinks hisself some pumpkins.” I duly expressed my horror, and my informant went on: “Wall, guess the citizens paid him off purty slick. They jess sent him a short thick bit of rope with a label ‘For his Excellency.’ You bet ef he ain‘t mad—you bet! Pass us those molasses, mister.”
I was not disappointed: I had not come to Nevada for nothing. To see Virginia City and Carson, since I first heard their fame in New York, had been with me a passion, but the deed thus told me in the dining-room of the “Empire” Hotel was worthy a place in the annals of “Washoe.” Under its former name, the chief town of Nevada was ranked not only the highest,but the “cussedest” town in the States, its citizens expecting a “dead man for breakfast” every day, and its streets ranging from seven to eight thousand feet above the sea. Its twofold fame is leaving it: the Coloradan villages of North Empire and Black Hawk are nine or ten thousand feet above sea level, and Austin, and Virginia City in Montana beat it in playful pistoling and vice. Nevertheless, in the point of “pure cussedness” old Washoe still stands well, as my first introduction to its ways will show. All the talk of Nevada reformation applies only to the surface signs: when a miner tells you that Washoe is turning pious, and that he intends shortly to “vamose,” he means that, unlike Austin, which is still in its first state of mule-stealing and monté, Virginia City has passed through the second period—that of “vigilance committees” and “historic trees”—and is entering the third, the stage of churches and “city officers,” or police.
The population is still a shifting one. A by-law of the municipality tells us that the “permanent population” consists of those who reside more than a month within the city. At this moment the miners are pouring into Washoe from north and south and east, from Montana, from Arizona, and from Utah, coming to the gayeties of the largest mining city to spend their money during the fierce short winter. When I saw Virginia City, it was worse than Austin.
Every other house is a restaurant, a drinking-shop, a gaming-hell, or worse. With no one to make beds, to mend clothes, to cook food—with no house, no home—men are almost certain to drink and gamble. The Washoe bar-rooms are the most brilliant in the States: as we drove in from Austin at 3A.M., there was blaze enough for us to see from the frozen street the portraits of Lola Montez, Ada Menken, Heenan,and the other Californian celebrities with which the bar-rooms were adorned.
Although “petticoats,” even Chinese, are scarce, dancing was going on in every house; but there is a rule in miners’ balls that prevents all difficulties arising from an over-supply of men: every one who has a patch on the rear portion of his breeches does duty for a lady in the dance, and as gentlemen are forced by the custom of the place to treat their partners at the bar, patches are popular.
Up to eleven in the morning hardly a man was to be seen: a community that sits up all night, begins its work in the afternoon. For hours I had the blazing hills called streets to myself for meditating ground; but it did not need hours to bring me to think that a Vermonter‘s description of the climate of the mountains was not a bad one when he said: “You rise at eight, and shiver in your cloak till nine, when you lay it aside, and walk freely in your woolens. At twelve you come in for your gauze coat and your Panama; at two you are in a hammock cursing the heat, but at four you venture out again, and by five are in your woolens. At six you begin to shake with cold, and shiver on till bedtime, which you make darned early.” Even at this great height, the thermometer in the afternoon touches 80° Fahr. in the shade, while from sunset to sunrise there is a bitter frost. So it is throughout the plateau. When morning after morning we reached a ranch, and rushed out of the freezing ambulance through the still colder outer air to the fragrant cedar fire, there to roll with pain at the thawing of our joints, it was hard to bear it in mind that by eight o‘clock we should be shutting out the sun, and by noon melting even in the deepest shade.
As I sat at dinner in a miner‘s restaurant, my oppositeneighbor, finding that I was not long from England, informed me he was “the independent editor of theNevada Union Gazette,” and went on to ask: “And how might you have left literatooral pursoots? How air Tennyson and Thomas T. Carlyle?” I assured him that to the best of my belief they were fairly well, to which his reply was: “Guess them ther men ken sling ink, they ken.” When we parted, he gave me a copy of his paper, in which I found that he called a rival editor “a walking whisky-bottle” and “a Fenian imp.” The latter phrase reminded me that, of the two or three dozen American editors that I had met, this New Englander was the first who was “native born.” Stenhouse, in Salt Lake City, is an Englishman, so is Stanton, of Denver, and the whole of the remainder of the band were Irishmen. As for the earlier assertion in the “editorial,” it was not a wild one, seeing that Virginia City has five hundred whisky-shops for a population of ten thousand. Artemus Ward said of Virginia City, in a farewell speech to the inhabitants that should have been published in his works: “I never, gentlemen, was in a city where I was treated sowell, nor, I will add, sooften.” Through every open door the diggers can be seen tossing the whisky down their throats with a scowl of resolve, as though they were committing suicide—which, indeed, except in the point of speed, is probably the case.
TheUnion Gazettewas not the only paper that I had given me to read that morning. Not a bridge over a “crick,” not even a blacked pair of boots, made me so thoroughly aware that I had in a measure returned to civilization as did the gift of anAlta Californiancontaining a report of a debate in the English Parliament upon the Bank Charter Act. The speeches were appropriate to my feelings; I had just returned not only to civilization,but to the European inconveniences of gold and silver money. In Utah, gold and greenbacks circulate indifferently, with a double set of prices always marked and asked; in Nevada and California, greenbacks are as invisible as gold in New York or Kansas. Nothing can persuade the Californians that the adoption by the Eastern States of an inconvertible paper system is anything but the result of a conspiracy against the Pacific States—one in which they at least are determined to have no share. Strongly Unionist in feeling as were California, Oregon, and Nevada during the rebellion, to have forced greenbacks upon them would have been almost more than their loyalty would have borne. In the severest taxation they were prepared to acquiesce; but paper money they believe to be downright robbery, and the invention of the devil.
To me the reaching gold once more was far from pleasant, for the advantages of paper money to the traveler are enormous; it is light, it wears no holes in your pockets, it reveals its presence by no untimely clinking; when you jump from a coach, every thief within a mile is not at once aware that you have ten dollars in your right-hand pocket. The Nevadans say that forgeries are so common that their neighbors in Colorado have been forced to agree that any decent imitation shall be taken as good, it being too difficult to examine into each case. For my part, though in rapid travel a good deal of paper passed through my hands in change, my only loss by forgery was one half-dollar note; my loss by wear and tear the same.
In spite of the gold currency, prices are higher in Nevada than in Denver. A shave is half a dollar—gold; in Washoe and in Atchison, but a paper quarter. A boot-blacking is fifty cents in gold, instead of ten cents paper, as in Chicago or St. Louis.
During the war, when fluctuations in the value of the paper were great and sudden, prices changed from day to day. Hotel proprietors in the West received their guests at breakfast, it is said, with “Glorious news; we‘ve whipped at ——. Gold‘s 180; board‘s down half a dollar.” While I was in the country, gold fluctuated between 140 and 163, but prices remained unaltered.
Paper money is of some use to a young country in making the rate of wages appear enormous, and so attracting immigration. If a Cork bog-trotter is told that he can get two dollars a day for his work in America, but only one in Canada, no economic considerations interfere to prevent him rushing to the nominally higher rate. Whether the workingmen of America have been gainers by the inflation of the currency, or the reverse, it is hard to say. It has been stated in the Senate that wages have risen sixty per cent., and prices ninety per cent.; but “prices” is a term of great width. The men themselves believe that they have not been losers, and no argument can be so strong as that.
My first afternoon upon Mount Davidson I spent underground in the Gould and Curry Mine, the wealthiest and largest of those that have tapped the famous Comstock Lode. In this single vein of silver lies the prosperity not only of the city, but of Nevada State; its discovery will have hastened the completion of the overland railway itself by several years. It is owing to the enormous yield of this one lode that the United States now stands second only to Mexico as a silver-producing land. In one year Nevada has given the world as much silver as there came from the mines of all Peru.
The rise of Nevada has been sudden. I was shown in Virginia City a building block of land thatrentsfor ten times what itcostfour years ago. Nothing short of solid silver by the yard would have brought twenty thousand men to live upon the summit of Mount Davidson. It is easy here to understand the mad rush and madder speculation that took place at the time of the discovery. Every valley in the Washoe Range was “prospected,” and pronounced paved with silver; every mountain was a solid mass. “Cities” were laid out, and town lots sold, wherever room was afforded by a flat piece of ground. The publication of the Californian newspapers was suspended, as writers, editors, proprietors, and devils, all had gone with the rush. San Francisco went clean mad, and London and Paris were not far behind. Of the hundred “cities” founded, but one was built; of the thousand claims registered, but a hundred were taken up and worked; of the companies formed, but half a dozen ever paid a dividend, except that obtained from the sale of their plant. The silver of which the whole base of Mount Davidson is composed has not been traced in the surrounding hills, though they are covered with a forest of posts, marking the limits of forgotten “claims:”
“James Thompson, 130 feet N.E. by N.”
“Ezra Williams, 130 feet due E.;”
and so for miles. The Gould and Curry Company, on the other hand, is said to have once paid a larger half-yearly dividend than the sum of the original capital, and its shares have been quoted at 1000 per cent. Such are the differences of a hundred yards.
One of the oddities of mining life is, that the gold-diggers profess a sublime contempt for silver-miners and their trade. A Coloradan going West was asked in Nevada if in his country they could beat the Comstock lode. “Dear, no!” he said. “The boys withus are plaguy discouraged jess at present.” The Nevadans were down upon the word. “Discouraged, air they!” “Why, yes! They‘ve jess found they‘ve got ter dig through three feet of solid silver ’fore ever they come ter gold.”
Some of the Nevada companies have curious titles. “The Union Lumber Association” is not bad; but “The Segregated Belcher Mining Enterprise of Gold Hill District, Storey County, Nevada State,” is far before it as an advertising name.
In a real “coach” at last—a coach with windows and a roof—drawn by six “mustangs,” we dashed down Mount Davidson upon a real road, engineered with grades and bridges—my first since Junction City. Through the Devil‘s Gate we burst out upon a chaotic country. For a hundred miles the eye ranged over humps and bumps of every size, from stones to mountains, but no level ground, no field, no house, no tree, no green. Not even the Sahara so thoroughly deserves the name of “desert.” In Egypt there is the oasis, in Arabia here and there a date and a sweet-water well; here there is nothing, not even earth. The ground is soda, and the water and air are full of salt.
This road is notorious for the depredations of the “road agents,” as white highwaymen are politely called, red or yellow robbers being still “darned thieves.” At Desert Wells, the coach had been robbed, a week before I passed, by men who had first tied up the ranchmen, and taken their places to receive the driver and passengers when they arrived. The prime object with the robbers is the treasury box of “dust,” but they generally “go through” the passengers, by way of pastime, after their more regular work is done. As to firing, they have a rule—asimple one. If a passenger shoots, every man is killed. It need not be said that the armed driver and armed guard never shoot; they know their business far too well.
Close here we came on hot and cold springs in close conjunction, flowing almost from the same “sink-hole”—the original twofold springs, I hinted to our driver, that Poseidon planted in the Atlantic isle. He said that “some one of that name” had a ranch near Carson, so I “concluded” to drop Poseidon, lest I should say something that might offend.
From Desert Wells the alkali grew worse and worse, but began to be alleviated at the ranches by irrigation of the throat with delicious Californian wine. The plain was strewn with erratic boulders, and here and there I noticed sharp sand-cones, like those of the Elk Mountain country in Utah.
At last we dashed into the “city” named after the notorious Kit Carson, of which an old inhabitant has lately said: “This here city is growing plaguy mean—there was only one man shot all yesterday.” There was what is here styled an “altercation” a day or two ago. The sheriff tried to arrest a man in broad daylight in the single street which Carson boasts. The result was that each fired several shots at the other, and that both were badly hurt.
The half-deserted mining village and wholly ruined Mormon settlement stand grimly on the bare rock, surrounded by weird-looking depressions of the earth, the far-famed “sinks,” the very bottom of the plateau, and goal of all the plateau streams—in summer dry, and spread with sheets of salt; in winter filled with brine. The Sierra Nevada rises like a wall from the salt pools, with a fringe of giant, leafless trees hanging stiffly from its heights—my first forest since I left theMissouri bottoms. The trees made me feel that I was really across the continent, within reach at least of the fogs of the Pacific—on “the other side;” that there was still rough, cold work to be done was clear from the great snow-fields that showed through the pines with that threatening blackness that the purest of snows wear in the evening when they face the east.
As I gazed upon the tremendous battlements of the Sierra, I not only ceased to marvel that for three hundred years traffic had gone round by Panama rather than through these frightful obstacles, but even wondered that they should be surmounted now. In this hideous valley it was that the California immigrants wintered in 1848, and killed their Indian guides for food. For three months more the strongest of them lived upon the bodies of those who died, incapable in their weakness of making good their foothold upon the slippery snows of the Sierra. After awhile, some were cannibals by choice; but the story is not one that can be told.
Galloping up the gentle grades of Johnson‘s Pass, we began the ascent of the last of fifteen great mountain ranges crossed or flanked since I had left Great Salt Lake City. The thought recalled a passage of arms that had occurred at Denver between Dixon and Governor Gilpin. In his grand enthusiastic way, the governor, pointing to the Cordillera, said: “Five hundred snowy ranges lie between this and San Francisco.” “Peaks,” said Dixon. “Ranges!” thundered Gilpin; “I‘ve seen them.”
Of the fifteen greater ranges to the westward of Salt Lake, eight at least are named from the rivers they contain, or are wholly nameless. Trade has preceded survey; the country is not yet thoroughly explored. The six paper maps by which I traveled—the best andlatest—differed in essential points. The position and length of the Great Salt Lake itself are not yet accurately known; the height of Mount Hood has been made anything between nine thousand and twenty thousand feet; the southern boundary line of Nevada State passes through untrodden wilds. A rectification of the limits of California and Nevada was attempted no great time ago, and the head-waters of some stream which formed a starting-point had been found to be erroneously laid down. At the flourishing young city of Aurora, in Esmeralda County, a court of California was sitting. A mounted messenger rode up at great pace, and, throwing his bridle round the stump, dashed in breathlessly, shouting, “What‘s this here court?” Being told that it was a Californian court, he said, “Wall, thet‘s all wrong: this here‘s Nevada. We‘ve been and rectified this boundary, an’ California‘s a good ten mile off here.” “Wall, Mr. Judge, I move this court adjourn,” said the plaintiff‘s counsel. “How can a court adjourn thet‘s not a court?” replied the judge. “Guess I‘ll go.” And off he went. So, if the court of Aurorawasa court, it must be sitting now.
The coaching on this line is beyond comparison the best the world can show. Drawn by six half-bred mustangs, driven by whips of the fame of the Hank Monk “who drove Greeley,” the mails and passengers have been conveyed from Virginia City to the rail at Placerville, 154 miles, in 15 hours and 20 minutes, including a stoppage of half an hour for supper, and sixteen shorter stays to change horses. In this distance, the Sierra Nevada has to be traversed in a rapid rise of three thousand feet, a fall of a thousand feet, another rise of the same, and then a descent of five thousand feet on the Californian side.
FRIDAY‘S STATION—VALLEY OF LAKE TAHOE.—P. 176.FRIDAY‘S STATION—VALLEY OF LAKE TAHOE.—P. 176.
Before the road was made, the passage was one ofextraordinary difficulty. A wagon once started, they say, from Folsom, bearing “Carson or bust” in large letters upon the tilt. After ten days, it returned lamely enough, with four of the twelve oxen gone, and bearing the label “Busted.”
When we were nearing Hank Monk‘s “piece,” I became impatient to see the hero of the famous ride. What was my disgust when the driver of the earlier portion of the road appeared again upon the box in charge of six magnificent iron-grays. The peremptory cry of “All aboard” brought me without remonstrance to the coach, but I took care to get upon the box, although, as we were starting before the break of day, the frost was terrible. To my relief, when I inquired after Hank, the driver said that he was at a ball at a timber ranch in the forest “six mile on.” At early light we reached the spot—the summit of the more eastern of the twin ranges of the Sierra. Out came Hank, amid the cheers of the half dozen men and women of the timber ranch who formed the “ball,” wrapped up to the eyes in furs, and took the reins without a word. For miles he drove steadily and moodily along. I knew these drivers top well to venture upon speaking first when they were in the sulks; at last, however, I lost all patience, and silently offered him a cigar. He took it without thanking me, but after a few minutes said: “Thet last driver, how did he drive?” I made some shuffling answer, when he cut in: “Drove as ef he were skeert; and so he was. Look at them mustangs. Yoo—ou!” As he yelled, the horses started at what out here they style “the run;” and when, after ten minutes, he pulled up, we must have done three miles, round most violent and narrow turns, with only the bare precipice at the side, and a fall of often a hundred feet to the stream at thebottom of the ravine—the Simplon without its wall. Dropping into the talking mood, he asked me the usual questions as to my business, and whither I was bound. When I told him I thought of visiting Australia, he said, “D‘you tell now! Jess give my love—at Bendigo—to Gumption Dick.” Not another word about Australia or Gumption Dick could I draw from him. I asked at Bendigo for Dick; but not even the officer in command of the police had ever heard of Hank Monk‘s friend.
The sun rose as we dashed through the grand landscapes of Lake Tahoe. On we went, through gloomy snow-drifts and still sadder forests of gigantic pines nearly three hundred feet in height, and down the canyon of the American River from the second range. Suddenly we left the snows, and burst through the pine woods into an open scene. From gloom there was a change to light; from somber green to glowing red and gold. The trees, no longer hung with icicles, were draped with Spanish moss. In ten yards we had come from winter into summer. Alkali was left behind forever; we were in El Dorado, on the Pacific shores—in sunny, dreamy California.
TEAMING UP THE GRADE AT SLIPPERY FORD, IN THE SIERRA.—P. 178.TEAMING UP THE GRADE AT SLIPPERY FORD, IN THE SIERRA.—P. 178.
THEcity of the high priest clothed in robes of gold figures largely in the story of Spanish discovery in America. The hardy soldiers who crossed the Atlantic in caravels and cockboats, and toiled in leathern doublets and plate armor through the jungle swamp of Panama, were lured on through years of plague and famine by the dream of a country whose rivers flowed with gold. Diego de Mendoza found the land in 1532, but it was not till January, 1848, that James Marshall washed the golden sands of El Dorado.
The Spaniards were not the first to place the earthly paradise in America. Not to speak of New Atlantis, the Canadian Indians have never ceased to hand down to their sons a legend of western abodes of bliss, to which their souls journey after death, through frightful glens and forests. In their mystic chants they describe minutely the obstacles over which the souls must toil to reach the regions of perpetual spring. These stories are no mere dreams, but records of the great Indian migration from the West: the liquid-eyed Hurons, not sprung from the Canadian snows, may be Californian if they are not Malay, the Pacific shores their happy hunting-ground, the climate of Los Angeles their never-ending spring.
The names The Golden State and El Dorado are doubly applicable to California; her light and landscape, as well as her soil, are golden. Here, on thePacific side, nature wears a robe of deep rich yellow: even the distant hills, no longer purple, are wrapt in golden haze. No more cliffs and canyons—all is rounded, soft, and warm. The Sierra, which faces eastward, with four thousand feet of wall-like rock, on the west descends gently in vine-clad slopes into the Californian vales, and trends away in spurs toward the sea. The scenery of the Nevada side was weird, but these western foot-hills are unlike anything in the world. Drake, who never left the Pacific shores, named the country New Albion, from the whiteness of a headland on the coast; but the first viceroys were less ridiculously misled by patriotic vanity when they christened it New Spain.
VIEW ON THE AMERICAN RIVER—THE PLACE WHERE GOLD WAS FIRST FOUND.—P. 180.VIEW ON THE AMERICAN RIVER—THE PLACE WHERE GOLD WAS FIRST FOUND.—P. 180.
In the warm dry sunlight, we rolled down hills of rich red loam, and through forests of noble redwood—theSequoia sempervirens, brother to theSequoia gigantea, or Wellingtonia of our lawns. Dashing at full gallop through the American River, just below its falls, where, in 1848, the Mormons first dug that Californian gold which in the interests of their church they had better have let alone, we came upon great gangs of Indians working by proxy upon the Continental railroad. The Indian‘s plan for living happily is a simple one: he sits and smokes in silence while his women work, and he thus lives upon the earnings of the squaws. Unlike a Mormon patriarch, he contrives that polygamy shall pay, and says with the New Zealand Maori: “A man with one wife may starve, but a man with many wives grows fat.” These fellows were Shoshonés from the other side of the plateau; for the Pacific Indians, who are black, not red, will not even force their wives to work, which, in the opinion of the Western men, is the ultimate form of degradation in a race. Higher up the hills, Chinamen alone are employed; but theirlabor is too costly to be thrown away upon the easier work.
In El Dorado City we stayed not long enough for the exploration of the once famous surface gold mines, now forming one long vineyard, but, rolling on, were soon among the tents of Placerville, which had been swept with fire a few months before. All these valley diggings have been deserted for deep-sinking—not that they are exhausted yet, but that the yield has ceased to be sufficient to tempt the gambling digger. The men who lived in Placerville and made it infamous throughout the world some years ago are scattered now through Nevada, Arizona, Montana, and the Frazer country, and Chinamen and Digger Indians have the old workings to themselves, settling their rights as against each other by daily battle and perpetual feud. The Digger Indians are the most degraded of all the aborigines of North America—outcasts from the other tribes—men under a ban—“tapu,” as their Maori cousins say—weaponless, naked savages who live on roots, and pester the industrious Chinese.
It is not with all their foes that the yellow men can cope so easily. In a tiny Chinese theater in their camp near Placerville, I saw a farce which to the remainder of the audience was no doubt a very solemn drama, in which the adventures of two Celestials on the diggings were given to the world. The only scene in which the pantomime was sufficiently clear for me to read it without the possibility of error was one in which a white man—“Melican man”—came to ask for taxes. The Chinamen had paid their taxes once before, but the fellow said that didn‘t matter. The yellow men consulted together, and at last agreed that the stranger was a humbug, so the play ended with a big fight, in which they drove him off their ground.A Chinaman played the over ’cute Yankee, and did it well.
Perhaps the tax-collectors in the remoter districts of the States count on the Chinese to make up the deficiencies in their accounts caused by the non-payment of their taxes by the whites; for even in these days of comparative quiet and civilization, taxes are not gathered to their full amount in any of the Territories, and the justice of the collector is in Montana tempered by many a threat of instant lynching if he proceeds with his assessment. Even in Utah, the returns are far from satisfactory: the three great merchants of Salt Lake City should, if their incomes are correctly stated, contribute a heavier sum than that returned for the whole of the population of the Territory.
The white diggers who preceded the Chinese have left their traces in the names of lodes and places. There is no town in California with such a title as the Coloradan City of Buckskin Joe, but Yankee Jim comes near it. Placerville itself was formerly known as Hangtown, on account of its being the city in which “lynch-law was inaugurated.” Dead Shot Flat is not far from here, and within easy distance are Hell‘s Delight, Jackass Gulch, and Loafer‘s Hill. The once famous Plug-ugly Gulch has now another name; but of Chucklehead Diggings and Puppytown I could not find the whereabouts in my walks and rides. Graveyard Canyon, Gospel Gulch, and Paint-pot Hill are other Californian names. It is to be hoped that the English and Spanish names will live unmutilated in California and Nevada, to hand down in liquid syllables the history of a half-forgotten conquest, an already perished race. San Francisco has become “Frisco” in speech if not on paper, and Sacramentowill hardly bear the wear and tear of Californian life; but the use of the Spanish tongue has spread among the Americans who have dealings with the Mexican country folk of California State, and, except in mining districts, the local names will stand.
It is not places only that have strange designations in America. Out of the Puritan fashion of naming children from the Old Testament patriarchs has grown, by a sort of recoil, the custom of following the heroes of the classics, and when they fail, inventing strange titles for children. Mahonri Cahoon lives in Salt Lake City; Attila Harding was secretary to one of the governors of Utah; Michigan University has for president Erastus Haven; for superintendent, Oramel Hosford; for professors, Abram Sanger, Silas Douglas, Moses Gunn, Zina Pitcher, Alonzo Pitman, De Volson Wood, Lucius Chapin, and Corydon Ford. Luman Stevens, Bolivar Barnum, Wyllys Ransom, Ozora Stearnes, and Buel Derby were Michigan officers during the war, and Epaphroditus Ransom was formerly governor of the State. Theron Rockwell, Gershon Weston, and Bela Kellogg are well-known politicians in Massachusetts, and Colonel Liberty Billings is equally prominent in Florida. In New England school-lists it is hard to pick boys from girls. Who shall tell the sex of Lois Lombard, Asahel Morton, Ginery French, Royal Miller, Thankful Poyne? A Chicago man, who was lynched in Central Illinois while I was in the neighborhood, was named Alonza Tibbets. Eliphalet Arnould and Velenus Sherman are ranchmen on the overland road; Sereno Burt is an editor in Montana; Persis Boynton a merchant in Chicago. Zelotes Terry, Datus Darner, Zeryiah Rainforth, Barzellai Stanton, Sardis Clark, Ozias Williams, Xenas Phelps, Converse Hopkins, and Hirodshai Blake are names with which Ihave met. Zilpah, Huldah, Nabby, Basetha, Minnesota, and Semantha are New England ladies; while one gentleman of Springfield, lately married, caught a Tartia. One of the earliest enemies of the Mormons was Palatiah Allen; one of their first converts Preserved Harris. Taking the pedigree of Joe Smith, the Mormon prophet, as that of a representative New England family, we shall find that his aunts were Lovisa and Lovina Mack, Dolly Smith, Eunice and Miranda Pearce; his uncles, Royal, Ira, and Bushrod Smith. His grandfather‘s name was Asael; of his great aunts one was Hephzibah, another Hypsebeth, and another Vasta. The prophet‘s eldest brother‘s name was Alvin; his youngest Don Carlos; his sister, Sophronia; and his sister-in-law, Jerusha Smith; while a nephew was christened Chilon. One of the nieces was Levira, and another Rizpah. The first wife of George A. Smith, the prophet‘s cousin, is Bathsheba, and his eldest daughter also bears this name.
In the smaller towns near Placerville, there is still a wide field for the discovery of character as well as gold; but eccentricity among the diggers here seems chiefly to waste itself on food. The luxury of this Pacific country is amazing. The restaurants and cafés of each petty digging-town put forth bills-of-fare which the “Trios Frères” could not equal for ingenuity; wine lists such as Delmonico‘s cannot beat. The facilities are great: except in the far interior or on the hills, one even spring reigns unchangeably—summer in all except the heat; every fruit and vegetable of the world is perpetually in season. Fruit is not named in the hotel bills-of-fare, but all the day long there are piled in strange confusion on the tables, Mission grapes, the Californian Bartlet pears, Empire apples from Oregon, melons—English, Spanish, American and Musk;peaches, nectarines, and fresh almonds. All comers may help themselves, and wash down the fruit with excellent Californian-made Sauterne. If dancing, gambling, drinking, and still shorter cuts to the devil have their votaries among the diggers, there is no employment upon which they so freely spend their cash as on dishes cunningly prepared by cooks—Chinese, Italian, Bordelais—who follow every “rush.” After the doctor and the coroner, no one makes money at the diggings like the cook. The dishes smell of the Californian soil; baked rock-cod à la Buena Vista, broiled Californian quail with Russian River bacon, Sacramento snipes on toast, Oregon ham with champagne sauce, and a dozen other toothsome things—these were the dishes on the Placerville bill-of-fare in an hotel which had escaped the fire, but whose only guests were diggers and their friends. A few Atlantic States dishes were down upon the list: hominy, cod chowder—hardly equal, I fear, to that of Salem—sassafras candy, and squash tart, but never a mention of pork and molasses, dear to the Massachusetts boy. All these good things the diggers, when “dirt is plenty,” moisten with Clicquot, or Heidsick cabinet; when returns are small, with their excellent Sonoma wine.
Even earthquakes fail to interrupt the triumphs of the cooks. The last “bad shake” was fourteen days ago, but it is forgotten in the joy called forth by the discovery of a thirteenth way to cook fresh oysters, which are brought here from the coast by train. There is still a something in Placerville that smacks of the time when tin-tacks were selling for their weight in gold.
Wandering through the only remaining street of Placerville before I left for the Southern country, I saw that grapes were marked “three cents a pound;” but as the lowest coin known on the Pacific shores is the ten-cent bit, the price exists but upon paper. Three pounds of grapes, however, for “a bit” is a practicable purchase, in which I indulged when starting on my journey South: in the towns you have always the hotel supply. If the value of the smallest coin be a test of the prosperity of a country, California must stand high. Not only is nothing less than the bit, or fivepence, known, but when fivepence is deducted from a “quarter,” or shilling, fivepence is all you get or give for change—a gain or loss upon which Californian shopkeepers look with profound indifference.
Hearing a greater jingling of glasses from one bar-room than from all the other hundred whisky-shops of Placerville, I turned into it to seek the cause, and found a Vermonter lecturing on Lincoln and the war to an audience of some fifty diggers. The lecturer and bar-keeper stood together within the sacred inclosure, the one mixing his drinks, while the other rounded off his periods in the inflated Western style. The audience was critical and cold till near the close of the oration, when the “corpse revivers” they were drinking seemed to take effect, and to be at the bottom of the stentorian shout, “Thet‘s bully,” with which the peroration was rewarded. The Vermonter told me that he had come round from Panama, and was on his way to Austin, as Placerville was “played out” since its “claims” had “fizzled.”
They have no lecture-room here at present, as it seems; but that there are churches, however small, appears from a paragraph in the Placerville news-sheet of to-day, which chronicles the removal of a Methodist meeting-house from Block A to Block C,vicea Catholic chapel retired, “having obtained a superior location.”
A few days were all that I could spend in the valleys that lie between the Sierra and the Contra Costa Range, basking in a rich sunlight, and unsurpassed in the world for climate, scenery, and soil. This single State—one of forty-five—has twice the area of Great Britain, the most fertile of known soils, and the sun and sea-breeze of Greece. Western rhapsodies are the expression of the intoxication produced by such a spectacle; but they are outdone by facts.
For mere charm to the eye, it is hard to give the palm between the cracks and canyons of the Sierra and the softer vales of the Coast Range, where the hot sun is tempered by the cool Pacific breeze, and thunder and lightning are unknown. To one coming from the wilds of the Carson Desert and of Mirage Plains, the more sensuous beauty of the lower dells has for the eye the relief that travelers from the coast must seek in the loftier heights and precipices of the Yosémite. The oak-filled valleys of the Contra Costa Range have all the pensive repose of the sheltered vales that lie between the Apennines and the Adriatic from Rimini to Ancona; but California has the advantage in her skies. Italy has the blue, but not the golden haze.
Nothing can be more singular than the variety of beauty that lies hid in these Pacific slopes; all that is best in Canada and the Eastern States finds more than its equal here. The terrible grandeur of Cape Trinité on the Saguenay, and the panorama of loveliness from the terrace at Quebec, are alike outdone.
Americans certainly need not go to Europe to find scenery; but neither need they go to California, or even Colorado. Those who tell us that there is no such thing as natural beauty west of the Atlantic can scarcely know the Eastern, while they ignore theWestern and Central States. The world can show few scenes more winning than Israel‘s River Valley in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, or North Conway in the southern slopes of the same range. Nothing can be more full of grandeur than the passage of the James at Balcony Falls, where the river rushes through a crack in the Appalachian chain; the wilderness of Northern New York is unequaled of its kind, and there are delicious landscapes in the Adirondacks. As for river scenery, the Hudson is grander than the Rhine; the Susquehanna is lovelier than the Meuse; the Schuylkill prettier than the Seine; the Mohawk more enchanting than the Dart. Of the rivers of North Europe, the Neckar alone is not beaten in the States.
Americans admit that their scenery is fine, but pretend that it is wholly wanting in the interest that historic memories bestow. So-called republicans affect to find a charm in Bishop Hatto‘s Tower which is wanting in Irving‘s “Sunnyside;” the ten thousand virgins of Cologne live in their fancy, while Constitution Island and Fort Washington are forgotten names. Americans or Britishers, we Saxons are all alike—a wandering, discontented race; we go 4000 miles to find us Sleepy Hollow, or Kilian Van Rensselaer‘s Castle, or Hiawatha‘s great red pipe-stone quarry; and the Americans, who live in the castle, picnic yearly in the Hollow, and flood the quarry for a skating-rink, come here to England to visit Burns‘s house, or to sit in Pope‘s arm-chair.
Down South I saw clearly the truth of a thought that struck me before I had been ten minutes west of the Sierra Pass. California is Saxon only in the looks and language of the people of its towns. In Pennsylvania, you may sometimes fancy yourself in Sussex; while inNew England, you seem only to be in some part of Europe that you have never happened to light upon before; in California, you are at last in a new world. The hills are weirdly peaked or flattened, the skies are new, the birds and plants are new; the atmosphere, crisp though warm, is unlike any in the world but that of South Australia. It will be strange if the Pacific coast does not produce a new school of Saxon poets—painters it has already given to the world.
Returning to Placerville, after an eventless exploration of the exquisite scenery to the south, I took the railway once again, for the first time since I had left Manhattan City—1800 miles away—and was soon in Sacramento, the State capital, now recovering slowly from the flood of 1862. Near the city I made out Oak Grove—famed for duels between well-known Californians. Here it was that General Denver, State Senator, shot Mr. Gilbert, the representative in Congress, in a duel fought with rifles. Here, too, it was that Mr. Thomas, district attorney for Placer County, killed Dr. Dickson, of the Marine Hospital, in a duel with pistols in 1854. Records of duels form a serious part of the State history. At Lone Mountain Cemetery near San Francisco, there is a great marble monument to the Hon. David Broderick, shot by Chief Justice Terry, of the Supreme Court, in 1859.
A few hours’ quiet steaming in the sunlight down the Sacramento River, past Rio Vista and Montezuma, through the gap in the Contra Costa Range, at which the grand volcanic peak of Monte Diablo stands sentinel watching over the Martinez Straits, and there opened to the south and west a vast mountain-surrounded bay. Volumes of cloud were rolling in unceasingly from the ocean, through the Golden Gate, past the fortified island of Alcatras, and spendingthemselves in the opposite shores of San Rafael, Benicia, and Vallejo. At last I was across the continent, and face to face with the Pacific.
“CALIFORNIANSare called the scum of the earth, yet their great city is the best policed in the world,” said a New York friend to me, when he heard that I thought of crossing the continent to San Francisco.
“Them New Yorkers is a sight too fond of looking after other people‘s morals,” replied an old “Forty-niner,” to whom I repeated this phrase, having first toned it down however. “Still,” he went on, “our history‘s baddish, but it ain‘t for us to play showman to our own worst pints:—let every man skin his own skunk!”
The story of the early days of San Francisco, as to which my curiosity was thus excited, is so curious an instance of the development of an English community under the most inauspicious circumstances, that the whole time which I spent in the city itself I devoted to hearing the tale from those who knew the actors. Not only is the history of the two Vigilance Committees in itself characteristic, but it works in with what I had gathered in Kansas, and Illinois, and Colorado as to the operation of the claim-clubs; and the stories, taken together, form a typical picture of the rise of a New English country.
The discovery of gold in 1848 brought down on luckless California the idle, the reckless, the vagabonds first of Polynesia, then of all the world. Street fighting, public gaming, masked balls given by unknown women and paid for nobody knew how, but attended by governor, supervisors, and alcalde—all these were minor matters by the side of the general undefined ruffianism of the place. Before the end of 1849, San Francisco presented on a gigantic scale much the same appearance that Helena in Montana wears in 1866.
Desperadoes poured in from all sides, the best of the bad flocking off to the mines, while the worst among the villains—those who lacked energy as well as moral sense—remained in the city, to raise by thieving or in the gambling-booth the “pile” that they were too indolent to earn by pick and pan. Hundreds of “emancipists” from Sydney, “old lags” from Norfolk Island, the pick of the criminals of England, still further trained and confirmed in vice and crime by the experiences of Macquarie Harbor and Port Arthur, rushed to San Francisco to continue a career which the vigilance of the police made hopeless in Tasmania and New South Wales. The floating vice of the Pacific ports of South America soon gathered to a spot where there were not only men to fleece, but men who, being fleeced, could pay. The police were necessarily few, for, appoint a man to-day, and to-morrow he was gone to the placers with some new friend; those who could be prevailed upon to remain a fortnight in the force were accessible to bribes from the men they were set to watch. They themselves admitted their inaction, but ascribed it to the continual change of place among the criminals, which prevented the slightest knowledge of theircharacters and haunts. The Australian jail-birds formed a quarter known as “Sydney Town,” which soon became what the Bay of Islands had been ten years before—the Alsatia of the Pacific. In spite of daily murders, not a single criminal was hanged.
The ruffians did not all agree: there were jealousies among the various bands; feuds between the Australians and Chilians; between the Mexicans and the New Yorkers. Under the various names of “Hounds,” “Regulators,” “Sydney ducks,” and “Sydney coves,” the English convict party organized themselves in opposition to the Chilenos as well as to the police and law-abiding citizens. Gangs of villains, whose sole bond of union was robbery or murder, marched, armed with bludgeons and revolvers, every Sunday afternoon, to the sound of music, unhindered through the streets, professing that they were “guardians of the community” against the Spaniards, Mexicans, and South Americans.
At last a movement took place among the merchants and reputable inhabitants which resulted in the break-up of the Australian gangs. By an uprising of the American citizens of San Francisco, in response to a proclamation by T. M. Leavenworth, the alcalde, twenty of the most notorious among the “Hounds” were seized and shipped to China: it is believed that some were taken south in irons, and landed near Cape Horn. “Anywhere so that they could not come back,” as my informant said.
For a week or two things went well, but a fresh impour of rogues and villains soon swamped the volunteer police by sheer force of numbers; and in February, 1851, occurred an instance of united action among the citizens which is noticeable as the forerunner of the Vigilance Committees. A Mr. Jansen had beenstunned by a blow from a slung-shot, and his person and premises rifled by Australian thieves. During the examination of two prisoners arrested on suspicion, five thousand citizens gathered round the City Hall, and handbills were circulated in which it was proposed that the prisoners should be lynched. In the afternoon an attempt to seize the men was made, but repulsed by another section of the citizens—the Washington Guard. A meeting was held on the plaza, and a committee appointed to watch the authorities, and prevent a release. A well-known citizen, Mr. Brannan, made a speech, in which he said: “We, the people, are the mayor, the recorder, and the laws.” The alcalde addressed the crowd, and suggested, by way of compromise, that they should elect a jury, which should sit in the regular court, and try the prisoners. This was refused, and the people elected not only a jury, but three judges, a sheriff, a clerk, a public prosecutor, and two counsel for the defense. This court then tried the prisoners in their absence, and the jury failed to agree—nine were for conviction, and three were doubtful. “Hang ’em, anyhow; majority rules,” was the shout, but the popular judges stood firm, and discharged their jury, while the people acquiesced. The next day the prisoners were tried and convicted by the regular court, although they were ultimately found to be innocent men.
Matters now went from bad to worse: five times San Francisco was swept from end to end by fires known to have been helped on, if not originally kindled, by incendiaries in the hope of plunder; and when, by the fires of May and June, 1851, hardly a house was left untouched, the pious Bostonians held up their hands, and cried “Gomorrah!”
Immediately after the discovery that the June fire was not an accident, the Vigilance Committee wasformed, being self-appointed, and consisting of the foremost merchants in the place. This was on the 7th of June, according to my friend; on the 9th, according to the Californian histories. It was rumored that the committee consisted of two hundred citizens; it was known that they were supported by the whole of the city press. They published a declaration, in which they stated that there is “no security for life or property under the ... law as now administered.” This they ascribed to the “quibbles of the law,” the “corruption of the police,” the “insecurity of prisons,” the “laxity of those who pretend to administer justice.” The secret instructions to the committee contained a direction that the members should at once assemble at the committee-room whenever signals, consisting of two taps on a bell, were heard at intervals of one minute. The committee was organized with president, vice-president, secretary, treasurer, sergeant-at-arms, standing committee on qualifications, and standing committee of finance. No one was to be admitted a member unless he were a “respectable citizen, and approved by the Committee on Qualifications.”
The very night of their organization, according to the histories, or three nights later, according to my friend Mr. A——, the work of the committee began. Some boatmen at Central Wharf saw something which led them to follow out into the Yerba Buena cove a man, whom they captured after a sharp row. As they over-hauled him, he threw overboard a safe, just stolen from a bank, but this was soon fished out. He was at once carried off to the committee-room of the Vigilants, and the bell of the Monumental Engine Company struck at intervals, as the rule prescribed. Not only the committee, but a vast surging crowd collected,although midnight was now past. A—— was on the plaza, and says that every man was armed, and evidently disposed to back up the committee. According to theAlta Californian, the chief of the police came up a little before 1A.M., and tried to force an entrance to the room; but he was met, politely enough, with a show of revolvers sufficient to annihilate his men, so he judged it prudent to retreat.
At one o‘clock, the bell of the engine-house began to toll, and the crowd became excited. Mr. Brannan came out of the committee-room, and, standing on a mound of sand, addressed the citizens. As well as my friend could remember, his words were these: “Gentlemen, the man—Jenkins by name—a Sydney convict, whose supposed offense you know, has had a fair trial before eighty gentlemen, and been unanimously found guilty by them. I have been deputed by the committee to ask whether it is your pleasure that he be hanged.” “Ay!” from every man in the crowd. “He will be given an hour to prepare for death, and the Rev. Mr. Mines has been already sent for to minister to him. Is this your pleasure?” Again a storm of “Ay!” Nothing was known in the crowd of the details of the trial, except that counsel had been heard on the prisoner‘s behalf. For another hour the excitement of the crowd was permitted to continue, but at two o‘clock the doors of the committee-room were thrown open, and Jenkins was seen smoking a cigar. Mr. A—— said that he did not believe the prisoner expected a rescue, but thought that an exhibition of pluck might make popular with the crowd, and save him. A procession of Vigilants with drawn Colts was then formed, and set off in the moonlight across the four chief streets to the plaza. Some of the people shouted “To the flagstaff!” but there came a cry, “Don‘t desecrate the Liberty Pole. To the old adobe! the oldadobe!” and to the old adobe custom-house the prisoner was dragged. In five minutes he was hanging from the roof, three hundred citizens lending a hand at the rope. At six in the morning, A—— went home, but he heard that the police cut down the body about that time, and carried it to the coroner‘s house.
An inquest was held next day. The city officers swore that they had done all they could to prevent the execution, but they refused to give up the names of the Vigilance Committee. The members themselves were less cautious. Mr. Brannan and others came forward of their own proper motion, and disclosed all the circumstances of the trial: 140 of the committee backed them up by a written protestation against interference with the Vigilants, to which their signatures were appended. Protest and evidence have been published, not only in the newspapers of the time, but in the San Francisco “Annals.” The coroner‘s jury found a verdict of “Strangulation, consequent on the concerted action of a body of citizens calling themselves a Committee of Vigilance.” An hour after the verdict was given, a mass meeting of the whole of the respectable inhabitants was held in the plaza, and a resolution approving of the action of the committee passed by acclamation.
In July, 1851, the committee hanged another man on the Market Street wharf, and appointed a sub-committee of thirty to board every ship that crossed the bar, seize all persons suspected of being “Sydney Coves,” and reship them to New South Wales.
In August came the great struggle between the Vigilants and constituted authority. It was sharp and decisive. Whittaker and McKenzie, two Sydney Coves, were arrested by the committee for various crimes, and sentenced to death. The next day, SheriffHays seized them on a writ of habeas corpus, in the rooms of the committee. The bell was tolled: the citizens assembled, the Vigilants told their story, the men were seized once more, and by noon they were hanging from the loft of the committee-house, by the ordinary lifting tackle for heavy goods. Fifteen thousand people were present, and approved. “After this,” said A——, “there could be no mistake about the citizens supporting the committee.”
By September, the Vigilants had transported all the “Coves” on whom they could lay hands; so they issued a proclamation, declaring that for the future they would confine themselves to aiding the law by tracing out and guarding criminals; and in pursuance of their decision, they soon afterward helped the authorities in preventing the lynching of a ship-captain for cruelty to his men.
After the great sweep of 1851, things became steadily worse again till they culminated in 1855, a year to which my friend looked backed with horror. Not counting Indians, there were four hundred persons died by violence in California in that single year. Fifty of these were lynched, a dozen were hanged by law, a couple of dozen shot by the sheriffs and tax-collectors in the course of their duty. The officers did not escape scot free. The under-sheriff of San Francisco was shot in Mission Street, in broad daylight, by a man upon whom he was trying to execute a writ of ejectment.
Judges, mayors, supervisors, politicians, all were bad alike. The merchants of the city were from New England, New York, and foreign lands; but the men who assumed the direction of public affairs, and especially of public funds, were Southerners, many of them “Border Ruffians” of the most savage stamp—“Pikes,” as they were called, from Pike‘s County in Missouri, from which their leaders came. Instead of banding themselves together to oppose the laws, these rogues and ruffians found it easier to control the making of them. Their favorite method of defeating their New England foes was by the simple plan of “stuffing,” or filling the ballot-box with forged tickets when the elections were concluded. Two Irishmen—Casey and Sullivan—were their tools in this shameful work. Werth, a Southerner, the leader of Casey‘s gang, had been denounced in theSan Francisco Bulletinas the murderer of a man named Kittering; and Casey, meeting James King, editor of theBulletin, shot him dead in Montgomery Street in the middle of the day. Casey and one of his assistants—a man named Cora—were hanged by the people as Mr. King‘s body was being carried to the grave, and Sullivan committed suicide the same day.
Books were opened for the enrollment of the names of those who were prepared to support the committee: nine thousand grown white males inscribed themselves within four days. Governor Johnson at once declared that he should suppress the committee, but the City of Sacramento prevented war by offering a thousand men for the Vigilants’ support, the other Californian cities following suit. The committee got together 6000 stand of arms and thirty cannon, and fortified their rooms with earthworks and barricades. The governor, having called on the general commanding the Federal forces at Benicia, who wisely refused to interfere, marched upon the city, was surrounded, and taken prisoner with all his forces without the striking of a blow.
Having now obtained the control of the State government, the committee proceeded to banish all the“Pikes” and “Pukes.” Four were hanged, forty transported, and many ran away. This done, the committee prepared an elaborate report upon the property and finances of the State, and then, after a great parade, ten regiments strong, upon the plaza and through the streets, they adjourned forever, and “the thirty-three” and their ten thousand backers retired into private life once more, and put an end to this singular spectacle of the rebellion of a free people against rulers nominally elected by itself. As my friend said, when he finished his long yarn, “This has more than archæologic interest: we may live to see a similar Vigilance Committee in New York.”
For my own part, I do not believe that an uprising against bad government is possible in New York City, because there the supporters of bad government are a majority of the people. Their interest is the other way: in increased city taxes they evidently lose far more than, as a class, they gain by what is spent among them in corruption; but when they come to see this, they will not rebel against their corrupt leaders, but elect those whom they can trust. In San Francisco, the case was widely different: through the ballot frauds, a majority of the citizens were being infamously misgoverned by a contemptible minority, and the events of 1856 were only the necessary acts of the majority to regain their power, coupled with certain exceptional acts in the shape of arbitrary transportation of “Pikes” and Southern rowdies, justified by the exceptional circumstances of the young community. At Melbourne, under circumstances somewhat similar, our English colonists, instead of setting up a committee, built Pentridge Stockade with walls some thirty feet high, and created a military police, with almost arbitrary power. The difference is one of words. The whirl of life in ayoung gold country not only prevents the best men entering the political field, and so forces citizens to exercise their right of choice only between candidates of equal badness, but so engrosses the members of the community who exercise the ballot as to prevent the detection of fraud till it has ruled for years. Throughout young countries generally you find men say: “Yes! we‘re robbed, we know; but no one has time to go into that.” “I‘m for the old men,” said a Californian elector once, “for they‘ve plundered us so long that they‘re gorged, and can‘t swallow any more.” “No,” said another, “let‘s have fresh blood. Give every man a chance of robbing the State. Shape and share alike.” The wonder is, not that in such a State as California was till lately the machinery of government should work unevenly, but that it should work at all. Democracy has never endured so rough a test as that from which it has triumphantly emerged in the Golden State and City.