Twohundred 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 theHenrywas 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 presumethat 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 theHenryduring 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 theHenry’speople 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 theHenry. 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 fora 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 theHenryseemed 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.
Aftera 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 picklejars 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, thenmuddy 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 theanimal 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, andvice 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 cradlepeacefully 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 andpried 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.
I thinkand 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 ofopinion, 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 Barproper 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 Inone,” 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 ground1,000 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 coveredwalls, 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.
Wegot 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 streamturned 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 dirtwould 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 thetin 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 fromtheir 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.
Nowork 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 theyleave 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 somegood 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 hasbeen 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?
Thisis 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 thisdilapidated 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 isthe 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 callsviva vocethe 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. Hiscombined 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 withthe 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 hasbeen 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.