CHAPTER IX.
SACRAMENTO—STOCKTON—CALIFORNIAN GROUND-SQUIRRELS—GRASS VALLEY—STAGE TRAVELLING—HYDRAULIC WASHINGS—NEVADA—MARYSVILLE—UP THE SACRAMENTO RIVER TO RED BLUFFS—A DANGEROUS BATH.
March 10th.—At San Francisco this morning a friend took me to see the ‘What Cheer House,’ a very large hotel, supported by gold-miners, where they make up six hundred beds, every lodger having a small room to himself, with marble wash-stand, looking-glass, and dressing-table. Each story shuts off from the next by fireproof doors, and the water is forced to the top of the house, where there are hoses, fire-buckets, and axes enough to fit out a fire-brigade. A large steam-engine is the cook’s assistant, doing everything that hands usually do; it kneads the bread, rolls the dough, drives the roasting gear, grinds coffee, peels apples and potatoes, beats the eggs (twelve hundred dozen a week), washes, irons, dries, and mangles the clothes; heats the water for the bathing-houses, which are perfectin every detail; does all the pumping, and cleans the knives.
Adjoining the dining-room is a well-selected library, general reading-room, and museum, containing a capital collection of stuffed birds, and other useful objects of Natural History. The rate each miner pays is five dollars, equal to 1£.per week: this includes eating and drinking. The house is strictly a temperance one, no fermented liquor being allowed within it.
Wandering about San Francisco would be much more enjoyable, if the hills were less steep, and the wind, which is everlastingly blowing, freighted with fine sand, that finds its way into your very watchcase, could be stilled.
March 11th.—Steaming across the bay in a white steamer called the ‘Eclipse,’ propelled by the largest paddlewheels I ever saw. We are en route to Sacramento, which we reach late at night.
March 12th.—Strolled about. Hardly believe so vast a place can have grown up in ten years. I think I like it better than San Francisco. The streets running east and west are marked by numbers—1ststreet,2ndstreet, and so on; those having a north and south bearing by letter, as—Astreet,Bstreet, &c. Received a telegram from the Commissioner, who had just reachedSan Francisco on his return from England, to join him.
Nothing material occurs in my journal until
March 23rd.—I am at the Webber House in Stockton, a very pretty city, built on what the Americans call aslew, or, in other words, a muddy arm of the San Joaquin river. The country round is perfectly flat, but fertile beyond description. To obtain water the inhabitants have only to bore an auger-hole about nine feet in depth, when it bubbles up like a fountain. In nearly every garden is a tiny windmill, employed to irrigate the peach-orchards and general crops. Hear of 700 mules that have just arrived from Salt Lake city.
March 24th.—Drive out in a buggy to the mule ranch. The country very bare of timber, but thickly covered with grass. Every hillock, I observe, is burrowed like a rabbit-warren by the Californian ground-squirrel (Spermophilus Beechyii). I am told that it is next to impossible to drive out or exterminate these most destructive pests; entire fields of young wheat are cleared off by them, as if mowed down; gardens are invaded, and a year’s labour and gain destroyed in a single day. Trapping, shooting, and strychnine have failed to accomplish the work of extinction. Farmers often flood entire districts,‘to drown out the darned cusses!’ Their habits are strictly diurnal; and pretty lively little fellows they are, scampering off to their holes on the approach of danger, where they sit up on their hind-legs, peering curiously at the intruder. You may come very near now: there is a safe retreat behind, and he knows it. When too close, however, for safety’s sake, the squirrel gives a shrill defiant whistle, like the laugh of a sprite, and dashes into its burrow.
Purchased twenty-one mules, at 150 dollars per head; the others were team-mules, and too large for pack animals. My mules are to remain on the ranch until I have completed my other purchases.
March 25th.—Cross in the stage from Stockton to Sacramento, a distance of about forty miles, through a country fertile in the extreme. Wild flowers, in endless variety of colour, decked the grass-land. The hawthorn, white with blossom, perfumes the air; and the waving green cornfields contrast pleasantly with the foliage of the oaks and chestnuts scattered about in graceful clumps. We change horses at Woodbridge, Fugit Ranch, and Elk Grove, and at four o’clock pull up at the St. George’s Hotel, Sacramento.
March 26th.—I am again on the road, this time bound to Grass Valley. A clumsy railway with cars, or carriages, like the yellow caravans giants, dwarfs, and wise pigs travel in, bumps me out to Fulsome, about thirty miles off. Here I am hustled into a stage, without a chance of seeing anything but mud, in which the horses are standing kneedeep.
This stage is different from any I have seen; loops, straps, and other contrivances, clearly meant to hold on by, evidence an inequality of motion and tendency to upset that give rise to disagreeable forebodings. Constructed to hold nine inside, the centre seat swings like abaledividing horses in a stable, and being somewhat rounded and padded, looks very like it. Five passengers seat themselves. I have hardly time to look at them, when a loud cracking of whips, several voices yelling ‘Hi! git up!’ ‘Hi! git along!’ and a sudden jerk sends me upon thebale—a general splash and scramble—and we are off!
We do the first ten miles with a bearable amount of jolting, and stop to change horses. The five insiders get out, and we take a nip at the roadside house, or what would be such if there were any roads. I observe four most perverse, obstinate, wild-looking horses being cautiouslyfastened to the stage; they are clearly uneducated—‘wild mustangs’ one of the insiders called them. They are held tightly. ‘All aboard, boys?’ says the driver (they call himMose)—in we scramble—bang slams the door—and with an awful lurch away we go! Now I can understand the suspicious-looking machinery, designed, on the principle of life-buoys, for stage-tossed travellers to cling to. Holding on to these we swing along as hard as the beasts can gallop.
I am told by a fellow-passenger that unless the ‘mustangs start at a gallop, they either upset the stage, or kick themselves clear of the harness.’ On this journey they were agreeable enough to gallop off, so we escaped the two contingencies. Several timesMoseshouted, ‘Get out, boys, and hang on awhile.’ I discover that this means that we are to cling to the side of the stage, that our united weight may prevent its capsizing, when going along the side of a slope like the slant of a housetop.
Near dark we are requested by ‘Mose’ to walk up the last hill. A tall sallow man, with a face hollow and sunken, closely shaven, except a tuft at the chin, steps along with me, and we reach the top of the hill a good time before the stage. We are standing amidst some scrubby timber.The long shadows of the trees are swallowed up in the gathering gloom, the music of the forest has died away, and, save the wind sighing through the leafy foliage, everything is still. My companion draws nearer. ‘Stranger,’ he began, in a voice that appeared to come from his boots, and get out at his nose, ‘jist war we are standin’, three weeks agone, a tarnation big grizzly come slick upon two men, jist waitin’ for the stage, as we are; chawed up one, and would a gone in for t’other, but he made tall travellin’ for the stage. When they came up Ephraim had skedaddled, and they never see him or old Buck-eye arter.’
This is refreshing! I hope if ‘old Ephraim’ does come, he may eat my tough companion. The stage came, but the bear did not. We reach our destination at 8 p.m.: how sore I am!
March 27th.—A good sleep has worked wonders. I find Grass Valley a romantic little mountain town, about 2,200 feet above the sea-level, on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada, owing its existence entirely to gold-mining. Visited Mr. A.’s mill—a magnificent quartz-crusher. Nine stamp-heads, each 900 lbs. in weight, are worked by one of Watts’ engines. The fine-dust gold is collected on blankets, or bullocks’ hides with the hair on, over which thewater washes it, as it comes from the stamp-heads. Some of the most productive gold deposits in California were discovered in and about this quaint little place. I descend a shaft 240 feet deep. The gold is distributed through the mud and silt of what was clearly an ancient riverbed.
March 28th.—Ride on horseback to Nevada and Hunt’s Hill. Nevada is a clean prettycity, with gay shops, brightly-painted houses, and planked streets. Near it are the famed hydraulic washings. The gold is disseminated through terraces of shingle conglomerates, often three hundred feet in thickness. These terraces are actually washed entirely off the face of the country, by propelling jets of water against them, forced under great pressure through a nozzle. To accomplish this, the water is brought in canals, tunnels, and wooden aqueducts, often forty miles away from the drift. This supply of water the miners rent.
As we near the washing-spot, in every direction immense hose, made of galvanized iron, and canvas tubes six feet round, coil in all directions over the ground, like gigantic serpents, converging towards a gap, where they disappear. On reaching this gap, I look down into a basin, or drylake, 300 feet below me. The hose hangs down this cliff of shingle, and following its course by a zigzag path, I reach a plateau of rock, from which the shingle has already been washed. A man stands at the end of each hose, that has for its head a brass nozzle. With the force of cannon-shot water issues, in a large jet, from this tube; and propelled against the shingle, guided by the men, washes it away, as easily as we could broom a molehill from off the grass.
The stream of water, bearing with it the materials washed from out the cliff, runs through wooden troughs called ‘flumes,’ floored with granite; these flumes extend six miles. Men are stationed at regular distances to fork out the heavy stones. Throughout its entire length transverse strips of wood dam back a tiny pond of mercury; these are calledriffles—gold-traps, in other words—that seize on the fine-dust gold distributed throughout the shingle. The ‘flumes’ are cleaned about once a month, and the gold extracted from the mercury. Masses of wood occur, in every stage of change, from that of pure silica to soft asbestiform material, and pure carbon.
I am strongly disposed to think this immense hollow must have been the rocky shore of aninlet or a lagoon; the rocks underlying the shingle have all the appearance, when denuded by the washing, of sea-wear. I try with a powerful lens to detect gold amidst the material they are washing, but not a trace is discoverable, and yet it pays an immense profit to the gold-washers.
Hunt’s Hill is a timbered mountain, about 3,500 feet in altitude. Washing its base is the Greenhorn river, on the banks of which some very rich gold-washings are carried on, as well as at Bear Creek, on the opposite slope of the ridge. Clothing the hill, towering high above the shanties of the miners, the sugar and nut-pines wave lazily; the immense cones of the latter, plentifully besprinkling the ground, afford a feast to the Indians and lesser rodent mammals.
March 29th.—Return to Marysville. Visited another hydraulic washing at Timbuctoo, on the Yuba river, much the same as that seen at Nevada. Marysville is about the third best city in California, situated on the bank of the Feather river, which is rapidly filling up, from the immense quantity of material brought down from the hydraulic washings. A single peach-orchard I visited was 200 acres, all fenced, and the trees in beautiful health; from it, I am told,80,000 dollars were returned in a single year by the sale of the peaches.
I commence my journal again on
April 24th.—I am in the ‘Victor’ steamboat, a small crank flat-bottomed affair, pushed against the current by a huge stern-wheel—an ugly appendage, but very effective in navigating swift shallow streams. I am bound for Red Bluffs, 275 miles above Sacramento. Pass the exits of the Yuba and Feather rivers, and change the yellow muddy water for the pure sparkling stream fresh from the mountain.
April 25th.—Starting again—the ‘Victor’ having been fastened up all night, tethered to a tree, as one would tie up his horse—the scenery, as we wend along the sinuous course of the stream, rapidly changes its character. The banks get steep, and sharp hills take the place of the flat lands behind us. Wild grape-vines hang in clustering tangles of green luxuriance from the branches of the ilex, oak, and arbutus, forming a continuous arcade over the water.
The Bluffs are reached. A straggling town, built on a high bank beetling over the Sacramento river, peeps out, from amidst some tall trees. Men, women, children, and dogs are crowdingdown, marching like ants from a hill towards a recent discovery of eatables. The banks are red, the soil is red, and the houses are built of red brick—Red Bluffs, a proper and appropriate name.
Land, and put up at —— House, not remarkable for anything but dirt and discomfort.
April 26th.—Purchase 59 mules, with a complete pack and equipment. My mules and men, that I had sent by land from Stockton, arrive. Hire two additional hands, and order the provisioning for my intended trip.
April 27th.—Mules and men need rest; breakfast over.
‘Now, Cap’en,’ says mine host, as I was debating whether it would be wiser to remain quietly at home, and enjoy a thoroughly idle day, or join the hunters, I calkilate we’ve got to worry out this day somehow. S’pose we take a ride over to the Tuscan Springs. It’s a mighty strange place, you bet your life; they say it’s right over the devil’s kitchen, and when he’s tarnation hot, he comes up and pops out his head to get a taste of fresh air. The very water comes risin’ up a-bilin’, and the pools flash into flame like powder, if you put fire near ‘um.’
‘Why, Major,’ I replied, ‘it is the place of all others I should enjoy seeing. How far is it?’
‘Waal, it ain’t over ten mile, but a mighty bad road at that.—Here, Joe, saddle up, and bring round two mustangs.’
The mustangs are small compact horses, seldom exceeding fourteen-and-a-half hands in height, descended from Spanish stock, originally brought into Mexico on its conquest by the Spaniards. They run wild in large herds on the grassy prairies in California and Texas, and are just lassoed when needed. I may perhaps mention,en passant, that a lasso is from thirty to forty feet long, and made of strips of raw hide plaited together. When a mustang is to be caught, an experienced hand always keeps the herd to windward of him; sufficiently near he circles the lasso round his head, and with unerring certainty flings it over the neck of the horse he has selected.
The end of a lasso being made fast to a ring in the saddle, as soon as the horse is captured, the rider turns his steed sharp round, and gallops off, dragging the terrified and choking animal after him. The terrible noose becomes tighter and tighter, pressing on the windpipe, until, unable to offer further resistance, the panic-stricken beast rolls in agony, half suffocated, on the prairie. Never after this does the horse forget the lasso—the sight of it makes him tremble in every limb.I have seen the most wild and vicious horses rendered gentle and docile in a minute, by simply laying the lasso on the neck behind the ears.
The breaking-in is a very simple affair: while the animal is down the eyes are bandaged, and a powerful Spanish bit placed in the mouth. This accomplished, he is allowed to get up, and the saddle is firmly ‘synched.’ The saddles commonly used in California differ very little from those used in Mexico. The stirrups are cut out from a block of wood, allowing only the point of the toe to be inserted; they are set far back, and oblige the rider to stand rather than sit in the saddle. One girth only is used, styled a ‘synch,’ made of horsehair, and extremly wide; no buckles or stitching is used, but all is fastened with strips of raw hide. Everything being complete, the rider fixes himself firmly in the saddle, and leaning forward jerks off the blind; it is now an open question who is to have the best of it. If the man succeeds in sitting on the mustang until he can spur him into a gallop, his wildness is soon taken out of him, and one or two more lessons complete the breaking.
Joe by this time had made his appearance with the mustangs. Mounting, away we went at a raking gallop!I know no exercise half as exhilarating and exciting as the ‘lope,’ a kind of long canter, the travelling pace of a mustang; there is no jarring or jolting. All one has to do is to sit firmly in the saddle; the horse, obeying the slightest turn of the wrist or check of the rein, swings along for hours at a stretch, without any show of weariness.
Having crossed the Sacramento in a ‘scow,’ a kind of rough ferry-boat, our road lay over broad plains and through scattered belts of timber. The grass was completely burnt up, and the series of gravelly arroyos, in and out of which we continually plunged and scrambled, marked clearly the course of the winter streams.
The air felt hot and sultry, but fragrant with the perfume of the mountain cudweed. Not a cloud was visible in the lurid sky, and the distant mountains, thinly dotted with timber, seemed softened and subdued as seen through the blue haze. We entered a valley leading through a pile of volcanic hills that one could easily have imagined had been once the habitat of civilised man. The wooded glades had all the appearance of lawns and parks planted with exquisite taste; the trees, in nothing resembling the wild growth of the forest, were grouped in every variety of graceful outline.
On either side the hills were covered with wild oat as thick as it could grow; its golden-yellow tints, contrasting with the dark glossy-green of the cypress, the oak, and the manzanita, had an indescribably charming effect. As we advanced the valley gradually narrowed, until it became a merecañon(the Spanish for funnel), shut in by vast masses of rock that looked like heaps of slag and cinder—bare, black, and treeless. A small stream of bitter, dark, intensely salt water trickled slowly through the gorge.
Following a rough kind of road, that led up the base of the hills for about two miles, we entered what I imagine was the crater of an extinct volcano nearly circular, about a mile in diameter, and shut in on every side by columnar walls of basalt. There was a weird desolation about the place that forcibly reminded me of the Wolf’s Glen in Der Freischütz—a fit haunt for Zamiel! Scarce a trace of forest-life was to be seen, not a tree or flower; everything looked scorched and cinderous, like thedébrisof a terrible fire, and smelt like a limekiln on a summer-night. A long narrow house, resembling a cattle-shed, stood in the centre of this circle.
‘Waal, Cap’en, I guess we’ve made the ranch anyhow,’ said the Major, as we drew up at thedoor of this most uninviting-looking establishment. ‘A mighty tall smell of brimstone,’ he further added, ‘seems coming up from “Old Hoof’s” stove-pipe. Calkilate he’s doing a tallish kind of dinner below.’
I had no time to reply, ere the host, owner, and general manager of the Tuscan Springs made his appearance. ‘How’s your health, Doctor?’ inquired the Major. ‘I’ve brought up Cap’en —— to have a peep at your location; he’s mighty curious about these kind of diggins.’
‘Waal, Cap’en,’ said the Doctor, in a long drawling voice, ‘I am glad to see you. I raither guess you don’t see such nat’ral ready-made places, for curin’ jist every sickness, in the old country as we have in California.—Here, boy, put up the mustangs: and now step in, and I’ll tell old aunty to scramble up some eggs and bacon, and then we can take a look round the springs.’
Aunty was a quaint specimen of the feminine gender, not at all suggestive of the gentler sex. Her features were small, but sharply cut. She was bent naturally, but not from age, and reminded me of a witch. One would not have felt at all astonished at seeing her mount a broomstick, and start on an aërial trip over theburnt-up rocks. But all honour to her skill as a cook,—she did her fixings admirably!
During dinner I had ample time to take stock of Doctor Ephraim Meadows. His face would have been a fortune as a study to a painter; his forehead high but narrow, his eyebrows thick, bushy, and overhanging; his hair would have joined his eyebrows, had not a narrow line of yellow skin formed a kind of boundary between them. Peering out from beneath his shaggy hair were two little twinkling, restless grey eyes, more roguish than good-natured. His nose, crooked and sharp, was like the beak of a buzzard; with thin dry lips that shut in a straight line, which told in pretty plain language he could be resolute and rusty if need be. The tip of his chin, bent up in an easy curve, was covered with a yellowish beard, that had been guiltless of comb or shears for many a day. His nether limbs were clad in leather never-mention-ums, kept up by a wide belt, from which dangled a six-shooter. A red shirt, with an immense collar that reached the point of the shoulders, and a dirty jean jacket completed his costume.
Our meal over, we started out to see the wonders of the doctor’s establishment. The house or hospital, as he designated it, was along frame-building, divided into numerous small rooms, all opening on a kind of platform that extended the entire length of the building; and sheltered overhead by a rough kind of verandah. A camp-bed, wash-basin, and stool constituted the furniture of each apartment. Four sickly-looking men were walking feebly up and down the platform. These, the Doctor assured me, were giants now as compared to what they had been ere they stumbled on the Tuscan Springs and his water-cure.
The springs are about ten in number, but not all alike. In some of them, the water rises at a temperature near to boiling, and densely impregnated with sulphuretted hydrogen-gas, perfectly poisoning the air with a most insufferable stench. In others, again, the waters bubble up tepid, but bitter and saline. From two of them, that widen into pools, gas (I imagine some compound of hydrogen) rises constantly to the surface; and when I applied a match to the water, a sudden flash lighted up the pool for a second or two, and this could be repeated at intervals of three or four minutes. This gas, by a simple contrivance, is collected and conveyed into a small shanty, dignified with the name of ‘Steam Bath,’ the gas being used to heat the waterfrom one of the springs so as to fill a small room with steam.
It is one of the most singular and interesting places I have ever visited. There can be no doubt that the springs rise from the crater of an extinct volcano, and that there is some active volcanic action still going on in the depths below. Incrustations of various salts and sulphur covered the edges of the pools and rocks over which the water runs. The water they drink has to be brought from a spring the other side of the encircling hills.
Although at this place I observed more direct evidence of some great internal fire or subterranean laboratory, in which Nature is ever transforming the elemental forms of crude matter into available materials for the supply of organic life; still throughout Oregon and California I have constantly come across similar sulphurous and saline eruptions, particularly soda-water springs, where the water rises through the earth, thoroughly impregnated with carbonic-acid gas. At Napa, not far from San Francisco, native soda-water is collected and bottled at the springs for the supply of the San Francisco market. Olympian nectar was never more grateful to thethirsty gods, than is this soda-water to the hot, parched, and thirsty hunter!
The Doctor had many strange and wild theories about these springs, and evidently entertained a lively belief in their close proximity to his Satanic Majesty’s kitchen.
‘Cap’en,’ said the doctor, ‘I calkilate you ain’t a-goin’ home without just tryin’ a bath?’
I at first declined. I did not feel at all ill, and as I bathed every day grudged the trouble of undressing. It was of no use—the Major joined the Doctor; persuasion failing, mild force was hinted at if I did not comply. I was led, or rather hustled, into the bathing-house. In one corner of this dismal-looking shed was an immense square tray, and over it was a most suspicious-looking contrivance, like the rose of a giant’s watering-pot. I shuddered, for I knew I should be held in that tray, and deluged from the terrible nozzle.
My miseries commenced by my being seized on by two brawny attendants (the bathers), and literally peeled like an onion, rather than undressed. This completed, a small door that I had not noticed before was opened, and disclosed a kind of cupboard, about six feet square. Aflap of board was raised by an attendant, and supported by a bracket; a contrivance one frequently sees in small kitchens to economise room. On this I was laid; my janitors withdrew, the door slammed, and I was alone in the dark.
A sudden noise, between a hiss and a whistle, enlightened me as to the fact, that sundry jets of steam were turned on. The room rapidly filled, and the perspiration soon streamed from my skin. At first I fancied it rather pleasant; a sort of lazy sleepy feeling came over me, but as this passed away I felt faint and thirsty, and yelled to be let out. No reply. I began to think it anything but a joke, and again shouted: not a sound but the hissing steam.
My thirst grew insupportable; it seemed as if a live crab was gnawing and rending my stomach with his claws and nippers. I made several attempts to get off the table, but wherever I put my leg the burning-hot steam came like a flame against it, and there was not sufficient room to stand betwixt the table and the partition of my steam-prison. I called louder and louder; my reasoning powers were growing feeble, my presence of mind was rapidly abandoning me, and a thousand wild fancies passed through my brain; I had given up all hope, whenI saw a gleam of light. I have a vague remembrance of being dragged out, plunged into cold water, and savagely rubbed with a kind of hempen rasp.
As I became quite conscious of what was going on, I was partly dressed, and lying on the grass, the Doctor and the Major standing close by, the bathers rubbing my hands and feet; whilst Aunty, squatted on a log, was holding a cup containing some steaming mixture.
‘O Doctor!’ I said, as well as I could articulate, ‘a little more, and you would have had to bury me; I was nearly gone!’
‘Waal, Cap’en, I kind of guess you must have had a near shave for life, but it warn’t meant nohow. You see the Major and me just strolled up to take a peep at the mustangs, and the darned brutes stampeded, breaking clean out of the “corral,” and went past the bath-house like mad. The boys see ’em, and hearin’ us a-hollerin’, made tracks right after ’em, and never thought about your bein’ a-steamin’. Old Aunty, by sheer luck, heard you a-screamin’ and a-snortin’, and it mighty nigh skeert the old woman to death, for she thought “Old Hoof” was a-bilin’ himself. Up she came a-tearin’ and a-shriekin’ that somethin’ unearthly was in the steamroom. “Thunder and grizzlys,” says the Major, “the boys have forgot the Cap’en, and gone right after the mustangs!” You’d better believe we soon had you out, and you ain’t none the worse for it, thank Providence!’
The combined powers of Aunty’s mixture and the Major’s whisky-flask rapidly restored me. The villainous mustangs—the cause of my mishap—were caught and saddled. Danger past is lightly thought of and we enjoyed a hearty laugh as the Major quaintly told the story at the Bluffs of the Cap’en’s bath at the Tuscan Springs.