CHAPTER X.
THE START FROM RED BLUFFS—MISHAPS BY THE WAY—DEVIL’S POCKET—ADVENTURE AT YREKA—FIELD-CRICKETS—THE CALIFORNIAN QUAIL—SINGULAR NESTING OF BULLOCK’S ORIOLE.
April 28th.—My pack-train is completed, my provisions arranged for packing on the mules. I have eighty-one mules and a bell-horse. To manage mules without a horse carrying a bell round its neck is perfectly impossible. The bell-horse is always ridden ahead, and wherever it goes the mules follow in single file. (But of this and packing I shall have more to say further on.)
April 29th.—Sunday.
April 30th.—I have determined to find my way through Oregon by an unknown route; doing this, I shall reach the Commission at least two months earlier than by taking the ordinary mail-route to Portland.
Again and again I am warned of the risk not only of losing my mules and men, but my own scalp into the bargain. The country swarms with hostile Indians, many large streams have tobe crossed, the trail is bad, if any; and altogether the prospect is anything but cheering. I have, however, made up my mind to go.
The annoyances of a start got over—wild mules reduced to a state of discipline, packs adjusted, and men as sober as could reasonably be expected—all went pleasant as a marriage-bell until the second day, when my first misfortune happened.
May 1st.—I camp on a beautiful bit of ground, with grass in abundance, and a stream, clear as crystal and cold as ice, rippling past close to my fire. I place a guard over my mules, fearing accidents; and choosing as level a spot as I can see, roll myself in my blanket, and with my head in my saddle soon slept.
I awoke at sun-up, lit my pipe, and wandered off to see what had become of my mules. I found the trusty guard sound asleep, coiled up under a tree, but not a mule. A sharp admonition, administered through the medium of my foot, soon dispelled his dreams, and awoke him to a lively sense of reality. He rapidly uncoiled, started up, stared vacantly around, and thus relieved his feelings:—
‘I guess they’re gone, Cap’en, every tarnation coon of ’em, right slick back to the Bluffs.’
I could have pistolled the rascal there and then, but the mules had to be recovered; so I bottled up my wrath, roused all my sleeping camp, and we started in pursuit of the missing culprits.
May 4th.—Three days have elapsed. I have got the mules together, but three are still absent. Again we started. I made a long march, crossing Cottonwood Creek, through Major Raddon’s ranch—one Of the finest in California for grazing—struck the Upper Sacramento, and camped about sundown on a creek called Stillwater.
May 5th.—In the night it came on a deluge of rain, that regularly soaked through everything; but it cleared towards morning, and we dried ourselves in the sun as we rode along.
The next three days we travelled through a beautiful parklike country, very lightly timbered, covered with grass, and thickly dotted with magnificent ranches (farms); we struck Pitt river on the fourth day, crossed it safely, swam the mules, and ferried over the packs.
May 9th.—Our journey for the first twelve miles lay through a narrow rocky gorge—the trail; simply a ledge of rock, barely wide enough for a mule to stand upon. Three hundred feetbelow rolled the river. The least mistake—a single false step, and over goes mule or man, as it may be, and you see the last of him.
Here I passed a most curious place called the Devil’s Pocket; the trail winds along the very edge, and you peer down into an immense hollow kind of basin, that looks as if it had once been a lake, and suddenly dried up. The hills are lofty, sharply pointed, and capped with snow.
At the head of this gorge I, for the first time, saw an encampment of Digger Indians, and a more famished picture of squalid misery can hardly be imagined. Their wretched comfortless huts are like large molehills; there is a pit sunk in the ground, and a framework of sticks, shaped like a large umbrella arched, over it; old skins and pieces of bark are thrown over this frame, and the whole is covered with earth. The entrance is a hole, into which they creep like animals.
Their food consists principally of esculent roots of various kinds, which they dig during the summer months, and dry in the sun. The field-cricket (Acheta nigra) they also dry in large quantities, and eat them just as we do shrimps. Bread made from acorn-flour is also another important article of their diet. They seldom fishor hunt. Their arms are bows and arrows; their clothing, both male and female, simply a bit of skin worn like an apron; they are small in stature; thin, squalid, dirty, and degraded in appearance. In their habits little better than an ourang-outang, they are certainly the lowest type of savage I have ever seen.
We camped in the evening on a large plain called Big Flat.
May 10th.—It was bitterly cold all night, and froze sharply. We got off soon after sun-up, and literally crept along the side of a high range of mountains, densely wooded, and forming one side of the valley of the Sacramento, which has dwindled down into a mere mountain-burn. Here I came suddenly on a little colony of miners, engaged in gold-washing. I discovered the place was named Dogtown—the entire town consisting of a store, a grogshop, and a smithy. I paid twenty-five cents (a shilling) for a mere sip of the vilest poison I ever tasted, libellously called ‘Fine Old Monongahela Whisky.’ About six miles farther, still on the same trail, I came to another gold-claim, where there were no houses at all, called Portuguese Flat. Passed through some thin timber; camped on a lovely mountain-stream.
May 11th.—Shotgun Creek; my camp is on the side of a steep mountain, and, about a mile farther on, is another stream, Mary’s Creek. Camped on this stream was a small pack-train, that had been with stores to some mining-station. I heard wolves barking and howling all night, and twice I drove them out of my camp with a fire-log. The next morning, as I passed the camp of the packers, they were in sad grief. The rascally wolves had pulled down one of their mules, and torn it almost to pieces. I rode up in the wood to see its mangled remains. The ravenous beasts must have fixed on its haunches, and ripped it up whilst it lived. I was sadly grieved for the poor beast that had come to so untimely an end, and for the man who had lost him—at least 30l.worth.
For two more days I followed up the course of the Sacramento, and crossed it for the last time. Standing at the ford, and looking straight up the valley, the scenery is wild and beautiful in the extreme; on either side sharp pinnacle-like rocks shoot up into all sorts of fantastic shapes, dotted with the sugar-pine, scrub-oak, and manzanita in front; and blocking up, as it were, the end of the valley, stood Mount Shasta, at this time covered to its base with snow.
This vast mountain is a constant landmark to the trappers, for it can be seen from an incredible distance, and stands completely isolated in the midst of the Shasta plains. I camped close to the very snow at its base, in a little dell called ‘Strawberry Valley.’ The next day reached the Shasta plains, and camped early in the day.
May 15th.—As I was to bid goodby to civilisation, and abandon all hopes of seeing aught but savages, after leaving this camp, and being by no means sure of the road, I made up my mind to ride into Yreka and obtain information about the Indians, and the state of the trails, and also (what was of equal importance) obtain a relay of provisions; the distance from my camp to the city was about thirty miles.
Yreka city is a small mining-station, situated on one side of the great Shasta plains; it stands quite away from law, society, and civilisation, gold being the magnet that attracts first the miner, and then the various satellites (jackals would be the more appropriate name) that follow his steps. I left the mules in charge of my packmaster, and started at sun-up. The ride was a most desolate affair, over an interminable sandy plain, without even a shrub or flower, much more a tree, to break the monotony. I reached Yrekaabout ten, and put up at the ‘What Cheer House,’ bespoke my bed, and ordered breakfast. The keen morning-air and a thirty-mile ride had made me perfectly ravenous, and I waged alarming havoc on the ham and eggs, fixings, and corn-dodgers, that, I must say, were admirable. The tea was not a success, being a remarkably mild infusion, very hot, and sweetened with brown sugar; but it washed down the solids, and the finest congou could not have done more.
Thus recuperated, I started off to call on Judge ——, to whom I had a letter of introduction from my agents in San Francisco. It did not take long to find the Judge’s quarters, the lanes, streets, and alleys being distinctions without any material differences. The mansion in which his judgeship ‘roomed’ was a small shanty, with a porch or verandah round it, to keep off the sun when it happened to be hot, and the wet when it rained. I knocked with my knuckles—no reply; tried again—still silence; resorted to the handle of my hunting-knife, anything but mildly—that did it.
‘I raither calkilate, stranger, you’d better jist open that door;Iain’t agwine to, you bet your boots.’
I opened it, and walked in. There sat Judge—— in a large armchair, cleverly balanced on the two hind-legs. No, it was not sitting, or lying, or standing, or lounging; it was a posture compounded of all these positions. His (I mean Judge ——’s) legs were extended on a level with his nose, and rested on the square deal table before him. He was smoking an immense cigar, one half of which was stowed away in his cheek, rolled about, and chewed; whilst the other half protruded from the corner of his mouth, and reached nearly to his eye. A little distance from the Judge was an immense spittoon, like a young sponging-bath. He was ‘whittling’ a piece of stick with a pocket-knife, and looked the embodiment of supreme indifference. The chair he occupied and the table—whose only use, as far as I could see, was to rest his legs on—constituted the entire furniture.
The Judge himself was a long spare man, and gave me the idea of an individual whose great attribute consisted in possessing length without breadth or thickness; everything about him was suggestive of length. Beginning at his head, his hair was long, and his face was long, and his nose was long, and a long goatee-beard terminated the end of his chin; his arms were long, and his legs were long, and his feet were long; he had a longdrawling utterance, and was inordinately long at arriving at a moderate pitch of civility. He eyed me over and drawled out, ‘W-a-e-l!’ I handed my letter, and quietly awaited its effect; as he was long in everything else, he was long in opening it. Having made a minute inspection of the exterior, he slowly took it from its yellow envelope, and gradually seemed to understand from its contents that he was to be civil.
‘So you ain’t bin long in these parts, Cap’en?’ said the Judge, without in the smallest degree shifting his position.
I said I was quite a stranger, and should be glad if he would give me some information about the trails and the Indians, along the route I intended taking.
‘Bars and steel traps!’ roared the Judge. ‘You’ll have your har ris, sure as beaver medicine! Why, thar ain’t worse redskins in all Oregon than the Klamaths. Jist three months agone come Friday, the darn’d skunks came right slick upon Dick Livingstone and his gang. You’ve heerd of Dick, I guess?’ (I said I had not.) ‘Wael, most people has, leastways. They was jist a-washing up a tall day’s work, up Rogue River, when the Klamaths swarmed ’em just as thick as mosquitos in a swamp. Several went under, bet your life, for Dick and his boyswarn’t the ones to cave in. But ‘twarn’t no use; the reds jist crowded them clean down, and took the har off everyone of ’em. The trails, too, is awful soft. Mose Hart says—and he’s now from Bogus Holler, whar you have to go—that a mule is jist sure to mire down a’most any place.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘your news is not by any means refreshing, Judge; nevertheless, I mean going.’
‘Wael, Cap’en, maybe you’re right; makin’ back-tracks ain’t good, anyway; we are a go-ahead people, we are, and it won’t pay to be skeerish, anyway. S’pose we go and take a drink, and I’ll jist put you through the city; I guess I’m well posted about most things in these diggins.’
So we did the city, which did not take very much time to do; we did the stores, where every person, from the master to the errand-boy, did nothing but sit on the counter to chew, whittle, and spit. The amount of whittling done in this city is perfectly astounding; every post supporting the verandahs outside the stores and bar-rooms was whittled nearly through; some of them in two or three places. We did the bar-rooms, and did sundry drinks with divers people. I purchased provisions, hired a guide, took leave of the Judge (who was not half a badfellow when you understood him), and retiring to my inn, determined to enjoy the luxury of a bed and a long night-in, having slept on the ground since leaving Red Bluffs; and if the Judge was right about the redskins, the chances were considerably against my ever stretching my limbs on another. So, to make the most of it—for a start at sun-up and a long ride, added to a tedious day, had pretty well fagged me—I retired very early, and turned in.
It really was a lovely bed, just like bathing in feathers. I stretched out my limbs until they fairly cracked again, and rolled in enjoyment. My thoughts were soon wandering; and visions of home, mixed up with mules falling over precipices, battles with Indians, an ugly feeling round the top of my head, judges, drinks, rowdies, all jumbled together in a ghostly medley—floated off in misty indistinctness, and I subsided into the land of dreams.
I awoke, with an indistinct idea that I was at a ball, with a jiggy kind of tune whirling through my brain. Pish! I must have been dreaming; so I turned over, and tugged the blankets more tightly round my shoulders, vexed that such a stupid dream should have awoke me. Hark! what on earth is that? ‘Ladies and gents, takeyour places, salute your partners,’—then crash went two fiddles, crowding out a break-down. Again the voice—‘Half right and left’—and off they went. The sounds of countless feet, scuffling rapidly over a floor, told me, in language not to be mistaken, that a ball was going briskly on very near my head.
I sat up, rubbed my eyes, took a long mournful yawn, and began to consider what had best be done. I discovered that a thin wooden partition only intervened betwixt my head and the ball-room; everything rattled to the jigging tune of the music and the dancers; the windows, the doors, the wash-crockery, the bed, all jigged; and I began to feel myself involuntarily nodding to the same measure, and jigging mentally like the rest. Shades of the departed! I could not stand this. Goodby bed, and feathers, and sleep! I may as well dance in reality as in imagination; and abandoning all my anticipated delights, dressed, and entered the ball-room.
It was a long room, lighted with candles hung against the wall in tin sconces; the company—if variety is charming—was perfect. The costumes, as a rule, were more suggestive of ease than elegance; scarlet shirts and buckskin ‘pants’ were in the ascendant. The boots as a rule,being of the species known as Wellingtons, were worn outside the trousers, inducing the latter indispensables to assume a bunchiness about the knees, not calculated to display the symmetry of the leg to advantage. Very few had any jackets on, but all, without exception, carried a bowie-knife and six-shooter in their waistbelts. The ladies’ costumes were equally varied: most of them wore bright-coloured muslins, of very large patterns, and showy waist-ribbons, tied behind in a large bow, with streamers down to their heels.
The dance was just ‘down’ when I came into the room. I saw a few citizens I had met in the day, but each one seemed to have his ‘fancy gal,’ and any chance of getting an introduction was a vain hope. The fashion, I discovered afterwards, is either to bring or meet your partner at the ball-room, and dance with her, and her only, all the evening.
A waltz was called, and I wanted a partner. Looking round, I espied a lady sitting near the end of the room, who evidently had not got one. She was in the same place when I entered the room, and it was clear to me, by her unrumpled appearance, that she had not danced for the evening. ‘Faint heart never won fair lady’ might, I imagined, apply as forcibly to dancingas to wooing or fighting; if I am snubbed it won’t be all the world, and I suppose I shall live it down—so here goes! Walking boldly up to her, I asked coolly, but rather apologetically, if she would try a waltz.
‘Guess, stranger, I ain’t a-fix’d up for waltzin.’
‘Perhaps, madam,’ I said, ‘you will excuse me, although unknown to you, if I ask you to dance the next cotillon with me?’
Looking into my face with an expression half doubt, half delight, she said: ‘Stranger, I’ll have the tallest kind of pleasure in puttin’ you right slick through a cotillon, for I’ve sot here, like a blue chicken on a pine-log, till I was like to a-grow’d to the seat.’
This satisfactorily arranged, I sat down by her side until the waltz finished, to have a good look at and trot out my new inamorata. She was a blonde beauty, with fair hair and light-grey eyes, that flashed and twinkled roguishly; and robed in some white material, with blue ribbons in her hair and round her waist—a mountain-sylph, that any wanderer in search of a partner would have deemed himself lucky to have stumbled on. Our conversation was rather discursive, until I discovered that home-politics, or rather the duties and requirements of agal t’hum, was anever-failing spring from which to draw fresh draughts of household knowledge. At last the cotillon was called by the master of the ceremonies, and again I heard—‘Take your places, salute your partners;’ the fiddles started the same kind of jigging tune, and away we went.
A cotillon is a compound, complicated kind of dance, evidently constructed from the elements and fragments of many other dances: a good deal of quadrille, a strong taste of lancers, a flavour of polka and waltz—the whole highly seasoned with Indian war-dance. You never stand still, neither can you lounge and talk soft nothings to your partner—it is real,bonâ fide, downright, honest dancing. I soon discovered why the men left off their jackets: a trained runner could not have stood it in clothing. My jacket and waist-coat soon hung on a peg, and, red-shirted like the rest, I footed it out gallantly.
My partner was a gem, with the endurance of a ballet-girl in pantomime time. How many cotillons we got through I never clearly remembered; but we danced on, till the grey morning light, stealing in through the windows, warned the revellers that Old Sol was creeping from behind the eastern hills, and that the day, with all its cares and toils, was near at hand once more.My fair partner positively refused to allow me to see her home. Being a casual acquaintance and not a lover, I suppose, of course, that it was highly proper on her part. I thanked her sincerely, for I really felt grateful to her for enabling me to dance away a night that I had destined for a long luxurious repose. With a hearty ‘good-night’ we parted, never to meet again.
It was a glorious morning—the air cool and fresh, the sky unflecked by a single cloud. The sun was just tipping the hilltops with rosy light, and peeping slily into the valleys, as I wandered out to think over my strange adventure. My way led by chance up the back of the street, and out by a little stream to the gold-washings. Early as it was, all was bustle and activity. Many of my friends of the ball were now wresting the yellow ore from its hiding-places, the anticipation of gold dispelling all sense of fatigue. The want of water is a great drawback to these diggings. So valuable is it, that it has been brought by a small canal a distance of thirty miles, and is rented by the miners at so much a cubic foot.
I lingered here some time, for there is much to see, then turned my steps towards my inn through the city.
‘Say—Cap’en—here—hold on!’
I turned, and saw a man in a one-horse dray, whipping up his horse, and violently gesticulating for me to stop. He soon came up, and jumping out of the dray, seized my hand, and shook it with a grip that made my very eyes water.
‘Guess you ain’t acquainted with this child?’
I said no; I had not the pleasure of knowing him.
‘I spotted you, Cap’en, just as soon as ever I seed you making tracks down the street. My gal Car’line told me how she put you through all the dance last night.’
It suddenly flashed upon me that the drayman was my partner’s papa. Here’s a lively affair! If he does not ask me my intentions, and riddle me with a six-shooter if I refuse to marry his ‘gal’ at once, I shall deem myself the most fortunate of men. I civilly said, in reply, that I found his daughter a most admirable partner.
‘I rather guess you did, Cap’en; she’s all watch-spring and whalebone, she is; can’t skeer up a smarter gal than “Car” in these parts, if you was to do your darndest. She! why, she’s worth her weight in nuggets to the man as gets her.’
I felt cold all over—I thought it was coming. ‘You must excuse me,’ I said; ‘my breakfast is waiting, and I daresay we shall meet again.’ (I knew this was an awful twister.)
‘I’m sure we shall, Cap’en. Let’s licker:’ so we adjourned to the nearest bar-room and took an ‘eye-opener,’ and so I escaped from the drayman. I drew a deep breath, and felt as if I had got clear from the claws of a grizzly bear—made for the inn as fast as I could, gobbled up a hasty breakfast, packed up my goods, and with my guide started for my camp.
Often I turned and gazed anxiously over the plain, expecting I should see the drayman, his daughter Caroline, and a priest in hot pursuit; and there and then, on the Shasta plains, I should be,nolens volens, linked to my fair-haired partner, for a life’s cotillon!
Such was my first, and such was my last, my only night in Yreka! ‘All’s well that ends well,’ and I trust the fair Caroline has as pleasant a remembrance of the Cap’en as he has of her!
I found my camp all right, saddled up, and am off on my perilous journey through the wilds of Oregon. The Shasta plains are vast sandy flats, half prairie, half desert, sparsely covered with withered grass, and not a bush or tree orshrub, as far as the eye could wander, had struggled into life. ’Tis true a stunted artemisia, or wild-sage bush, had fought its way inch by inch in its struggle for existence, and looked so old, dry, and parched, that your idea was, if you laid a finger on it, it would powder up like dried herbs; but whatever had been in shape of grass, or herb, or shrub, was gone, cleared bodily and entirely away by the field-crickets.
Never shall I forget this insect array. On getting well upon the plains, I found every inch of ground covered with field-crickets; they were as thick on the ground as ants on a hill; the mules could not tread without stepping on them; not an atom or vestige of vegetation remained, the ground as clear as a planed floor. It was about twenty good long miles to the next water, and straight across the sand-plains, and, for that entire distance, the crickets were as thick as ever. It is impossible to estimate the quantity; but when you suppose a space of ground twenty-seven miles long, and how wide I know not, but at least twice that, covered with crickets as thick as they could be packed, you can roughly imagine what they would have looked like if swept into a heap.
It was long after sundown when we reached the water, tired, thirsty, and utterly worn-out;but the stream being wide and swift, the crickets had not crossed it, so our tired animals had a good supper, and we a comfortable camp. I rode off to some farm-enclosures I saw, in search of milk and eggs; and, to my great surprise, I noticed every field had a little tin-fence inside thesnakeorrailfence, about six or eight inches wide, nailed along on a piece of lumber, placed edgeways in the ground, so that a good wide ledge of tin projected towards the prairie.
‘What,’ I said to the first farmer I met, ‘induces you to put this tin affair round your field?’
‘Why, stranger, I guess you ain’t a-travelled this way much, or you’d be pretty tall sure that them darned blackshirts out on the prairie would eat a hoss and chase the rider. But for that bit of a tin-fixin’ thar, they’d mighty soon make tracks for my field, and just leave her clean as an axe-blade. These critters come about once in four years, and a mighty tall time they have when they do come!’
It was a most effectual and capital contrivance to keep them out, for if they came underneath the tin they jumped up against it, and it was too wide to leap over. These field-crickets (Acheta nigra) are black, and very much larger than the ordinary house-cricket. They eatseeds, grass, fruit, and, when they can get nothing else, they devour each other. I frequently got off my horse to see what a large mob of crickets were about. They had dragged down, perhaps, two or three others, and were one and all deliberately tearing them to pieces. If they meet head to head, they rush at each other and butt like rams, but, backing against each other, they lash out their hind-legs and kick like horses. What becomes of them when they die I cannot imagine; the entire atmosphere for miles must become pestilential. I suppose, from their coming in such vast numbers every fourth year, that the larvæ must take that time ere they assume the perfect shape.
May 16th.—The Californian quail, which I found most plentiful along the course of the Sacramento, ceases at the edge of this great sandy desert; it appears to be the limit to its northern range. I note a singular instance, how curiously and readily birds alter their usual habits under difficulties, in the nesting of Bullock’s Oriole. A solitary oak stood by the little patch of water, a spring that oozed, rather than bubbled, through the sandy soil where my camp stood; it was the only water within many miles, and the only tree too; every available branch and spray had oneof the woven nests of this brilliant bird hanging from it. I have never seen them colonise elsewhere. The nests are usually some distance from each other, and concealed amidst thick foliage.