The Silverado Squatters

The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Silverado Squatters, by Robert Louis
Stevenson, Illustrated by Joseph D. Strong
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Title: The Silverado Squatters
Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
Release Date: January 29, 2013 [eBook #516]
[This file was first posted on March 12, 1996]
Language: English
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***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS***
Transcribed from the 1906 Chatto & Windus edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org
[Picture: Picture of the squatters by Joseph D. Strong. The title page
incorrectly claims it was by Joseph A. Strong]
THE
SILVERADO SQUATTERS
BY
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
[Picture: Decorative graphic]
A NEW IMPRESSION
WITH A FRONTISPIECE BY JOSEPH D. STRONG
* * * * *
LONDON
CHATTO & WINDUS
1906
* * * * *
“Vixerunt nonnulli in agris, delectati re sua familiari. His idem
propositum fuit quod regibus, ut ne qua re agerent, ne cui parerent,
libertate uterentur: cujus proprium est sic vivere ut velis.”
—CIC., _De Off._, I. xx.
CONTENTS
IN THE VALLEY:
I. Calistoga 13
II. The Petrified Forest 24
III. Napa Wine 34
IV. The Scot Abroad 48
WITH THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL:
I. To Introduce Mr. Kelmar 59
II. First Impressions of Silverado 68
III. The Return 92
THE ACT OF SQUATTING 103
THE HUNTER’S FAMILY 127
THE SEA FOGS 153
THE TOLL HOUSE 171
A STARRY DRIVE 185
EPISODES IN THE STORY OF A MINE 197
TOILS AND PLEASURES 223
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
THE scene of this little book is on a high mountain. There are, indeed,
many higher; there are many of a nobler outline. It is no place of
pilgrimage for the summary globe-trotter; but to one who lives upon its
sides, Mount Saint Helena soon becomes a centre of interest. It is the
Mont Blanc of one section of the Californian Coast Range, none of its
near neighbours rising to one-half its altitude. It looks down on much
green, intricate country. It feeds in the spring-time many splashing
brooks. From its summit you must have an excellent lesson of geography:
seeing, to the south, San Francisco Bay, with Tamalpais on the one hand
and Monte Diablo on the other; to the west and thirty miles away, the
open ocean; eastward, across the corn-lands and thick tule swamps of
Sacramento Valley, to where the Central Pacific railroad begins to climb
the sides of the Sierras; and northward, for what I know, the white head
of Shasta looking down on Oregon. Three counties, Napa County, Lake
County, and Sonoma County, march across its cliffy shoulders. Its naked
peak stands nearly four thousand five hundred feet above the sea; its
sides are fringed with forest; and the soil, where it is bare, glows warm
with cinnabar.
Life in its shadow goes rustically forward. Bucks, and bears, and
rattlesnakes, and former mining operations, are the staple of men’s talk.
Agriculture has only begun to mount above the valley. And though in a
few years from now the whole district may be smiling with farms, passing
trains shaking the mountain to the heart, many-windowed hotels lighting
up the night like factories, and a prosperous city occupying the site of
sleepy Calistoga; yet in the mean time, around the foot of that mountain
the silence of nature reigns in a great measure unbroken, and the people
of hill and valley go sauntering about their business as in the days
before the flood.
To reach Mount Saint Helena from San Francisco, the traveller has twice
to cross the bay: once by the busy Oakland Ferry, and again, after an
hour or so of the railway, from Vallejo junction to Vallejo. Thence he
takes rail once more to mount the long green strath of Napa Valley.
In all the contractions and expansions of that inland sea, the Bay of San
Francisco, there can be few drearier scenes than the Vallejo Ferry. Bald
shores and a low, bald islet inclose the sea; through the narrows the
tide bubbles, muddy like a river. When we made the passage (bound,
although yet we knew it not, for Silverado) the steamer jumped, and the
black buoys were dancing in the jabble; the ocean breeze blew killing
chill; and, although the upper sky was still unflecked with vapour, the
sea fogs were pouring in from seaward, over the hilltops of Marin county,
in one great, shapeless, silver cloud.
South Vallejo is typical of many Californian towns. It was a blunder;
the site has proved untenable; and, although it is still such a young
place by the scale of Europe, it has already begun to be deserted for its
neighbour and namesake, North Vallejo. A long pier, a number of drinking
saloons, a hotel of a great size, marshy pools where the frogs keep up
their croaking, and even at high noon the entire absence of any human
face or voice—these are the marks of South Vallejo. Yet there was a tall
building beside the pier, labelled the _Star Flour Mills_; and sea-going,
full-rigged ships lay close along shore, waiting for their cargo. Soon
these would be plunging round the Horn, soon the flour from the _Star
Flour Mills_ would be landed on the wharves of Liverpool. For that, too,
is one of England’s outposts; thither, to this gaunt mill, across the
Atlantic and Pacific deeps and round about the icy Horn, this crowd of
great, three-masted, deep-sea ships come, bringing nothing, and return
with bread.
The Frisby House, for that was the name of the hotel, was a place of
fallen fortunes, like the town. It was now given up to labourers, and
partly ruinous. At dinner there was the ordinary display of what is
called in the west a _two-bit house_: the tablecloth checked red and
white, the plague of flies, the wire hencoops over the dishes, the great
variety and invariable vileness of the food and the rough coatless men
devoting it in silence. In our bedroom, the stove would not burn, though
it would smoke; and while one window would not open, the other would not
shut. There was a view on a bit of empty road, a few dark houses, a
donkey wandering with its shadow on a slope, and a blink of sea, with a
tall ship lying anchored in the moonlight. All about that dreary inn
frogs sang their ungainly chorus.
Early the next morning we mounted the hill along a wooden footway,
bridging one marish spot after another. Here and there, as we ascended,
we passed a house embowered in white roses. More of the bay became
apparent, and soon the blue peak of Tamalpais rose above the green level
of the island opposite. It told us we were still but a little way from
the city of the Golden Gates, already, at that hour, beginning to awake
among the sand-hills. It called to us over the waters as with the voice
of a bird. Its stately head, blue as a sapphire on the paler azure of
the sky, spoke to us of wider outlooks and the bright Pacific. For
Tamalpais stands sentry, like a lighthouse, over the Golden Gates,
between the bay and the open ocean, and looks down indifferently on both.
Even as we saw and hailed it from Vallejo, seamen, far out at sea, were
scanning it with shaded eyes; and, as if to answer to the thought, one of
the great ships below began silently to clothe herself with white sails,
homeward bound for England.
For some way beyond Vallejo the railway led us through bald green
pastures. On the west the rough highlands of Marin shut off the ocean;
in the midst, in long, straggling, gleaming arms, the bay died out among
the grass; there were few trees and few enclosures; the sun shone wide
over open uplands, the displumed hills stood clear against the sky. But
by-and-by these hills began to draw nearer on either hand, and first
thicket and then wood began to clothe their sides; and soon we were away
from all signs of the sea’s neighbourhood, mounting an inland, irrigated
valley. A great variety of oaks stood, now severally, now in a becoming
grove, among the fields and vineyards. The towns were compact, in about
equal proportions, of bright, new wooden houses and great and growing
forest trees; and the chapel bell on the engine sounded most festally
that sunny Sunday, as we drew up at one green town after another, with
the townsfolk trooping in their Sunday’s best to see the strangers, with
the sun sparkling on the clean houses, and great domes of foliage humming
overhead in the breeze.
This pleasant Napa Valley is, at its north end, blockaded by our
mountain. There, at Calistoga, the railroad ceases, and the traveller
who intends faring farther, to the Geysers or to the springs in Lake
County, must cross the spurs of the mountain by stage. Thus, Mount Saint
Helena is not only a summit, but a frontier; and, up to the time of
writing, it has stayed the progress of the iron horse.
PART I—IN THE VALLEY
CHAPTER I—CALISTOGA
IT is difficult for a European to imagine Calistoga, the whole place is
so new, and of such an accidental pattern; the very name, I hear, was
invented at a supper-party by the man who found the springs.
The railroad and the highway come up the valley about parallel to one
another. The street of Calistoga joins the perpendicular to both—a wide
street, with bright, clean, low houses, here and there a verandah over
the sidewalk, here and there a horse-post, here and there lounging
townsfolk. Other streets are marked out, and most likely named; for
these towns in the New World begin with a firm resolve to grow larger,
Washington and Broadway, and then First and Second, and so forth, being
boldly plotted out as soon as the community indulges in a plan. But, in
the meanwhile, all the life and most of the houses of Calistoga are
concentrated upon that street between the railway station and the road.
I never heard it called by any name, but I will hazard a guess that it is
either Washington or Broadway. Here are the blacksmith’s, the chemist’s,
the general merchant’s, and Kong Sam Kee, the Chinese laundryman’s; here,
probably, is the office of the local paper (for the place has a
paper—they all have papers); and here certainly is one of the hotels,
Cheeseborough’s, whence the daring Foss, a man dear to legend, starts his
horses for the Geysers.
It must be remembered that we are here in a land of stage-drivers and
highwaymen: a land, in that sense, like England a hundred years ago. The
highway robber—road-agent, he is quaintly called—is still busy in these
parts. The fame of Vasquez is still young. Only a few years go, the
Lakeport stage was robbed a mile or two from Calistoga. In 1879, the
dentist of Mendocino City, fifty miles away upon the coast, suddenly
threw off the garments of his trade, like Grindoff, in _The Miller and
his Men_, and flamed forth in his second dress as a captain of banditti.
A great robbery was followed by a long chase, a chase of days if not of
weeks, among the intricate hill-country; and the chase was followed by
much desultory fighting, in which several—and the dentist, I believe,
amongst the number—bit the dust. The grass was springing for the first
time, nourished upon their blood, when I arrived in Calistoga. I am
reminded of another highwayman of that same year. “He had been unwell,”
so ran his humorous defence, “and the doctor told him to take something,
so he took the express-box.”
The cultus of the stage-coachman always flourishes highest where there
are thieves on the road, and where the guard travels armed, and the stage
is not only a link between country and city, and the vehicle of news, but
has a faint warfaring aroma, like a man who should be brother to a
soldier. California boasts her famous stage-drivers, and among the
famous Foss is not forgotten. Along the unfenced, abominable mountain
roads, he launches his team with small regard to human life or the
doctrine of probabilities. Flinching travellers, who behold themselves
coasting eternity at every corner, look with natural admiration at their
driver’s huge, impassive, fleshy countenance. He has the very face for
the driver in Sam Weller’s anecdote, who upset the election party at the
required point. Wonderful tales are current of his readiness and skill.
One in particular, of how one of his horses fell at a ticklish passage of
the road, and how Foss let slip the reins, and, driving over the fallen
animal, arrived at the next stage with only three. This I relate as I
heard it, without guarantee.
I only saw Foss once, though, strange as it may sound, I have twice
talked with him. He lives out of Calistoga, at a ranche called
Fossville. One evening, after he was long gone home, I dropped into
Cheeseborough’s, and was asked if I should like to speak with Mr. Foss.
Supposing that the interview was impossible, and that I was merely called
upon to subscribe the general sentiment, I boldly answered “Yes.” Next
moment, I had one instrument at my ear, another at my mouth and found
myself, with nothing in the world to say, conversing with a man several
miles off among desolate hills. Foss rapidly and somewhat plaintively
brought the conversation to an end; and he returned to his night’s grog
at Fossville, while I strolled forth again on Calistoga high street. But
it was an odd thing that here, on what we are accustomed to consider the
very skirts of civilization, I should have used the telephone for the
first time in my civilized career. So it goes in these young countries;
telephones, and telegraphs, and newspapers, and advertisements running
far ahead among the Indians and the grizzly bears.
Alone, on the other side of the railway, stands the Springs Hotel, with
its attendant cottages. The floor of the valley is extremely level to
the very roots of the hills; only here and there a hillock, crowned with
pines, rises like the barrow of some chieftain famed in war; and right
against one of these hillocks is the Springs Hotel—is or was; for since I
was there the place has been destroyed by fire, and has risen again from
its ashes. A lawn runs about the house, and the lawn is in its turn
surrounded by a system of little five-roomed cottages, each with a
verandah and a weedy palm before the door. Some of the cottages are let
to residents, and these are wreathed in flowers. The rest are occupied
by ordinary visitors to the Hotel; and a very pleasant way this is, by
which you have a little country cottage of your own, without domestic
burthens, and by the day or week.
The whole neighbourhood of Mount Saint Helena is full of sulphur and of
boiling springs. The Geysers are famous; they were the great health
resort of the Indians before the coming of the whites. Lake County is
dotted with spas; Hot Springs and White Sulphur Springs are the names of
two stations on the Napa Valley railroad; and Calistoga itself seems to
repose on a mere film above a boiling, subterranean lake. At one end of
the hotel enclosure are the springs from which it takes its name, hot
enough to scald a child seriously while I was there. At the other end,
the tenant of a cottage sank a well, and there also the water came up
boiling. It keeps this end of the valley as warm as a toast. I have
gone across to the hotel a little after five in the morning, when a sea
fog from the Pacific was hanging thick and gray, and dark and dirty
overhead, and found the thermometer had been up before me, and had
already climbed among the nineties; and in the stress of the day it was
sometimes too hot to move about.
But in spite of this heat from above and below, doing one on both sides,
Calistoga was a pleasant place to dwell in; beautifully green, for it was
then that favoured moment in the Californian year, when the rains are
over and the dusty summer has not yet set in; often visited by fresh
airs, now from the mountain, now across Sonoma from the sea; very quiet,
very idle, very silent but for the breezes and the cattle bells afield.
And there was something satisfactory in the sight of that great mountain
that enclosed us to the north: whether it stood, robed in sunshine,
quaking to its topmost pinnacle with the heat and brightness of the day;
or whether it set itself to weaving vapours, wisp after wisp growing,
trembling, fleeting, and fading in the blue.
The tangled, woody, and almost trackless foot-hills that enclose the
valley, shutting it off from Sonoma on the west, and from Yolo on the
east—rough as they were in outline, dug out by winter streams, crowned by
cliffy bluffs and nodding pine trees—wore dwarfed into satellites by the
bulk and bearing of Mount Saint Helena. She over-towered them by
two-thirds of her own stature. She excelled them by the boldness of her
profile. Her great bald summit, clear of trees and pasture, a cairn of
quartz and cinnabar, rejected kinship with the dark and shaggy wilderness
of lesser hill-tops.
CHAPTER II—THE PETRIFIED FOREST
WE drove off from the Springs Hotel about three in the afternoon. The
sun warmed me to the heart. A broad, cool wind streamed pauselessly down
the valley, laden with perfume. Up at the top stood Mount Saint Helena,
a bulk of mountain, bare atop, with tree-fringed spurs, and radiating
warmth. Once we saw it framed in a grove of tall and exquisitely
graceful white oaks, in line and colour a finished composition. We
passed a cow stretched by the roadside, her bell slowly beating time to
the movement of her ruminating jaws, her big red face crawled over by
half a dozen flies, a monument of content.
A little farther, and we struck to the left up a mountain road, and for
two hours threaded one valley after another, green, tangled, full of
noble timber, giving us every now and again a sight of Mount Saint Helena
and the blue hilly distance, and crossed by many streams, through which
we splashed to the carriage-step. To the right or the left, there was
scarce any trace of man but the road we followed; I think we passed but
one ranchero’s house in the whole distance, and that was closed and
smokeless. But we had the society of these bright streams—dazzlingly
clear, as is their wont, splashing from the wheels in diamonds, and
striking a lively coolness through the sunshine. And what with the
innumerable variety of greens, the masses of foliage tossing in the
breeze, the glimpses of distance, the descents into seemingly
impenetrable thickets, the continual dodging of the road which made haste
to plunge again into the covert, we had a fine sense of woods, and
spring-time, and the open air.
Our driver gave me a lecture by the way on Californian trees—a thing I
was much in need of, having fallen among painters who know the name of
nothing, and Mexicans who know the name of nothing in English. He taught
me the madrona, the manzanita, the buck-eye, the maple; he showed me the
crested mountain quail; he showed me where some young redwoods were
already spiring heavenwards from the ruins of the old; for in this
district all had already perished: redwoods and redskins, the two noblest
indigenous living things, alike condemned.
At length, in a lonely dell, we came on a huge wooden gate with a sign
upon it like an inn. “The Petrified Forest. Proprietor: C. Evans,” ran
the legend. Within, on a knoll of sward, was the house of the
proprietor, and another smaller house hard by to serve as a museum, where
photographs and petrifactions were retailed. It was a pure little isle
of touristry among these solitary hills.
The proprietor was a brave old white-faced Swede. He had wandered this
way, Heaven knows how, and taken up his acres—I forget how many years
ago—all alone, bent double with sciatica, and with six bits in his pocket
and an axe upon his shoulder. Long, useless years of seafaring had thus
discharged him at the end, penniless and sick. Without doubt he had
tried his luck at the diggings, and got no good from that; without doubt
he had loved the bottle, and lived the life of Jack ashore. But at the
end of these adventures, here he came; and, the place hitting his fancy,
down he sat to make a new life of it, far from crimps and the salt sea.
And the very sight of his ranche had done him good. It was “the
handsomest spot in the Californy mountains.” “Isn’t it handsome, now?”
he said. Every penny he makes goes into that ranche to make it
handsomer. Then the climate, with the sea-breeze every afternoon in the
hottest summer weather, had gradually cured the sciatica; and his sister
and niece were now domesticated with him for company—or, rather, the
niece came only once in the two days, teaching music the meanwhile in the
valley. And then, for a last piece of luck, “the handsomest spot in the
Californy mountains” had produced a petrified forest, which Mr. Evans now
shows at the modest figure of half a dollar a head, or two-thirds of his
capital when he first came there with an axe and a sciatica.
This tardy favourite of fortune—hobbling a little, I think, as if in
memory of the sciatica, but with not a trace that I can remember of the
sea—thoroughly ruralized from head to foot, proceeded to escort us up the
hill behind his house.
“Who first found the forest?” asked my wife.
“The first? I was that man,” said he. “I was cleaning up the pasture
for my beasts, when I found _this_”—kicking a great redwood seven feet in
diameter, that lay there on its side, hollow heart, clinging lumps of
bark, all changed into gray stone, with veins of quartz between what had
been the layers of the wood.
“Were you surprised?”
“Surprised? No! What would I be surprised about? What did I know about
petrifactions—following the sea? Petrifaction! There was no such word
in my language! I knew about putrifaction, though! I thought it was a
stone; so would you, if you was cleaning up pasture.”
And now he had a theory of his own, which I did not quite grasp, except
that the trees had not “grewed” there. But he mentioned, with evident
pride, that he differed from all the scientific people who had visited
the spot; and he flung about such words as “tufa” and “scilica” with
careless freedom.
When I mentioned I was from Scotland, “My old country,” he said; “my old
country”—with a smiling look and a tone of real affection in his voice.
I was mightily surprised, for he was obviously Scandinavian, and begged
him to explain. It seemed he had learned his English and done nearly all
his sailing in Scotch ships. “Out of Glasgow,” said he, “or Greenock;
but that’s all the same—they all hail from Glasgow.” And he was so
pleased with me for being a Scotsman, and his adopted compatriot, that he
made me a present of a very beautiful piece of petrifaction—I believe the
most beautiful and portable he had.
Here was a man, at least, who was a Swede, a Scot, and an American,
acknowledging some kind allegiance to three lands. Mr. Wallace’s
Scoto-Circassian will not fail to come before the reader. I have myself
met and spoken with a Fifeshire German, whose combination of abominable
accents struck me dumb. But, indeed, I think we all belong to many
countries. And perhaps this habit of much travel, and the engendering of
scattered friendships, may prepare the euthanasia of ancient nations.
And the forest itself? Well, on a tangled, briery hillside—for the
pasture would bear a little further cleaning up, to my eyes—there lie
scattered thickly various lengths of petrified trunk, such as the one
already mentioned. It is very curious, of course, and ancient enough, if
that were all. Doubtless, the heart of the geologist beats quicker at
the sight; but, for my part, I was mightily unmoved. Sight-seeing is the
art of disappointment.
“There’s nothing under heaven so blue,
That’s fairly worth the travelling to.”
But, fortunately, Heaven rewards us with many agreeable prospects and
adventures by the way; and sometimes, when we go out to see a petrified
forest, prepares a far more delightful curiosity, in the form of Mr.
Evans, whom may all prosperity attend throughout a long and green old
age.
CHAPTER III—NAPA WINE
I WAS interested in Californian wine. Indeed, I am interested in all
wines, and have been all my life, from the raisin wine that a
schoolfellow kept secreted in his play-box up to my last discovery, those
notable Valtellines, that once shone upon the board of Cæsar.
Some of us, kind old Pagans, watch with dread the shadows falling on the
age: how the unconquerable worm invades the sunny terraces of France, and
Bordeaux is no more, and the Rhone a mere Arabia Petræa. Château Neuf is
dead, and I have never tasted it; Hermitage—a hermitage indeed from all
life’s sorrows—lies expiring by the river. And in the place of these
imperial elixirs, beautiful to every sense, gem-hued, flower-scented,
dream-compellers:—behold upon the quays at Cette the chemicals arrayed;
behold the analyst at Marseilles, raising hands in obsecration, attesting
god Lyoeus, and the vats staved in, and the dishonest wines poured forth
among the sea. It is not Pan only; Bacchus, too, is dead.
If wine is to withdraw its most poetic countenance, the sun of the white
dinner-cloth, a deity to be invoked by two or three, all fervent, hushing
their talk, degusting tenderly, and storing reminiscences—for a bottle of
good wine, like a good act, shines ever in the retrospect—if wine is to
desert us, go thy ways, old Jack! Now we begin to have compunctions, and
look back at the brave bottles squandered upon dinner-parties, where the
guests drank grossly, discussing politics the while, and even the
schoolboy “took his whack,” like liquorice water. And at the same time,
we look timidly forward, with a spark of hope, to where the new lands,
already weary of producing gold, begin to green with vineyards. A nice
point in human history falls to be decided by Californian and Australian
wines.
Wine in California is still in the experimental stage; and when you taste
a vintage, grave economical questions are involved. The beginning of
vine-planting is like the beginning of mining for the precious metals:
the wine-grower also “Prospects.” One corner of land after another is
tried with one kind of grape after another. This is a failure; that is
better; a third best. So, bit by bit, they grope about for their Clos
Vougeot and Lafite. Those lodes and pockets of earth, more precious than
the precious ores, that yield inimitable fragrance and soft fire; those
virtuous Bonanzas, where the soil has sublimated under sun and stars to
something finer, and the wine is bottled poetry: these still lie
undiscovered; chaparral conceals, thicket embowers them; the miner chips
the rock and wanders farther, and the grizzly muses undisturbed. But
there they bide their hour, awaiting their Columbus; and nature nurses
and prepares them. The smack of Californian earth shall linger on the
palate of your grandson.
Meanwhile the wine is merely a good wine; the best that I have tasted
better than a Beaujolais, and not unlike. But the trade is poor; it
lives from hand to mouth, putting its all into experiments, and forced to
sell its vintages. To find one properly matured, and bearing its own
name, is to be fortune’s favourite.
Bearing its own name, I say, and dwell upon the innuendo.
“You want to know why California wine is not drunk in the States?” a San
Francisco wine merchant said to me, after he had shown me through his
premises. “Well, here’s the reason.”
And opening a large cupboard, fitted with many little drawers, he
proceeded to shower me all over with a great variety of gorgeously tinted
labels, blue, red, or yellow, stamped with crown or coronet, and hailing
from such a profusion of _clos_ and _chateaux_, that a single department
could scarce have furnished forth the names. But it was strange that all
looked unfamiliar.
“Chateau X—?” said I. “I never heard of that.”
“I dare say not,” said he. “I had been reading one of X—’s novels.”
They were all castles in Spain! But that sure enough is the reason why
California wine is not drunk in the States.
Napa valley has been long a seat of the wine-growing industry. It did
not here begin, as it does too often, in the low valley lands along the
river, but took at once to the rough foot-hills, where alone it can
expect to prosper. A basking inclination, and stones, to be a reservoir
of the day’s heat, seem necessary to the soil for wine; the grossness of
the earth must be evaporated, its marrow daily melted and refined for
ages; until at length these clods that break below our footing, and to
the eye appear but common earth, are truly and to the perceiving mind, a
masterpiece of nature. The dust of Richebourg, which the wind carries
away, what an apotheosis of the dust! Not man himself can seem a
stranger child of that brown, friable powder, than the blood and sun in
that old flask behind the faggots.
A Californian vineyard, one of man’s outposts in the wilderness, has
features of its own. There is nothing here to remind you of the Rhine or
Rhone, of the low _côte d’or_, or the infamous and scabby deserts of
Champagne; but all is green, solitary, covert. We visited two of them,
Mr. Schram’s and Mr. M’Eckron’s, sharing the same glen.
Some way down the valley below Calistoga, we turned sharply to the south
and plunged into the thick of the wood. A rude trail rapidly mounting; a
little stream tinkling by on the one hand, big enough perhaps after the
rains, but already yielding up its life; overhead and on all sides a
bower of green and tangled thicket, still fragrant and still
flower-bespangled by the early season, where thimble-berry played the
part of our English hawthorn, and the buck-eyes were putting forth their
twisted horns of blossom: through all this, we struggled toughly upwards,
canted to and fro by the roughness of the trail, and continually switched
across the face by sprays of leaf or blossom. The last is no great
inconvenience at home; but here in California it is a matter of some
moment. For in all woods and by every wayside there prospers an
abominable shrub or weed, called poison-oak, whose very neighbourhood is
venomous to some, and whose actual touch is avoided by the most
impervious.
The two houses, with their vineyards, stood each in a green niche of its
own in this steep and narrow forest dell. Though they were so near,
there was already a good difference in level; and Mr. M’Eckron’s head
must be a long way under the feet of Mr. Schram. No more had been
cleared than was necessary for cultivation; close around each oasis ran
the tangled wood; the glen enfolds them; there they lie basking in sun
and silence, concealed from all but the clouds and the mountain birds.
Mr. M’Eckron’s is a bachelor establishment; a little bit of a wooden
house, a small cellar hard by in the hillside, and a patch of vines
planted and tended single-handed by himself. He had but recently began;
his vines were young, his business young also; but I thought he had the
look of the man who succeeds. He hailed from Greenock: he remembered his
father putting him inside Mons Meg, and that touched me home; and we
exchanged a word or two of Scotch, which pleased me more than you would
fancy.
Mr. Schram’s, on the other hand, is the oldest vineyard in the valley,
eighteen years old, I think; yet he began a penniless barber, and even
after he had broken ground up here with his black malvoisies, continued
for long to tramp the valley with his razor. Now, his place is the
picture of prosperity: stuffed birds in the verandah, cellars far dug
into the hillside, and resting on pillars like a bandit’s cave:—all
trimness, varnish, flowers, and sunshine, among the tangled wildwood.
Stout, smiling Mrs. Schram, who has been to Europe and apparently all
about the States for pleasure, entertained Fanny in the verandah, while I
was tasting wines in the cellar. To Mr. Schram this was a solemn office;
his serious gusto warmed my heart; prosperity had not yet wholly banished
a certain neophite and girlish trepidation, and he followed every sip and
read my face with proud anxiety. I tasted all. I tasted every variety
and shade of Schramberger, red and white Schramberger, Burgundy
Schramberger, Schramberger Hock, Schramberger Golden Chasselas, the
latter with a notable bouquet, and I fear to think how many more. Much
of it goes to London—most, I think; and Mr. Schram has a great notion of
the English taste.
In this wild spot, I did not feel the sacredness of ancient cultivation.
It was still raw, it was no Marathon, and no Johannisberg; yet the
stirring sunlight, and the growing vines, and the vats and bottles in the
cavern, made a pleasant music for the mind. Here, also, earth’s cream
was being skimmed and garnered; and the London customers can taste, such
as it is, the tang of the earth in this green valley. So local, so
quintessential is a wine, that it seems the very birds in the verandah
might communicate a flavour, and that romantic cellar influence the
bottle next to be uncorked in Pimlico, and the smile of jolly Mr. Schram
might mantle in the glass.
But these are but experiments. All things in this new land are moving
farther on: the wine-vats and the miner’s blasting tools but picket for a
night, like Bedouin pavillions; and to-morrow, to fresh woods! This stir
of change and these perpetual echoes of the moving footfall, haunt the
land. Men move eternally, still chasing Fortune; and, fortune found,
still wander. As we drove back to Calistoga, the road lay empty of mere
passengers, but its green side was dotted with the camps of travelling
families: one cumbered with a great waggonful of household stuff,
settlers going to occupy a ranche they had taken up in Mendocino, or
perhaps Tehama County; another, a party in dust coats, men and women,
whom we found camped in a grove on the roadside, all on pleasure bent,
with a Chinaman to cook for them, and who waved their hands to us as we
drove by.
CHAPTER IV—THE SCOT ABROAD
A FEW pages back, I wrote that a man belonged, in these days, to a
variety of countries; but the old land is still the true love, the others
are but pleasant infidelities. Scotland is indefinable; it has no unity
except upon the map. Two languages, many dialects, innumerable forms of
piety, and countless local patriotisms and prejudices, part us among
ourselves more widely than the extreme east and west of that great
continent of America. When I am at home, I feel a man from Glasgow to be
something like a rival, a man from Barra to be more than half a
foreigner. Yet let us meet in some far country, and, whether we hail
from the braes of Manor or the braes of Mar, some ready-made affection
joins us on the instant. It is not race. Look at us. One is Norse, one
Celtic, and another Saxon. It is not community of tongue. We have it
not among ourselves; and we have it almost to perfection, with English,
or Irish, or American. It is no tie of faith, for we detest each other’s
errors. And yet somewhere, deep down in the heart of each one of us,
something yearns for the old land, and the old kindly people.
Of all mysteries of the human heart, this is perhaps the most
inscrutable. There is no special loveliness in that gray country, with
its rainy, sea-beat archipelago; its fields of dark mountains; its
unsightly places, black with coal; its treeless, sour, unfriendly looking
corn-lands; its quaint, gray, castled city, where the bells clash of a
Sunday, and the wind squalls, and the salt showers fly and beat. I do
not even know if I desire to live there; but let me hear, in some far
land, a kindred voice sing out, “Oh, why left I my hame?” and it seems at
once as if no beauty under the kind heavens, and no society of the wise
and good, can repay me for my absence from my country. And though I
think I would rather die elsewhere, yet in my heart of hearts I long to
be buried among good Scots clods. I will say it fairly, it grows on me
with every year: there are no stars so lovely as Edinburgh street-lamps.
When I forget thee, auld Reekie, may my right hand forget its cunning!
The happiest lot on earth is to be born a Scotchman. You must pay for it
in many ways, as for all other advantages on earth. You have to learn
the paraphrases and the shorter catechism; you generally take to drink;
your youth, as far as I can find out, is a time of louder war against
society, of more outcry and tears and turmoil, than if you had been born,
for instance, in England. But somehow life is warmer and closer; the
hearth burns more redly; the lights of home shine softer on the rainy
street; the very names, endeared in verse and music, cling nearer round
our hearts. An Englishman may meet an Englishman to-morrow, upon
Chimborazo, and neither of them care; but when the Scotch wine-grower
told me of Mons Meg, it was like magic.
“From the dim shieling on the misty island
Mountains divide us, and a world of seas;
Yet still our hearts are true, our hearts are Highland,
And we, in dreams, behold the Hebrides.”
And, Highland and Lowland, all our hearts are Scotch.
Only a few days after I had seen M’Eckron, a message reached me in my
cottage. It was a Scotchman who had come down a long way from the hills
to market. He had heard there was a countryman in Calistoga, and came
round to the hotel to see him. We said a few words to each other; we had
not much to say—should never have seen each other had we stayed at home,
separated alike in space and in society; and then we shook hands, and he
went his way again to his ranche among the hills, and that was all.
Another Scotchman there was, a resident, who for the more love of the
common country, douce, serious, religious man, drove me all about the
valley, and took as much interest in me as if I had been his son: more,
perhaps; for the son has faults too keenly felt, while the abstract
countryman is perfect—like a whiff of peats.
And there was yet another. Upon him I came suddenly, as he was calmly
entering my cottage, his mind quite evidently bent on plunder: a man of
about fifty, filthy, ragged, roguish, with a chimney-pot hat and a tail
coat, and a pursing of his mouth that might have been envied by an elder
of the kirk. He had just such a face as I have seen a dozen times behind
the plate.
“Hullo, sir!” I cried. “Where are you going?”
He turned round without a quiver.
“You’re a Scotchman, sir?” he said gravely. “So am I; I come from
Aberdeen. This is my card,” presenting me with a piece of pasteboard
which he had raked out of some gutter in the period of the rains. “I was
just examining this palm,” he continued, indicating the misbegotten plant
before our door, “which is the largest sp_a_cimen I have yet observed in
Califoarnia.”
There were four or five larger within sight. But where was the use of
argument? He produced a tape-line, made me help him to measure the tree
at the level of the ground, and entered the figures in a large and filthy
pocket-book, all with the gravity of Solomon. He then thanked me
profusely, remarking that such little services were due between
countrymen; shook hands with me, “for add lang syne,” as he said; and
took himself solemnly away, radiating dirt and humbug as he went.
A month or two after this encounter of mine, there came a Scot to
Sacramento—perhaps from Aberdeen. Anyway, there never was any one more
Scotch in this wide world. He could sing and dance, and drink, I
presume; and he played the pipes with vigour and success. All the Scotch
in Sacramento became infatuated with him, and spent their spare time and
money, driving him about in an open cab, between drinks, while he blew
himself scarlet at the pipes. This is a very sad story. After he had
borrowed money from every one, he and his pipes suddenly disappeared from
Sacramento, and when I last heard, the police were looking for him.
I cannot say how this story amused me, when I felt myself so thoroughly
ripe on both sides to be duped in the same way.
It is at least a curious thing, to conclude, that the races which wander
widest, Jews and Scotch, should be the most clannish in the world. But
perhaps these two are cause and effect: “For ye were strangers in the
land of Egypt.”
PART II—WITH THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL
CHAPTER I.—TO INTRODUCE MR. KELMAR
ONE thing in this new country very particularly strikes a stranger, and
that is the number of antiquities. Already there have been many cycles
of population succeeding each other, and passing away and leaving behind
them relics. These, standing on into changed times, strike the
imagination as forcibly as any pyramid or feudal tower. The towns, like
the vineyards, are experimentally founded: they grow great and prosper by
passing occasions; and when the lode comes to an end, and the miners move
elsewhere, the town remains behind them, like Palmyra in the desert. I
suppose there are, in no country in the world, so many deserted towns as
here in California.
The whole neighbourhood of Mount Saint Helena, now so quiet and sylvan,
was once alive with mining camps and villages. Here there would be two
thousand souls under canvas; there one thousand or fifteen hundred
ensconced, as if for ever, in a town of comfortable houses. But the luck
had failed, the mines petered out; and the army of miners had departed,
and left this quarter of the world to the rattlesnakes and deer and
grizzlies, and to the slower but steadier advance of husbandry.
It was with an eye on one of these deserted places, Pine Flat, on the
Geysers road, that we had come first to Calistoga. There is something
singularly enticing in the idea of going, rent-free, into a ready-made
house. And to the British merchant, sitting at home at ease, it may
appear that, with such a roof over your head and a spring of clear water
hard by, the whole problem of the squatter’s existence would be solved.
Food, however, has yet to be considered, I will go as far as most people
on tinned meats; some of the brightest moments of my life were passed
over tinned mulli-gatawney in the cabin of a sixteen-ton schooner,
storm-stayed in Portree Bay; but after suitable experiments, I pronounce
authoritatively that man cannot live by tins alone. Fresh meat must be
had on an occasion. It is true that the great Foss, driving by along the
Geysers road, wooden-faced, but glorified with legend, might have been
induced to bring us meat, but the great Foss could hardly bring us milk.
To take a cow would have involved taking a field of grass and a milkmaid;
after which it would have been hardly worth while to pause, and we might
have added to our colony a flock of sheep and an experienced butcher.
It is really very disheartening how we depend on other people in this
life. “Mihi est propositum,” as you may see by the motto, “id quod
regibus;” and behold it cannot be carried out, unless I find a neighbour
rolling in cattle.
Now, my principal adviser in this matter was one whom I will call Kelmar.
That was not what he called himself, but as soon as I set eyes on him, I
knew it was or ought to be his name; I am sure it will be his name among
the angels. Kelmar was the store-keeper, a Russian Jew, good-natured, in
a very thriving way of business, and, on equal terms, one of the most
serviceable of men. He also had something of the expression of a Scotch
country elder, who, by some peculiarity, should chance to be a Hebrew.
He had a projecting under lip, with which he continually smiled, or
rather smirked. Mrs. Kelmar was a singularly kind woman; and the oldest
son had quite a dark and romantic bearing, and might be heard on summer
evenings playing sentimental airs on the violin.
I had no idea, at the time I made his acquaintance, what an important
person Kelmar was. But the Jew store-keepers of California, profiting at
once by the needs and habits of the people, have made themselves in too
many cases the tyrants of the rural population. Credit is offered, is
pressed on the new customer, and when once he is beyond his depth, the
tune changes, and he is from thenceforth a white slave. I believe, even
from the little I saw, that Kelmar, if he choose to put on the screw,
could send half the settlers packing in a radius of seven or eight miles
round Calistoga. These are continually paying him, but are never
suffered to get out of debt. He palms dull goods upon them, for they
dare not refuse to buy; he goes and dines with them when he is on an
outing, and no man is loudlier welcomed; he is their family friend, the
director of their business, and, to a degree elsewhere unknown in modern
days, their king.
For some reason, Kelmar always shook his head at the mention of Pine
Flat, and for some days I thought he disapproved of the whole scheme and
was proportionately sad. One fine morning, however, he met me, wreathed
in smiles. He had found the very place for me—Silverado, another old
mining town, right up the mountain. Rufe Hanson, the hunter, could take
care of us—fine people the Hansons; we should be close to the Toll House,
where the Lakeport stage called daily; it was the best place for my
health, besides. Rufe had been consumptive, and was now quite a strong
man, ain’t it? In short, the place and all its accompaniments seemed
made for us on purpose.
He took me to his back door, whence, as from every point of Calistoga,
Mount Saint Helena could be seen towering in the air. There, in the
nick, just where the eastern foothills joined the mountain, and she
herself began to rise above the zone of forest—there was Silverado. The
name had already pleased me; the high station pleased me still more. I
began to inquire with some eagerness. It was but a little while ago that
Silverado was a great place. The mine—a silver mine, of course—had
promised great things. There was quite a lively population, with several
hotels and boarding-houses; and Kelmar himself had opened a branch store,
and done extremely well—“Ain’t it?” he said, appealing to his wife. And
she said, “Yes; extremely well.” Now there was no one living in the town
but Rufe the hunter; and once more I heard Rufe’s praises by the yard,
and this time sung in chorus.
I could not help perceiving at the time that there was something
underneath; that no unmixed desire to have us comfortably settled had
inspired the Kelmars with this flow of words. But I was impatient to be
gone, to be about my kingly project; and when we were offered seats in
Kelmar’s waggon, I accepted on the spot. The plan of their next Sunday’s
outing took them, by good fortune, over the border into Lake County.
They would carry us so far, drop us at the Toll House, present us to the
Hansons, and call for us again on Monday morning early.
CHAPTER II—FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF SILVERADO
WE were to leave by six precisely; that was solemnly pledged on both
sides; and a messenger came to us the last thing at night, to remind us
of the hour. But it was eight before we got clear of Calistoga: Kelmar,
Mrs. Kelmar, a friend of theirs whom we named Abramina, her little
daughter, my wife, myself, and, stowed away behind us, a cluster of
ship’s coffee-kettles. These last were highly ornamental in the sheen of
their bright tin, but I could invent no reason for their presence. Our
carriageful reckoned up, as near as we could get at it, some three
hundred years to the six of us. Four of the six, besides, were Hebrews.
But I never, in all my life, was conscious of so strong an atmosphere of
holiday. No word was spoken but of pleasure; and even when we drove in
silence, nods and smiles went round the party like refreshments.
The sun shone out of a cloudless sky. Close at the zenith rode the
belated moon, still clearly visible, and, along one margin, even bright.
The wind blew a gale from the north; the trees roared; the corn and the
deep grass in the valley fled in whitening surges; the dust towered into
the air along the road and dispersed like the smoke of battle. It was
clear in our teeth from the first, and for all the windings of the road
it managed to keep clear in our teeth until the end.
For some two miles we rattled through the valley, skirting the eastern
foothills; then we struck off to the right, through haugh-land, and
presently, crossing a dry water-course, entered the Toll road, or, to be
more local, entered on “the grade.” The road mounts the near shoulder of
Mount Saint Helena, bound northward into Lake County. In one place it
skirts along the edge of a narrow and deep canyon, filled with trees, and
I was glad, indeed, not to be driven at this point by the dashing Foss.
Kelmar, with his unvarying smile, jogging to the motion of the trap,
drove for all the world like a good, plain, country clergyman at home;
and I profess I blessed him unawares for his timidity.
Vineyards and deep meadows, islanded and framed with thicket, gave place
more and more as we ascended to woods of oak and madrona, dotted with
enormous pines. It was these pines, as they shot above the lower wood,
that produced that pencilling of single trees I had so often remarked
from the valley. Thence, looking up and from however far, each fir
stands separate against the sky no bigger than an eyelash; and all
together lend a quaint, fringed aspect to the hills. The oak is no baby;
even the madrona, upon these spurs of Mount Saint Helena, comes to a fine
bulk and ranks with forest trees—but the pines look down upon the rest
for underwood. As Mount Saint Helena among her foothills, so these dark
giants out-top their fellow-vegetables. Alas! if they had left the
redwoods, the pines, in turn, would have been dwarfed. But the redwoods,
fallen from their high estate, are serving as family bedsteads, or yet
more humbly as field fences, along all Napa Valley.
A rough smack of resin was in the air, and a crystal mountain purity. It
came pouring over these green slopes by the oceanful. The woods sang
aloud, and gave largely of their healthful breath. Gladness seemed to
inhabit these upper zones, and we had left indifference behind us in the
valley. “I to the hills lift mine eyes!” There are days in a life when
thus to climb out of the lowlands, seems like scaling heaven.
As we continued to ascend, the wind fell upon us with increasing
strength. It was a wonder how the two stout horses managed to pull us up
that steep incline and still face the athletic opposition of the wind, or
how their great eyes were able to endure the dust. Ten minutes after we
went by, a tree fell, blocking the road; and even before us leaves were
thickly strewn, and boughs had fallen, large enough to make the passage
difficult. But now we were hard by the summit. The road crosses the
ridge, just in the nick that Kelmar showed me from below, and then,
without pause, plunges down a deep, thickly wooded glen on the farther
side. At the highest point a trail strikes up the main hill to the
leftward; and that leads to Silverado. A hundred yards beyond, and in a
kind of elbow of the glen, stands the Toll House Hotel. We came up the
one side, were caught upon the summit by the whole weight of the wind as
it poured over into Napa Valley, and a minute after had drawn up in
shelter, but all buffetted and breathless, at the Toll House door.
A water-tank, and stables, and a gray house of two stories, with gable
ends and a verandah, are jammed hard against the hillside, just where a
stream has cut for itself a narrow canyon, filled with pines. The pines
go right up overhead; a little more and the stream might have played,
like a fire-hose, on the Toll House roof. In front the ground drops as
sharply as it rises behind. There is just room for the road and a sort
of promontory of croquet ground, and then you can lean over the edge and
look deep below you through the wood. I said croquet _ground_, not
_green_; for the surface was of brown, beaten earth. The toll-bar itself
was the only other note of originality: a long beam, turning on a post,
and kept slightly horizontal by a counterweight of stones. Regularly
about sundown this rude barrier was swung, like a derrick, across the
road and made fast, I think, to a tree upon the farther side.
On our arrival there followed a gay scene in the bar. I was presented to
Mr. Corwin, the landlord; to Mr. Jennings, the engineer, who lives there
for his health; to Mr. Hoddy, a most pleasant little gentleman, once a
member of the Ohio legislature, again the editor of a local paper, and
now, with undiminished dignity, keeping the Toll House bar. I had a
number of drinks and cigars bestowed on me, and enjoyed a famous
opportunity of seeing Kelmar in his glory, friendly, radiant, smiling,
steadily edging one of the ship’s kettles on the reluctant Corwin.
Corwin, plainly aghast, resisted gallantly, and for that bout victory
crowned his arms.
At last we set forth for Silverado on foot. Kelmar and his jolly Jew
girls were full of the sentiment of Sunday outings, breathed geniality
and vagueness, and suffered a little vile boy from the hotel to lead them
here and there about the woods. For three people all so old, so bulky in
body, and belonging to a race so venerable, they could not but surprise
us by their extreme and almost imbecile youthfulness of spirit. They
were only going to stay ten minutes at the Toll House; had they not
twenty long miles of road before them on the other side? Stay to dinner?
Not they! Put up the horses? Never. Let us attach them to the verandah
by a wisp of straw rope, such as would not have held a person’s hat on
that blustering day. And with all these protestations of hurry, they
proved irresponsible like children. Kelmar himself, shrewd old Russian
Jew, with a smirk that seemed just to have concluded a bargain to its
satisfaction, intrusted himself and us devoutly to that boy. Yet the boy
was patently fallacious; and for that matter a most unsympathetic urchin,
raised apparently on gingerbread. He was bent on his own pleasure,
nothing else; and Kelmar followed him to his ruin, with the same shrewd
smirk. If the boy said there was “a hole there in the hill”—a hole, pure
and simple, neither more nor less—Kelmar and his Jew girls would follow
him a hundred yards to look complacently down that hole. For two hours
we looked for houses; and for two hours they followed us, smelling trees,
picking flowers, foisting false botany on the unwary. Had we taken five,
with that vile lad to head them off on idle divagations, for five they
would have smiled and stumbled through the woods.
However, we came forth at length, and as by accident, upon a lawn, sparse
planted like an orchard, but with forest instead of fruit trees. That
was the site of Silverado mining town. A piece of ground was levelled
up, where Kelmar’s store had been; and facing that we saw Rufe Hanson’s
house, still bearing on its front the legend _Silverado Hotel_. Not
another sign of habitation. Silverado town had all been carted from the
scene; one of the houses was now the school-house far down the road; one
was gone here, one there, but all were gone away.
It was now a sylvan solitude, and the silence was unbroken but by the
great, vague voice of the wind. Some days before our visit, a grizzly
bear had been sporting round the Hansons’ chicken-house.
Mrs. Hanson was at home alone, we found. Rufe had been out after a
“bar,” had risen late, and was now gone, it did not clearly appear
whither. Perhaps he had had wind of Kelmar’s coming, and was now
ensconced among the underwood, or watching us from the shoulder of the
mountain. We, hearing there were no houses to be had, were for
immediately giving up all hopes of Silverado. But this, somehow, was not
to Kelmar’s fancy. He first proposed that we should “camp someveres
around, ain’t it?” waving his hand cheerily as though to weave a spell;
and when that was firmly rejected, he decided that we must take up house
with the Hansons. Mrs. Hanson had been, from the first, flustered,
subdued, and a little pale; but from this proposition she recoiled with
haggard indignation. So did we, who would have preferred, in a manner of
speaking, death. But Kelmar was not to be put by. He edged Mrs. Hanson
into a corner, where for a long time he threatened her with his
forefinger, like a character in Dickens; and the poor woman, driven to
her entrenchments, at last remembered with a shriek that there were still
some houses at the tunnel.
Thither we went; the Jews, who should already have been miles into Lake
County, still cheerily accompanying us. For about a furlong we followed
a good road alone, the hillside through the forest, until suddenly that
road widened out and came abruptly to an end. A canyon, woody below,
red, rocky, and naked overhead, was here walled across by a dump of
rolling stones, dangerously steep, and from twenty to thirty feet in
height. A rusty iron chute on wooden legs came flying, like a monstrous
gargoyle, across the parapet. It was down this that they poured the
precious ore; and below here the carts stood to wait their lading, and
carry it mill-ward down the mountain.
The whole canyon was so entirely blocked, as if by some rude guerilla
fortification, that we could only mount by lengths of wooden ladder,
fixed in the hillside. These led us round the farther corner of the
dump; and when they were at an end, we still persevered over loose rubble
and wading deep in poison oak, till we struck a triangular platform,
filling up the whole glen, and shut in on either hand by bold projections
of the mountain. Only in front the place was open like the proscenium of
a theatre, and we looked forth into a great realm of air, and down upon
treetops and hilltops, and far and near on wild and varied country. The
place still stood as on the day it was deserted: a line of iron rails
with a bifurcation; a truck in working order; a world of lumber, old
wood, old iron; a blacksmith’s forge on one side, half buried in the
leaves of dwarf madronas; and on the other, an old brown wooden house.
Fanny and I dashed at the house. It consisted of three rooms, and was so
plastered against the hill, that one room was right atop of another, that
the upper floor was more than twice as large as the lower, and that all
three apartments must be entered from a different side and level. Not a
window-sash remained.
The door of the lower room was smashed, and one panel hung in splinters.
We entered that, and found a fair amount of rubbish: sand and gravel that
had been sifted in there by the mountain winds; straw, sticks, and
stones; a table, a barrel; a plate-rack on the wall; two home-made
bootjacks, signs of miners and their boots; and a pair of papers pinned
on the boarding, headed respectively “Funnel No. 1,” and “Funnel No. 2,”
but with the tails torn away. The window, sashless of course, was choked
with the green and sweetly smelling foliage of a bay; and through a chink
in the floor, a spray of poison oak had shot up and was handsomely
prospering in the interior. It was my first care to cut away that poison
oak, Fanny standing by at a respectful distance. That was our first
improvement by which we took possession.
The room immediately above could only be entered by a plank propped
against the threshold, along which the intruder must foot it gingerly,
clutching for support to sprays of poison oak, the proper product of the
country. Herein was, on either hand, a triple tier of beds, where miners
had once lain; and the other gable was pierced by a sashless window and a
doorless doorway opening on the air of heaven, five feet above the
ground. As for the third room, which entered squarely from the ground
level, but higher up the hill and farther up the canyon, it contained
only rubbish and the uprights for another triple tier of beds.
The whole building was overhung by a bold, lion-like, red rock. Poison
oak, sweet bay trees, calcanthus, brush, and chaparral, grew freely but
sparsely all about it. In front, in the strong sunshine, the platform lay
overstrewn with busy litter, as though the labours of the mine might
begin again to-morrow in the morning.
Following back into the canyon, among the mass of rotting plant and
through the flowering bushes, we came to a great crazy staging, with a
wry windless on the top; and clambering up, we could look into an open
shaft, leading edgeways down into the bowels of the mountain, trickling
with water, and lit by some stray sun-gleams, whence I know not. In that
quiet place the still, far-away tinkle of the water-drops was loudly
audible. Close by, another shaft led edgeways up into the superincumbent
shoulder of the hill. It lay partly open; and sixty or a hundred feet
above our head, we could see the strata propped apart by solid wooden
wedges, and a pine, half undermined, precariously nodding on the verge.
Here also a rugged, horizontal tunnel ran straight into the unsunned
bowels of the rock. This secure angle in the mountain’s flank was, even
on this wild day, as still as my lady’s chamber. But in the tunnel a
cold, wet draught tempestuously blew. Nor have I ever known that place
otherwise than cold and windy.
Such was our fist prospect of Juan Silverado. I own I had looked for
something different: a clique of neighbourly houses on a village green,
we shall say, all empty to be sure, but swept and varnished; a trout
stream brawling by; great elms or chestnuts, humming with bees and nested
in by song-birds; and the mountains standing round about, as at
Jerusalem. Here, mountain and house and the old tools of industry were
all alike rusty and downfalling. The hill was here wedged up, and there
poured forth its bowels in a spout of broken mineral; man with his picks
and powder, and nature with her own great blasting tools of sun and rain,
labouring together at the ruin of that proud mountain. The view up the
canyon was a glimpse of devastation; dry red minerals sliding together,
here and there a crag, here and there dwarf thicket clinging in the
general glissade, and over all a broken outline trenching on the blue of
heaven. Downwards indeed, from our rock eyrie, we behold the greener
side of nature; and the bearing of the pines and the sweet smell of bays
and nutmegs commanded themselves gratefully to our senses. One way and
another, now the die was cast. Silverado be it!
After we had got back to the Toll House, the Jews were not long of
striking forward. But I observed that one of the Hanson lads came down,
before their departure, and returned with a ship’s kettle. Happy
Hansons! Nor was it until after Kelmar was gone, if I remember rightly,
that Rufe put in an appearance to arrange the details of our
installation.
The latter part of the day, Fanny and I sat in the verandah of the Toll
House, utterly stunned by the uproar of the wind among the trees on the
other side of the valley. Sometimes, we would have it it was like a sea,
but it was not various enough for that; and again, we thought it like the
roar of a cataract, but it was too changeful for the cataract; and then
we would decide, speaking in sleepy voices, that it could be compared
with nothing but itself. My mind was entirely preoccupied by the noise.
I hearkened to it by the hour, gapingly hearkened, and let my cigarette
go out. Sometimes the wind would make a sally nearer hand, and send a
shrill, whistling crash among the foliage on our side of the glen; and
sometimes a back-draught would strike into the elbow where we sat, and
cast the gravel and torn leaves into our faces. But for the most part,
this great, streaming gale passed unweariedly by us into Napa Valley, not
two hundred yards away, visible by the tossing boughs, stunningly
audible, and yet not moving a hair upon our heads. So it blew all night
long while I was writing up my journal, and after we were in bed, under a
cloudless, starset heaven; and so it was blowing still next morning when
we rose.
It was a laughable thought to us, what had become of our cheerful,
wandering Hebrews. We could not suppose they had reached a destination.
The meanest boy could lead them miles out of their way to see a
gopher-hole. Boys, we felt to be their special danger; none others were
of that exact pitch of cheerful irrelevancy to exercise a kindred sway
upon their minds: but before the attractions of a boy their most settled
resolutions would be war. We thought we could follow in fancy these
three aged Hebrew truants wandering in and out on hilltop and in thicket,
a demon boy trotting far ahead, their will-o’-the-wisp conductor; and at
last about midnight, the wind still roaring in the darkness, we had a
vision of all three on their knees upon a mountain-top around a
glow-worm.
CHAPTER III. THE RETURN
NEXT morning we were up by half-past five, according to agreement, and it
was ten by the clock before our Jew boys returned to pick us up. Kelmar,
Mrs. Kelmar, and Abramina, all smiling from ear to ear, and full of tales
of the hospitality they had found on the other side. It had not gone
unrewarded; for I observed with interest that the ship’s kettles, all but
one, had been “placed.” Three Lake County families, at least, endowed
for life with a ship’s kettle. Come, this was no misspent Sunday. The
absence of the kettles told its own story: our Jews said nothing about
them; but, on the other hand, they said many kind and comely things about
the people they had met. The two women, in particular, had been charmed
out of themselves by the sight of a young girl surrounded by her
admirers; all evening, it appeared, they had been triumphing together in
the girl’s innocent successes, and to this natural and unselfish joy they
gave expression in language that was beautiful by its simplicity and
truth.
Take them for all in all, few people have done my heart more good; they
seemed so thoroughly entitled to happiness, and to enjoy it in so large a
measure and so free from after-thought; almost they persuaded me to be a
Jew. There was, indeed, a chink of money in their talk. They
particularly commanded people who were well to do. “_He_ don’t
care—ain’t it?” was their highest word of commendation to an individual
fate; and here I seem to grasp the root of their philosophy—it was to be
free from care, to be free to make these Sunday wanderings, that they so
eagerly pursued after wealth; and all this carefulness was to be
careless. The fine, good humour of all three seemed to declare they had
attained their end. Yet there was the other side to it; and the
recipients of kettles perhaps cared greatly.
No sooner had they returned, than the scene of yesterday began again.
The horses were not even tied with a straw rope this time—it was not
worth while; and Kelmar disappeared into the bar, leaving them under a
tree on the other side of the road. I had to devote myself. I stood
under the shadow of that tree for, I suppose, hard upon an hour, and had
not the heart to be angry. Once some one remembered me, and brought me
out half a tumblerful of the playful, innocuous American cocktail. I
drank it, and lo! veins of living fire ran down my leg; and then a focus
of conflagration remained seated in my stomach, not unpleasantly, for
quarter of an hour. I love these sweet, fiery pangs, but I will not
court them. The bulk of the time I spent in repeating as much French
poetry as I could remember to the horses, who seemed to enjoy it hugely.
And now it went—
“O ma vieille Font-georges
Où volent les rouges-gorges:”
and again, to a more trampling measure—
“Et tout tremble, Irun, Coïmbre,
Sautander, Almodovar,
Sitôt qu’on entend le timbre
Des cymbales do Bivar.”
The redbreasts and the brooks of Europe, in that dry and songless land;
brave old names and wars, strong cities, cymbals, and bright armour, in
that nook of the mountain, sacred only to the Indian and the bear! This
is still the strangest thing in all man’s travelling, that he should
carry about with him incongruous memories. There is no foreign land; it
is the traveller only that is foreign, and now and again, by a flash of
recollection, lights up the contrasts of the earth.
But while I was thus wandering in my fancy, great feats had been
transacted in the bar. Corwin the bold had fallen, Kelmar was again
crowned with laurels, and the last of the ship’s kettles had changed
hands. If I had ever doubted the purity of Kelmar’s motives, if I had
ever suspected him of a single eye to business in his eternal dallyings,
now at least, when the last kettle was disposed of, my suspicions must
have been allayed. I dare not guess how much more time was wasted; nor
how often we drove off, merely to drive back again and renew interrupted
conversations about nothing, before the Toll House was fairly left
behind. Alas! and not a mile down the grade there stands a ranche in a
sunny vineyard, and here we must all dismount again and enter.
Only the old lady was at home, Mrs. Guele, a brown old Swiss dame, the
picture of honesty; and with her we drank a bottle of wine and had an
age-long conversation, which would have been highly delightful if Fanny
and I had not been faint with hunger. The ladies each narrated the story
of her marriage, our two Hebrews with the prettiest combination of
sentiment and financial bathos. Abramina, specially, endeared herself
with every word. She was as simple, natural, and engaging as a kid that
should have been brought up to the business of a money-changer. One
touch was so resplendently Hebraic that I cannot pass it over. When her
“old man” wrote home for her from America, her old man’s family would not
intrust her with the money for the passage, till she had bound herself by
an oath—on her knees, I think she said—not to employ it otherwise.
This had tickled Abramina hugely, but I think it tickled me fully more.
Mrs. Guele told of her home-sickness up here in the long winters; of her
honest, country-woman troubles and alarms upon the journey; how in the
bank at Frankfort she had feared lest the banker, after having taken her
cheque, should deny all knowledge of it—a fear I have myself every time I
go to a bank; and how crossing the Luneburger Heath, an old lady,
witnessing her trouble and finding whither she was bound, had given her
“the blessing of a person eighty years old, which would be sure to bring
her safely to the States. And the first thing I did,” added Mrs. Guele,
“was to fall downstairs.”
At length we got out of the house, and some of us into the trap,
when—judgment of Heaven!—here came Mr. Guele from his vineyard. So
another quarter of an hour went by; till at length, at our earnest
pleading, we set forth again in earnest, Fanny and I white-faced and
silent, but the Jews still smiling. The heart fails me. There was yet
another stoppage! And we drove at last into Calistoga past two in the
afternoon, Fanny and I having breakfasted at six in the morning, eight
mortal hours before. We were a pallid couple; but still the Jews were
smiling.
So ended our excursion with the village usurers; and, now that it was
done, we had no more idea of the nature of the business, nor of the part
we had been playing in it, than the child unborn. That all the people we
had met were the slaves of Kelmar, though in various degrees of
servitude; that we ourselves had been sent up the mountain in the
interests of none but Kelmar; that the money we laid out, dollar by
dollar, cent by cent, and through the hands of various intermediaries,
should all hop ultimately into Kelmar’s till;—these were facts that we
only grew to recognize in the course of time and by the accumulation of
evidence. At length all doubt was quieted, when one of the
kettle-holders confessed. Stopping his trap in the moonlight, a little
way out of Calistoga, he told me, in so many words, that he dare not show
face therewith an empty pocket. “You see, I don’t mind if it was only
five dollars, Mr. Stevens,” he said, “but I must give Mr. Kelmar
_something_.”
Even now, when the whole tyranny is plain to me, I cannot find it in my
heart to be as angry as perhaps I should be with the Hebrew tyrant. The
whole game of business is beggar my neighbour; and though perhaps that
game looks uglier when played at such close quarters and on so small a
scale, it is none the more intrinsically inhumane for that. The village
usurer is not so sad a feature of humanity and human progress as the
millionaire manufacturer, fattening on the toil and loss of thousands,
and yet declaiming from the platform against the greed and dishonesty of
landlords. If it were fair for Cobden to buy up land from owners whom he
thought unconscious of its proper value, it was fair enough for my
Russian Jew to give credit to his farmers. Kelmar, if he was unconscious
of the beam in his own eye, was at least silent in the matter of his
brother’s mote.
THE ACT OF SQUATTING
THERE were four of us squatters—myself and my wife, the King and Queen of
Silverado; Sam, the Crown Prince; and Chuchu, the Grand Duke. Chuchu, a
setter crossed with spaniel, was the most unsuited for a rough life. He
had been nurtured tenderly in the society of ladies; his heart was large
and soft; he regarded the sofa-cushion as a bed-rook necessary of
existence. Though about the size of a sheep, he loved to sit in ladies’
laps; he never said a bad word in all his blameless days; and if he had
seen a flute, I am sure he could have played upon it by nature. It may
seem hard to say it of a dog, but Chuchu was a tame cat.
The king and queen, the grand duke, and a basket of cold provender for
immediate use, set forth from Calistoga in a double buggy; the crown
prince, on horseback, led the way like an outrider. Bags and boxes and a
second-hand stove were to follow close upon our heels by Hanson’s team.
It was a beautiful still day; the sky was one field of azure. Not a leaf
moved, not a speck appeared in heaven. Only from the summit of the
mountain one little snowy wisp of cloud after another kept detaching
itself, like smoke from a volcano, and blowing southward in some high
stream of air: Mount Saint Helena still at her interminable task, making
the weather, like a Lapland witch.
By noon we had come in sight of the mill: a great brown building,
half-way up the hill, big as a factory, two stories high, and with tanks
and ladders along the roof; which, as a pendicle of Silverado mine, we
held to be an outlying province of our own. Thither, then, we went,
crossing the valley by a grassy trail; and there lunched out of the
basket, sitting in a kind of portico, and wondering, while we ate, at
this great bulk of useless building. Through a chink we could look far
down into the interior, and see sunbeams floating in the dust and
striking on tier after tier of silent, rusty machinery. It cost six
thousand dollars, twelve hundred English sovereigns; and now, here it
stands deserted, like the temple of a forgotten religion, the busy
millers toiling somewhere else. All the time we were there, mill and
mill town showed no sign of life; that part of the mountain-side, which
is very open and green, was tenanted by no living creature but ourselves
and the insects; and nothing stirred but the cloud manufactory upon the
mountain summit. It was odd to compare this with the former days, when
the engine was in fall blast, the mill palpitating to its strokes, and
the carts came rattling down from Silverado, charged with ore.
By two we had been landed at the mine, the buggy was gone again, and we
were left to our own reflections and the basket of cold provender, until
Hanson should arrive. Hot as it was by the sun, there was something
chill in such a home-coming, in that world of wreck and rust, splinter
and rolling gravel, where for so many years no fire had smoked.
Silverado platform filled the whole width of the canyon. Above, as I
have said, this was a wild, red, stony gully in the mountains; but below
it was a wooded dingle. And through this, I was told, there had gone a
path between the mine and the Toll House—our natural north-west passage
to civilization. I found and followed it, clearing my way as I went
through fallen branches and dead trees. It went straight down that steep
canyon, till it brought you out abruptly over the roofs of the hotel.
There was nowhere any break in the descent. It almost seemed as if, were
you to drop a stone down the old iron chute at our platform, it would
never rest until it hopped upon the Toll House shingles. Signs were not
wanting of the ancient greatness of Silverado. The footpath was well
marked, and had been well trodden in the old clays by thirsty miners.
And far down, buried in foliage, deep out of sight of Silverado, I came
on a last outpost of the mine—a mound of gravel, some wreck of wooden
aqueduct, and the mouth of a tunnel, like a treasure grotto in a fairy
story. A stream of water, fed by the invisible leakage from our shaft,
and dyed red with cinnabar or iron, ran trippingly forth out of the
bowels of the cave; and, looking far under the arch, I could see
something like an iron lantern fastened on the rocky wall. It was a
promising spot for the imagination. No boy could have left it
unexplored.
The stream thenceforward stole along the bottom of the dingle, and made,
for that dry land, a pleasant warbling in the leaves. Once, I suppose,
it ran splashing down the whole length of the canyon, but now its head
waters had been tapped by the shaft at Silverado, and for a great part of
its course it wandered sunless among the joints of the mountain. No
wonder that it should better its pace when it sees, far before it,
daylight whitening in the arch, or that it should come trotting forth
into the sunlight with a song.
The two stages had gone by when I got down, and the Toll House stood,
dozing in sun and dust and silence, like a place enchanted. My mission
was after hay for bedding, and that I was readily promised. But when I
mentioned that we were waiting for Rufe, the people shook their heads.
Rufe was not a regular man any way, it seemed; and if he got playing
poker—Well, poker was too many for Rufe. I had not yet heard them
bracketted together; but it seemed a natural conjunction, and commended
itself swiftly to my fears; and as soon as I returned to Silverado and
had told my story, we practically gave Hanson up, and set ourselves to do
what we could find do-able in our desert-island state.
The lower room had been the assayer’s office. The floor was thick with
_débris_—part human, from the former occupants; part natural, sifted in
by mountain winds. In a sea of red dust there swam or floated sticks,
boards, hay, straw, stones, and paper; ancient newspapers, above all—for
the newspaper, especially when torn, soon becomes an antiquity—and bills
of the Silverado boarding-house, some dated Silverado, some Calistoga
Mine. Here is one, verbatim; and if any one can calculate the scale of
charges, he has my envious admiration.
Calistoga Mine, May 3rd, 1875.
John Stanley
To S. Chapman, Cr.
To board from April 1st, to April 30 $25 75
,, ,, ,, May 1st, to 3rd . . . 2 00
27 75
Where is John Stanley mining now? Where is S. Chapman, within whose
hospitable walls we were to lodge? The date was but five years old, but
in that time the world had changed for Silverado; like Palmyra in the
desert, it had outlived its people and its purpose; we camped, like
Layard, amid ruins, and these names spoke to us of prehistoric time. A
boot-jack, a pair of boots, a dog-hutch, and these bills of Mr. Chapman’s
were the only speaking relics that we disinterred from all that vast
Silverado rubbish-heap; but what would I not have given to unearth a
letter, a pocket-book, a diary, only a ledger, or a roll of names, to
take me back, in a more personal manner, to the past? It pleases me,
besides, to fancy that Stanley or Chapman, or one of their companions,
may light upon this chronicle, and be struck by the name, and read some
news of their anterior home, coming, as it were, out of a subsequent
epoch of history in that quarter of the world.
As we were tumbling the mingled rubbish on the floor, kicking it with our
feet, and groping for these written evidences of the past, Sam, with a
somewhat whitened face, produced a paper bag. “What’s this?” said he.
It contained a granulated powder, something the colour of Gregory’s
Mixture, but rosier; and as there were several of the bags, and each more
or less broken, the powder was spread widely on the floor. Had any of us
ever seen giant powder? No, nobody had; and instantly there grew up in
my mind a shadowy belief, verging with every moment nearer to certitude,
that I had somewhere heard somebody describe it as just such a powder as
the one around us. I have learnt since that it is a substance not unlike
tallow, and is made up in rolls for all the world like tallow candles.
Fanny, to add to our happiness, told us a story of a gentleman who had
camped one night, like ourselves, by a deserted mine. He was a handy,
thrifty fellow, and looked right and left for plunder, but all he could
lay his hands on was a can of oil. After dark he had to see to the
horses with a lantern; and not to miss an opportunity, filled up his lamp
from the oil can. Thus equipped, he set forth into the forest. A little
while after, his friends heard a loud explosion; the mountain echoes
bellowed, and then all was still. On examination, the can proved to
contain oil, with the trifling addition of nitro-glycerine; but no
research disclosed a trace of either man or lantern.
It was a pretty sight, after this anecdote, to see us sweeping out the
giant powder. It seemed never to be far enough away. And, after all, it
was only some rock pounded for assay.
So much for the lower room. We scraped some of the rougher dirt off the
floor, and left it. That was our sitting-room and kitchen, though there
was nothing to sit upon but the table, and no provision for a fire except
a hole in the roof of the room above, which had once contained the
chimney of a stove.
To that upper room we now proceeded. There were the eighteen bunks in a
double tier, nine on either hand, where from eighteen to thirty-six
miners had once snored together all night long, John Stanley, perhaps,
snoring loudest. There was the roof, with a hole in it through which the
sun now shot an arrow. There was the floor, in much the same state as
the one below, though, perhaps, there was more hay, and certainly there
was the added ingredient of broken glass, the man who stole the
window-frames having apparently made a miscarriage with this one.
Without a broom, without hay or bedding, we could but look about us with
a beginning of despair. The one bright arrow of day, in that gaunt and
shattered barrack, made the rest look dirtier and darker, and the sight
drove us at last into the open.
Here, also, the handiwork of man lay ruined: but the plants were all
alive and thriving; the view below was fresh with the colours of nature;
and we had exchanged a dim, human garret for a corner, even although it
were untidy, of the blue hall of heaven. Not a bird, not a beast, not a
reptile. There was no noise in that part of the world, save when we
passed beside the staging, and heard the water musically falling in the
shaft.
We wandered to and fro. We searched among that drift of lumber-wood and
iron, nails and rails, and sleepers and the wheels of tracks. We gazed
up the cleft into the bosom of the mountain. We sat by the margin of the
dump and saw, far below us, the green treetops standing still in the
clear air. Beautiful perfumes, breaths of bay, resin, and nutmeg, came
to us more often and grew sweeter and sharper as the afternoon declined.
But still there was no word of Hanson.
I set to with pick and shovel, and deepened the pool behind the shaft,
till we were sure of sufficient water for the morning; and by the time I
had finished, the sun had begun to go down behind the mountain shoulder,
the platform was plunged in quiet shadow, and a chill descended from the
sky. Night began early in our cleft. Before us, over the margin of the
dump, we could see the sun still striking aslant into the wooded nick
below, and on the battlemented, pine-bescattered ridges on the farther
side.
There was no stove, of course, and no hearth in our lodging, so we betook
ourselves to the blacksmith’s forge across the platform. If the platform
be taken as a stage, and the out-curving margin of the dump to represent
the line of the foot-lights, then our house would be the first wing on
the actor’s left, and this blacksmith’s forge, although no match for it
in size, the foremost on the right. It was a low, brown cottage, planted
close against the hill, and overhung by the foliage and peeling boughs of
a madrona thicket. Within it was full of dead leaves and mountain dust,
and rubbish from the mine. But we soon had a good fire brightly blazing,
and sat close about it on impromptu seats. Chuchu, the slave of
sofa-cushions, whimpered for a softer bed; but the rest of us were
greatly revived and comforted by that good creature-fire, which gives us
warmth and light and companionable sounds, and colours up the emptiest
building with better than frescoes. For a while it was even pleasant in
the forge, with the blaze in the midst, and a look over our shoulders on
the woods and mountains where the day was dying like a dolphin.
It was between seven and eight before Hanson arrived, with a waggonful of
our effects and two of his wife’s relatives to lend him a hand. The
elder showed surprising strength. He would pick up a huge packing-case,
full of books of all things, swing it on his shoulder, and away up the
two crazy ladders and the breakneck spout of rolling mineral, familiarly
termed a path, that led from the cart-track to our house. Even for a man
unburthened, the ascent was toilsome and precarious; but Irvine sealed it
with a light foot, carrying box after box, as the hero whisks the stage
child up the practicable footway beside the waterfall of the fifth act.
With so strong a helper, the business was speedily transacted. Soon the
assayer’s office was thronged with our belongings, piled
higgledy-piggledy, and upside down, about the floor. There were our
boxes, indeed, but my wife had left her keys in Calistoga. There was the
stove, but, alas! our carriers had forgot the chimney, and lost one of
the plates along the road. The Silverado problem was scarce solved.
Rufe himself was grave and good-natured over his share of blame; he even,
if I remember right, expressed regret. But his crew, to my astonishment
and anger, grinned from ear to ear, and laughed aloud at our distress.
They thought it “real funny” about the stove-pipe they had forgotten;
“real funny” that they should have lost a plate. As for hay, the whole
party refused to bring us any till they should have supped. See how late
they were! Never had there been such a job as coming up that grade! Nor
often, I suspect, such a game of poker as that before they started. But
about nine, as a particular favour, we should have some hay.
So they took their departure, leaving me still staring, and we resigned
ourselves to wait for their return. The fire in the forge had been
suffered to go out, and we were one and all too weary to kindle another.
We dined, or, not to take that word in vain, we ate after a fashion, in
the nightmare disorder of the assayer’s office, perched among boxes. A
single candle lighted us. It could scarce be called a housewarming; for
there was, of course, no fire, and with the two open doors and the open
window gaping on the night, like breaches in a fortress, it began to grow
rapidly chill. Talk ceased; nobody moved but the unhappy Chuchu, still
in quest of sofa-cushions, who tumbled complainingly among the trunks.
It required a certain happiness of disposition to look forward hopefully,
from so dismal a beginning, across the brief hours of night, to the warm
shining of to-morrow’s sun.
But the hay arrived at last, and we turned, with our last spark of
courage, to the bedroom. We had improved the entrance, but it was still
a kind of rope-walking; and it would have been droll to see us mounting,
one after another, by candle-light, under the open stars.
The western door—that which looked up the canyon, and through which we
entered by our bridge of flying plank—was still entire, a handsome,
panelled door, the most finished piece of carpentry in Silverado. And
the two lowest bunks next to this we roughly filled with hay for that
night’s use. Through the opposite, or eastern-looking gable, with its
open door and window, a faint, disused starshine came into the room like
mist; and when we were once in bed, we lay, awaiting sleep, in a haunted,
incomplete obscurity. At first the silence of the night was utter. Then
a high wind began in the distance among the treetops, and for hours
continued to grow higher. It seemed to me much such a wind as we had
found on our visit; yet here in our open chamber we were fanned only by
gentle and refreshing draughts, so deep was the canyon, so close our
house was planted under the overhanging rock.
THE HUNTER’S FAMILY
THERE is quite a large race or class of people in America, for whom we
scarcely seem to have a parallel in England. Of pure white blood, they
are unknown or unrecognizable in towns; inhabit the fringe of settlements
and the deep, quiet places of the country; rebellious to all labour, and
pettily thievish, like the English gipsies; rustically ignorant, but with
a touch of wood-lore and the dexterity of the savage. Whence they came
is a moot point. At the time of the war, they poured north in crowds to
escape the conscription; lived during summer on fruits, wild animals, and
petty theft; and at the approach of winter, when these supplies failed,
built great fires in the forest, and there died stoically by starvation.
They are widely scattered, however, and easily recognized. Loutish, but
not ill-looking, they will sit all day, swinging their legs on a field
fence, the mind seemingly as devoid of all reflection as a Suffolk
peasant’s, careless of politics, for the most part incapable of reading,
but with a rebellious vanity and a strong sense of independence. Hunting
is their most congenial business, or, if the occasion offers, a little
amateur detection. In tracking a criminal, following a particular horse
along a beaten highway, and drawing inductions from a hair or a
footprint, one of those somnolent, grinning Hodges will suddenly display
activity of body and finesse of mind. By their names ye may know them,
the women figuring as Loveina, Larsenia, Serena, Leanna, Orreana; the men
answering to Alvin, Alva, or Orion, pronounced Orrion, with the accent on
the first. Whether they are indeed a race, or whether this is the form
of degeneracy common to all back-woodsmen, they are at least known by a
generic byword, as Poor Whites or Low-downers.
I will not say that the Hanson family was Poor White, because the name
savours of offence; but I may go as far as this—they were, in many
points, not unsimilar to the people usually so-cared. Rufe himself
combined two of the qualifications, for he was both a hunter and an
amateur detective. It was he who pursued Russel and Dollar, the robbers
of the Lake Port stage, and captured them the very morning after the
exploit, while they were still sleeping in a hayfield. Russel, a drunken
Scotch carpenter, was even an acquaintance of his own, and he expressed
much grave commiseration for his fate. In all that he said and did, Rufe
was grave. I never saw him hurried. When he spoke, he took out his pipe
with ceremonial deliberation, looked east and west, and then, in quiet
tones and few words, stated his business or told his story. His gait was
to match; it would never have surprised you if, at any step, he had
turned round and walked away again, so warily and slowly, and with so
much seeming hesitation did he go about. He lay long in bed in the
morning—rarely indeed, rose before noon; he loved all games, from poker
to clerical croquet; and in the Toll House croquet ground I have seen him
toiling at the latter with the devotion of a curate. He took an interest
in education, was an active member of the local school-board, and when I
was there, he had recently lost the schoolhouse key. His waggon was
broken, but it never seemed to occur to him to mend it. Like all truly
idle people, he had an artistic eye. He chose the print stuff for his
wife’s dresses, and counselled her in the making of a patchwork quilt,
always, as she thought, wrongly, but to the more educated eye, always
with bizarre and admirable taste—the taste of an Indian. With all this,
he was a perfect, unoffending gentleman in word and act. Take his clay
pipe from him, and he was fit for any society but that of fools. Quiet
as he was, there burned a deep, permanent excitement in his dark blue
eyes; and when this grave man smiled, it was like sunshine in a shady
place.
Mrs. Hanson (_née_, if you please, Lovelands) was more commonplace than
her lord. She was a comely woman, too, plump, fair-coloured, with
wonderful white teeth; and in her print dresses (chosen by Rufe) and with
a large sun-bonnet shading her valued complexion, made, I assure you, a
very agreeable figure. But she was on the surface, what there was of
her, out-spoken and loud-spoken. Her noisy laughter had none of the
charm of one of Hanson’s rare, slow-spreading smiles; there was no
reticence, no mystery, no manner about the woman: she was a first-class
dairymaid, but her husband was an unknown quantity between the savage and
the nobleman. She was often in and out with us, merry, and healthy, and
fair; he came far seldomer—only, indeed, when there was business, or now
and again, to pay a visit of ceremony, brushed up for the occasion, with
his wife on his arm, and a clean clay pipe in his teeth. These visits,
in our forest state, had quite the air of an event, and turned our red
canyon into a salon.
Such was the pair who ruled in the old Silverado Hotel, among the windy
trees, on the mountain shoulder overlooking the whole length of Napa
Valley, as the man aloft looks down on the ship’s deck. There they kept
house, with sundry horses and fowls, and a family of sons, Daniel
Webster, and I think George Washington, among the number. Nor did they
want visitors. An old gentleman, of singular stolidity, and called
Breedlove—I think he had crossed the plains in the same caravan with
Rufe—housed with them for awhile during our stay; and they had besides a
permanent lodger, in the form of Mrs. Hanson’s brother, Irvine Lovelands.
I spell Irvine by guess; for I could get no information on the subject,
just as I could never find out, in spite of many inquiries, whether or
not Rufe was a contraction for Rufus. They were all cheerfully at sea
about their names in that generation. And this is surely the more
notable where the names are all so strange, and even the family names
appear to have been coined. At one time, at least, the ancestors of all
these Alvins and Alvas, Loveinas, Lovelands, and Breedloves, must have
taken serious council and found a certain poetry in these denominations;
that must have been, then, their form of literature. But still times
change; and their next descendants, the George Washingtons and Daniel
Websters, will at least be clear upon the point. And anyway, and however
his name should be spelt, this Irvine Lovelands was the most unmitigated
Caliban I ever knew.
Our very first morning at Silverado, when we were full of business,
patching up doors and windows, making beds and seats, and getting our
rough lodging into shape, Irvine and his sister made their appearance
together, she for neighbourliness and general curiosity; he, because he
was working for me, to my sorrow, cutting firewood at I forget how much a
day. The way that he set about cutting wood was characteristic. We were
at that moment patching up and unpacking in the kitchen. Down he sat on
one side, and down sat his sister on the other. Both were chewing
pine-tree gum, and he, to my annoyance, accompanied that simple pleasure
with profuse expectoration. She rattled away, talking up hill and down
dale, laughing, tossing her head, showing her brilliant teeth. He looked
on in silence, now spitting heavily on the floor, now putting his head
back and uttering a loud, discordant, joyless laugh. He had a tangle of
shock hair, the colour of wool; his mouth was a grin; although as strong
as a horse, he looked neither heavy nor yet adroit, only leggy, coltish,
and in the road. But it was plain he was in high spirits, thoroughly
enjoying his visit; and he laughed frankly whenever we failed to
accomplish what we were about. This was scarcely helpful: it was even,
to amateur carpenters, embarrassing; but it lasted until we knocked off
work and began to get dinner. Then Mrs. Hanson remembered she should
have been gone an hour ago; and the pair retired, and the lady’s laughter
died away among the nutmegs down the path. That was Irvine’s first day’s
work in my employment—the devil take him!
The next morning he returned and, as he was this time alone, he bestowed
his conversation upon us with great liberality. He prided himself on his
intelligence; asked us if we knew the school ma’am. _He_ didn’t think
much of her, anyway. He had tried her, he had. He had put a question to
her. If a tree a hundred feet high were to fall a foot a day, how long
would it take to fall right down? She had not been able to solve the
problem. “She don’t know nothing,” he opined. He told us how a friend
of his kept a school with a revolver, and chuckled mightily over that;
his friend could teach school, he could. All the time he kept chewing
gum and spitting. He would stand a while looking down; and then he would
toss back his shock of hair, and laugh hoarsely, and spit, and bring
forward a new subject. A man, he told us, who bore a grudge against him,
had poisoned his dog. “That was a low thing for a man to do now, wasn’t
it? It wasn’t like a man, that, nohow. But I got even with him: I
pisoned _his_ dog.” His clumsy utterance, his rude embarrassed manner,
set a fresh value on the stupidity of his remarks. I do not think I ever
appreciated the meaning of two words until I knew Irvine—the verb, loaf,
and the noun, oaf; between them, they complete his portrait. He could
lounge, and wriggle, and rub himself against the wall, and grin, and be
more in everybody’s way than any other two people that I ever set my eyes
on. Nothing that he did became him; and yet you were conscious that he
was one of your own race, that his mind was cumbrously at work, revolving
the problem of existence like a quid of gum, and in his own cloudy manner
enjoying life, and passing judgment on his fellows. Above all things, he
was delighted with himself. You would not have thought it, from his
uneasy manners and troubled, struggling utterance; but he loved himself
to the marrow, and was happy and proud like a peacock on a rail.
His self-esteem was, indeed, the one joint in his harness. He could be
got to work, and even kept at work, by flattery. As long as my wife
stood over him, crying out how strong he was, so long exactly he would
stick to the matter in hand; and the moment she turned her back, or
ceased to praise him, he would stop. His physical strength was
wonderful; and to have a woman stand by and admire his achievements,
warmed his heart like sunshine. Yet he was as cowardly as he was
powerful, and felt no shame in owning to the weakness. Something was
once wanted from the crazy platform over the shaft, and he at once
refused to venture there—“did not like,” as he said, “foolen’ round them
kind o’ places,” and let my wife go instead of him, looking on with a
grin. Vanity, where it rules, is usually more heroic: but Irvine
steadily approved himself, and expected others to approve him; rather
looked down upon my wife, and decidedly expected her to look up to him,
on the strength of his superior prudence.
Yet the strangest part of the whole matter was perhaps this, that Irvine
was as beautiful as a statue. His features were, in themselves, perfect;
it was only his cloudy, uncouth, and coarse expression that disfigured
them. So much strength residing in so spare a frame was proof sufficient
of the accuracy of his shape. He must have been built somewhat after the
pattern of Jack Sheppard; but the famous housebreaker, we may be certain,
was no lout. It was by the extraordinary powers of his mind no less than
by the vigour of his body, that he broke his strong prison with such
imperfect implements, turning the very obstacles to service. Irvine, in
the same case, would have sat down and spat, and grumbled curses. He had
the soul of a fat sheep, but, regarded as an artist’s model, the exterior
of a Greek God. It was a cruel thought to persons less favoured in their
birth, that this creature, endowed—to use the language of theatres—with
extraordinary “means,” should so manage to misemploy them that he looked
ugly and almost deformed. It was only by an effort of abstraction, and
after many days, that you discovered what he was.
By playing on the oaf’s conceit, and standing closely over him, we got a
path made round the corner of the dump to our door, so that we could come
and go with decent ease; and he even enjoyed the work, for in that there
were boulders to be plucked up bodily, bushes to be uprooted, and other
occasions for athletic display: but cutting wood was a different matter.
Anybody could cut wood; and, besides, my wife was tired of supervising
him, and had other things to attend to. And, in short, days went by, and
Irvine came daily, and talked and lounged and spat; but the firewood
remained intact as sleepers on the platform or growing trees upon the
mountainside. Irvine, as a woodcutter, we could tolerate; but Irvine as
a friend of the family, at so much a day, was too bald an imposition, and
at length, on the afternoon of the fourth or fifth day of our connection,
I explained to him, as clearly as I could, the light in which I had grown
to regard his presence. I pointed out to him that I could not continue
to give him a salary for spitting on the floor; and this expression,
which came after a good many others, at last penetrated his obdurate
wits. He rose at once, and said if that was the way he was going to be
spoke to, he reckoned he would quit. And, no one interposing, he
departed.
So far, so good. But we had no firewood. The next afternoon, I strolled
down to Rufe’s and consulted him on the subject. It was a very droll
interview, in the large, bare north room of the Silverado Hotel, Mrs.
Hanson’s patchwork on a frame, and Rufe, and his wife, and I, and the oaf
himself, all more or less embarrassed. Rufe announced there was nobody
in the neighbourhood but Irvine who could do a day’s work for anybody.
Irvine, thereupon, refused to have any more to do with my service; he
“wouldn’t work no more for a man as had spoke to him’s I had done.” I
found myself on the point of the last humiliation—driven to beseech the
creature whom I had just dismissed with insult: but I took the high hand
in despair, said there must be no talk of Irvine coming back unless
matters were to be differently managed; that I would rather chop firewood
for myself than be fooled; and, in short, the Hansons being eager for the
lad’s hire, I so imposed upon them with merely affected resolution, that
they ended by begging me to re-employ him again, on a solemn promise that
he should be more industrious. The promise, I am bound to say, was kept.
We soon had a fine pile of firewood at our door; and if Caliban gave me
the cold shoulder and spared me his conversation, I thought none the
worse of him for that, nor did I find my days much longer for the
deprivation.
The leading spirit of the family was, I am inclined to fancy, Mrs.
Hanson. Her social brilliancy somewhat dazzled the others, and she had
more of the small change of sense. It was she who faced Kelmar, for
instance; and perhaps, if she had been alone, Kelmar would have had no
rule within her doors. Rufe, to be sure, had a fine, sober, open-air
attitude of mind, seeing the world without exaggeration—perhaps, we may
even say, without enough; for he lacked, along with the others, that
commercial idealism which puts so high a value on time and money. Sanity
itself is a kind of convention. Perhaps Rufe was wrong; but, looking on
life plainly, he was unable to perceive that croquet or poker were in any
way less important than, for instance, mending his waggon. Even his own
profession, hunting, was dear to him mainly as a sort of play; even that
he would have neglected, had it not appealed to his imagination. His
hunting-suit, for instance, had cost I should be afraid to say how many
bucks—the currency in which he paid his way: it was all befringed, after
the Indian fashion, and it was dear to his heart. The pictorial side of
his daily business was never forgotten. He was even anxious to stand for
his picture in those buckskin hunting clothes; and I remember how he once
warmed almost into enthusiasm, his dark blue eyes growing perceptibly
larger, as he planned the composition in which he should appear, “with
the horns of some real big bucks, and dogs, and a camp on a crick”
(creek, stream).
There was no trace in Irvine of this woodland poetry. He did not care
for hunting, nor yet for buckskin suits. He had never observed scenery.
The world, as it appeared to him, was almost obliterated by his own great
grinning figure in the foreground: Caliban Malvolio. And it seems to me
as if, in the persons of these brothers-in-law, we had the two sides of
rusticity fairly well represented: the hunter living really in nature;
the clodhopper living merely out of society: the one bent up in every
corporal agent to capacity in one pursuit, doing at least one thing
keenly and thoughtfully, and thoroughly alive to all that touches it; the
other in the inert and bestial state, walking in a faint dream, and
taking so dim an impression of the myriad sides of life that he is truly
conscious of nothing but himself. It is only in the fastnesses of
nature, forests, mountains, and the back of man’s beyond, that a creature
endowed with five senses can grow up into the perfection of this crass
and earthy vanity. In towns or the busier country sides, he is roughly
reminded of other men’s existence; and if he learns no more, he learns at
least to fear contempt. But Irvine had come scatheless through life,
conscious only of himself, of his great strength and intelligence; and in
the silence of the universe, to which he did not listen, dwelling with
delight on the sound of his own thoughts.
THE SEA FOGS
A CHANGE in the colour of the light usually called me in the morning. By
a certain hour, the long, vertical chinks in our western gable, where the
boards had shrunk and separated, flashed suddenly into my eyes as stripes
of dazzling blue, at once so dark and splendid that I used to marvel how
the qualities could be combined. At an earlier hour, the heavens in that
quarter were still quietly coloured, but the shoulder of the mountain
which shuts in the canyon already glowed with sunlight in a wonderful
compound of gold and rose and green; and this too would kindle, although
more mildly and with rainbow tints, the fissures of our crazy gable. If
I were sleeping heavily, it was the bold blue that struck me awake; if
more lightly, then I would come to myself in that earlier and fairier
fight.
One Sunday morning, about five, the first brightness called me. I rose
and turned to the east, not for my devotions, but for air. The night had
been very still. The little private gale that blew every evening in our
canyon, for ten minutes or perhaps a quarter of an hour, had swiftly
blown itself out; in the hours that followed not a sigh of wind had
shaken the treetops; and our barrack, for all its breaches, was less
fresh that morning than of wont. But I had no sooner reached the window
than I forgot all else in the sight that met my eyes, and I made but two
bounds into my clothes, and down the crazy plank to the platform.
The sun was still concealed below the opposite hilltops, though it was
shining already, not twenty feet above my head, on our own mountain
slope. But the scene, beyond a few near features, was entirely changed.
Napa valley was gone; gone were all the lower slopes and woody foothills
of the range; and in their place, not a thousand feet below me, rolled a
great level ocean. It was as though I had gone to bed the night before,
safe in a nook of inland mountains, and had awakened in a bay upon the
coast. I had seen these inundations from below; at Calistoga I had risen
and gone abroad in the early morning, coughing and sneezing, under
fathoms on fathoms of gray sea vapour, like a cloudy sky—a dull sight for
the artist, and a painful experience for the invalid. But to sit aloft
one’s self in the pure air and under the unclouded dome of heaven, and
thus look down on the submergence of the valley, was strangely different
and even delightful to the eyes. Far away were hilltops like little
islands. Nearer, a smoky surf beat about the foot of precipices and
poured into all the coves of these rough mountains. The colour of that
fog ocean was a thing never to be forgotten. For an instant, among the
Hebrides and just about sundown, I have seen something like it on the sea
itself. But the white was not so opaline; nor was there, what
surprisingly increased the effect, that breathless, crystal stillness
over all. Even in its gentlest moods the salt sea travails, moaning
among the weeds or lisping on the sand; but that vast fog ocean lay in a
trance of silence, nor did the sweet air of the morning tremble with a
sound.
As I continued to sit upon the dump, I began to observe that this sea was
not so level as at first sight it appeared to be. Away in the extreme
south, a little hill of fog arose against the sky above the general
surface, and as it had already caught the sun, it shone on the horizon
like the topsails of some giant ship. There were huge waves, stationary,
as it seemed, like waves in a frozen sea; and yet, as I looked again, I
was not sure but they were moving after all, with a slow and august
advance. And while I was yet doubting, a promontory of the some four or
five miles away, conspicuous by a bouquet of tall pines, was in a single
instant overtaken and swallowed up. It reappeared in a little, with its
pines, but this time as an islet, and only to be swallowed up once more
and then for good. This set me looking nearer, and I saw that in every
cove along the line of mountains the fog was being piled in higher and
higher, as though by some wind that was inaudible to me. I could trace
its progress, one pine tree first growing hazy and then disappearing
after another; although sometimes there was none of this fore-running
haze, but the whole opaque white ocean gave a start and swallowed a piece
of mountain at a gulp. It was to flee these poisonous fogs that I had
left the seaboard, and climbed so high among the mountains. And now,
behold, here came the fog to besiege me in my chosen altitudes, and yet
came so beautifully that my first thought was of welcome.
The sun had now gotten much higher, and through all the gaps of the hills
it cast long bars of gold across that white ocean. An eagle, or some
other very great bird of the mountain, came wheeling over the nearer
pine-tops, and hung, poised and something sideways, as if to look abroad
on that unwonted desolation, spying, perhaps with terror, for the eyries
of her comrades. Then, with a long cry, she disappeared again towards
Lake County and the clearer air. At length it seemed to me as if the
flood were beginning to subside. The old landmarks, by whose
disappearance I had measured its advance, here a crag, there a brave pine
tree, now began, in the inverse order, to make their reappearance into
daylight. I judged all danger of the fog was over. This was not Noah’s
flood; it was but a morning spring, and would now drift out seaward
whence it came. So, mightily relieved, and a good deal exhilarated by
the sight, I went into the house to light the fire.
I suppose it was nearly seven when I once more mounted the platform to
look abroad. The fog ocean had swelled up enormously since last I saw
it; and a few hundred feet below me, in the deep gap where the Toll House
stands and the road runs through into Lake County, it had already topped
the slope, and was pouring over and down the other side like driving
smoke. The wind had climbed along with it; and though I was still in
calm air, I could see the trees tossing below me, and their long,
strident sighing mounted to me where I stood.
Half an hour later, the fog had surmounted all the ridge on the opposite
side of the gap, though a shoulder of the mountain still warded it out of
our canyon. Napa valley and its bounding hills were now utterly blotted
out. The fog, sunny white in the sunshine, was pouring over into Lake
County in a huge, ragged cataract, tossing treetops appearing and
disappearing in the spray. The air struck with a little chill, and set
me coughing. It smelt strong of the fog, like the smell of a
washing-house, but with a shrewd tang of the sea salt.
Had it not been for two things—the sheltering spur which answered as a
dyke, and the great valley on the other side which rapidly engulfed
whatever mounted—our own little platform in the canyon must have been
already buried a hundred feet in salt and poisonous air. As it was, the
interest of the scene entirely occupied our minds. We were set just out
of the wind, and but just above the fog; we could listen to the voice of
the one as to music on the stage; we could plunge our eyes down into the
other, as into some flowing stream from over the parapet of a bridge;
thus we looked on upon a strange, impetuous, silent, shifting exhibition
of the powers of nature, and saw the familiar landscape changing from
moment to moment like figures in a dream.
The imagination loves to trifle with what is not. Had this been indeed
the deluge, I should have felt more strongly, but the emotion would have
been similar in kind. I played with the idea, as the child flees in
delighted terror from the creations of his fancy. The look of the thing
helped me. And when at last I began to flee up the mountain, it was
indeed partly to escape from the raw air that kept me coughing, but it
was also part in play.
As I ascended the mountain-side, I came once more to overlook the upper
surface of the fog; but it wore a different appearance from what I had
beheld at daybreak. For, first, the sun now fell on it from high
overhead, and its surface shone and undulated like a great nor’land moor
country, sheeted with untrodden morning snow. And next the new level
must have been a thousand or fifteen hundred feet higher than the old, so
that only five or six points of all the broken country below me, still
stood out. Napa valley was now one with Sonoma on the west. On the
hither side, only a thin scattered fringe of bluffs was unsubmerged; and
through all the gaps the fog was pouring over, like an ocean, into the
blue clear sunny country on the east. There it was soon lost; for it
fell instantly into the bottom of the valleys, following the water-shed;
and the hilltops in that quarter were still clear cut upon the eastern
sky.
Through the Toll House gap and over the near ridges on the other side,
the deluge was immense. A spray of thin vapour was thrown high above it,
rising and falling, and blown into fantastic shapes. The speed of its
course was like a mountain torrent. Here and there a few treetops were
discovered and then whelmed again; and for one second, the bough of a
dead pine beckoned out of the spray like the arm of a drowning man. But
still the imagination was dissatisfied, still the ear waited for
something more. Had this indeed been water (as it seemed so, to the
eye), with what a plunge of reverberating thunder would it have rolled
upon its course, disembowelling mountains and deracinating pines! And
yet water it was, and sea-water at that—true Pacific billows, only
somewhat rarefied, rolling in mid air among the hilltops.
I climbed still higher, among the red rattling gravel and dwarf underwood
of Mount Saint Helena, until I could look right down upon Silverado, and
admire the favoured nook in which it lay. The sunny plain of fog was
several hundred feet higher; behind the protecting spur a gigantic
accumulation of cottony vapour threatened, with every second, to blow
over and submerge our homestead; but the vortex setting past the Toll
House was too strong; and there lay our little platform, in the arms of
the deluge, but still enjoying its unbroken sunshine. About eleven,
however, thin spray came flying over the friendly buttress, and I began
to think the fog had hunted out its Jonah after all. But it was the last
effort. The wind veered while we were at dinner, and began to blow
squally from the mountain summit; and by half-past one, all that world of
sea-fogs was utterly routed and flying here and there into the south in
little rags of cloud. And instead of a lone sea-beach, we found
ourselves once more inhabiting a high mountainside, with the clear green
country far below us, and the light smoke of Calistoga blowing in the
air.
This was the great Russian campaign for that season. Now and then, in
the early morning, a little white lakelet of fog would be seen far down
in Napa Valley; but the heights were not again assailed, nor was the
surrounding world again shut off from Silverado.
THE TOLL HOUSE
THE Toll House, standing alone by the wayside under nodding pines, with
its streamlet and water-tank; its backwoods, toll-bar, and well trodden
croquet ground; the ostler standing by the stable door, chewing a straw;
a glimpse of the Chinese cook in the back parts; and Mr. Hoddy in the
bar, gravely alert and serviceable, and equally anxious to lend or borrow
books;—dozed all day in the dusty sunshine, more than half asleep. There
were no neighbours, except the Hansons up the hill. The traffic on the
road was infinitesimal; only, at rare intervals, a couple in a waggon, or
a dusty farmer on a springboard, toiling over “the grade” to that
metropolitan hamlet, Calistoga; and, at the fixed hours, the passage of
the stages.
The nearest building was the school-house, down the road; and the
school-ma’am boarded at the Toll House, walking thence in the morning to
the little brown shanty, where she taught the young ones of the district,
and returning thither pretty weary in the afternoon. She had chosen this
outlying situation, I understood, for her health. Mr. Corwin was
consumptive; so was Rufe; so was Mr. Jennings, the engineer. In short,
the place was a kind of small Davos: consumptive folk consorting on a
hilltop in the most unbroken idleness. Jennings never did anything that
I could see, except now and then to fish, and generally to sit about in
the bar and the verandah, waiting for something to happen. Corwin and
Rufe did as little as possible; and if the school-ma’am, poor lady, had
to work pretty hard all morning, she subsided when it was over into much
the same dazed beatitude as all the rest.
Her special corner was the parlour—a very genteel room, with Bible
prints, a crayon portrait of Mrs. Corwin in the height of fashion, a few
years ago, another of her son (Mr. Corwin was not represented), a mirror,
and a selection of dried grasses. A large book was laid religiously on
the table—“From Palace to Hovel,” I believe, its name—full of the raciest
experiences in England. The author had mingled freely with all classes,
the nobility particularly meeting him with open arms; and I must say that
traveller had ill requited his reception. His book, in short, was a
capital instance of the Penny Messalina school of literature; and there
arose from it, in that cool parlour, in that silent, wayside, mountain
inn, a rank atmosphere of gold and blood and “Jenkins,” and the
“Mysteries of London,” and sickening, inverted snobbery, fit to knock you
down. The mention of this book reminds me of another and far racier
picture of our island life. The latter parts of _Rocambole_ are surely
too sparingly consulted in the country which they celebrate. No man’s
education can be said to be complete, nor can he pronounce the world yet
emptied of enjoyment, till he has made the acquaintance of “the Reverend
Patterson, director of the Evangelical Society.” To follow the
evolutions of that reverend gentleman, who goes through scenes in which
even Mr. Duffield would hesitate to place a bishop, is to rise to new
ideas. But, alas! there was no Patterson about the Toll House. Only,
alongside of “From Palace to Hovel,” a sixpenny “Ouida” figured. So
literature, you see, was not unrepresented.
The school-ma’am had friends to stay with her, other school-ma’ams
enjoying their holidays, quite a bevy of damsels. They seemed never to
go out, or not beyond the verandah, but sat close in the little parlour,
quietly talking or listening to the wind among the trees. Sleep dwelt in
the Toll House, like a fixture: summer sleep, shallow, soft, and
dreamless. A cuckoo-clock, a great rarity in such a place, hooted at
intervals about the echoing house; and Mr. Jenning would open his eyes
for a moment in the bar, and turn the leaf of a newspaper, and the
resting school-ma’ams in the parlour would be recalled to the
consciousness of their inaction. Busy Mrs. Corwin and her busy Chinaman
might be heard indeed, in the penetralia, pounding dough or rattling
dishes; or perhaps Rufe had called up some of the sleepers for a game of
croquet, and the hollow strokes of the mallet sounded far away among the
woods: but with these exceptions, it was sleep and sunshine and dust, and
the wind in the pine trees, all day long.
A little before stage time, that castle of indolence awoke. The ostler
threw his straw away and set to his preparations. Mr. Jennings rubbed
his eyes; happy Mr. Jennings, the something he had been waiting for all
day about to happen at last! The boarders gathered in the verandah,
silently giving ear, and gazing down the road with shaded eyes. And as
yet there was no sign for the senses, not a sound, not a tremor of the
mountain road. The birds, to whom the secret of the hooting cuckoo is
unknown, must have set down to instinct this premonitory bustle.
And then the first of the two stages swooped upon the Toll House with a
roar and in a cloud of dust; and the shock had not yet time to subside,
before the second was abreast of it. Huge concerns they were,
well-horsed and loaded, the men in their shirt-sleeves, the women swathed
in veils, the long whip cracking like a pistol; and as they charged upon
that slumbering hostelry, each shepherding a dust storm, the dead place
blossomed into life and talk and clatter. This the Toll House?—with its
city throng, its jostling shoulders, its infinity of instant business in
the bar? The mind would not receive it! The heartfelt bustle of that
hour is hardly credible; the thrill of the great shower of letters from
the post-bag, the childish hope and interest with which one gazed in all
these strangers’ eyes. They paused there but to pass: the blue-clad
China-boy, the San Francisco magnate, the mystery in the dust coat, the
secret memoirs in tweed, the ogling, well-shod lady with her troop of
girls; they did but flash and go; they were hull-down for us behind
life’s ocean, and we but hailed their topsails on the line. Yet, out of
our great solitude of four and twenty mountain hours, we thrilled to
their momentary presence gauged and divined them, loved and hated; and
stood light-headed in that storm of human electricity. Yes, like
Piccadilly circus, this is also one of life’s crossing-places. Here I
beheld one man, already famous or infamous, a centre of pistol-shots: and
another who, if not yet known to rumour, will fill a column of the Sunday
paper when he comes to hang—a burly, thick-set, powerful Chinese
desperado, six long bristles upon either lip; redolent of whiskey,
playing cards, and pistols; swaggering in the bar with the lowest
assumption of the lowest European manners; rapping out blackguard English
oaths in his canorous oriental voice; and combining in one person the
depravities of two races and two civilizations. For all his lust and
vigour, he seemed to look cold upon me from the valley of the shadow of
the gallows. He imagined a vain thing; and while he drained his
cock-tail, Holbein’s death was at his elbow. Once, too, I fell in talk
with another of these flitting strangers—like the rest, in his
shirt-sleeves and all begrimed with dust—and the next minute we were
discussing Paris and London, theatres and wines. To him, journeying from
one human place to another, this was a trifle; but to me! No, Mr.
Lillie, I have not forgotten it.
And presently the city-tide was at its flood and began to ebb. Life runs
in Piccadilly Circus, say, from nine to one, and then, there also, ebbs
into the small hours of the echoing policeman and the lamps and stars.
But the Toll House is far up stream, and near its rural springs; the
bubble of the tide but touches it. Before you had yet grasped your
pleasure, the horses were put to, the loud whips volleyed, and the tide
was gone. North and south had the two stages vanished, the towering dust
subsided in the woods; but there was still an interval before the flush
had fallen on your cheeks, before the ear became once more contented with
the silence, or the seven sleepers of the Toll House dozed back to their
accustomed corners. Yet a little, and the ostler would swing round the
great barrier across the road; and in the golden evening, that dreamy inn
begin to trim its lamps and spread the board for supper.
As I recall the place—the green dell below; the spires of pine; the
sun-warm, scented air; that gray, gabled inn, with its faint stirrings of
life amid the slumber of the mountains—I slowly awake to a sense of
admiration, gratitude, and almost love. A fine place, after all, for a
wasted life to doze away in—the cuckoo clock hooting of its far home
country; the croquet mallets, eloquent of English lawns; the stages daily
bringing news of—the turbulent world away below there; and perhaps once
in the summer, a salt fog pouring overhead with its tale of the Pacific.
A STARRY DRIVE
IN our rule at Silverado, there was a melancholy interregnum. The queen
and the crown prince with one accord fell sick; and, as I was sick to
begin with, our lone position on Mount Saint Helena was no longer
tenable, and we had to hurry back to Calistoga and a cottage on the
green. By that time we had begun to realize the difficulties of our
position. We had found what an amount of labour it cost to support life
in our red canyon; and it was the dearest desire of our hearts to get a
China-boy to go along with us when we returned. We could have given him
a whole house to himself, self-contained, as they say in the
advertisements; and on the money question we were prepared to go far.
Kong Sam Kee, the Calistoga washerman, was entrusted with the affair; and
from day to day it languished on, with protestations on our part and
mellifluous excuses on the part of Kong Sam Kee.
At length, about half-past eight of our last evening, with the waggon
ready harnessed to convey us up the grade, the washerman, with a somewhat
sneering air, produced the boy. He was a handsome, gentlemanly lad,
attired in rich dark blue, and shod with snowy white; but, alas! he had
heard rumours of Silverado. He know it for a lone place on the
mountain-side, with no friendly wash-house near by, where he might smoke
a pipe of opium o’ nights with other China-boys, and lose his little
earnings at the game of tan; and he first backed out for more money; and
then, when that demand was satisfied, refused to come point-blank. He
was wedded to his wash-houses; he had no taste for the rural life; and we
must go to our mountain servantless. It must have been near half an hour
before we reached that conclusion, standing in the midst of Calistoga
high street under the stars, and the China-boy and Kong Sam Kee singing
their pigeon English in the sweetest voices and with the most musical
inflections.
We were not, however, to return alone; for we brought with us Joe Strong,
the painter, a most good-natured comrade and a capital hand at an
omelette. I do not know in which capacity he was most valued—as a cook
or a companion; and he did excellently well in both.
The Kong Sam Kee negotiation had delayed us unduly; it must have been
half-past nine before we left Calistoga, and night came fully ere we
struck the bottom of the grade. I have never seen such a night. It
seemed to throw calumny in the teeth of all the painters that ever
dabbled in starlight. The sky itself was of a ruddy, powerful, nameless,
changing colour, dark and glossy like a serpent’s back. The stars, by
innumerable millions, stuck boldly forth like lamps. The milky way was
bright, like a moonlit cloud; half heaven seemed milky way. The greater
luminaries shone each more clearly than a winter’s moon. Their light was
dyed in every sort of colour—red, like fire; blue, like steel; green,
like the tracks of sunset; and so sharply did each stand forth in its own
lustre that there was no appearance of that flat, star-spangled arch we
know so well in pictures, but all the hollow of heaven was one chaos of
contesting luminaries—a hurry-burly of stars. Against this the hills and
rugged treetops stood out redly dark.
As we continued to advance, the lesser lights and milky ways first grew
pale, and then vanished; the countless hosts of heaven dwindled in number
by successive millions; those that still shone had tempered their
exceeding brightness and fallen back into their customary wistful
distance; and the sky declined from its first bewildering splendour into
the appearance of a common night. Slowly this change proceeded, and
still there was no sign of any cause. Then a whiteness like mist was
thrown over the spurs of the mountain. Yet a while, and, as we turned a
corner, a great leap of silver light and net of forest shadows fell
across the road and upon our wondering waggonful; and, swimming low among
the trees, we beheld a strange, misshapen, waning moon, half-tilted on
her back.
“Where are ye when the moon appears?” so the old poet sang,
half-taunting, to the stars, bent upon a courtly purpose.
“As the sunlight round the dim earth’s midnight tower of shadow
pours,
Streaming past the dim, wide portals,
Viewless to the eyes of mortals,
Till it floods the moon’s pale islet or the morning’s golden shores.”
So sings Mr. Trowbridge, with a noble inspiration. And so had the
sunlight flooded that pale islet of the moon, and her lit face put out,
one after another, that galaxy of stars. The wonder of the drive was
over; but, by some nice conjunction of clearness in the air and fit
shadow in the valley where we travelled, we had seen for a little while
that brave display of the midnight heavens. It was gone, but it had
been; nor shall I ever again behold the stars with the same mind. He who
has seen the sea commoved with a great hurricane, thinks of it very
differently from him who has seen it only in a calm. And the difference
between a calm and a hurricane is not greatly more striking than that
between the ordinary face of night and the splendour that shone upon us
in that drive. Two in our waggon knew night as she shines upon the
tropics, but even that bore no comparison. The nameless colour of the
sky, the hues of the star-fire, and the incredible projection of the
stars themselves, starting from their orbits, so that the eye seemed to
distinguish their positions in the hollow of space—these were things that
we had never seen before and shall never see again.
Meanwhile, in this altered night, we proceeded on our way among the
scents and silence of the forest, reached the top of the grade, wound up
by Hanson’s, and came at last to a stand under the flying gargoyle of the
chute. Sam, who had been lying back, fast asleep, with the moon on his
face, got down, with the remark that it was pleasant “to be home.” The
waggon turned and drove away, the noise gently dying in the woods, and we
clambered up the rough path, Caliban’s great feat of engineering, and
came home to Silverado.
The moon shone in at the eastern doors and windows, and over the lumber
on the platform. The one tall pine beside the ledge was steeped in
silver. Away up the canyon, a wild cat welcomed us with three discordant
squalls. But once we had lit a candle, and began to review our
improvements, homely in either sense, and count our stores, it was
wonderful what a feeling of possession and permanence grow up in the
hearts of the lords of Silverado. A bed had still to be made up for
Strong, and the morning’s water to be fetched, with clinking pail; and as
we set about these household duties, and showed off our wealth and
conveniences before the stranger, and had a glass of wine, I think, in
honour of our return, and trooped at length one after another up the
flying bridge of plank, and lay down to sleep in our shattered,
moon-pierced barrack, we were among the happiest sovereigns in the world,
and certainly ruled over the most contented people. Yet, in our absence,
the palace had been sacked. Wild cats, so the Hansons said, had broken
in and carried off a side of bacon, a hatchet, and two knives.
EPISODES IN THE STORY OF A MINE
NO one could live at Silverado and not be curious about the story of the
mine. We were surrounded by so many evidences of expense and toil, we
lived so entirely in the wreck of that great enterprise, like mites in
the ruins of a cheese, that the idea of the old din and bustle haunted
our repose. Our own house, the forge, the dump, the chutes, the rails,
the windlass, the mass of broken plant; the two tunnels, one far below in
the green dell, the other on the platform where we kept our wine; the
deep shaft, with the sun-glints and the water-drops; above all, the
ledge, that great gaping slice out of the mountain shoulder, propped
apart by wooden wedges, on whose immediate margin, high above our heads,
the one tall pine precariously nodded—these stood for its greatness;
while, the dog-hutch, boot-jacks, old boots, old tavern bills, and the
very beds that we inherited from bygone miners, put in human touches and
realized for us the story of the past.
I have sat on an old sleeper, under the thick madronas near the forge,
with just a look over the dump on the green world below, and seen the sun
lying broad among the wreck, and heard the silence broken only by the
tinkling water in the shaft, or a stir of the royal family about the
battered palace, and my mind has gone back to the epoch of the Stanleys
and the Chapmans, with a grand _tutti_ of pick and drill, hammer and
anvil, echoing about the canyon; the assayer hard at it in our
dining-room; the carts below on the road, and their cargo of red mineral
bounding and thundering down the iron chute. And now all gone—all fallen
away into this sunny silence and desertion: a family of squatters dining
in the assayer’s office, making their beds in the big sleeping room
erstwhile so crowded, keeping their wine in the tunnel that once rang
with picks.
But Silverado itself, although now fallen in its turn into decay, was
once but a mushroom, and had succeeded to other mines and other flitting
cities. Twenty years ago, away down the glen on the Lake County side
there was a place, Jonestown by name, with two thousand inhabitants
dwelling under canvas, and one roofed house for the sale of whiskey.
Round on the western side of Mount Saint Helena, there was at the same
date, a second large encampment, its name, if it ever had one, lost for
me. Both of these have perished, leaving not a stick and scarce a memory
behind them. Tide after tide of hopeful miners have thus flowed and
ebbed about the mountain, coming and going, now by lone prospectors, now
with a rush. Last, in order of time came Silverado, reared the big mill,
in the valley, founded the town which is now represented, monumentally,
by Hanson’s, pierced all these slaps and shafts and tunnels, and in turn
declined and died away.
“Our noisy years seem moments in the wake
Of the eternal silence.”
As to the success of Silverado in its time of being, two reports were
current. According to the first, six hundred thousand dollars were taken
out of that great upright seam, that still hung open above us on crazy
wedges. Then the ledge pinched out, and there followed, in quest of the
remainder, a great drifting and tunnelling in all directions, and a great
consequent effusion of dollars, until, all parties being sick of the
expense, the mine was deserted, and the town decamped. According to the
second version, told me with much secrecy of manner, the whole affair,
mine, mill, and town, were parts of one majestic swindle. There had
never come any silver out of any portion of the mine; there was no silver
to come. At midnight trains of packhorses might have been observed
winding by devious tracks about the shoulder of the mountain. They came
from far away, from Amador or Placer, laden with silver in “old cigar
boxes.” They discharged their load at Silverado, in the hour of sleep;
and before the morning they were gone again with their mysterious drivers
to their unknown source. In this way, twenty thousand pounds’ worth of
silver was smuggled in under cover of night, in these old cigar boxes;
mixed with Silverado mineral; carted down to the mill; crushed,
amalgated, and refined, and despatched to the city as the proper product
of the mine. Stock-jobbing, if it can cover such expenses, must be a
profitable business in San Francisco.
I give these two versions as I got them. But I place little reliance on
either, my belief in history having been greatly shaken. For it chanced
that I had come to dwell in Silverado at a critical hour; great events in
its history were about to happen—did happen, as I am led to believe; nay,
and it will be seen that I played a part in that revolution myself. And
yet from first to last I never had a glimmer of an idea what was going
on; and even now, after full reflection, profess myself at sea. That
there was some obscure intrigue of the cigar-box order, and that I, in
the character of a wooden puppet, set pen to paper in the interest of
somebody, so much, and no more, is certain.
Silverado, then under my immediate sway, belonged to one whom I will call
a Mr. Ronalds. I only knew him through the extraordinarily distorting
medium of local gossip, now as a momentous jobber; now as a dupe to point
an adage; and again, and much more probably, as an ordinary Christian
gentleman like you or me, who had opened a mine and worked it for a while
with better and worse fortune. So, through a defective window-pane, you
may see the passer-by shoot up into a hunchbacked giant or dwindle into a
potbellied dwarf.
To Ronalds, at least, the mine belonged; but the notice by which he held
it would ran out upon the 30th of June—or rather, as I suppose, it had
run out already, and the month of grace would expire upon that day, after
which any American citizen might post a notice of his own, and make
Silverado his. This, with a sort of quiet slyness, Rufe told me at an
early period of our acquaintance. There was no silver, of course; the
mine “wasn’t worth nothing, Mr. Stevens,” but there was a deal of old
iron and wood around, and to gain possession of this old wood and iron,
and get a right to the water, Rufe proposed, if I had no objections, to
“jump the claim.”
Of course, I had no objection. But I was filled with wonder. If all he
wanted was the wood and iron, what, in the name of fortune, was to
prevent him taking them? “His right there was none to dispute.” He
might lay hands on all to-morrow, as the wild cats had laid hands upon
our knives and hatchet. Besides, was this mass of heavy mining plant
worth transportation? If it was, why had not the rightful owners carted
it away? If it was, would they not preserve their title to these
movables, even after they had lost their title to the mine? And if it
were not, what the better was Rufe? Nothing would grow at Silverado;
there was even no wood to cut; beyond a sense of property, there was
nothing to be gained. Lastly, was it at all credible that Ronalds would
forget what Rufe remembered? The days of grace were not yet over: any
fine morning he might appear, paper in hand, and enter for another year
on his inheritance. However, it was none of my business; all seemed
legal; Rufe or Ronalds, all was one to me.
On the morning of the 27th, Mrs. Hanson appeared with the milk as usual,
in her sun-bonnet. The time would be out on Tuesday, she reminded us,
and bade me be in readiness to play my part, though I had no idea what it
was to be. And suppose Ronalds came? we asked. She received the idea
with derision, laughing aloud with all her fine teeth. He could not find
the mine to save his life, it appeared, without Rufe to guide him. Last
year, when he came, they heard him “up and down the road a hollerin’ and
a raisin’ Cain.” And at last he had to come to the Hansons in despair,
and bid Rufe, “Jump into your pants and shoes, and show me where this old
mine is, anyway!” Seeing that Ronalds had laid out so much money in the
spot, and that a beaten road led right up to the bottom of the clump, I
thought this a remarkable example. The sense of locality must be
singularly in abeyance in the case of Ronalds.
That same evening, supper comfortably over, Joe Strong busy at work on a
drawing of the dump and the opposite hills, we were all out on the
platform together, sitting there, under the tented heavens, with the same
sense of privacy as if we had been cabined in a parlour, when the sound
of brisk footsteps came mounting up the path. We pricked our ears at
this, for the tread seemed lighter and firmer than was usual with our
country neighbours. And presently, sure enough, two town gentlemen, with
cigars and kid gloves, came debauching past the house. They looked in
that place like a blasphemy.
“Good evening,” they said. For none of us had stirred; we all sat stiff
with wonder.
“Good evening,” I returned; and then, to put them at their ease, “A stiff
climb,” I added.
“Yes,” replied the leader; “but we have to thank you for this path.”
I did not like the man’s tone. None of us liked it. He did not seem
embarrassed by the meeting, but threw us his remarks like favours, and
strode magisterially by us towards the shaft and tunnel.
Presently we heard his voice raised to his companion. “We drifted every
sort of way, but couldn’t strike the ledge.” Then again: “It pinched out
here.” And once more: “Every minor that ever worked upon it says there’s
bound to be a ledge somewhere.”
These were the snatches of his talk that reached us, and they had a
damning significance. We, the lords of Silverado, had come face to face
with our superior. It is the worst of all quaint and of all cheap ways
of life that they bring us at last to the pinch of some humiliation. I
liked well enough to be a squatter when there was none but Hanson by;
before Ronalds, I will own, I somewhat quailed. I hastened to do him
fealty, said I gathered he was the Squattee, and apologized. He
threatened me with ejection, in a manner grimly pleasant—more pleasant to
him, I fancy, than to me; and then he passed off into praises of the
former state of Silverado. “It was the busiest little mining town you
ever saw:” a population of between a thousand and fifteen hundred souls,
the engine in full blast, the mill newly erected; nothing going but
champagne, and hope the order of the day. Ninety thousand dollars came
out; a hundred and forty thousand were put in, making a net loss of fifty
thousand. The last days, I gathered, the days of John Stanley, were not
so bright; the champagne had ceased to flow, the population was already
moving elsewhere, and Silverado had begun to wither in the branch before
it was cut at the root. The last shot that was fired knocked over the
stove chimney, and made that hole in the roof of our barrack, through
which the sun was wont to visit slug-a-beds towards afternoon. A noisy,
last shot, to inaugurate the days of silence.
Throughout this interview, my conscience was a good deal exercised; and I
was moved to throw myself on my knees and own the intended treachery.
But then I had Hanson to consider. I was in much the same position as
Old Rowley, that royal humourist, whom “the rogue had taken into his
confidence.” And again, here was Ronalds on the spot. He must know the
day of the month as well as Hanson and I. If a broad hint were
necessary, he had the broadest in the world. For a large board had been
nailed by the crown prince on the very front of our house, between the
door and window, painted in cinnabar—the pigment of the country—with
doggrel rhymes and contumelious pictures, and announcing, in terms
unnecessarily figurative, that the trick was already played, the claim
already jumped, and Master Sam the legitimate successor of Mr. Ronalds.
But no, nothing could save that man; _quem deus vult perdere_, _prius
dementat_. As he came so he went, and left his rights depending.
Late at night, by Silverado reckoning, and after we were all abed, Mrs.
Hanson returned to give us the newest of her news. It was like a scene
in a ship’s steerage: all of us abed in our different tiers, the single
candle struggling with the darkness, and this plump, handsome woman,
seated on an upturned valise beside the bunks, talking and showing her
fine teeth, and laughing till the rafters rang. Any ship, to be sure,
with a hundredth part as many holes in it as our barrack, must long ago
have gone to her last port. Up to that time I had always imagined Mrs.
Hanson’s loquacity to be mere incontinence, that she said what was
uppermost for the pleasure of speaking, and laughed and laughed again as
a kind of musical accompaniment. But I now found there was an art in it,
I found it less communicative than silence itself. I wished to know why
Ronalds had come; how he had found his way without Rufe; and why, being
on the spot, he had not refreshed his title. She talked interminably on,
but her replies were never answers. She fled under a cloud of words; and
when I had made sure that she was purposely eluding me, I dropped the
subject in my turn, and let her rattle where she would.
She had come to tell us that, instead of waiting for Tuesday, the claim
was to be jumped on the morrow. How? If the time were not out, it was
impossible. Why? If Ronalds had come and gone, and done nothing, there
was the less cause for hurry. But again I could reach no satisfaction.
The claim was to be jumped next morning, that was all that she would
condescend upon.
And yet it was not jumped the next morning, nor yet the next, and a whole
week had come and gone before we heard more of this exploit. That day
week, however, a day of great heat, Hanson, with a little roll of paper
in his hand, and the eternal pipe alight; Breedlove, his large, dull
friend, to act, I suppose, as witness; Mrs. Hanson, in her Sunday best;
and all the children, from the oldest to the youngest;—arrived in a
procession, tailing one behind another up the path. Caliban was absent,
but he had been chary of his friendly visits since the row; and with that
exception, the whole family was gathered together as for a marriage or a
christening. Strong was sitting at work, in the shade of the dwarf
madronas near the forge; and they planted themselves about him in a
circle, one on a stone, another on the waggon rails, a third on a piece
of plank. Gradually the children stole away up the canyon to where there
was another chute, somewhat smaller than the one across the dump; and
down this chute, for the rest of the afternoon, they poured one avalanche
of stones after another, waking the echoes of the glen. Meantime we
elders sat together on the platform, Hanson and his friend smoking in
silence like Indian sachems, Mrs. Hanson rattling on as usual with an
adroit volubility, saying nothing, but keeping the party at their ease
like a courtly hostess.
Not a word occurred about the business of the day. Once, twice, and
thrice I tried to slide the subject in, but was discouraged by the stoic
apathy of Rufe, and beaten down before the pouring verbiage of his wife.
There is nothing of the Indian brave about me, and I began to grill with
impatience. At last, like a highway robber, I cornered Hanson, and bade
him stand and deliver his business. Thereupon he gravely rose, as though
to hint that this was not a proper place, nor the subject one suitable
for squaws, and I, following his example, led him up the plank into our
barrack. There he bestowed himself on a box, and unrolled his papers
with fastidious deliberation. There were two sheets of note-paper, and
an old mining notice, dated May 30th, 1879, part print, part manuscript,
and the latter much obliterated by the rains. It was by this identical
piece of paper that the mine had been held last year. For thirteen
months it had endured the weather and the change of seasons on a cairn
behind the shoulder of the canyon; and it was now my business, spreading
it before me on the table, and sitting on a valise, to copy its terms,
with some necessary changes, twice over on the two sheets of note-paper.
One was then to be placed on the same cairn—a “mound of rocks” the notice
put it; and the other to be lodged for registration.
Rufe watched me, silently smoking, till I came to the place for the
locator’s name at the end of the first copy; and when I proposed that he
should sign, I thought I saw a scare in his eye. “I don’t think that’ll
be necessary,” he said slowly; “just you write it down.” Perhaps this
mighty hunter, who was the most active member of the local school board,
could not write. There would be nothing strange in that. The constable
of Calistoga is, and has been for years, a bed-ridden man, and, if I
remember rightly, blind. He had more need of the emoluments than
another, it was explained; and it was easy for him to “depytize,” with a
strong accent on the last. So friendly and so free are popular
institutions.
When I had done my scrivening, Hanson strolled out, and addressed
Breedlove, “Will you step up here a bit?” and after they had disappeared
a little while into the chaparral and madrona thicket, they came back
again, minus a notice, and the deed was done. The claim was jumped; a
tract of mountain-side, fifteen hundred feet long by six hundred wide,
with all the earth’s precious bowels, had passed from Ronalds to Hanson,
and, in the passage, changed its name from the “Mammoth” to the
“Calistoga.” I had tried to get Rufe to call it after his wife, after
himself, and after Garfield, the Republican Presidential candidate of the
hour—since then elected, and, alas! dead—but all was in vain. The claim
had once been called the Calistoga before, and he seemed to feel safety
in returning to that.
And so the history of that mine became once more plunged in darkness, lit
only by some monster pyrotechnical displays of gossip. And perhaps the
most curious feature of the whole matter is this: that we should have
dwelt in this quiet corner of the mountains, with not a dozen neighbours,
and yet struggled all the while, like desperate swimmers, in this sea of
falsities and contradictions. Wherever a man is, there will be a lie.
TOILS AND PLEASURES
I MUST try to convey some notion of our life, of how the days passed and
what pleasure we took in them, of what there was to do and how we set
about doing it, in our mountain hermitage. The house, after we had
repaired the worst of the damages, and filled in some of the doors and
windows with white cotton cloth, became a healthy and a pleasant
dwelling-place, always airy and dry, and haunted by the outdoor perfumes
of the glen. Within, it had the look of habitation, the human look. You
had only to go into the third room, which we did not use, and see its
stones, its sifting earth, its tumbled litter; and then return to our
lodging, with the beds made, the plates on the rack, the pail of bright
water behind the door, the stove crackling in a corner, and perhaps the
table roughly laid against a meal,—and man’s order, the little clean
spots that he creates to dwell in, were at once contrasted with the rich
passivity of nature. And yet our house was everywhere so wrecked and
shattered, the air came and went so freely, the sun found so many
portholes, the golden outdoor glow shone in so many open chinks, that we
enjoyed, at the same time, some of the comforts of a roof and much of the
gaiety and brightness of al fresco life. A single shower of rain, to be
sure, and we should have been drowned out like mice. But ours was a
Californian summer, and an earthquake was a far likelier accident than a
shower of rain.
Trustful in this fine weather, we kept the house for kitchen and bedroom,
and used the platform as our summer parlour. The sense of privacy, as I
have said already, was complete. We could look over the clump on miles
of forest and rough hilltop; our eyes commanded some of Napa Valley,
where the train ran, and the little country townships sat so close
together along the line of the rail. But here there was no man to
intrude. None but the Hansons were our visitors. Even they came but at
long intervals, or twice daily, at a stated hour, with milk. So our
days, as they were never interrupted, drew out to the greater length;
hour melted insensibly into hour; the household duties, though they were
many, and some of them laborious, dwindled into mere islets of business
in a sea of sunny day-time; and it appears to me, looking back, as though
the far greater part of our life at Silverado had been passed, propped
upon an elbow, or seated on a plank, listening to the silence that there
is among the hills.
My work, it is true, was over early in the morning. I rose before any
one else, lit the stove, put on the water to boil, and strolled forth
upon the platform to wait till it was ready. Silverado would then be
still in shadow, the sun shining on the mountain higher up. A clean
smell of trees, a smell of the earth at morning, hung in the air.
Regularly, every day, there was a single bird, not singing, but awkwardly
chirruping among the green madronas, and the sound was cheerful, natural,
and stirring. It did not hold the attention, nor interrupt the thread of
meditation, like a blackbird or a nightingale; it was mere woodland
prattle, of which the mind was conscious like a perfume. The freshness
of these morning seasons remained with me far on into the day.
As soon as the kettle boiled, I made porridge and coffee; and that,
beyond the literal drawing of water, and the preparation of kindling,
which it would be hyperbolical to call the hewing of wood, ended my
domestic duties for the day. Thenceforth my wife laboured single-handed
in the palace, and I lay or wandered on the platform at my own sweet
will. The little corner near the forge, where we found a refuge under
the madronas from the unsparing early sun, is indeed connected in my mind
with some nightmare encounters over Euclid, and the Latin Grammar. These
were known as Sam’s lessons. He was supposed to be the victim and the
sufferer; but here there must have been some misconception, for whereas I
generally retired to bed after one of these engagements, he was no sooner
set free than he dashed up to the Chinaman’s house, where he had
installed a printing press, that great element of civilization, and the
sound of his labours would be faintly audible about the canyon half the
day.
To walk at all was a laborious business; the foot sank and slid, the
boots were cut to pieces, among sharp, uneven, rolling stones. When we
crossed the platform in any direction, it was usual to lay a course,
following as much as possible the line of waggon rails. Thus, if water
were to be drawn, the water-carrier left the house along some tilting
planks that we had laid down, and not laid down very well. These carried
him to that great highroad, the railway; and the railway served him as
far as to the head of the shaft. But from thence to the spring and back
again he made the best of his unaided way, staggering among the stones,
and wading in low growth of the calcanthus, where the rattlesnakes lay
hissing at his passage. Yet I liked to draw water. It was pleasant to
dip the gray metal pail into the clean, colourless, cool water; pleasant
to carry it back, with the water ripping at the edge, and a broken
sunbeam quivering in the midst.
But the extreme roughness of the walking confined us in common practice
to the platform, and indeed to those parts of it that were most easily
accessible along the line of rails. The rails came straight forward from
the shaft, here and there overgrown with little green bushes, but still
entire, and still carrying a truck, which it was Sam’s delight to trundle
to and fro by the hour with various ladings. About midway down the
platform, the railroad trended to the right, leaving our house and
coasting along the far side within a few yards of the madronas and the
forge, and not far of the latter, ended in a sort of platform on the edge
of the dump. There, in old days, the trucks were tipped, and their load
sent thundering down the chute. There, besides, was the only spot where
we could approach the margin of the dump. Anywhere else, you took your
life in your right hand when you came within a yard and a half to peer
over. For at any moment the dump might begin to slide and carry you down
and bury you below its ruins. Indeed, the neighbourhood of an old mine
is a place beset with dangers. For as still as Silverado was, at any
moment the report of rotten wood might tell us that the platform had
fallen into the shaft; the dump might begin to pour into the road below;
or a wedge slip in the great upright seam, and hundreds of tons of
mountain bury the scene of our encampment.
I have already compared the dump to a rampart, built certainly by some
rude people, and for prehistoric wars. It was likewise a frontier. All
below was green and woodland, the tall pines soaring one above another,
each with a firm outline and full spread of bough. All above was arid,
rocky, and bald. The great spout of broken mineral, that had dammed the
canyon up, was a creature of man’s handiwork, its material dug out with a
pick and powder, and spread by the service of the tracks. But nature
herself, in that upper district, seemed to have had an eye to nothing
besides mining; and even the natural hill-side was all sliding gravel and
precarious boulder. Close at the margin of the well leaves would decay
to skeletons and mummies, which at length some stronger gust would carry
clear of the canyon and scatter in the subjacent woods. Even moisture
and decaying vegetable matter could not, with all nature’s alchemy,
concoct enough soil to nourish a few poor grasses. It is the same, they
say, in the neighbourhood of all silver mines; the nature of that
precious rock being stubborn with quartz and poisonous with cinnabar.
Both were plenty in our Silverado. The stones sparkled white in the
sunshine with quartz; they were all stained red with cinnabar. Here,
doubtless, came the Indians of yore to paint their faces for the
war-path; and cinnabar, if I remember rightly, was one of the few
articles of Indian commerce. Now, Sam had it in his undisturbed
possession, to pound down and slake, and paint his rude designs with.
But to me it had always a fine flavour of poetry, compounded out of
Indian story and Hawthornden’s allusion:
“Desire, alas! I desire a Zeuxis new,
From Indies borrowing gold, from Eastern skies
Most bright cinoper . . .”
Yet this is but half the picture; our Silverado platform has another side
to it. Though there was no soil, and scarce a blade of grass, yet out of
these tumbled gravel-heaps and broken boulders, a flower garden bloomed
as at home in a conservatory. Calcanthus crept, like a hardy weed, all
over our rough parlour, choking the railway, and pushing forth its rusty,
aromatic cones from between two blocks of shattered mineral. Azaleas
made a big snow-bed just above the well. The shoulder of the hill waved
white with Mediterranean heath. In the crannies of the ledge and about
the spurs of the tall pine, a red flowering stone-plant hung in clusters.
Even the low, thorny chaparral was thick with pea-like blossom. Close at
the foot of our path nutmegs prospered, delightful to the sight and
smell. At sunrise, and again late at night, the scent of the sweet bay
trees filled the canyon, and the down-blowing night wind must have borne
it hundreds of feet into the outer air.
All this vegetation, to be sure, was stunted. The madrona was here no
bigger than the manzanita; the bay was but a stripling shrub; the very
pines, with four or five exceptions in all our upper canyon, were not so
tall as myself, or but a little taller, and the most of them came lower
than my waist. For a prosperous forest tree, we must look below, where
the glen was crowded with green spires. But for flowers and ravishing
perfume, we had none to envy: our heap of road-metal was thick with
bloom, like a hawthorn in the front of June; our red, baking angle in the
mountain, a laboratory of poignant scents. It was an endless wonder to
my mind, as I dreamed about the platform, following the progress of the
shadows, where the madrona with its leaves, the azalea and calcanthus
with their blossoms, could find moisture to support such thick, wet, waxy
growths, or the bay tree collect the ingredients of its perfume. But
there they all grew together, healthy, happy, and happy-making, as though
rooted in a fathom of black soil.
Nor was it only vegetable life that prospered. We had, indeed, few
birds, and none that had much of a voice or anything worthy to be called
a song. My morning comrade had a thin chirp, unmusical and monotonous,
but friendly and pleasant to hear. He had but one rival: a fellow with
an ostentatious cry of near an octave descending, not one note of which
properly followed another. This is the only bird I ever knew with a
wrong ear; but there was something enthralling about his performance.
You listened and listened, thinking each time he must surely get it
right; but no, it was always wrong, and always wrong the same way. Yet
he seemed proud of his song, delivered it with execution and a manner of
his own, and was charming to his mate. A very incorrect, incessant human
whistler had thus a chance of knowing how his own music pleased the
world. Two great birds—eagles, we thought—dwelt at the top of the
canyon, among the crags that were printed on the sky. Now and again, but
very rarely, they wheeled high over our heads in silence, or with a
distant, dying scream; and then, with a fresh impulse, winged fleetly
forward, dipped over a hilltop, and were gone. They seemed solemn and
ancient things, sailing the blue air: perhaps co-oeval with the mountain
where they haunted, perhaps emigrants from Rome, where the glad legions
may have shouted to behold them on the morn of battle.
But if birds were rare, the place abounded with rattlesnakes—the
rattlesnake’s nest, it might have been named. Wherever we brushed among
the bushes, our passage woke their angry buzz. One dwelt habitually in
the wood-pile, and sometimes, when we came for firewood, thrust up his
small head between two logs, and hissed at the intrusion. The rattle has
a legendary credit; it is said to be awe-inspiring, and, once heard, to
stamp itself for ever in the memory. But the sound is not at all
alarming; the hum of many insects, and the buzz of the wasp convince the
ear of danger quite as readily. As a matter of fact, we lived for weeks
in Silverado, coming and going, with rattles sprung on every side, and it
never occurred to us to be afraid. I used to take sun-baths and do
calisthenics in a certain pleasant nook among azalea and calcanthus, the
rattles whizzing on every side like spinning-wheels, and the combined
hiss or buzz rising louder and angrier at any sudden movement; but I was
never in the least impressed, nor ever attacked. It was only towards the
end of our stay, that a man down at Calistoga, who was expatiating on the
terrifying nature of the sound, gave me at last a very good imitation;
and it burst on me at once that we dwelt in the very metropolis of deadly
snakes, and that the rattle was simply the commonest noise in Silverado.
Immediately on our return, we attacked the Hansons on the subject. They
had formerly assured us that our canyon was favoured, like Ireland, with
an entire immunity from poisonous reptiles; but, with the perfect
inconsequence of the natural man, they were no sooner found out than they
went off at score in the contrary direction, and we were told that in no
part of the world did rattlesnakes attain to such a monstrous bigness as
among the warm, flower-dotted rocks of Silverado. This is a contribution
rather to the natural history of the Hansons, than to that of snakes.
One person, however, better served by his instinct, had known the rattle
from the first; and that was Chuchu, the dog. No rational creature has
ever led an existence more poisoned by terror than that dog’s at
Silverado. Every whiz of the rattle made him bound. His eyes rolled; he
trembled; he would be often wet with sweat. One of our great mysteries
was his terror of the mountain. A little away above our nook, the
azaleas and almost all the vegetation ceased. Dwarf pines not big enough
to be Christmas trees, grew thinly among loose stone and gravel scaurs.
Here and there a big boulder sat quiescent on a knoll, having paused
there till the next rain in his long slide down the mountain. There was
here no ambuscade for the snakes, you could see clearly where you trod;
and yet the higher I went, the more abject and appealing became Chuchu’s
terror. He was an excellent master of that composite language in which
dogs communicate with men, and he would assure me, on his honour, that
there was some peril on the mountain; appeal to me, by all that I held
holy, to turn back; and at length, finding all was in vain, and that I
still persisted, ignorantly foolhardy, he would suddenly whip round and
make a bee-line down the slope for Silverado, the gravel showering after
him. What was he afraid of? There were admittedly brown bears and
California lions on the mountain; and a grizzly visited Rufe’s poultry
yard not long before, to the unspeakable alarm of Caliban, who dashed out
to chastise the intruder, and found himself, by moonlight, face to face
with such a tartar. Something at least there must have been: some hairy,
dangerous brute lodged permanently among the rocks a little to the
north-west of Silverado, spending his summer thereabout, with wife and
family.
And there was, or there had been, another animal. Once, under the broad
daylight, on that open stony hillside, where the baby pines were growing,
scarcely tall enough to be a badge for a MacGregor’s bonnet, I came
suddenly upon his innocent body, lying mummified by the dry air and sun:
a pigmy kangaroo. I am ingloriously ignorant of these subjects; had
never heard of such a beast; thought myself face to face with some
incomparable sport of nature; and began to cherish hopes of immortality
in science. Rarely have I been conscious of a stranger thrill than when
I raised that singular creature from the stones, dry as a board, his
innocent heart long quiet, and all warm with sunshine. His long hind
legs were stiff, his tiny forepaws clutched upon his breast, as if to
leap; his poor life cut short upon that mountain by some unknown
accident. But the kangaroo rat, it proved, was no such unknown animal;
and my discovery was nothing.
Crickets were not wanting. I thought I could make out exactly four of
them, each with a corner of his own, who used to make night musical at
Silverado. In the matter of voice, they far excelled the birds, and
their ringing whistle sounded from rock to rock, calling and replying the
same thing, as in a meaningless opera. Thus, children in full health and
spirits shout together, to the dismay of neighbours; and their idle,
happy, deafening vociferations rise and fall, like the song of the
crickets. I used to sit at night on the platform, and wonder why these
creatures were so happy; and what was wrong with man that he also did not
wind up his days with an hour or two of shouting; but I suspect that all
long-lived animals are solemn. The dogs alone are hardly used by nature;
and it seems a manifest injustice for poor Chuchu to die in his teens,
after a life so shadowed and troubled, continually shaken with alarm, and
the tear of elegant sentiment permanently in his eye.
There was another neighbour of ours at Silverado, small but very active,
a destructive fellow. This was a black, ugly fly—a bore, the Hansons
called him—who lived by hundreds in the boarding of our house. He
entered by a round hole, more neatly pierced than a man could do it with
a gimlet, and he seems to have spent his life in cutting out the interior
of the plank, but whether as a dwelling or a store-house, I could never
find. When I used to lie in bed in the morning for a rest—we had no
easy-chairs in Silverado—I would hear, hour after hour, the sharp cutting
sound of his labours, and from time to time a dainty shower of sawdust
would fall upon the blankets. There lives no more industrious creature
than a bore.
And now that I have named to the reader all our animals and insects
without exception—only I find I have forgotten the flies—he will be able
to appreciate the singular privacy and silence of our days. It was not
only man who was excluded: animals, the song of birds, the lowing of
cattle, the bleating of sheep, clouds even, and the variations of the
weather, were here also wanting; and as, day after day, the sky was one
dome of blue, and the pines below us stood motionless in the still air,
so the hours themselves were marked out from each other only by the
series of our own affairs, and the sun’s great period as he ranged
westward through the heavens. The two birds cackled a while in the early
morning; all day the water tinkled in the shaft, the bores ground sawdust
in the planking of our crazy palace—infinitesimal sounds; and it was only
with the return of night that any change would fall on our surroundings,
or the four crickets begin to flute together in the dark.
Indeed, it would be hard to exaggerate the pleasure that we took in the
approach of evening. Our day was not very long, but it was very tiring.
To trip along unsteady planks or wade among shifting stones, to go to and
fro for water, to clamber down the glen to the Toll House after meat and
letters, to cook, to make fires and beds, were all exhausting to the
body. Life out of doors, besides, under the fierce eye of day, draws
largely on the animal spirits. There are certain hours in the afternoon
when a man, unless he is in strong health or enjoys a vacant mind, would
rather creep into a cool corner of a house and sit upon the chairs of
civilization. About that time, the sharp stones, the planks, the
upturned boxes of Silverado, began to grow irksome to my body; I set out
on that hopeless, never-ending quest for a more comfortable posture; I
would be fevered and weary of the staring sun; and just then he would
begin courteously to withdraw his countenance, the shadows lengthened,
the aromatic airs awoke, and an indescribable but happy change announced
the coming of the night.
The hours of evening, when we were once curtained in the friendly dark,
sped lightly. Even as with the crickets, night brought to us a certain
spirit of rejoicing. It was good to taste the air; good to mark the
dawning of the stars, as they increased their glittering company; good,
too, to gather stones, and send them crashing down the chute, a wave of
light. It seemed, in some way, the reward and the fulfilment of the day.
So it is when men dwell in the open air; it is one of the simple
pleasures that we lose by living cribbed and covered in a house, that,
though the coming of the day is still the most inspiriting, yet day’s
departure, also, and the return of night refresh, renew, and quiet us;
and in the pastures of the dusk we stand, like cattle, exulting in the
absence of the load.
Our nights wore never cold, and they were always still, but for one
remarkable exception. Regularly, about nine o’clock, a warm wind sprang
up, and blew for ten minutes, or maybe a quarter of an hour, right down
the canyon, fanning it well out, airing it as a mother airs the night
nursery before the children sleep. As far as I could judge, in the clear
darkness of the night, this wind was purely local: perhaps dependant on
the configuration of the glen. At least, it was very welcome to the hot
and weary squatters; and if we were not abed already, the springing up of
this lilliputian valley-wind would often be our signal to retire.
I was the last to go to bed, as I was still the first to rise. Many a
night I have strolled about the platform, taking a bath of darkness
before I slept. The rest would be in bed, and even from the forge I
could hear them talking together from bunk to bunk. A single candle in
the neck of a pint bottle was their only illumination; and yet the old
cracked house seemed literally bursting with the light. It shone keen as
a knife through all the vertical chinks; it struck upward through the
broken shingles; and through the eastern door and window, it fell in a
great splash upon the thicket and the overhanging rock. You would have
said a conflagration, or at the least a roaring forge; and behold, it was
but a candle. Or perhaps it was yet more strange to see the procession
moving bedwards round the corner of the house, and up the plank that
brought us to the bedroom door; under the immense spread of the starry
heavens, down in a crevice of the giant mountain these few human shapes,
with their unshielded taper, made so disproportionate a figure in the eye
and mind. But the more he is alone with nature, the greater man and his
doings bulk in the consideration of his fellow-men. Miles and miles away
upon the opposite hill-tops, if there were any hunter belated or any
traveller who had lost his way, he must have stood, and watched and
wondered, from the time the candle issued from the door of the assayer’s
office till it had mounted the plank and disappeared again into the
miners’ dormitory.
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