It was in this Sacramento Valley, just referred to, that a
deal of the most lucrative of the early gold mining was done, and
you may still see, in places, its grassy slopes and levels torn
and guttered and disfigured by the avaricious spoilers of fifteen
and twenty years ago. You may see such disfigurements far and
wide over California—and in some such places, where only meadows
and forests are visible—not a living creature, not a house, no
stick or stone or remnant of a ruin, and not a sound, not even a
whisper to disturb the Sabbath stillness—you will find it hard
to believe that there stood at one time a fiercely-flourishing
little city, of two thousand or three thousand souls, with its
newspaper, fire company, brass band, volunteer militia, bank,
hotels, noisy Fourth of July processions and speeches, gambling
hells crammed with tobacco smoke, profanity, and rough-bearded
men of all nations and colors, with tables heaped with gold dust
sufficient for the revenues of a German principality—streets
crowded and rife with business—town lots worth four hundred
dollars a front foot—labor, laughter, music, dancing, swearing,
fighting, shooting, stabbing—a bloody inquest and a man for
breakfast every morning—everything that delights and adorns
existence—all the appointments and appurtenances of a thriving
and prosperous and promising young city,—and now nothing is left
of it all but a lifeless, homeless solitude. The men are gone,
the houses have vanished, even the name of the place is
forgotten. In no other land, in modern times, have towns so
absolutely died and disappeared, as in the old mining regions of
California.
It was a driving, vigorous, restless population in those days.
It was a curious population. It was the only population of the
kind that the world has ever seen gathered together, and it is
not likely that the world will ever see its like again. For
observe, it was an assemblage of two hundred thousand young
men—not simpering, dainty, kid-gloved weaklings, but stalwart,
muscular, dauntless young braves, brimful of push and energy, and
royally endowed with every attribute that goes to make up a
peerless and magnificent manhood—the very pick and choice of the
world’s glorious ones. No women, no children, no gray and
stooping veterans,—none but erect, bright-eyed, quick-moving,
strong-handed young giants—the strangest population, the finest
population, the most gallant host that ever trooped down the
startled solitudes of an unpeopled land. And where are they now?
Scattered to the ends of the earth—or prematurely aged and
decrepit—or shot or stabbed in street affrays—or dead of
disappointed hopes and broken hearts—all gone, or nearly
all—victims devoted upon the altar of the golden calf—the noblest
holocaust that ever wafted its sacrificial incense heavenward. It
is pitiful to think upon.
It was a splendid population—for all the slow, sleepy,
sluggish-brained sloths staid at home—you never find that sort
of people among pioneers—you cannot build pioneers out of that
sort of material. It was that population that gave to California
a name for getting up astounding enterprises and rushing them
through with a magnificent dash and daring and a recklessness of
cost or consequences, which she bears unto this day—and when she
projects a new surprise, the grave world smiles as usual, and
says “Well, that is California all over.”
But they were rough in those times! They fairly reveled in
gold, whisky, fights, and fandangoes, and were unspeakably happy.
The honest miner raked from a hundred to a thousand dollars out
of his claim a day, and what with the gambling dens and the other
entertainments, he hadn’t a cent the next morning, if he had any
sort of luck. They cooked their own bacon and beans, sewed on
their own buttons, washed their own shirts—blue woollen ones;
and if a man wanted a fight on his hands without any annoying
delay, all he had to do was to appear in public in a white shirt
or a stove-pipe hat, and he would be accommodated. For those
people hated aristocrats. They had a particular and malignant
animosity toward what they called a “biled shirt.”
It was a wild, free, disorderly, grotesque society! Men—only
swarming hosts of stalwart men—nothing juvenile, nothing
feminine, visible anywhere!
In those days miners would flock in crowds to catch a glimpse
of that rare and blessed spectacle, a woman! Old inhabitants tell
how, in a certain camp, the news went abroad early in the morning
that a woman was come! They had seen a calico dress hanging out
of a wagon down at the camping-ground—sign of emigrants from
over the great plains. Everybody went down there, and a shout
went up when an actual, bona fide dress was discovered fluttering
in the wind! The male emigrant was visible. The miners said:
“Fetch her out!”
He said: “It is my wife, gentlemen—she is sick—we have been
robbed of money, provisions, everything, by the Indians—we want
to rest.”
“Fetch her out! We’ve got to see her!”
“But, gentlemen, the poor thing, she—”
“FETCH HER OUT!”
He “fetched her out,” and they swung their hats and sent up
three rousing cheers and a tiger; and they crowded around and
gazed at her, and touched her dress, and listened to her voice
with the look of men who listened to a memory rather than a
present reality—and then they collected twenty-five hundred
dollars in gold and gave it to the man, and swung their hats
again and gave three more cheers, and went home satisfied.
Once I dined in San Francisco with the family of a pioneer,
and talked with his daughter, a young lady whose first experience
in San Francisco was an adventure, though she herself did not
remember it, as she was only two or three years old at the time.
Her father said that, after landing from the ship, they were
walking up the street, a servant leading the party with the
little girl in her arms. And presently a huge miner, bearded,
belted, spurred, and bristling with deadly weapons—just down
from a long campaign in the mountains, evidently-barred the way,
stopped the servant, and stood gazing, with a face all alive with
gratification and astonishment. Then he said, reverently:
“Well, if it ain’t a child!” And then he snatched a little
leather sack out of his pocket and said to the servant:
“There’s a hundred and fifty dollars in dust, there, and I’ll
give it to you to let me kiss the child!”
That anecdote is true.
But see how things change. Sitting at that dinner-table,
listening to that anecdote, if I had offered double the money for
the privilege of kissing the same child, I would have been
refused. Seventeen added years have far more than doubled the
price.
And while upon this subject I will remark that once in Star
City, in the Humboldt Mountains, I took my place in a sort of
long, post-office single file of miners, to patiently await my
chance to peep through a crack in the cabin and get a sight of
the splendid new sensation—a genuine, live Woman! And at the end
of half of an hour my turn came, and I put my eye to the crack,
and there she was, with one arm akimbo, and tossing flap-jacks
in a frying-pan with the other.
And she was one hundred and sixty-five [Being in calmer mood,
now, I voluntarily knock off a hundred from that.—M.T.] years
old, and hadn’t a tooth in her head.
