The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Silverado Squatters, by Robert Louis Stevenson (#23 in our series by Robert Louis Stevenson) Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook. This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project Gutenberg file. Please do not remove it. Do not change or edit the header without written permission. Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file. Included is important information about your specific rights and restrictions in how the file may be used. You can also find out about how to make a donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved. **Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts** **eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971** *****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!***** Title: The Silverado Squatters Author: Robert Louis Stevenson Release Date: May, 1996 [EBook #516] [Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on March 12, 1996] [Most recently updated: August 27, 2002] Edition: 10 Language: English Character set encoding: ASCII
Transcribed from the 1906 Chatto & Windus edition by David Price,
email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
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 rattle-snakes, 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 Caesar.
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 Petraea.
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 spacimen 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 lst, 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 tree-tops, 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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