ON THE PACIFIC SLOPE.
When at last the long voyage up the Western coast came to an end and
the ship sailed into the broad bay of San Francisco, which lay serene
and beautiful under the shadow of its towering guardian, Mount
Tamalpais, Fanny Osbourne hung over the rail and surveyed the scene
with eager interest. Yet it is altogether unlikely that any
realization came to her then that the lively seaport town that lay
before her was to become to her that magic thing we call "home," for
men still regarded California as a place to "make their pile" in and
then shake its dust from their feet. Her stay here was very brief, for
her husband had gone at once to Nevada in the hope of getting a
foothold in the silver-mines, which were then "booming," and she
immediately followed him.
From the level green corn-fields of Indiana, the land of her birth, to
the grey sage-brush of the desert and the naked mountains of Nevada
was a long step, but regrets were lost in the absorbing interest of
the new life.
In a canyon high up in the Toyabee Range, about six miles from Reese
River, lay the new mining camp of Austin, then only about a year old.
Reese River, though in summer it dries up in places so that its bed is
only a series of shallow pools, is nevertheless a most picturesque
stream, and Austin is surrounded by mountain scenery of the
stupendous, awe-inspiring sort.
In a little cabin on a mountainside Fanny Osbourne took up her new
life amidst these strange surroundings, which she found most
interesting and exciting. The men, who were generally away from the
camp during the day, working in the mines, were all adventurers--young,
bold men--and though they wore rough clothes, were nearly all college
bred. In Austin and its vicinity there were but six women, and when it
was decided to give a party at another camp miles away, a thorough
scouring of the whole surrounding country produced just seven of the
fair sex. These ladies came in a sleigh, made of a large packing-box
put on runners, to beg the newcomer, Mrs. Osbourne, to join them in
this festivity. Having some pretty clothes she had brought with her,
she hastily dressed by the aid of a shining tin pan which one of the
women held up for her, there being no such thing as a mirror in the
entire camp. Years afterwards, when Mrs. Osbourne was in Paris, she
read in the papers of this woman as having taken the whole first floor
of the Splendide Hotel, which led her to remark: "I wonder if she
remembers when she held the tin pan for me to do my hair!" At the
party there were fifty men and seven women, and no woman danced twice
with the same man. Among the men was a clergyman, who made himself
very agreeable to Mrs. Osbourne. She asked why she had never heard of
him before, and he replied: "You have heard of me, I am sure, but not
by my real name. They call me 'Squinting Jesus'!"
Her pioneer blood now began to show itself in all kinds of inventions
with which she mitigated the discomforts of the raw mining camp. As
vegetables were exceedingly scarce, the diet of the miners consisted
almost exclusively of meat, and Mrs. Osbourne made a great hit by her
ingenuity in devising variations of this monotonous fare. She learned
how to cook beef in fifteen different ways. Her great achievement,
however, was in making imitation honey, to eat with griddle-cakes, out
of boiled sugar with a lump of alum in it.
All about in the mountains there were Indians, belonging to the Paiute
tribe, and between 1849 and 1882 there was constant trouble with them.
They were a better-looking and more spirited race than the "Diggers"
of California, and consequently more disposed to resent the frequent
outrages put upon them by irresponsible men among the whites. As an
instance, in 1861 some white men stole horses from the Indians, who
then rose up in retaliation, and all the whites, the innocent as well
as the guilty, were compelled to unite for defense, a large number
losing their lives in the subsequent fight.
In the mornings, while Mrs. Osbourne was doing her housework in the
little cabin on the hillside, Indians would gather outside and press
their faces against the window-panes, their eyes following her about
the room. There were blinds, but she was afraid to give offense by
pulling them down. The absence of the Indians was sometimes even more
alarming than their presence, and once when it was noticed that none
of them had been seen about the camp for several days, the residents
knew that trouble threatened. One night signal fires blazed on the
distant mountain tops, and a thrill of fear ran through the little
community. The women and children were gathered in one cabin and made
to lie on the floor and keep quiet. Even the smallest ones must have
felt the danger, for not a whimper escaped them. One of them was a
baby called Aurora. Little Isobel Osbourne thought she was called
"Roarer" because she bawled all the time, but even "Roarer" was quiet
that night.
Among the Austin Indians there was a little boy who named his pony
"Fanny." "Did you name it for me?" my sister asked. He nodded his
head. "Why?" she asked, and he said it was because the pony had such
little feet.
Near the Osbourne cabin lived a miner named Johnny Crakroft. Mrs.
Osbourne never saw him, for he was too shy to speak to a woman, but he
left offerings on her door-step or tied to the knob. Johnny had killed
a man in Virginia City, not an unusual occurrence in those days, but
the circumstances seem to have been such that he did not dare go back
there. Yet, with one of those strange contrasts so common in the life
of the mines, he was a kind-hearted, domestic soul, and on baking days
he made little dogs and cats and elephants out of sweetened dough,
with currants for eyes, for his little pal, Isobel Osbourne. One day
he bestowed upon the child the rather incongruous present of a bottle
of quicksilver and a bowie-knife, which she proudly carried home.
Other neighbours in a cabin on the mountainside were two young
Englishmen, mere boys of twenty or thereabout, named John Lloyd and
Tom Reid. Wishing to celebrate the Queen's birthday in true British
fashion, they went to Mrs. Osbourne to learn how to concoct a plum
pudding. They learned, only the string broke and the pudding had to be
served in soup-plates.
Whatever else the life and the society may have been, they were never
dull or tame. On one occasion, while crossing the desert in a
stage-coach, Mrs. Osbourne met the man said to be the original of Bret
Harte's Colonel Starbottle. When the coach stopped at a little
station, this gentleman politely asked his pretty fellow passenger
what he could bring her. He was so flowery and pompous that as a
little joke she asked for strawberries, thinking them the most
impossible thing to be found at the forlorn little place. To her
amazement he actually brought her the berries.
On another desert trip she was allowed, as a special favour, to sit on
the front seat, between the driver and the express messenger. There
had been, not long before, a number of hold-ups by "road agents," and
when the stage came to suspicious-looking turns in the road the
messenger made her put her head down on her knees while he laid his
gun across her back. She could have gone inside with the other women,
of course, but it was like her to prefer the seat with the driver,
with its risk and its adventure.
Later the Osbournes moved to Virginia City, where the life, while not
quite so primitive as at Austin, was still highly flavoured with all
the spice of a wild mining town. Gambling went on night and day, and
the killing of men over the games still happened often enough. In the
diary of a pioneer of that time, Samuel Orr, of Alameda, who later
married one of Mrs. Osbourne's sisters, Cora Van de Grift, I find this
entry: "This is the hardest place I ever struck. I saw two men killed
to-day in a gambling fight." Men engaged at their work or passing
along the streets were quite often compelled to duck and dodge to
escape sudden fusillades of bullets. There was little regard for the
law, and "killings" seldom received legal punishment.
Virginia City, despite its desolate environment of grey, naked
mountains and deep, narrow ravines, had its own rugged charm. The air
was so crystal-pure that at times one could see as far as one hundred
and eighty miles from its lofty seat on the skirts of Mount Davidson.
Far to the west and south stretched a wonderful panorama of
multicoloured and snow-capped mountains, and in the gap between lay
the desert and a fringe of green to mark the course of the Carson
River. The town, which lay immediately over the famous Comstock Lode,
was built on ground with such a pitch that what was the second story
of a house in front became the first in the back. Every winter snow
falls to a depth of several feet in the town, and on the summit of
Mount Davidson it never melts. At that time Virginia City was
described as "a lively place, wherein all kinds of industry as well as
vice flourished."
After their arrival here Samuel Osbourne bought the Mills, Post, and
White mine, and in the interval of waiting for results worked, like
the resourceful American that he was, at various employments to earn
a living for himself and his family. For a time he was clerk of the
Justice's Court in Virginia City.
It was even so early as in these Nevada mining days that the grey
cloud which was to darken some of the best years of her life first
appeared above the young wife's horizon, for it was there that the
first foreboding came to her that her marriage was to be a failure.
The wild, free life of the West had carried her young and
impressionable husband off his feet, and the painful suspicion now
came to her that she did not reign alone in his heart. As time passed
this trouble went from bad to worse, but no more need be said of it at
this point except to make it clear that years before her meeting with
the true love of her heart, Robert Louis Stevenson, the disagreements
which finally resulted in the shattering of her first romance had
already begun.
In 1866, lured by reports of rich strikes in Montana, Osbourne set off
on a prospecting tour to the Coeur d'Alene Mountains, leaving his wife
and child in Virginia City. While in Montana he met another
prospector, Samuel Orr (who afterwards became his brother-in-law), and
the two joined forces, becoming, in miners' phrase, "pardners."
Led on by the ever-fleeing hope of the great "strike" that might lie
just ahead, the two men penetrated so far into the depths of this
rugged mountain country that they were for some time out of the reach
of mails, causing their friends to finally give them up as dead.
Running out of funds, they were obliged to take work at what they
could get, and Osbourne sold tickets in a theatre at Helena, Montana,
and later took a job in a sawmill at Bear Gulch. At one place he and
another man bought up all the coffee to be had, and, after grinding it
up, sold it in small lots at an advanced price.
Failing in their quest for the elusive treasure, Osbourne and Orr, not
being able to cash the cheques with which they were paid for their
work, were at last compelled to borrow the money with which to make
their way back to civilization and their families.
About this time the silver-mining boom in Nevada began to ebb, and
there was an exodus of men and women, mostly discouraged and "broke,"
to San Francisco. As Mrs. Osbourne had arranged to meet her husband in
that city, she decided to join some of her friends in their removal to
the coast, and began to make preparations for the long, hard journey.
In those days little girls wore very short dresses, with several white
petticoats, like ballet dancers, and long white stockings. This dress
seemed peculiarly unsuitable for the dusty stage trip across the
desert, and Mrs. Osbourne, meeting the situation with her usual common
sense, bought a boy's suit and dressed her little girl in it. The
passengers called her "Billy," and a sensation was created among them
when, after arrival at the Occidental Hotel in the bustling city of
San Francisco, the child appeared in her own little ballet costume.
At this date, 1866, San Francisco was no longer a mere resting-place
for the birds of passage on their way to the mines, but had become a
settled town, with an air of permanency and solidity. It was then
compactly built, for it was only the advent years later of the
cable-cars that enabled it to spread out over its many hills. The
glamour of the days of the first mad rush for gold, with their
feverish alternations of mounting hope and black despair, was gone,
but in its stead had come safety and comfort, and there were few
places in the world where one could live more agreeably, or even more
luxuriously, than in San Francisco in the '60's.
Here word was brought that Osbourne had been killed by the Indians,
and life began to bear heavily upon the young wife and mother,
stranded without means in a strange city. She put on widow's weeds and
looked about for employment with which to eke out her fast diminishing
store. When she was a little girl she had learned to do fine sewing on
the ruffles for her father's shirts, and had always made her own and
her child's dresses. This talent, which proved exceedingly useful at
various times in her life, now served her in good stead. She secured a
situation as fitter in a dressmaking establishment, where, on account
of her foreign looks, she was thought to be French.
Friends were not lacking, for many looked with pity upon the supposed
widow struggling to keep her head above water in a land so far from
her own home and family. During her absence at work she left the child
in the care of the kind-hearted landlady of the boarding-house and her
young son, Michael, still gratefully remembered as "Mackerel" by
Isobel. In the same boarding-house John Lloyd, the young Englishman of
the Reese River days, had also established himself. On Sundays, no
doubt to give the tired mother a long rest, he would take little Bel
to the beach out by old Fort Point, where he made swords for her out
of driftwood, played at Jack the Giant-Killer, and told stories about
Mr. and Mrs. Sea-Gull and what they said to each other. He even
borrowed fairy-tale books from the public library in order to learn
stories to tell his little friend on these Sunday outings. There came
a birthday, with very little to make it gay, but the kind-hearted
young man bought a small jointed doll with his meagre earnings, and
the mother made a set of beautiful clothes for it out of bits of
bright-coloured silks she had saved from her sewing. This, with a
little table whittled out of a cigar-box and a ten-cent set of dishes,
made a glorious day for the happy child. This friendship was
maintained in later years, and when the once poor clerk became a bank
president, Fanny Stevenson put her money in his bank.
So life went on for the mother and child until one eventful day, when
a tall, handsome man in high boots and a wide hat suddenly appeared at
the door, and crying out, "Is this my little girl?" caught her up in
his arms. As one risen from the dead, the husband and father had
returned, and, to the child's amazement, they immediately moved into
what seemed to her a very fine house, and she had a wax doll for
Christmas.
For a few succeeding years happiness seemed to have returned to dwell
with the little family. Osbourne soon made his way in the busy city
and all went well. They lived in San Francisco for several years.
There a son was born to them, and they named him Lloyd, after their
good friend, John Lloyd, now a successful lawyer.
Those peaceful days were brought to an end when Mrs. Osbourne
discovered that her husband had again betrayed her, and she returned
to her father's house in Indiana. After nearly a year she yielded to
entreaties and promises of reform, and again journeyed to California,
taking Cora Van de Grift, one of her younger sisters, with her.
A little while after their return to San Francisco, in 1869, Osbourne
bought a house and lot for his family in East Oakland, then known as
Brooklyn, at the corner of Eleventh Avenue and East 18th Street.
Settled under their own rooftree in the golden land of California, the
family for a time were measurably happy. Mrs. Osbourne, who is
described as being then "a young and slender woman, wearing her hair
in two long braids down her back," was evidently making a strong
effort to forget past differences and to make home a pleasant place
for her children. Though she cared little for society in the general
sense of the word, yet she contrived to gather about her in East
Oakland a little intimate circle of clever, talented, and agreeable
people. Among them were Judge Timothy Rearden, a well-known attorney
and _littérateur_ of San Francisco; Virgil Williams, director of the
San Francisco School of Design, and his wife; Yelland, Bush, and other
distinguished artists; the musician Oscar Weil, and many more whose
names do not now come to mind.
She built a studio where she painted, had a dark room where she took
photographs--and photography in those days of "wet plates" was a
mysterious and unheard-of accomplishment for an amateur; then there
was a rifle-range where she set up a target, and, occasionally, when
it was the cook's day out, she would make wonderful dishes, while odd
moments were filled in at a sewing-machine making pretty clothes. By
this time she had become a famous cook, and often prepared dinners fit
to set before a king. She little thought then that some day she would
break bread with real kings, even though they were but Polynesian
monarchs.
Of all her activities that from which she drew the purest joy was her
gardening, for in this fortunate place, where sun and soil and balmy
air all conspire to produce a paradise for flowers, "her Dutch blood
began to come out," as she said, and she threw herself with ardour
into the business of digging and pruning and planting. The little
cottage was soon curtained with vines, and the whole place glowed with
the many-coloured hues of gorgeous roses. There, too, the tawny golden
bells of the tiger lily, her own particular flower, hung from their
tall stalks. This was the first of the many wonderful gardens that
were made to bloom under her skilful tending in various parts of the
world.
The charming domestic picture of her life in this period can be given
in no better way than by quoting the words of her daughter:
"At that time our fashionable neighbors gave 'parties' for their
children. One night a fire broke out in a house where I had gone to a
party. My mother was at home, sitting at her work, when she suddenly
cried 'Something is the matter with Bel!' and rushing out, ran across
ploughed fields, her slippers falling off, leaving her to run in
stockings all the way. It was not until she was half-way there that
she saw the smoke and realized the meaning of her intuition. When she
found that I was all right and had been sent home she fainted and had
to be carried home herself. She made my clothes herself, and I can
remember to this day how pretty they were. I was very dark and of
course ashamed of it, but she told me it was very nice to be different
from other people, and dressed me in crisp yellow linen or pale blue,
which made me look still darker, on the principle that Sarah Bernhardt
followed in exaggerating her thinness when it was the fashion to have
a rounded form. My mother told me to consider my dark skin a beauty,
for she believed that if children had a good opinion of themselves
they would never be self-conscious.
"All the other girls in my school had given parties and I begged to be
allowed to give one too. Our little house was not very suitable for
the purpose, but my mother put her wits to work. She fitted up the
stable with a stage and seats, and persuaded a neighbor who played the
cornet to act as 'band.' Then she taught a small group of us to act
'Villikens and his Dinah,' which she read aloud behind the scenes, and
'Bluebeard,' made into a little play. My paternal grandmother, a
straight-backed, severe looking old lady, was then visiting us. How my
mother managed it I don't know, but Grandma, who abhorred
theatricals, was soon reading 'Villikens' for us to practice, and she
even consented to appear as one of Bluebeard's departed wives. A sheet
was hung up to represent a wall; the wives stood behind it and put
their heads through holes that had been cut for the purpose; their
hair was pulled up and tacked to imaginary nails, and very realistic
pieces of red flannel arranged to represent gore. My grandmother was a
truly awful sight when my mother had painted her face and made her up
for the show. The party was a great success, and only the other day I
met a woman who had been one of the guests and she still remembered it
as one of the striking events of her childhood.
"My mother influenced me in those days in many ways that I shall never
forget, especially in her hatred of anything that savored of snobbery.
When I gave the party I placed the invitations in little pink
envelopes and put them on the desks of my schoolmates. A neighbor's
son who was poor and had to carry newspapers and peddle milk, sat next
to me in school. Children are snobs by nature, and this boy was never
asked to any of our parties. I consulted my mother as to what I should
do about Danny, for he had been nice to me and I hated to leave him
out. 'Of course you must invite him,' she said. 'But none of the other
girls invited him to their parties,' said I. 'There is nothing against
him, is there, except being poor?' 'Nothing at all,' I replied, and so
I was directed to include him in the invitations. I shall never forget
poor slighted Danny's radiant face when he saw there was a note for
him. He came to the party dressed in new clothes from head to foot,
and made such a success that after that he was always asked in 'our
set.'
"My mother also taught me to be considerate of other people's
feelings. My teacher once kept me in for slamming a door; I told my
mother about it and admitted that I had slammed it purposely because
my teacher was so cross. In the guise of an entertaining story, she
told me how the teacher, a pretty young woman named Miss Miller, had
come to teach a big class, a stranger, alone, and that perhaps she had
a headache from having cried the night before from homesickness. In
this way she harrowed my feelings to such an extent that I went to
Miss Miller of my own accord and begged her pardon, and the poor girl
wept and loved me, and thenceforth made life miserable for me among my
schoolmates by acts of 'favoritism.'"
In the little rose-covered cottage in Oakland a second son, Hervey,
was born to the Osbournes. He was an extraordinarily beautiful child,
with the rare combination of large dark eyes and yellow curls, but
there was an ethereal look about him that boded no long stay on this
earthly sphere.
It was perhaps partly to fill a great void that she began to feel in
her life that Mrs. Osbourne took up the study of art in the School of
Design conducted by Virgil Williams in San Francisco. Mother and
daughter studied there side by side. While there Mrs. Osbourne won the
prize, a silver medal, for the best drawing. She seemed not to value
it at the time, but after her death her daughter found it in a little
box laid away in her jewel-case.
When the little yellow-haired boy was about four years old, the cloud
which had menaced the happiness of the family for so long again
descended upon them. For years Mrs. Osbourne had made earnest and
conscientious efforts to avoid the disruption of her marital ties,
plighted with such high hopes in the springtime of her girlhood, but
her husband's infidelities had now become so open and flagrant that
the situation was no longer bearable. Divorce was at that time a far
more serious step than it is now, and, for the sake of her family, she
hesitated long before taking it, but there is no doubt that she was
deeply wounded and humiliated by this painful episode in her life,
and, in 1875, partly to remove herself as far as possible from
distressing associations, partly to give her daughter the advantage of
instruction in foreign schools of art, she took her three children and
set out for Europe. When she left California for this journey it is no
exaggeration to say that every bond of affection that held her to
Samuel Osbourne had been broken.