began to flourish; but it was long before the monotony of bacon, bread,
and dried apples was varied by a potato. And for sleeping
accommodations, a limited space was allotted upon the floor, the guest
furnishing his own blankets. A theatre soon sprang up. And either
because of the refined taste of some of the auditors, or the advanced
talent of the performers, the playing was not the broad farce which
might have been entertaining, but was confined to Shakespeare and heavy
tragedy, which was simply disgusting. This style of acting culminated in
the _debut_ of a local celebrity, possessed of a sonorous voice and
seized with a sudden longing for Thespian laurels. He chose the part of
Othello, and all Virginia assembled to applaud. The part was not well
committed, and sentences were commenced with Shakespearian loftiness and
ended with the actor's own emendations, which were certainly
questionable improvements. Anything but a tragic effect was produced by
seeing the swarthy Moor turn to the prompter at frequent intervals, and
inquire, "What?" in a hoarse whisper. A running colloquy took place
between Othello and his audience, in which he made good his assertion
that he was rude in speech. Since then, Shakespeare has not been
attempted on the Virginia boards. "Othello's occupation's gone"; and all
tragic efforts are confined to the legitimate Rocky Mountain drama.
"Nick of the Woods" has frequently been produced with great applause,
though the illusion is somewhat marred by the audible creaking of the
wheels of the boat in which the Jibbenainosay sails triumphantly over
the cataract.
Sunday is distinguished from other days in being the great day of
business. The mines are not worked and it is the miners' holiday. All is
bustle and confusion. A dozen rival auctioneers vend their wares, and
gallop fast horses up and down the street. The drinking and gambling
saloons and dance-houses are in full blast, all with bands of music to
allure the passing miner, who comes into town on Sunday to spend his
earnings. The discoverer of Virginia is the miner _par excellence_,--a
good-natured Hercules clad in buckskin, or a lion in repose. All the
week he toils hard in some hole in the earth for this Sunday folly. The
programme for the day is prepared on a scale of grandeur in direct ratio
to the length of his purse. The necessity of spending the entire week's
earnings is obvious, and to assist him in doing so seems to be the only
visible means of support of half the people of the town. The dance-house
and the gambling-saloon, flaunting their gaudy attractions, own him for
the hour their king. His Midas touch is all-powerful. I must confess,
with all my admiration for his character, that his tastes are low. I
know that the civilization of the East would bore him immeasurably, and
that he considers Colt, with his revolvers, a broader philanthropist
than Raikes with his Sunday schools. But he is frank and open, generous
and confiding, honorable and honest, scorning anything mean and
cowardly. Mention to him, in his prodigal waste of money, that a poor
woman or child is in want of the necessaries of life, and the
purse-strings open with a tear. Tell him that corruption and wrong have
worked an injury to a comrade or a stranger, and his pistol flashes only
too quickly, to right it. Circumstances have made him coarse and brutal,
but below all this surface beats a heart full of true instincts and
honest impulses. I am certain the recording angel will blot out many of
his sins, as he did those of Uncle Toby. His means exhausted, he
abdicates his ephemeral kingdom, and, uncomplaining, takes his pick and
shovel, his frying-pan, bacon, and flour, and starts over the mountains
for new diggings. Yet he gains no wisdom by experience. The same
bacchanalian orgies follow the next full purse.
The Road Agents came to the new city from Bannack increased in strength
and boldness. Long impunity had made them scarcely anxious to conceal
their connection with the band. Life and property were nowhere secure.
Spies in Virginia announced to confederates on the road every ounce of
treasure that left the city, and sometimes reports came back of
robberies of the coaches, sometimes of murder of the travellers, and
still more frequently the poor victim was never heard of after his
departure. There were no laws or courts, except the miners' courts, and
these were powerless. Self-protection demanded vigorous measures, and a
few good men of Bannack and Virginia met together and formed a Vigilance
Committee, similar in all respects to that which has had such a
beneficent influence in the growth of California. It was, of course,
secret, and composed of a mere handful. It must be secret, for the Road
Agents had so overawed the people that few dared acknowledge themselves
as champions of law and order. They had threatened, and they had the
power to crush such an organization at its inception, by taking the
lives of its members. But moving stealthily and unknown, the little
organization grew. Whenever a good man and true was found, he became a
link of the chain. At last it tried its power over a notorious desperado
named Ives, by calling a public trial of the miners. It was a citizens'
trial, but the Vigilantes were the leading spirits. Ives confronted his
accusers boldly, relying on the promised aid of his confederates. They
lay in wait to offer it, but the criminal was too infamous for just men
to hesitate which side to take, and the cowards, as always in such
cases, though probably a numerical majority, dared not meet the issue.
Ives was hanged without any attempt at rescue.
The proceedings thus vigorously commenced were as vigorously continued.
The Road Agents still trusted their power, and the contest was not
settled. The Vigilantes settled it soon and forever. One morning their
pickets barred every point of egress from Virginia. A secret trial had
been held and six well-known robbers sentenced to death. Five of them
were one by one found in the city. The quickness of their captors had
foiled their attempts at escape or resistance, and their impotent rage
at seeing every point guarded sternly by armed Vigilantes knew no
bounds. They were all executed together at noon. It was a sickening
scene,--five men, with the most revolting crimes to answer for, summoned
with hardly an hour's preparation into eternity. Yet they are frequently
spoken of with respect because they "died game." All of them, drinking
heavily to keep up their courage, died with the most impious gibes and
curses on their lips. Boone Helm, a hoary reprobate, actually said, as
the block was being removed from him, "Good by, boys! I will meet you in
hell in five minutes." Harsh measures were these, but their effect was
magical. One of the leaders had been hanged at Bannack, and the others
as fast as found were promptly executed,--perhaps thirty in all. A few
fled, and are heard of now and then among the robbers of Portneuf Canon;
but under the sway of the Vigilantes life and property in Virginia
became safer than to-day in Boston. For minor offences they banished the
guilty, and for grave offences they took life. As their history is now
recounted by the people, there is no man who does not praise their work
and agree that their acts were just and for the public good. The first
courts were held in December, 1864, and the Vigilantes were the earliest
to support their authority. They are still in existence, but as a
support and ally of the courts, and only appearing when the public
safety demands the most rigorous dealing.
Virginia can never be a pretty city, but in many respects it is a model
one. The earlier log-houses are now giving way to substantial stores of
granite; and the number of gambling and tippling shops is steadily
decreasing, the buildings being taken up by the wholesale traders. An
organized city government preserves strict police regulations. Two
thriving churches have grown up, and very recently the principal
merchants have agreed to close their houses on the Sabbath. The old
residents are bringing in their wives and children, and society
constantly gains in tone. Erelong, it will compare favorably with the
steadiest town in the land of steady habits.
Eight miles above Virginia is Summit. Its name sufficiently designates
its location, which is at the head of the gulch and among the highest
mountains. The sun is not seen there till a late hour in the winter, and
the few who make it their home burrow closely as rabbits from the bitter
cold and deep snows. The placer diggings are at their greatest depth
here, but exceedingly rich. Here also are the richest gold lodes of the
Territory. All the quartz seems impregnated with gold, sometimes in
little pockets of nuggets, sometimes spattered by the intense heat of
old into all forms of wires and spangles.
Quartz mining is yet in its rudest form. The gold is buried in solid
rock, and requires heavy crushing-mills and cumbrous machinery, which
must be built and transported at immense expense by capitalists. It is a
question with such capitalists how certain is the promise of returns.
The uncertainty of mining, as shown by the results of ventures in
Colorado, has naturally deterred them. Under the old process of crushing
the quartz to powder by stamps, and then separating the gold by
amalgamation with quicksilver, but twenty-five per cent of the gold is
saved. After the amalgamation a practical chemist could take the
"tailings" of the Dacotah ore, and produce almost the full assay of the
original rock. Very much depends in the mountain territories upon the
success of experiments, now in operation, with the various new
desulphurizing processes. This success established, the wealth of the
territories is incalculable.
All the mining of Montana is now confined to the placer or gulch
diggings. There are many of these, but probably none to compare in all
respects with those at Virginia. At Bannack is found purer gold, at
Biven's are larger nuggets, and many diggings at McClellan's yield
larger amounts per day. But these are lotteries,--some claims paying
largely to-day and nothing to-morrow, or one yielding enormously, while
the next, after all the labor and expense of opening, gives nothing.
They are called "spotted," while nearly every claim at Virginia has
yielded with great regularity. How the gold came into these gulches is
of little consequence to the miner. It suffices him to know that it is
there, and his practical experience enables him to point out its
location with great accuracy, though without any scientific knowledge of
its origin. Most probably, far away in the Preadamite periods, when
these mountains were much loftier than to-day, they were cloven and
pierced by volcanic fires, and then into their innumerable vents and
fissures infiltrated the molten quartz and the base and precious metals.
Afterwards followed the period of the glaciers, and all the working of
the seasons and chemical decompositions. Traces of the glaciers and the
rotten burnt quartz of the volcanic periods exist everywhere. Thus
washing and crumbling away in the waters and suns of untold springs and
summers, the gold has come down the mountain gorges into the valleys
below. The manner of gathering it is rude and incomplete enough. In all
the gulches, at depths varying from six to fifty feet, is a _bed-rock_
of the same general conformation as the surface. Usually this is
granite; but sometimes before reaching the primitive rock two or three
strata of pipe-clay--the later beds of the stream, upon which frequently
lies a deposit of gold--are passed. Upon the bed-rock is a deposit, from
three to four feet in depth, of gravel and boulders, in which the gold
is hidden. This is called by the miners "pay-dirt," and to remove it to
the surface and wash it is the end of mining. It is an expensive and
laborious process indeed. The water has first to be controlled; and in
mines of not too great depth this is done by a drain ditch along the
bed-rock, commenced many claims below. In this all the claim-holders are
interested, and all contribute their quota of the labor and expense of
digging it. The district laws permit every person to run such a drain
through all the claims below his own, and force every man to contribute
alike towards its construction, on pain of not being allowed to use the
water, even though it flows through his own land. The water controlled,
the rest is mere physical labor, which only bones and sinews of iron can
endure. In the shallow diggings the superincumbent earth above the
pay-dirt is removed, and the process is called "stripping." In deep
diggings a shaft is sunk to the bed-rock, and tunnels are run in every
direction,--and this is called "drifting." The roof is supported by
strong piles, but these supports too frequently give way, and hurry the
poor miners to untimely deaths. The pay-dirt, in whichever way obtained,
is then shovelled into the sluice-boxes,--a series of long troughs, set
at the proper angle to prevent the gold from washing past, or the dirt
from settling to the bottom. Managed with the skill which experience has
taught, the constant stream of water carries over the sand, while the
gold, being seven times heavier, sinks to the bottom, and is caught by
cross-bars called "_riffles_," placed there for the purpose. In the
lower boxes is frequently placed quicksilver, with which the lighter
particles amalgamate. During the washings the larger stones and boulders
are removed by a fork. These boxes, after a successful day's work, are a
pleasant sight to see, all brilliant with gold and black sand and
magnetic iron. All is gold that glitters. The heavy sand and iron are
separated by a more careful washing by hand and by the magnet. Of
course, all this system is very rude and imperfect,--so much so, that it
has been found profitable in California to wash over the same earth nine
times.
The gold-dust thus obtained is the only circulating medium in the
Territory, and is the standard of trade. Treasury notes and coin are
articles of merchandise. Everybody who has gold has also his little
buckskin pouch to hold it. Every store has its scales, and in these is
weighed out the fixed amount for all purchases according to Troy weight.
An ounce is valued at eighteen dollars, a pennyweight at ninety cents,
and so on. It is amusing to notice how the friction of the scales is
made by some men--particularly the Jews, whose name is legion--to work
them no loss. In _weighing in_, the scale-beam bows most deferentially
to the gold side; but in _weighing out_, it makes profound obeisance to
the weights. The same cupidity has given rise to two new terms in the
miners' glossary,--_trade dust_ and _bankable dust_. Bankable dust means
simply gold, pure and undefiled. Trade dust is gold with a plentiful
sprinkling of black sand, and is of three grades, described very clearly
by the terms _good_, _fair_, and _dirty_. The trader, in receiving our
money, complains if it does not approximate what is bankable, but in
paying us his money pours out a combination in which black sand is a
predominating ingredient. Many merchants even keep a saucer of black
sand in readiness to dilute their bankable gold to the utmost thinness
it will bear.
As might be expected, the courts were hardly opened before grave
questions arose as to the construction of contracts based on this
anomalous currency. Notes were usually made to pay a given number of
"dollars, in good, bankable dust." But the laws recognized no such
commodity as a dollar in dust. The decision of the court protecting a
trickster in paying treasury-notes worth but fifty cents for the gold
loaned by a friend, savored to the plain miner of rank injustice. To
avoid even this opportunity for a legal tender, sometimes notes promised
to pay a certain number of ounces and pennyweights, with interest at a
fixed rate. The question was immediately sprung as to whether such an
agreement was to be construed as a promissory note, or was to be sued
for as a contract to do a specified act, by setting out a breach and
claiming damages for the non-performance. The miners listened to the
long discussions on these points impatiently, and compared the courts
unfavorably with the miners' courts, which unloosed all such Gordian
knots with Alexander's directness.
In the month of September, 1864, reports came to Virginia of mines on
the Yellowstone. The reports were founded on some strange tales of old
trappers, and were clothed with a vagueness and mystery as uncertain as
dreams. Yet on such unsubstantial bases every miner built a pet theory,
and a large "stampede" took place in consequence. I started with a party
for the new mines, early in October. A day's ride brought us to the
Madison Fork, a broad, shallow stream, difficult of fording on account
of its large boulders, and flowing through a narrow strip of arable
land. Very different is the Gallatin, beyond. It is cut up into narrow
streams of a very rapid current, and waters a valley of surprising
fertility. The Snakes called it Swift River. This valley is forty miles
long and from ten to fifteen wide, and rising at its sides into low
plateaus plenteously covered with rich bunch-grass. It is already
pre-empted by farmers, and by easy irrigation are produced all the
hardier vegetables and cereals, in quantity, size, and closeness of
fibre not equalled on the Iowa prairies. The valley gradually widens as
you descend the stream, until, at the junction of the Three Forks, it
stretches into a broad prairie, sufficient alone to supply all the mines
with grain and vegetables. A few enterprising speculators once laid out
a town here, with all the pomp and circumstance of Martin Chuzzlewit's
Eden. Pictures of it were made, with steamers lying at the wharves and a
university in the suburbs. Liberal donations of lots were made to the
first woman married, to the first newspaper, to the first church, to the
first child born. But there were no mines near, and the city never had
an inhabitant. The half-dozen buildings put up by the proprietors are
left for the nightly carnivals of bats and owls.
On our road we passed a half-dozen huts, dignified with the name of
Bozeman City. Here lives a Cincinnatus in retirement, one of the great
pioneers of mountain civilization, named Bozeman. To him belongs the
credit of having laid out the Bozeman Cut-off, on the road from Fort
Laramie to Virginia, and he is looked up to among emigrants much as
Chief-Justice Marshall is among lawyers. I saw the great man, with one
foot moccasoned and the other as Nature made it, giving Bunsby opinions
to a crowd of miners as to the location of the mythical mines.
Parting from him, we crossed a high range of mountains, and from their
tops looked down upon the spiral line of the Yellowstone, marked by the
rich tints of its willows and cottonwoods, red, yellow, and green, in
the crisp frosts of October. The air on these mountain-tops is much
rarefied, and so very clear and pure that objects at a great distance
seem within the reach of an easy walk. The Yellowstone flows in the
eastern portion of Montana through an uninhabitable desert called the
Mauvaises Terres, or Bad Lands, which, mingling their soil with its
waters, give it the yellow color from which it is named. These lands are
vast wastes, covered with what appears to be pine ashes. No signs of
vegetation are found, but they are abundant in strange petrifactions. I
have seen from them petrified reptiles and portions of the human body,
having a pearly lustre and inlaid with veins, and looking like the
finest work in _papier-mache_.
The valley of the Upper Yellowstone has a thin, rocky soil, almost
worthless for farming land. But what a paradise it would be for Izaak
Walton and Daniel Boone! Quaint old Izaak would have realized a dream of
Utopia in watching in the crystal stream its millions of speckled trout.
It almost seems as if the New England trout had learned their proverbial
wariness from long experience. There is none of it in these Yellowstone
fish. They leap at the bare hook with the most guileless innocence.
Trout are rarely found in the waters of the Missouri, but they fill all
the brooks west of the mountains. They bite ravenously; one veracious
traveller going so far as to assert that they followed him from the
water far into the woods, and bit at the spurs on his boots. But
mountaineers, even of the most scrupulous veracity, are occasionally
given to hyperbole. Daniel Boone, too, would have found his paradise of
a solitude undisturbed by white men, and full of wild game. Every night
our camp was entertained with the hungry cry of wolves, the melancholy
hooting of owls, and the growls of bears crackling the underbrush. The
grizzly bear is not found in Montana; only the small black and cinnamon
bears are seen. When wounded, these exhibit the most extreme ferocity;
but persons who choose to avoid them will find them always willing to
preserve the most distant relations. The most interesting of all the
wild animals is the antelope. Every hour we passed flocks of these
little fellows. They are timid as school-girls, but as inquisitive as
village gossips; and while frightened and trembling at our presence,
they could not resist keeping long in our view, and stopping every few
moments to watch us, with most childish curiosity. Though fleet as the
wind, I have seen many of the meek-eyed little fellows watch too long,
and pay for their curiosity with their lives.
The most eastern settlement of Montana is at the mouth of a canon near
the Yellowstone, one hundred and thirty miles from Virginia. A party of
Iowa emigrants found fair prospects here, and made it their home,
calling their mines Emigrant Gulch, and their half-dozen log-huts
Yellowstone City. Their gulch is rich in gold, but the huge boulders,
many tons in weight, make it impossible to obtain the treasure by the
present rude methods. The few profitable claims are high up in the
mountains, and are free from ice only in the hottest days of summer.
Even the donkeys, so much in use in transporting supplies to the
mountain miners, cannot travel here, and every pound of flour is carried
on men's backs over giddy paths almost impassable for the chamois. Still
the emigrants went to work with a will, and full of confidence. They
built themselves log-cabins, not so convenient as those at
Virginia,--for they had not the miner's knack of reaping large results
from such limited resources,--but still substantial and comfortable.
They enacted written laws, as ample as the Code Napoleon. Almost every
day during our visit they met to revise this code and enact new
provisions. Its most prominent feature was the ample protection it
afforded to women in the distribution of lots in their prospective city,
and the terrible punishment with which it visited any man who dared
offer one of them an insult. They certainly founded their republic on
principles of adamant, but in spite of high hopes and wise laws the
boulders refused to move. Even Iowa enterprise at last gave way under
constant disaster, and the people of the little city are one by one
forsaking it for the older mines.
The swift Yellowstone and the Colorado rise in lakes in the enchanted
Wind River Mountains. Mr. Stuart mentions the weird tales, told by
trappers and hunters, of places--avoided, if possible, by man and
beast--in these mountains where trees and game and even Indians are
petrified, and yet look natural as in life. These trappers are
accustomed to exaggerate. I remember hearing a very serious account from
one of them of a vast mountain of quartz so transparent that he could
see mules feeding on the other side. There is also a story of a trapper
who was lost in the fastnesses of the mountains years ago, and wandered
for many days among streams whose bottoms were pebbled with gold. It is
the miner's romance to repeat these fables of the Wind River Mountains,
and to look forward to the day when the Indians shall be forced to yield
them to his enterprise.
We arrived at Virginia at the end of October, and the commencement of
the long mountain winter. The snows were soon blown in deep drifts over
the hills, and the roads became almost impassable. A few hardy
prospecters braved them in the search for quartz lodes, but many
perished, and others were brought back to the city with frozen limbs.
The mines lay idle, and the business of the city, dependent upon them
for support, was completely stagnant. It was humanity living a squirrel
life among its little garners of roots and nuts. But as usual, the
reason of humanity fell far behind the instinct of the squirrel. Before
spring came, the supply of flour at Virginia failed, and the most
hideous of all calamities was threatened,--a famine. The range on the
Salt Lake road lay utterly impassable under more than fifteen feet of
snow. No mails had arrived for three months. The fear of famine soon
became a panic, and flour speedily rose from twenty dollars per sack of
one hundred pounds to one hundred and ten dollars in gold. A mob was
organized by the drones, who would rather steal than work; and the
miners were wrought upon by statements that a few speculators held an
abundance of flour, and were extorting money from the necessities of the
people. The Robespierres of the new reform drew the miners into passing
a resolution to place all the flour in Virginia in the hands of a
committee, with authority to distribute it among the most needy, at a
fair and reasonable compensation, payable to the owner. A riot followed,
and the flour-merchants quietly awaited the mob behind barricades of
their own flour. The County Sheriff stood at the front of these with
cocked revolver, and threatened to kill the first who advanced. The
thieves knew that he did not threaten idly, and, though a hundred were
ready to follow, not one was bold enough to lead. The riot failed for
want of a courageous leader, and towards night slowly dwindled away.
Another mob followed in a few days; but the merchants had sold their
flour at sacrifices, and the booty was only a few sacks. The want of
this staff of life caused great suffering. All other vegetable food was
rapidly consumed, and for six weeks the poorer classes were forced to
live on beef alone. The effect was in all cases an inability to labor,
and in some cases serious sickness.
While thus cut off from all communication with the outer world, and
buried in the dull town, there was little for us to do save to study
each other's characters and talk the miners' language. In all new and
thinly settled countries, many ideas are expressed by figures drawn from
the pursuits of the people. Among the Indians, more than half of every
sentence is expressed by signs. And miners illustrate their conversation
by the various terms used in mining. I have always noticed how clearly
these terms conveyed the idea sought. Awkwardness in comprehending this
dialect easily reveals that the hearer bears the disgrace of being a
"pilgrim," or a "tender-foot," as they style the new emigrant. To master
it is an object of prime necessity to him who would win the miner's
respect. Thus the term "adobe," the sun-dried brick, as applied to a
man, signifies vealiness and verdancy. A "corral" is an enclosure into
which the herds are gathered; hence a person who has everything arranged
to his satisfaction announces that he has everything "corralled." A man
fortunate in any business has "struck the pay-dirt"; unfortunate, has
"reached the bed-rock." Everything viewed in the aggregate, as a train,
a family, or a town, is an "outfit." I was much at a loss, on my first
arrival, to comprehend the exact purport of a miner's criticism upon a
windy lawyer of Virginia,--"When you come to pan him out, you don't find
color." But this vocabulary is not extensive, and the pilgrim soon
learns to perceive and use its beauties.
Helena, the second point of importance in the Territory, is one hundred
and twenty-five miles north from Virginia. We travel to it over a fine,
hard road, through the low valleys of the Missouri. The beauty and
richness of these valleys increase as we leave Virginia, and everywhere
the green spots are becoming the homes of thrifty farmers. On the divide
near Boulder Creek are wonderful proofs of the gradual levelling of the
mountains, in the huge blocks of rock piled up in the most grotesque
shapes. Many of these are colossal pillars, surmounted by boulders
weighing many tons. The softer rock and gravel have washed down the
ravines, leaving these as monuments of the primal ages. The ravines
penetrate the mountain on every side, and little by little wear the
monster away. The beavers choose the prettiest nooks in them for their
villages, and the miner, finding the water cut off, often learns that in
a single night these busy architects have built a tight and closely
interwoven dam up the stream, which it takes him many hours to demolish.
Is it strange that, in speaking of the beaver dam, he should sometimes
transpose the words?
We ride down the pleasantest of the ravines, till it develops into the
Prickly Pear River, and past embryo cities,--at present noticeable for
nothing except their rivalry of each other,--and hurry on to Last Chance
Gulch and the city of Helena. A few emigrants from Minnesota had been
here for many months. They made no excitement, no parade, but steadily
worked on amid their majestic mountain scenery, and asked no heralding
of their wealth. On either side of their cabins grew tall pines straight
as arrows, and in front spread a vast fertile valley watered by clear
rivulets, marked here and there with the low cottages of the rancheros,
and dotted everywhere with innumerable herds of cattle. Beyond the
Missouri rose abruptly chains of snow-capped mountains, glistening in
the sunlight and veined with gold and silver. Reports of these men came
at times to Virginia,--reports always of a quiet and unostentatious
prosperity. In the winter of 1864 their secret became known, and half
the nomadic population of Virginia hurried to the new mines, and puzzled
the slow-moving Minnesotians by their bustle and activity. Claims
advanced rapidly in price, and the discoverers reaped fortunes. A city
rose like an exhalation. Yet I never saw better order than in the
earliest days of Helena, though I am afraid that Hangman's Tree could
tell some stories of too much haste and injustice in taking the lives of
criminals.
The hundred ravines near Helena showed gold, and every one of them was
soon claimed from mouth to source. Every night I heard the clattering
hoofs of the stampeders for some new gulch, starting in the utmost
secrecy to gain the first right for themselves and friends. A trifling
hint induces these stampedes. A wink from one old miner to another, and
hundreds mounted their horses to seek some inaccessible mountain
fissure. The more remote the diggings, so much the greater the
excitement. Half the people of Helena lately hurried, in the depth of
winter, to diggings on Sun River, (where many and many a brave fellow
perished in the snows,) to learn that far richer mines had lain
unclaimed for months within a stone's throw of their homes. The
excitement over quartz lodes rapidly followed; and every spot on the
mountains which showed any slight indications of auriferous quartz was
claimed by the prospecters. Hardly a third of these can ever prove rich,
but here and there is one of great value.
Helena, supported by the trade of the surrounding mines, already rivals
Virginia. Perhaps in years to come it may have a larger population and a
more reckless enterprise. One hundred and fifty miles north from Helena
is Fort Benton, an old fortified post of the American Fur Company, and
the head of navigation on the Missouri. Steamers have arrived here in
the spring, but the uncertainty of the water will fix the terminus of
travel at some point farther down. A town charter for such a terminus
was granted to a party of Virginia speculators at the mouth of Maria's
River. They called it Ophir, which a friend of mine says is a very
appropriate name and of poetic origin, being derived from Cowper's line,
"O for a lodge in some vast wilderness!"
On the first visit of the proprietors to their new site, every one of
them was murdered and scalped by the Indians.
These regions are held by the Blackfeet, who, with their offshoots, the
Bloods, Gros Ventres, and Piegans, are the most formidable Indians of
Montana. They are polygamists, being in that respect exceptional among
the Indians. But Catlin rather unsentimentally apologizes for this, on
the ground that the chiefs are required to give expensive
entertainments, in getting up which the labor of a hundred wives is no
trifling assistance. Attempts have long been made to civilize and
Christianize these savages by the Catholic missions under Father de
Smet, and the government has furthered these attempts by establishing a
fine farm on Sun River. The chiefs would sometimes be induced to
stolidly witness the grain-planting; but Captain Mullan quietly
describes all this waste of philanthropy in the words: "I can only
regret that the results as yet obtained would not seem commensurate with
the endeavors so manfully put forth."
The noble Indians of history and poetry do not exist among the Indians
of to-day. You seek in vain for Logan or Pocahontas, for Uncas or
Minnehaha. The real Indians are cruel and treacherous, lazy and filthy,
crafty and ungrateful. Many of them live upon ants and grasshoppers, and
at the best only know enough to preserve in the rudest manner a few of
the commonest roots and berries.
These tribes have no history and no growth. They live a mere animal
life. Even their few traditions are rude and disgusting enough. I am
indebted to Mr. Stuart for a fair example of the Bannack superstitions,
from which not even Longfellow could glean any poetry or beauty. Among
the caves in the rocks dwells a race of fairy imps, who, with arrow and
quiver, kill game upon the mountains, and sing boisterous songs on the
cliffs in summer evenings. Whenever an Indian mother leaves her infant,
one of these pleasant cannibals devours it straightway, and takes its
place, crying piteously. When the poor woman returns and seeks to pacify
her child, the little usurper falls ravenously upon her. Fire-arms,
knives, and stones are all powerless; and when the screams of the woman
bring the men to her help, the destroyer runs away and leaves her in a
dying condition. She always dies before morning. When little children
play at a distance from camp, these fairies seek to sport among them.
Lucky is it for those timid few who, frightened at the long tail,
scamper away from the intruder; for, when allowed to mingle in the
sport, he suddenly seizes the fairest child, and hurries away to make a
dainty meal off him with his little wives in elfin-land. To the Indian
men the fairies profess a real friendship; and when they meet one near
their dwellings they invite him in and feast him, and press him to stay
all night. He invariably declines the polite invitation with his thanks,
and his regrets that he has killed an elk and must take it home before
the wolves can eat it.
Beyond the main chain of the Rocky Mountains are the Deer Lodge and
Bitter Root Valleys, celebrated for their great grazing capabilities. I
rode through these valleys in June, passing up the Pipestone Creek,
whose waters flow into the Missouri, and down the Silver Bow, whose
waters flow into the Columbia. At the highest point we could almost see
the springs of either river, flowing on one hand to the Atlantic, on the
other to the Pacific. How widely are these children of the same mother
separated! Summer sprinkles all the ravines with innumerable
wild-flowers, which make a rich carpet even up close to the white line
of the snow. I found among them wild varieties of the harebell,
larkspur, and sunflower, and many pansies. Upon the Silver Bow Creek is
a city of the same name, built in the winter, when it was hoped that
spring would prove the richness of its mines. From a distance it looked
like a large town; but upon riding in, we found only here and there a
straggling inhabitant. Other mines proved richer, and any purchaser can
buy its best house for less than the cost of drawing the logs to build
it. At Deer Lodge in this valley,--almost equal in extent and fertility
to that of the Gallatin,--old Johnny Grant lived for many years a life
of patriarchal serenity among his wives and concubines, his flocks and
herds. By constant presents of beads and whiskey, and many a warm meal
when on the war-path, he had raised himself high in the esteem of the
savages, and had a favorite squaw from almost every tribe among his
wives. When the Flatheads passed by, no woman appeared at his hearth but
a Flathead; when the Blackfeet came, the sole wife of his bosom was a
Blackfoot. Thus for many years, almost the only white man in these
solitudes, he lived at peace with the natives, a sharer in all their
spoils and arbiter in all their quarrels. And when the patriarch was
gathered to his fathers, he left cattle on a thousand hills to his son.
Young Johnny is a mere repetition of his father. He cannot read or
write, and in conversation his nominatives are not always true to his
verbs; but he has all the slyness and craftiness of the Indian. I heard
that he was immensely disgusted at the white immigration. He
acknowledges that his beeves are of greater value, and he has no small
admiration for dollars and cents; but he fears that his moral and
intellectual standing will suffer.
Passing down the Deer Lodge River,--
"In the continuous woods
Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound
Save his own dashings,"--
we come to a pass through the mountains, called Hell-Gate by the
Flatheads, because through it rode the scalping parties of the Eastern
tribes. Beyond is the sunny valley of the Bitter Root. It has long been
settled by hardy trappers and hunters, and by comfortable farmers with
well-stored barns and granaries and fenced fields. There is a charm
about this isolated life, and a freshness and exhilaration about these
Daniel Boones, that one meets nowhere else. Many of them are old army
officers, men of education, who left the exploring parties to which they
were attached to make their homes among the wild allurements of this
fascinating valley. It is pleasant to hear their stories of life among
the Indians, and their accounts of the strange features of the
mountains, their animal life, their flora and minerals. Most of them
have squaw wives, and are rearing large families of ugly pappooses, and
many have amassed wealth by their long trade with the fur companies. The
great Hudson's Bay Company has for many years had a station in this
valley, and drawn from it large quantities of costly furs and skins.
Here and farther west is spoken the famous Chinnook jargon, invented by
the Company to facilitate its trade with the Indians. It borrows words
from the English, from the French, from all the Indian tongues, and
works them all into an incongruous combination. It has an entire lack of
system or rule, but is quickly learned, and is designed to express only
the simplest ideas. The powerful influence of the Company introduced it
everywhere, and it was found of indispensable utility. Ardent
Oregonians are said to woo their coy maidens in its unpronounceable
gutturals. The white man is called "Boston" in this tongue, because the
first whites whom the Oregon Indians met came in a Boston ship.
The best Indians of the mountains dwell in this valley,--the Flatheads
and Pend' d'Oreilles. Many of them are devoted Catholics, but liable at
times to lapse into intoxication. The Jesuits have a thriving mission
among them, with a neat church, whose clear ringing bell sounds
strangely enough in the mountain recesses. The strict asceticism of the
fathers, their careful nursing of the sick and wounded, and their
cordial co-operation in all objects of philanthropy, have enabled them
to wield an immense influence among the Indians. The white miners also,
who have often lain sick or frost-bitten in their hospitals, except
these zealous priests in their too common sneers at religion. Captain
Mullan quite reflects the universal sentiment when he says: "The only
good that I have ever seen effected among these people [the Indians] has
been due to the exertions of these Catholic missionaries."
I have hurried over the points of interest in the early days of Montana.
But any picture of its shifting life can only be a view of one of the
combinations of the kaleidoscope. The discovery of new mines, and the
abandonment of old ones, the fresh advent of gold-seekers and the exodus
of the winners of fortunes, the increase of facilities for travel and of
all the comforts of life, are daily and perceptibly working out new
combinations. But while welcoming all changes tending towards refinement
and a higher civilization, the careful observer of the life of these
remote people can point to some qualities among them which he would have
unchangeable as their grand old mountains,--their frankness and honesty
of purpose, their love of justice, and their sturdy democracy.
REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.
_The Poems of_ THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH. Boston: Ticknor and Fields.
The things which please in these poems are so obvious, that we feel it
all but idle to point them out; for who loves not graceful form, bright
color, and delicate perfume? Of our younger singers, Mr. Aldrich is one
of the best known and the best liked, for he has been wise as well as
poetical in his generation. The simple theme, the easy measure, have
been his choice; while he is a very Porphyro in the profusion with which
he heaps his board with delicates:--
"Candied apple, quince and plum and gourd;
With jellies soother than the creamy curd,
And lucent syrops tinct with cinnamon;
Manna and dates, in argosy transferred
From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one,
From silken Samarcand to cedared Lebanon."
And the feast is well lighted, and the guest has not to third his way
through knotty sentences, past perilous punctuation-points, to reach the
table, nor to grope in the dark for the dainties when he has found it.
We imagine that it is this charm of perfect clearness and accessibility
which attracts popular liking to Mr. Aldrich's poetry; afterwards, its
other qualities easily hold the favor won. He is endowed with a singular
richness of fancy, and he has well chosen most of his themes from among
those which allow the exercise of his best gifts. He has seldom,
therefore, attempted to poetize any feature or incident of our national
life; for this might have demanded a realistic treatment foreign to his
genius. But it is poetry, the result, which we want, and we do not care
from what material it is produced. The honey is the same, whether the
bee stores it from the meadow-clover and the wild-flower of our own
fields, or, loitering over city wharves, gathers it from ships laden
with tropic oranges and orient dates.
If Mr. Aldrich needed any defence for the poems in which he gives rein
to his love for the East and the South, he would have it in the fact
that they are very beautiful, and distinctively his own, while they
breathe full east in their sumptousness of diction, and are genuinely
southern in their summer-warmth of feeling. We doubt if any poet of
Persia could have told more exquisitely than he what takes place
"WHEN THE SULTAN GOES TO ISPAHAN.
"_When the Sultan Shah-Zaman_
_Goes to the city Ispahan_,
Even before he gets so far
As the place where the clustered palm-trees are,
At the last of the thirty palace-gates,
The pet of the harem, Rose-in-Bloom,
Orders a feast in his favorite room,--
Glittering squares of colored ice,
Sweetened with syrop, tinctured with spice,
Creams, and cordials, and sugared dates,
Syrian apples, Othmanee quinces,
Limes, and citrons, and apricots,
And wines that are known to Eastern princes;
And Nubian slaves, with smoking pots
Of spiced meats and costliest fish,
And all that the curious palate could wish,
Pass in and out of the cedarn doors:
Scattered over mosaic floors
Are anemones, myrtles, and violets,
And a musical fountain throws its jets
Of a hundred colors into the air.
The dusk Sultana loosens her hair,
And stains with the henna-plant the tips
Of her pearly nails, and bites her lips
Till they bloom again,--but, alas! _that_ rose
Not for the Sultan buds and blows;
_Not for the Sultan Shah-Zaman,
When he goes to the city Ispahan._
"Then, at a wave of her sunny hand,
the dancing girls of Samarcand
Float in like mists from Fairy-land!
And to the low voluptuous swoons
Of music rise and fall the moons
Of their full, brown bosoms. Orient blood
Runs in their veins, shines in their eyes:
And there, in this Eastern Paradise,
Filled with the fumes of sandal-wood,
And Khoten musk, and aloes and myrrh,
Sits Rose-in-Bloom on a silk divan,
Sipping the wines of Astrakhan;
And her Arab lover sits with her.
_That's when the Sultan Shah-Zaman
Goes to the city Ispahan._
"Now, when I see an extra light,
Flaming, flickering on the night
From my neighbor's casement opposite,
I know as well as I know to pray,
I know as well as a tongue can say,
_That the innocent Sultan Shah-Zaman
Has gone to the city Ispahan._"
As subtilely beautiful as this, and even richer in color and flavor than
this, is the complete little poem which Mr. Aldrich calls a fragment:--
"DRESSING THE BRIDE.
"So, after bath, the slave-girls brought
The broidered raiment for her wear,
The misty izar from Mosul,
The pearls and opals for her hair,
The slippers for her supple feet,
(Two radiant crescent moons they were,)
And lavender, and spikenard sweet,
And attars, nedd, and richest musk.
When they had finished dressing her,
(The eye of morn, the heart's desire!)
Like one pale star against the dusk,
A single diamond on her brow
Trembled with its imprisoned fire!"
Too long for quotation here, but by no means too long to be read many
times over, is "Pampinea," an idyl in which the poet's fancy plays
lightly and gracefully with the romance of life in Boccaccio's
Florentine garden, and returns again to the beauty which inspired his
dream of Italy, as he lay musing beside our northern sea. The thread of
thought running through the poem is slight as the plot of
dreams,--breaks, perhaps, if you take it up too abruptly; but how
beautiful are the hues and the artificing of the jewels strung upon it!
"And knowing how in other times
Her lips were ripe with Tuscan rhymes
Of love and wine and dance, I spread
My mantle by almond-tree,
'And here, beneath the rose,' I said,
'I'll hear thy Tuscan melody.'
I heard a tale that was not told
In those ten dreamy days of old,
When Heaven, for some divine offence,
Smote Florence with the pestilence;
And in that garden's odorous shade,
The dames of the Decameron,
With each a loyal lover, strayed,
To laugh and sing, at sorest need,
To lie in the lilies in the sun
With glint of plume and silver brede!
And while she whispered in my ear,
The pleasant Arno murmured near,
The dewy, slim chameleons run
Through twenty colors in the sun;
The breezes broke the fountain's glass,
And woke aeolian melodies,
And shook from out the scented trees
The lemon-blossoms on the grass.
The tale? I have forgot the tale,--
A Lady all for love forlorn,
A rose-bud, and a nightingale
That bruised his bosom on the thorn:
A pot of rubies buried deep,
A glen, a corpse, a child asleep,
A Monk, that was no monk at all,
In the moonlight by a castle wall."
As to "Babie Bell," that ballad has passed too deeply into the popular
heart to be affected for good or ill by criticism,--and we have only to
express our love of it. Simple, pathetic, and real, it early made the
poet a reputation and friends in every home visited by the newspapers,
in which it has been printed over and over again. It is but one of
various poems by Mr. Aldrich which enjoy a sort of perennial fame, and
for which we have come to look in the papers, as we do for certain
flowers in the fields, at their proper season. In the middle of June,
when the beauty of earth and sky drives one to despair, we know that it
is time to find the delicately sensuous and pensive little poem
"Nameless Pain" in all our exchanges; and later, when the summer is
subject to sudden thunderstorms, we look out for "Before the Rain," and
"After the Rain." It is very high praise of these charming lyrics, that
they have thus associated themselves with a common feeling for certain
aspects of nature, and we confess that we recur to them with greater
pleasure than we find in some of our poet's more ambitious efforts.
Indeed, we think Mr. Aldrich's fame destined to gain very little from
his recent poems, "Judith," "Garnaut Hall," and "Pythagoras"; for when
it comes to be decided what is his and what is his period's, these poems
cannot be justly awarded to him. To borrow a figure from the polygamic
usages of our Mormon brethren, they are sealed to Mr. Aldrich for time
and to Mr. Tennyson for eternity. They contain many fine and original
passages: the "Judith" contains some very grand ones, but they must bear
the penalty of the error common to all our younger poets,--the error of
an imitation more or less unconscious. It is to the example of the
dangerous poet named that Mr. Aldrich evidently owes, among other minor
blemishes, a mouse which does some mischief in his verses. It is a
wainscot mouse, and a blood-relation, we believe, to the very mouse that
shrieked behind the mouldering wainscot in the lonely moated grange.
This mouse of Mr. Aldrich's appears twice in a brief lyric called
"December"; in "Garnaut Hall," she makes
"A lodging for her glossy young
In dead Sir Egbert's empty coat of mail,"
and immediately afterwards drags the poet over the precipice of
anti-climax:--
"'T was a haunted spot.
A legend killed it for a kindly home,--
A grim estate, which every heir in turn
Left to the orgies of the wind and rain,
The newt, the toad, the spider, and the mouse."
A little of Costar's well-known exterminator would rid Mr. Aldrich of
this rascal rodent. Perhaps, when the mouse is disposed of, the poet
will use some other word than _torso_ to describe a headless, but not
limbless body, and will relieve Agnes Vail of either her shield or her
buckler, since she can hardly need both.
We have always thought Mr. Aldrich's "Palabras Carinosas" among the most
delicious and winning that he has spoken, and nearly all of his earlier
poems please us; but on the whole it seems to us that his finest is his
latest poem, "Friar Jerome's Beautiful Book"; for it is original in
conception and expression, and noble and elevated in feeling, with all
our poet's wonted artistic grace and felicity of diction. We think it
also a visible growth from what was strong and individual in his style,
before he allowed himself to be so deeply influenced by study of one
whose flower indeed becomes a weed in the garden of another.
_The United States during the War._ By AUGUST LAUGEL. New York:
Bailliere Brothers. Paris: Germer Bailliere.
_The Civil War in America._ An Address read at the last Meeting of the
Manchester Union and Emancipation Society. By GOLDWIN SMITH. London:
Simpkin, Marshall, & Co. Manchester: A. Ireland & Co.
As a people, we are so used to policeman-like severity or snobbish
ridicule from European criticism, that we hardly know what to make of
the attentions of a Frenchman who is not an Inspector Javert, or of an
Englishman who is not a Commercial Traveller. M. Laugel eulogizes us
without the least patronage in his manner; Mr. Goldwin Smith praises us
with those reserves which enhance the value of applause. We are
ourselves accustomed to deal generously and approvingly with the facts
of our civilization, but our pride in them falls short of M. Laugel's;
and our most sanguine faith in the national future is not more cordial
than Mr. Goldwin Smith's.
The diverse methods in which these writers discuss the same aspects and
events of our history are characteristic and interesting, and the
difference in spirit is even greater than that of form,--greater than
the difference between a book, which, made from articles in the _Revue
de Deux Mondes_, recounts the political, military, and financial
occurrences of the last four years, sketches popular scenes and
characters, and deals with the wonders of our statistics, and a slender
pamphlet address, in which the author concerns himself rather with the
results than the events of our recent war. This is always Mr. Smith's
manner of dealing with the past; but in considering a period known in
all its particulars to his audience, he has been able to philosophize
history more purely and thoroughly than usual. He arrives directly and
clearly at the moral of the Ilias Americana, and sees that Christianity
is the life of our political system, and that this principle, without
which democracy is a passing dream, and equality an idle fallacy,
triumphed forever in the downfall of slavery. He has been the first of
our commentators to discern that the heroism displayed in the war could
only come from that principle which made our social life decent and
orderly, built the school-house and the church, and filled city and
country with prosperous and religious homes. He has seen this principle
at work under changing names and passing creeds, and has recognized that
here, for the first time in the history of the world, a whole nation
strives to govern itself according to the Example and the Word that
govern good men everywhere.
In the Introduction to his book, M. Laugel declares as the reasons for
his admiration of the United States, that they "have shown that men can
found a government on reason, where equality does not stifle liberty,
and democracy does not yield to despotism; they have shown that a people
can be religious when the State neither pays the Church nor regulates
belief; they have given to woman the place that is her due in a
Christian and civilized society." It is this Introduction, indeed, that
will most interest the American reader, for here also the author
presents the result of his study of our national character in a sketch
that the nation may well glass itself in when low-spirited. The truth
is, that we looked our very best to the friendly eyes of M. Laugel, and
we cannot but be gratified with the portrait he has made of us. An
American would hardly have ventured to draw so flattering a picture, but
he cannot help exulting that an alien should see us poetic in our
realism, curious of truth and wisdom as well as of the stranger's
personal history, cordial in our friendships, and not ignoble even in
our pursuit of wealth, but having the Republic's greatness at heart as
well as our own gain.
In the chapters which succeed this Introduction, M. Laugel discusses, in
a spirit of generous admiration, the facts of our civilization as they
present themselves in nearly all the States of the North and West; and
while he does not pretend to see polished society everywhere, but very
often an elemental ferment, he finds also that the material of national
goodness and greatness is sound and of unquestionable strength. He falls
into marvellously few errors, and even his figures have not that bad
habit of lying to which the figures of travellers so often fall victims.
The books of M. Laugel and Mr. Goldwin Smith come to us, as we hinted,
after infinite stupid and dishonest censure from their countrymen; but
the intelligent friendship of such writers is not the less welcome to us
because we have ceased to care for the misrepresentations of the French
and English tourists.
_Hospital Life in the Army of the Potomac._ By WILLIAM HOWELL REED.
Boston; William V. Spencer.
The advice of friends, so often mistaken, and so productive of mischief
in goading reluctant authorship to the publication of unwise, immature,
or feeble literature, prevailed upon Mr. Reed to give the world the
present book; and we have a real pleasure in saying that for once this
affectionate counsel has done the world a favor and a service. We have
read the volume through with great interest, and with a lively
impression of the author's good sense and modesty. In great part it is a
personal narrative; but Mr. Reed, in recounting the story of the
unwearied vigilance and tenderness and dauntless courage with which the
corps of the Sanitary Commission discharged their high duties, contrives
to present his individual acts as representative of those of the whole
body, and to withdraw himself from the reader's notice. With the same
spirit, in describing scenes of misery and suffering, he has more
directly celebrated the patience and heroism of the soldiers who bore
the pain than the indefatigable goodness that ministered to them,
though he does full justice to this also. The book is a record of every
variety of wretchedness; yet one comes from its perusal strengthened and
elevated rather than depressed, and with new feelings of honor for the
humanity that could do and endure so much. Mr. Reed does not fail to
draw from the scenes and experiences of hospital life their religious
lesson, and throughout his work are scattered pictures of anguish
heroically borne, and of Christian resignation to death, which are all
the more touching because the example of courage through simple and
perfect faith is enforced without cant or sentimentality.
The history of the great Christian aspect of our war cannot be too
minutely written nor too often read. There is some danger, now the
occasion of mercy is past, that we may forget how wonderfully complete
the organization of the Sanitary Commission was, and how unfailingly it
gave to the wounded and disabled of our hosts all the succor that human
foresight could afford,--how, beginning with the establishment of depots
convenient for the requisitions of the surgeons, it came to send out its
own corps of nurses and watchers, until its lines of mercy were
stretched everywhere almost in sight of the lines of battle, and its
healing began almost at the hour the hurt was given. Mr. Reed devotes a
chapter to this history, in which he briefly and clearly describes the
practical operation of the system of national charity, accrediting to
Mr. Frank B. Fay the organization of the auxiliary corps, and speaking
with just praise of its members who perished in the service, or clung to
it, till, overtaken by contagion or malaria, they returned home to die.
The subject is dealt with very frankly; and Mr. Reed, while striving to
keep in view the consoling and self-recompensing character of their
work, does not conceal that, though they were rewarded by patience and
thankfulness in far the greater number of cases, their charities were
sometimes met by disheartening selfishness and ingratitude. But they
bore up under all, and gave the world such an illustration of practical
Christianity as it had never seen before.
Mr. Reed's little book is so earnestly and unambitiously written, that
its graphic power may escape notice. Yet it is full of picturesque
touches; and in the line of rapidly succeeding anecdote there is nothing
of repetition.
_A History of the Gypsies: with Specimens of the Gypsy Language._ By
WALTER SIMPSON. Edited, with Preface, Introduction, and Notes, and a
Disquisition on the Past, Present, and Future of Gypsydom, by JAMES
SIMPSON. New York: M. Doolady.
The history of the Gypsies, according to the editor of the present work,
is best presented in a series of desultory anecdotes which relate
chiefly to the Egyptian usages of murder, pocket-picking, and
horse-stealing, and the behavior of the rogues when they come to be
hanged for their crimes. Incidentally, a good deal of interesting
character is developed, and both author and editor show a very intimate
acquaintance with the life and customs and speech of an inexplicable
people. But here the value of their book ends; and we imagine that the
earlier Simpson, who contributed the greater part of it in articles to
Blackwood's Magazine, scarcely supposed himself to be writing anything
more than sketches of the Scotch Gypsies whom he found in the different
shires, and of the Continental and English Gypsies of whom he had read.
The later Simpson thought it, as we have seen, a history of the Gypsies,
and he has furnished it with an Introduction and a Disquisition of
amusingly pompous and inconsequent nature. His subject has been too much
for him, and his mental vision, disordered by too ardent contemplation
of Gypsies, reproduces them wherever he turns his thought. If he values
any one of his illusions above the rest,--for they all seem equally
pleasant to him,--it is his persuasion that John Bunyan was a Gypsy. "He
was a tinker," says our editor. "And who were the tinkers?" "Why,
Gypsies, without a doubt," answers the reader, and makes no struggle to
escape the conclusion thus skilfully sprung upon him. Will it be
credited that the inventor of this theory was denied admittance to the
columns of the religious newspapers in this country, on the flimsy
pretext that the editors could not afford the space for a disquisition
on John Bunyan's Gypsy origin?
The comparison of the Gypsy language in this book with a dialect of the
Hindostanee is interesting and useful, and the accounts of Gypsy habits
and usages are novel and curious; and otherwise the work is a mass of
rather entertaining rubbish.
_Eros. A Series of connected Poems._ By LORENZO SOMERVILLE, London:
Truebner & Co.
_Patriotic Poems._ By FRANCIS DE HAES JANVIER. Philadelphia: J. B.
Lippincott & Co.
_The Contest: a Poem._ By G. P. CARR. Chicago: P. L. Hanscom.
_Poems._ By ANNIE E. CLARK. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co.
All these little books are very prettily printed and very pleasingly
bound. Each has its little index and its little dedication, and each its
hundred pages of rhymes, and so each flutters forth into the world.
"Dove vai, povera foglia frale?"
To oblivion, by the briefest route, we think; and we find a pensive
satisfaction in speculating upon the incidents of the journey. Shall any
one challenge the wanderers in their flight, and seek to stay them?
Shall they all reach an utter forgetfulness, and be resolved again into
elemental milk and water, or shall one of them lodge in a dusty library,
here and there, and, having ceased to be literature, lead the idle life
of a curiosity? We imagine another as finding a moment's pause upon the
centre-table of a country parlor. Perhaps a third, hastily bought at a
railway station as the train started, and abandoned by the purchaser,
may at this hour have entered upon a series of railway journeys in
company with the brakeman's lamps and oil-bottles, with a fair prospect
of surviving many generations of short-lived railway travellers. We
figure to ourselves the heart-breaking desolation of a village-tavern,
where, on the bureau under the mirror, to which the public comb and
brush are chained, a fourth might linger for a while.
But in all the world shall anybody read one of these books? We fancy not
even a critic; for the race so vigilantly malign in other days has lost
its bitterness, or has been broken of its courage by the myriad numbers
of the versifiers once so exultingly destroyed. Indeed, that cruel
slaughter was but a combat with Nature,--
"So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life";
and from the exanimate dust of one crushed poetaster she bade a thousand
rhymesters rise. Yet one cannot help thinking with a shudder of the
hideous spectacle of "Eros" in the jaws of Blackwood or the mortal
Quarterly, thirty years ago; or of how ruthlessly our own Raven would
have plucked the poor trembling life from the "Patriotic Poems," or "The
Contest," or the "Poems."
The world grows wiser and better-natured every day, and the tender
statistician has long since stayed the hand of the critic. "Why strike,"
says the gentle sage, "when figures will do your work so much more
effectually, and leave you the repose of a compassionate soul? Do you
not know that but one book in a thousand survives the year of its
publication?" etc., etc., etc. "And then as to the infinite reproduction
of the species," adds Science, "_is_ Nature,
"'So careful of the single type?' But no,
From scarped cliff and quarried stone
She cries, 'A thousand types are gone.'"
Patience! the glyptodon and the dodo have been dead for ages. Perhaps in
a million years the poetaster also shall pass.
_Thirty Years of Army Life on the Border._ By COLONEL R. B. MARCY, U. S.
A. With Numerous Illustrations. New York: Harper and Brothers.
There is not much variety in frontier life, it must be confessed, though
there is abundant adventure. A family likeness runs through nearly all
histories of bear-fights, and one Indian-fight might readily be mistaken
for another. So also bear-fighters and Indian-fighters are akin in
character, and the pioneers who appear in literature leave a sense of
sameness upon the reader's mind. Nevertheless, one continues to read of
them with considerable patience, and likes the stories because he liked
their ancestral legends when a boy.
Colonel Marcy's book offers something more than the usual attractions of
the class to which it belongs; for it contains the history of his own
famous passage of the Rocky Mountains in mid-winter, and notices of many
frontiersmen of original and striking character (like the immortal
Captain Scott), as well as much shrewd observation of Indian nature and
other wild-beast nature. All topics are treated with perfect
common-sense; if our soldierly author sometimes philosophizes rather
narrowly, he never sentimentalizes, though he is not without poetry; and
he is thoroughly imbued with the importance of his theme. One,
therefore, suffers a great deal from him, in the way of unnecessary
detail, without a murmur, and now and then willingly accepts an old
story from him, charmed by the simplicity and good faith with which he
attempts to pass it off as new.
The style of the book is clear and direct, except in those parts where
light and humorous narration is required. There it is bad, and seems to
have been formed upon the style of the sporting newspapers and the local
reporters, with now and then a hint from the witty passages of the
circus, as in this colloquy:--
"'Mought you be the boss hossifer of that thar army?'
"'I am the commanding officer of that detachment, sir.'
"'Wall, Mr. Hossifer, be them sure 'nuff sogers, or is they only
make-believe chaps, like I see down to Orleans?'
"'They have passed through the Mexican war, and I trust have proved
themselves not only worthy of the appellation of real, genuine soldiers,
but of veterans, sir.'"
And so forth. We like Colonel Mercy when he talks of himself better than
when he talks for himself. In the latter case he is often what we see
him above, and in the former he is always modest, discreet, and
entertaining.
_Memoirs of a Good-for-Nothing._ From the German of JOSEPH VON
EICHENDORFF, by CHARLES GODFREY LELAND. With Vignettes by E. B. Bensell.
New York: Leypoldt and Holt.
When, as Heine says, Napoleon, who was Classic like Caesar and Alexander,
fell to the ground, and Herren August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel,
who were Romantic like Puss in Boots, arose as victors, Baron von
Eichendorff was one of those who shared the triumph. He wrote plays and
poems and novels to the tunes set by the masters of his school, but for
himself practically he was a wise man,--held comfortable offices all his
life long, and, in spite of vast literary yearning, sentiment, and
misanthropy, was a Philister of the Philisters. The tale which Mr.
Leland translates so gracefully is an extravaganza, in marked contrast
to all the other romances of Eichendorff, in so far as it is purposely
farcical, and they are serious; but we imagine it does not differ from
them greatly in its leading qualities of fanciful incoherency and
unbridled feebleness. An idle boy, who is driven from home by his
father, the miller, and is found with his violin on the road to nowhere
by two great ladies and carried to their castle near Vienna,--who falls
in love with one of these lovely countesses, and runs away for love of
her to Italy, and, after passing through many confused adventures there,
with no relation to anything that went before or comes after, returns to
the castle, and finds that his lovely countess is not a countess, but a
poor orphan adopted by the great folk,--and so happily marries
her,--this is the Good-for-Nothing and his story. A young student of the
German language, struggling through the dusty paths of the dictionary to
a comprehension of the tale, would perhaps think it a wonderful romance,
when once he had achieved its meaning; but being translated into our
pitiless English, its poverty of wit and feeling and imagination is
apparent; and one is soon weary of its mere fantasticality.