the remissness of their medicine-men. They were sore with grief and
afraid for themselves; as a result of the council, one in every
campoodie was sentenced to the ancient penalty. But schooling and
native shrewdness had raised up in the younger men an unfaith in old
usages, so judgment halted between sentence and execution. At Three
Pines the government teacher brought out influential whites to threaten
and cajole the stubborn tribes. At Tunawai the conservatives sent into
Nevada for that pacific old humbug, Johnson Sides, most notable of
Paiute orators, to harangue his people. Citizens of the towns turned
out with food and comforts, and so after a season the trouble passed.
But here at Maverick there was no school, no oratory, and no
alleviation. One third of the campoodie died, and the rest killed
the medicine-men. Winnenap´ expected it, and for days walked and sat
a little apart from his family that he might meet it as became a
Shoshone, no doubt suffering the agony of dread deferred. When finally
three men came and sat at his fire without greeting he knew his time.
He turned a little from them, dropped his chin upon his knees, and
looked out over Shoshone Land, breathing evenly. The women went into
the wickiup and covered their heads with their blankets.
So much has the Indian lost of savageness by merely desisting from
killing, that the executioners braved themselves to their work
by drinking and a show of quarrelsomeness. In the end a sharp
hatchet-stroke discharged the duty of the campoodie. Afterward his
women buried him, and a warm wind coming out of the south, the force of
the disease was broken, and even they acquiesced in the wisdom of the
tribe. That summer they told me all except the names of the Three.
Since it appears that we make our own heaven here, no doubt we shall
have a hand in the heaven of hereafter; and I know what Winnenap´’s
will be like: worth going to if one has leave to live in it according
to his liking. It will be tawny gold underfoot, walled up with jacinth
and jasper, ribbed with chalcedony, and yet no hymn-book heaven, but
the free air and free spaces of Shoshone Land.
[Illustration]
JIMVILLE
A BRET HARTE TOWN
[Illustration]
When Mr. Harte found himself with a fresh palette and his particular
local color fading from the West, he did what he considered the only
safe thing, and carried his young impression away to be worked out
untroubled by any newer fact. He should have gone to Jimville. There he
would have found cast up on the ore-ribbed hills the bleached timbers
of more tales, and better ones.
You could not think of Jimville as anything more than a survival, like
the herb-eating, bony-cased old tortoise that pokes cheerfully about
those borders some thousands of years beyond his proper epoch. Not
that Jimville is old, but it has an atmosphere favorable to the type of
a half century back, if not “forty-niners,” of that breed. It is said
of Jimville that getting away from it is such a piece of work that it
encourages permanence in the population; the fact is that most have
been drawn there by some real likeness or liking. Not however that
I would deny the difficulty of getting into or out of that cove of
reminder, I who have made the journey so many times at great pains of
a poor body. Any way you go at it, Jimville is about three days from
anywhere in particular. North or south, after the railroad there is a
stage journey of such interminable monotony as induces forgetfulness of
all previous states of existence.
The road to Jimville is the happy hunting ground of old stage-coaches
bought up from superseded routes the West over, rocking, lumbering,
wide vehicles far gone in the odor of romance, coaches that Vasquez has
held up, from whose high seats express messengers have shot or been
shot as their luck held. This is to comfort you when the driver stops
to rummage for wire to mend a failing bolt. There is enough of this
sort of thing to quite prepare you to believe what the driver insists,
namely, that all that country and Jimville are held together by wire.
[Illustration]
First on the way to Jimville you cross a lonely open land, with a hint
in the sky of things going on under the horizon, a palpitant, white,
hot land where the wheels gird at the sand and the midday heaven shuts
it in breathlessly like a tent. So in still weather; and when the
wind blows there is occupation enough for the passengers, shifting
seats to hold down the windward side of the wagging coach. This is
a mere trifle. The Jimville stage is built for five passengers, but
when you have seven, with four trunks, several parcels, three sacks
of grain, the mail and express, you begin to understand that proverb
about the road which has been reported to you. In time you learn to
engage the high seat beside the driver, where you get good air and the
best company. Beyond the desert rise the lava flats, scoriæ strewn;
sharp-cutting walls of narrow cañons; league-wide, frozen puddles of
black rock, intolerable and forbidding. Beyond the lava the mouths
that spewed it out, ragged-lipped, ruined craters shouldering to the
cloud-line, mostly of red earth, as red as a red heifer. These have
some comforting of shrubs and grass. You get the very spirit of the
meaning of that country when you see Little Pete feeding his sheep
in the red, choked maw of an old vent,--a kind of silly pastoral
gentleness that glozes over an elemental violence. Beyond the craters
rise worn, auriferous hills of a quiet sort, tumbled together; a valley
full of mists; whitish green scrub; and bright, small, panting lizards;
then Jimville.
The town looks to have spilled out of Squaw Gulch, and that, in fact,
is the sequence of its growth. It began around the Bully Boy and
Theresa group of mines midway up Squaw Gulch, spreading down to the
smelter at the mouth of the ravine. The freight wagons dumped their
loads as near to the mill as the slope allowed, and Jimville grew
in between. Above the Gulch begins a pine wood with sparsely grown
thickets of lilac, azalea, and odorous blossoming shrubs.
Squaw Gulch is a very sharp, steep, ragged-walled ravine, and that
part of Jimville which is built in it has only one street,--in summer
paved with bone-white cobbles, in the wet months a frothy yellow flood.
All between the ore dumps and solitary small cabins, pieced out with
tin cans and packing cases, run footpaths drawing down to the Silver
Dollar saloon. When Jimville was having the time of its life the Silver
Dollar had those same coins let into the bar top for a border, but the
proprietor pried them out when the glory departed. There are three
hundred inhabitants in Jimville and four bars, though you are not to
argue anything from that.
Hear now how Jimville came by its name. Jim Calkins discovered the
Bully Boy, Jim Baker located the Theresa. When Jim Jenkins opened an
eating-house in his tent he chalked up on the flap, “Best meals in
Jimville, $1.00,” and the name stuck.
[Illustration]
There was more human interest in the origin of Squaw Gulch, though it
tickled no humor. It was Dimmick’s squaw from Aurora way. If Dimmick
had been anything except New Englander he would have called her a
mahala, but that would not have bettered his behavior. Dimmick made a
strike, went East, and the squaw who had been to him as his wife took
to drink. That was the bald way of stating it in the Aurora country.
The milk of human kindness, like some wine, must not be uncorked too
much in speech lest it lose savor. This is what they did. The woman
would have returned to her own people, being far gone with child,
but the drink worked her bane. By the river of this ravine her pains
overtook her. There Jim Calkins, prospecting, found her dying with a
three days’ babe nozzling at her breast. Jim heartened her for the
end, buried her, and walked back to Poso, eighteen miles, the child
poking in the folds of his denim shirt with small mewing noises, and
won support for it from the rough-handed folks of that place. Then he
came back to Squaw Gulch, so named from that day, and discovered the
Bully Boy. Jim humbly regarded this piece of luck as interposed for his
reward, and I for one believed him. If it had been in mediæval times
you would have had a legend or a ballad. Bret Harte would have given
you a tale. You see in me a mere recorder, for I know what is best for
you; you shall blow out this bubble from your own breath.
You could never get into any proper relation to Jimville unless you
could slough off and swallow your acquired prejudices as a lizard
does his skin. Once wanting some womanly attentions, the stage-driver
assured me I might have them at the Nine-Mile House from the lady
barkeeper. The phrase tickled all my after-dinner-coffee sense of humor
into an anticipation of Poker Flat. The stage-driver proved himself
really right, though you are not to suppose from this that Jimville had
no conventions and no caste. They work out these things in the personal
equation largely. Almost every latitude of behavior is allowed a good
fellow, one no liar, a free spender, and a backer of his friends’
quarrels. You are respected in as much ground as you can shoot over,
in as many pretensions as you can make good.
[Illustration]
That probably explains Mr. Fanshawe, the gentlemanly faro dealer of
those parts, built for the rôle of Oakhurst, going white-shirted and
frock-coated in a community of overalls; and persuading you that
whatever shifts and tricks of the game were laid to his deal, he
could not practice them on a person of your penetration. But he does.
By his own account and the evidence of his manners he had been bred
for a clergyman, and he certainly has gifts for the part. You find
him always in possession of your point of view, and with an evident
though not obtrusive desire to stand well with you. For an account of
his killings, for his way with women and the way of women with him, I
refer you to Brown of Calaveras and some others of that stripe. His
improprieties had a certain sanction of long standing not accorded to
the gay ladies who wore Mr. Fanshawe’s favors. There were perhaps too
many of them. On the whole, the point of the moral distinctions of
Jimville appears to be a point of honor, with an absence of humorous
appreciation that strangers mistake for dullness. At Jimville they see
behavior as history and judge it by facts, untroubled by invention and
the dramatic sense. You glimpse a crude equity in their dealings with
Wilkins, who had shot a man at Lone Tree, fairly, in an open quarrel.
Rumor of it reached Jimville before Wilkins rested there in flight. I
saw Wilkins, all Jimville saw him; in fact, he came into the Silver
Dollar when we were holding a church fair and bought a pink silk
pincushion. I have often wondered what became of it. Some of us shook
hands with him, not because we did not know, but because we had not
been officially notified, and there were those present who knew how
it was themselves. When the sheriff arrived Wilkins had moved on, and
Jimville organized a posse and brought him back, because the sheriff
was a Jimville man and we had to stand by him.
I said we had the church fair at the Silver Dollar. We had most things
there, dances, town meetings, and the kinetoscope exhibition of the
Passion Play. The Silver Dollar had been built when the borders of
Jimville spread from Minton to the red hill the Defiance twisted
through. “Side-Winder” Smith scrubbed the floor for us and moved the
bar to the back room. The fair was designed for the support of the
circuit rider who preached to the few that would hear, and buried us
all in turn. He was the symbol of Jimville’s respectability, although
he was of a sect that held dancing among the cardinal sins. The
management took no chances on offending the minister; at 11.30 they
tendered him the receipts of the evening in the chairman’s hat, as a
delicate intimation that the fair was closed. The company filed out of
the front door and around to the back. Then the dance began formally
with no feelings hurt. These were the sort of courtesies, common enough
in Jimville, that brought tears of delicate inner laughter.
There were others besides Mr. Fanshawe who had walked out of Mr.
Harte’s demesne to Jimville and wore names that smacked of the
soil,--“Alkali Bill,” “Pike” Wilson, “Three Finger,” and “Mono Jim;”
fierce, shy, profane, sun-dried derelicts of the windy hills, who each
owned, or had owned, a mine and was wishful to own one again. They
laid up on the worn benches of the Silver Dollar or the Same Old Luck
like beached vessels, and their talk ran on endlessly of “strike” and
“contact” and “mother lode,” and worked around to fights and hold-ups,
villainy, haunts, and the hoodoo of the Minietta, told austerely
without imagination.
Do not suppose I am going to repeat it all; you who want these things
written up from the point of view of people who do not do them every
day would get no savor in their speech.
Says Three Finger, relating the history of the Mariposa, “I took it
off’n Tom Beatty, cheap, after his brother Bill was shot.”
Says Jim Jenkins, “What was the matter of him?”
“Who? Bill? Abe Johnson shot him; he was fooling around Johnson’s wife,
an’ Tom sold me the mine dirt cheap.”
“Why didn’t he work it himself?”
“Him? Oh, he was laying for Abe and calculated to have to leave the
country pretty quick.”
“Huh!” says Jim Jenkins, and the tale flows smoothly on.
Yearly the spring fret floats the loose population of Jimville out
into the desolate waste hot lands, guiding by the peaks and a few
rarely touched water-holes, always, always with the golden hope. They
develop prospects and grow rich, develop others and grow poor but
never embittered. Say the hills, It is all one, there is gold enough,
time enough, and men enough to come after you. And at Jimville they
understand the language of the hills.
Jimville does not know a great deal about the crust of the earth, it
prefers a “hunch.” That is an intimation from the gods that if you go
over a brown back of the hills, by a dripping spring, up Coso way, you
will find what is worth while. I have never heard that the failure of
any particular hunch disproved the principle. Somehow the rawness of
the land favors the sense of personal relation to the supernatural.
There is not much intervention of crops, cities, clothes, and manners
between you and the organizing forces to cut off communication. All
this begets in Jimville a state that passes explanation unless you
will accept an explanation that passes belief. Along with killing
and drunkenness, coveting of women, charity, simplicity, there is
a certain indifference, blankness, emptiness if you will, of all
vaporings, no bubbling of the pot,--it wants the German to coin a word
for that,--no bread-envy, no brother-fervor. Western writers have not
sensed it yet; they smack the savor of lawlessness too much upon their
tongues, but you have these to witness it is not mean-spiritedness. It
is pure Greek in that it represents the courage to sheer off what is
not worth while. Beyond that it endures without sniveling, renounces
without self-pity, fears no death, rates itself not too great in the
scheme of things; so do beasts, so did St. Jerome in the desert, so
also in the elder day did gods. Life, its performance, cessation, is no
new thing to gape and wonder at.
Here you have the repose of the perfectly accepted instinct which
includes passion and death in its perquisites. I suppose that the end
of all our hammering and yawping will be something like the point of
view of Jimville. The only difference will be in the decorations.
MY NEIGHBOR’S FIELD
[Illustration]
It is one of those places God must have meant for a field from all
time, lying very level at the foot of the slope that crowds up against
Kearsarge, falling slightly toward the town. North and south it is
fenced by low old glacial ridges, boulder strewn and untenable.
Eastward it butts on orchard closes and the village gardens, brimming
over into them by wild brier and creeping grass. The village street,
with its double row of unlike houses, breaks off abruptly at the edge
of the field in a footpath that goes up the streamside, beyond it, to
the source of waters.
The field is not greatly esteemed of the town, not being put to the
plough nor affording firewood, but breeding all manner of wild seeds
that go down in the irrigating ditches to come up as weeds in the
gardens and grass plots. But when I had no more than seen it in the
charm of its spring smiling, I knew I should have no peace until I had
bought ground and built me a house beside it, with a little wicket to
go in and out at all hours, as afterward came about.
Edswick, Roeder, Connor, and Ruffin owned the field before it fell to
my neighbor. But before that the Paiutes, mesne lords of the soil, made
a campoodie by the rill of Pine Creek; and after, contesting the soil
with them, cattle-men, who found its foodful pastures greatly to their
advantage; and bands of blethering flocks shepherded by wild, hairy
men of little speech, who attested their rights to the feeding ground
with their long staves upon each other’s skulls. Edswick homesteaded
the field about the time the wild tide of mining life was roaring and
rioting up Kearsarge, and where the village now stands built a stone
hut, with loopholes to make good his claim against cattle-men or
Indians. But Edswick died and Roeder became master of the field. Roeder
owned cattle on a thousand hills, and made it a recruiting ground for
his bellowing herds before beginning the long drive to market across a
shifty desert. He kept the field fifteen years, and afterward falling
into difficulties, put it out as security against certain sums. Connor,
who held the securities, was cleverer than Roeder and not so busy. The
money fell due the winter of the Big Snow, when all the trails were
forty feet under drifts, and Roeder was away in San Francisco selling
his cattle. At the set time Connor took the law by the forelock and
was adjudged possession of the field. Eighteen days later Roeder
arrived on snowshoes, both feet frozen, and the money in his pack. In
the long suit at law ensuing, the field fell to Ruffin, that clever
one-armed lawyer with the tongue to wile a bird out of the bush,
Connor’s counsel, and was sold by him to my neighbor, whom from envying
his possession I call Naboth.
[Illustration]
Curiously, all this human occupancy of greed and mischief left no mark
on the field, but the Indians did, and the unthinking sheep. Round its
corners children pick up chipped arrow points of obsidian, scattered
through it are kitchen middens and pits of old sweat-houses. By the
south corner, where the campoodie stood, is a single shrub of “hoopee”
(_Lycium Andersonii_), maintaining itself hardly among alien shrubs,
and near by, three low rakish trees of hackberry, so far from home that
no prying of mine has been able to find another in any cañon east or
west. But the berries of both were food for the Paiutes, eagerly sought
and traded for as far south as Shoshone Land. By the fork of the creek
where the shepherds camp is a single clump of mesquite of the variety
called “screw bean.” The seed must have shaken there from some sheep’s
coat, for this is not the habitat of mesquite, and except for other
single shrubs at sheep camps, none grows freely for a hundred and fifty
miles south or east.
Naboth has put a fence about the best of the field, but neither the
Indians nor the shepherds can quite forego it. They make camp and build
their wattled huts about the borders of it, and no doubt they have
some sense of home in its familiar aspect.
As I have said, it is a low-lying field, between the mesa and the town,
with no hillocks in it, but a gentle swale where the waste water of the
creek goes down to certain farms, and the hackberry-trees, of which
the tallest might be three times the height of a man, are the tallest
things in it. A mile up from the water gate that turns the creek into
supply pipes for the town, begins a row of long-leaved pines, threading
the watercourse to the foot of Kearsarge. These are the pines that
puzzle the local botanist, not easily determined, and unrelated to
other conifers of the Sierra slope; the same pines of which the Indians
relate a legend mixed of brotherliness and the retribution of God.
Once the pines possessed the field, as the worn stumps of them along
the streamside show, and it would seem their secret purpose to regain
their old footing. Now and then some seedling escapes the devastating
sheep a rod or two down-stream. Since I came to live by the field
one of these has tiptoed above the gully of the creek, beckoning the
procession from the hills, as if in fact they would make back toward
that skyward-pointing finger of granite on the opposite range, from
which, according to the legend, when they were bad Indians and it a
great chief, they ran away. This year the summer floods brought the
round, brown, fruitful cones to my very door, and I look, if I live
long enough, to see them come up greenly in my neighbor’s field.
It is interesting to watch this retaking of old ground by the wild
plants, banished by human use. Since Naboth drew his fence about the
field and restricted it to a few wild-eyed steers, halting between the
hills and the shambles, many old habitués of the field have come back
to their haunts. The willow and brown birch, long ago cut off by the
Indians for wattles, have come back to the streamside, slender and
virginal in their spring greenness, and leaving long stretches of the
brown water open to the sky. In stony places where no grass grows,
wild olives sprawl; close-twigged, blue-gray patches in winter, more
translucent greenish gold in spring than any aureole. Along with willow
and birch and brier, the clematis, that shyest plant of water borders,
slips down season by season to within a hundred yards of the village
street. Convinced after three years that it would come no nearer, we
spent time fruitlessly pulling up roots to plant in the garden. All
this while, when no coaxing or care prevailed upon any transplanted
slip to grow, one was coming up silently outside the fence near the
wicket, coiling so secretly in the rabbit-brush that its presence was
never suspected until it flowered delicately along its twining length.
The horehound comes through the fence and under it, shouldering the
pickets off the railings; the brier rose mines under the horehound;
and no care, though I own I am not a close weeder, keeps the small
pale moons of the primrose from rising to the night moth under my
apple-trees. The first summer in the new place, a clump of cypripediums
came up by the irrigating ditch at the bottom of the lawn. But the
clematis will not come inside, nor the wild almond.
I have forgotten to find out, though I meant to, whether the wild
almond grew in that country where Moses kept the flocks of his
father-in-law, but if so one can account for the burning bush. It
comes upon one with a flame-burst as of revelation; little hard red
buds on leafless twigs, swelling unnoticeably, then one, two, or three
strong suns, and from tip to tip one soft fiery glow, whispering with
bees as a singing flame. A twig of finger size will be furred to the
thickness of one’s wrist by pink five-petaled bloom, so close that
only the blunt-faced wild bees find their way in it. In this latitude
late frosts cut off the hope of fruit too often for the wild almond to
multiply greatly, but the spiny, tap-rooted shrubs are resistant to
most plant evils.
It is not easy always to be attentive to the maturing of wild fruit.
Plants are so unobtrusive in their material processes, and always at
the significant moment some other bloom has reached its perfect hour.
One can never fix the precise moment when the rosy tint the field has
from the wild almond passes into the inspiring blue of lupines. One
notices here and there a spike of bloom, and a day later the whole
field royal and ruffling lightly to the wind. Part of the charm of
the lupine is the continual stir of its plumes to airs not suspected
otherwhere. Go and stand by any crown of bloom and the tall stalks do
but rock a little as for drowsiness, but look off across the field,
and on the stillest days there is always a trepidation in the purple
patches.