In one place we came upon a large company of naked natives, of both

sexes and all ages, amusing themselves with the national pastime of

surf-bathing. Each heathen would paddle three or four hundred yards out

to sea, (taking a short board with him), then face the shore and wait

for a particularly prodigious billow to come along; at the right moment

he would fling his board upon its foamy crest and himself upon the

board, and here he would come whizzing by like a bombshell! It did not

seem that a lightning express train could shoot along at a more hair-

lifting speed. I tried surf-bathing once, subsequently, but made a

failure of it. I got the board placed right, and at the right moment,

too; but missed the connection myself.—The board struck the shore in

three quarters of a second, without any cargo, and I struck the bottom

about the same time, with a couple of barrels of water in me. None but

natives ever master the art of surf-bathing thoroughly.

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At the end of an hour, we had made the four miles, and landed on a level

point of land, upon which was a wide extent of old ruins, with many a

tall cocoanut tree growing among them. Here was the ancient City of

Refuge—a vast inclosure, whose stone walls were twenty feet thick at the

base, and fifteen feet high; an oblong square, a thousand and forty feet

one way and a fraction under seven hundred the other. Within this

inclosure, in early times, has been three rude temples; each two hundred

and ten feet long by one hundred wide, and thirteen high.

In those days, if a man killed another anywhere on the island the

relatives were privileged to take the murderer’s life; and then a chase

for life and liberty began—the outlawed criminal flying through pathless

forests and over mountain and plain, with his hopes fixed upon the

protecting walls of the City of Refuge, and the avenger of blood

following hotly after him!

Sometimes the race was kept up to the very gates of the temple, and the

panting pair sped through long files of excited natives, who watched the

contest with flashing eye and dilated nostril, encouraging the hunted

refugee with sharp, inspiriting ejaculations, and sending up a ringing

shout of exultation when the saving gates closed upon him and the

cheated pursuer sank exhausted at the threshold. But sometimes the

flying criminal fell under the hand of the avenger at the very door,

when one more brave stride, one more brief second of time would have

brought his feet upon the sacred ground and barred him against all harm.

Where did these isolated pagans get this idea of a City of Refuge—this

ancient Oriental custom?

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This old sanctuary was sacred to all—even to rebels in arms and invading

armies. Once within its walls, and confession made to the priest and

absolution obtained, the wretch with a price upon his head could go

forth without fear and without danger—he was _tabu_, and to harm him was

death. The routed rebels in the lost battle for idolatry fled to this

place to claim sanctuary, and many were thus saved.

Close to the corner of the great inclosure is a round structure of

stone, some six or eight feet high, with a level top about ten or twelve

in diameter. This was the place of execution. A high palisade of

cocoanut piles shut out the cruel scenes from the vulgar multitude. Here

criminals were killed, the flesh stripped from the bones and burned, and

the bones secreted in holes in the body of the structure. If the man had

been guilty of a high crime, the entire corpse was burned.

The walls of the temple are a study. The same food for speculation that

is offered the visitor to the Pyramids of Egypt he will find here—the

mystery of how they were constructed by a people unacquainted with

science and mechanics. The natives have no invention of their own for

hoisting heavy weights, they had no beasts of burden, and they have

never even shown any knowledge of the properties of the lever. Yet some

of the lava blocks quarried out, brought over rough, broken ground, and

built into this wall, six or seven feet from the ground, are of

prodigious size and would weigh tons. How did they transport and how

raise them?

Both the inner and outer surfaces of the walls present a smooth front

and are very creditable specimens of masonry. The blocks are of all

manner of shapes and sizes, but yet are fitted together with the neatest

exactness. The gradual narrowing of the wall from the base upward is

accurately preserved.

No cement was used, but the edifice is firm and compact and is capable

of resisting storm and decay for centuries. Who built this temple, and

how was it built, and when, are mysteries that may never be unraveled.

Outside of these ancient walls lies a sort of coffin-shaped stone eleven

feet four inches long and three feet square at the small end (it would

weigh a few thousand pounds), which the high chief who held sway over

this district many centuries ago brought thither on his shoulder one day

to use as a lounge! This circumstance is established by the most

reliable traditions. He used to lie down on it, in his indolent way, and

keep an eye on his subjects at work for him and see that there was no

“soldiering” done. And no doubt there was not any done to speak of,

because he was a man of that sort of build that incites to attention to

business on the part of an employee.

He was fourteen or fifteen feet high. When he stretched himself at full

length on his lounge, his legs hung down over the end, and when he

snored he woke the dead. These facts are all attested by irrefragable

tradition.

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On the other side of the temple is a monstrous seven-ton rock, eleven

feet long, seven feet wide and three feet thick. It is raised a foot or

a foot and a half above the ground, and rests upon half a dozen little

stony pedestals. The same old fourteen-footer brought it down from the

mountain, merely for fun (he had his own notions about fun), and propped

it up as we find it now and as others may find it a century hence, for

it would take a score of horses to budge it from its position. They say

that fifty or sixty years ago the proud Queen Kaahumanu used to fly to

this rock for safety, whenever she had been making trouble with her

fierce husband, and hide under it until his wrath was appeased. But

these Kanakas will lie, and this statement is one of their ablest

efforts—for Kaahumanu was six feet high—she was bulky—she was built like

an ox—and she could no more have squeezed herself under that rock than

she could have passed between the cylinders of a sugar mill. What could

she gain by it, even if she succeeded? To be chased and abused by a

savage husband could not be otherwise than humiliating to her high

spirit, yet it could never make her feel so flat as an hour’s repose

under that rock would.

We walked a mile over a raised macadamized road of uniform width; a road

paved with flat stones and exhibiting in its every detail a considerable

degree of engineering skill. Some say that that wise old pagan,

Kamehameha I planned and built it, but others say it was built so long

before his time that the knowledge of who constructed it has passed out

of the traditions. In either case, however, as the handiwork of an

untaught and degraded race it is a thing of pleasing interest. The

stones are worn and smooth, and pushed apart in places, so that the road

has the exact appearance of those ancient paved highways leading out of

Rome which one sees in pictures.

The object of our tramp was to visit a great natural curiosity at the

base of the foothills—a congealed cascade of lava. Some old forgotten

volcanic eruption sent its broad river of fire down the mountain side

here, and it poured down in a great torrent from an overhanging bluff

some fifty feet high to the ground below. The flaming torrent cooled in

the winds from the sea, and remains there to-day, all seamed, and

frothed and rippled a petrified Niagara. It is very picturesque, and

withal so natural that one might almost imagine it still flowed. A

smaller stream trickled over the cliff and built up an isolated pyramid

about thirty feet high, which has the semblance of a mass of large

gnarled and knotted vines and roots and stems intricately twisted and

woven together.

We passed in behind the cascade and the pyramid, and found the bluff

pierced by several cavernous tunnels, whose crooked courses we followed

a long distance.

Two of these winding tunnels stand as proof of Nature’s mining

abilities. Their floors are level, they are seven feet wide, and their

roofs are gently arched. Their height is not uniform, however. We passed

through one a hundred feet long, which leads through a spur of the hill

and opens out well up in the sheer wall of a precipice whose foot rests

in the waves of the sea. It is a commodious tunnel, except that there

are occasional places in it where one must stoop to pass under. The roof

is lava, of course, and is thickly studded with little lava-pointed

icicles an inch long, which hardened as they dripped. They project as

closely together as the iron teeth of a corn-sheller, and if one will

stand up straight and walk any distance there, he can get his hair

combed free of charge.

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CHAPTER LXXIV.

We got back to the schooner in good time, and then sailed down to Kau,

where we disembarked and took final leave of the vessel. Next day we

bought horses and bent our way over the summer-clad mountain-terraces,

toward the great volcano of Kilauea (Ke-low-way-ah). We made nearly a

two days’ journey of it, but that was on account of laziness. Toward

sunset on the second day, we reached an elevation of some four thousand

feet above sea level, and as we picked our careful way through billowy

wastes of lava long generations ago stricken dead and cold in the climax

of its tossing fury, we began to come upon signs of the near presence of

the volcano—signs in the nature of ragged fissures that discharged jets

of sulphurous vapor into the air, hot from the molten ocean down in the

bowels of the mountain.

Shortly the crater came into view. I have seen Vesuvius since, but it

was a mere toy, a child’s volcano, a soup-kettle, compared to this.

Mount Vesuvius is a shapely cone thirty-six hundred feet high; its

crater an inverted cone only three hundred feet deep, and not more than

a thousand feet in diameter, if as much as that; its fires meagre,

modest, and docile.—But here was a vast, perpendicular, walled cellar,

nine hundred feet deep in some places, thirteen hundred in others,

level- floored, and _ten miles in circumference_! Here was a yawning pit

upon whose floor the armies of Russia could camp, and have room to

spare.

Perched upon the edge of the crater, at the opposite end from where we

stood, was a small look-out house—say three miles away. It assisted us,

by comparison, to comprehend and appreciate the great depth of the

basin—it looked like a tiny martin-box clinging at the eaves of a

cathedral. After some little time spent in resting and looking and

ciphering, we hurried on to the hotel.

By the path it is half a mile from the Volcano House to the lookout-

house. After a hearty supper we waited until it was thoroughly dark and

then started to the crater. The first glance in that direction revealed

a scene of wild beauty. There was a heavy fog over the crater and it was

splendidly illuminated by the glare from the fires below. The

illumination was two miles wide and a mile high, perhaps; and if you

ever, on a dark night and at a distance beheld the light from thirty or

forty blocks of distant buildings all on fire at once, reflected

strongly against over-hanging clouds, you can form a fair idea of what

this looked like.

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A colossal column of cloud towered to a great height in the air

immediately above the crater, and the outer swell of every one of its

vast folds was dyed with a rich crimson luster, which was subdued to a

pale rose tint in the depressions between. It glowed like a muffled

torch and stretched upward to a dizzy height toward the zenith. I

thought it just possible that its like had not been seen since the

children of Israel wandered on their long march through the desert so

many centuries ago over a path illuminated by the mysterious “pillar of

fire.” And I was sure that I now had a vivid conception of what the

majestic “pillar of fire” was like, which almost amounted to a

revelation.

Arrived at the little thatched lookout house, we rested our elbows on

the railing in front and looked abroad over the wide crater and down

over the sheer precipice at the seething fires beneath us. The view was

a startling improvement on my daylight experience. I turned to see the

effect on the balance of the company and found the reddest-faced set of

men I almost ever saw. In the strong light every countenance glowed like

red-hot iron, every shoulder was suffused with crimson and shaded

rearward into dingy, shapeless obscurity! The place below looked like

the infernal regions and these men like half-cooled devils just come up

on a furlough.

I turned my eyes upon the volcano again. The “cellar” was tolerably well

lighted up. For a mile and a half in front of us and half a mile on

either side, the floor of the abyss was magnificently illuminated;

beyond these limits the mists hung down their gauzy curtains and cast a

deceptive gloom over all that made the twinkling fires in the remote

corners of the crater seem countless leagues removed—made them seem like

the camp-fires of a great army far away. Here was room for the

imagination to work! You could imagine those lights the width of a

continent away—and that hidden under the intervening darkness were

hills, and winding rivers, and weary wastes of plain and desert—and even

then the tremendous vista stretched on, and on, and on!—to the fires and

far beyond! You could not compass it—it was the idea of eternity made

tangible—and the longest end of it made visible to the naked eye!

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The greater part of the vast floor of the desert under us was as black

as ink, and apparently smooth and level; but over a mile square of it

was ringed and streaked and striped with a thousand branching streams of

liquid and gorgeously brilliant fire! It looked like a colossal railroad

map of the State of Massachusetts done in chain lightning on a midnight

sky. Imagine it—imagine a coal-black sky shivered into a tangled net-

work of angry fire!

Here and there were gleaming holes a hundred feet in diameter, broken in

the dark crust, and in them the melted lava—the color a dazzling white

just tinged with yellow—was boiling and surging furiously; and from

these holes branched numberless bright torrents in many directions, like

the spokes of a wheel, and kept a tolerably straight course for a while

and then swept round in huge rainbow curves, or made a long succession

of sharp worm-fence angles, which looked precisely like the fiercest

jagged lightning. These streams met other streams, and they mingled with

and crossed and recrossed each other in every conceivable direction,

like skate tracks on a popular skating ground. Sometimes streams twenty

or thirty feet wide flowed from the holes to some distance without

dividing—and through the opera-glasses we could see that they ran down

small, steep hills and were genuine cataracts of fire, white at their

source, but soon cooling and turning to the richest red, grained with

alternate lines of black and gold. Every now and then masses of the dark

crust broke away and floated slowly down these streams like rafts down a

river. Occasionally the molten lava flowing under the superincumbent

crust broke through—split a dazzling streak, from five hundred to a

thousand feet long, like a sudden flash of lightning, and then acre

after acre of the cold lava parted into fragments, turned up edgewise

like cakes of ice when a great river breaks up, plunged downward and

were swallowed in the crimson cauldron. Then the wide expanse of the

“thaw” maintained a ruddy glow for a while, but shortly cooled and

became black and level again. During a “thaw,” every dismembered cake

was marked by a glittering white border which was superbly shaded inward

by aurora borealis rays, which were a flaming yellow where they joined

the white border, and from thence toward their points tapered into

glowing crimson, then into a rich, pale carmine, and finally into a

faint blush that held its own a moment and then dimmed and turned black.

Some of the streams preferred to mingle together in a tangle of

fantastic circles, and then they looked something like the confusion of

ropes one sees on a ship’s deck when she has just taken in sail and

dropped anchor—provided one can imagine those ropes on fire.

Through the glasses, the little fountains scattered about looked very

beautiful. They boiled, and coughed, and spluttered, and discharged

sprays of stringy red fire—of about the consistency of mush, for

instance—from ten to fifteen feet into the air, along with a shower of

brilliant white sparks—a quaint and unnatural mingling of gouts of blood

and snow-flakes!

We had circles and serpents and streaks of lightning all twined and

wreathed and tied together, without a break throughout an area more than

a mile square (that amount of ground was covered, though it was not

strictly “square”), and it was with a feeling of placid exultation that

we reflected that many years had elapsed since any visitor had seen such

a splendid display—since any visitor had seen anything more than the now

snubbed and insignificant “North” and “South” lakes in action. We had

been reading old files of Hawaiian newspapers and the “Record Book” at

the Volcano House, and were posted.

I could see the North Lake lying out on the black floor away off in the

outer edge of our panorama, and knitted to it by a web-work of lava

streams. In its individual capacity it looked very little more

respectable than a schoolhouse on fire. True, it was about nine hundred

feet long and two or three hundred wide, but then, under the present

circumstances, it necessarily appeared rather insignificant, and besides

it was so distant from us.

I forgot to say that the noise made by the bubbling lava is not great,

heard as we heard it from our lofty perch. It makes three distinct

sounds—a rushing, a hissing, and a coughing or puffing sound; and if you

stand on the brink and close your eyes it is no trick at all to imagine

that you are sweeping down a river on a large low-pressure steamer, and

that you hear the hissing of the steam about her boilers, the puffing

from her escape-pipes and the churning rush of the water abaft her

wheels. The smell of sulphur is strong, but not unpleasant to a sinner.

We left the lookout house at ten o’clock in a half cooked condition,

because of the heat from Pele’s furnaces, and wrapping up in blankets,

for the night was cold, we returned to our Hotel.

CHAPTER LXXV.

The next night was appointed for a visit to the bottom of the crater,

for we desired to traverse its floor and see the “North Lake” (of fire)

which lay two miles away, toward the further wall. After dark half a

dozen of us set out, with lanterns and native guides, and climbed down a

crazy, thousand-foot pathway in a crevice fractured in the crater wall,

and reached the bottom in safety.

The irruption of the previous evening had spent its force and the floor

looked black and cold; but when we ran out upon it we found it hot yet,

to the feet, and it was likewise riven with crevices which revealed the

underlying fires gleaming vindictively. A neighboring cauldron was

threatening to overflow, and this added to the dubiousness of the

situation. So the native guides refused to continue the venture, and

then every body deserted except a stranger named Marlette. He said he

had been in the crater a dozen times in daylight and believed he could

find his way through it at night. He thought that a run of three hundred

yards would carry us over the hottest part of the floor and leave us our

shoe-soles. His pluck gave me back-bone. We took one lantern and

instructed the guides to hang the other to the roof of the look-out

house to serve as a beacon for us in case we got lost, and then the

party started back up the precipice and Marlette and I made our run. We

skipped over the hot floor and over the red crevices with brisk dispatch

and reached the cold lava safe but with pretty warm feet. Then we took

things leisurely and comfortably, jumping tolerably wide and probably

bottomless chasms, and threading our way through picturesque lava

upheavals with considerable confidence. When we got fairly away from the

cauldrons of boiling fire, we seemed to be in a gloomy desert, and a

suffocatingly dark one, surrounded by dim walls that seemed to tower to

the sky. The only cheerful objects were the glinting stars high

overhead.

By and by Marlette shouted “Stop!” I never stopped quicker in my life. I

asked what the matter was. He said we were out of the path. He said we

must not try to go on till we found it again, for we were surrounded

with beds of rotten lava through which we could easily break and plunge

down a thousand feet. I thought eight hundred would answer for me, and

was about to say so when Marlette partly proved his statement by

accidentally crushing through and disappearing to his arm-pits.

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He got out and we hunted for the path with the lantern. He said there

was only one path and that it was but vaguely defined. We could not find

it. The lava surface was all alike in the lantern light. But he was an

ingenious man. He said it was not the lantern that had informed him that

we were out of the path, but his _feet_. He had noticed a crisp grinding

of fine lava-needles under his feet, and some instinct reminded him that

in the path these were all worn away. So he put the lantern behind him,

and began to search with his boots instead of his eyes. It was good

sagacity. The first time his foot touched a surface that did not grind

under it he announced that the trail was found again; and after that we

kept up a sharp listening for the rasping sound and it always warned us

in time.

It was a long tramp, but an exciting one. We reached the North Lake

between ten and eleven o’clock, and sat down on a huge overhanging lava-

shelf, tired but satisfied. The spectacle presented was worth coming

double the distance to see. Under us, and stretching away before us, was

a heaving sea of molten fire of seemingly limitless extent. The glare

from it was so blinding that it was some time before we could bear to

look upon it steadily.

It was like gazing at the sun at noon-day, except that the glare was not

quite so white. At unequal distances all around the shores of the lake

were nearly white-hot chimneys or hollow drums of lava, four or five

feet high, and up through them were bursting gorgeous sprays of lava-

gouts and gem spangles, some white, some red and some golden—a ceaseless

bombardment, and one that fascinated the eye with its unapproachable

splendor. The mere distant jets, sparkling up through an intervening

gossamer veil of vapor, seemed miles away; and the further the curving

ranks of fiery fountains receded, the more fairy-like and beautiful they

appeared.

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Now and then the surging bosom of the lake under our noses would calm

down ominously and seem to be gathering strength for an enterprise; and

then all of a sudden a red dome of lava of the bulk of an ordinary

dwelling would heave itself aloft like an escaping balloon, then burst

asunder, and out of its heart would flit a pale-green film of vapor, and

float upward and vanish in the darkness—a released soul soaring homeward

from captivity with the damned, no doubt. The crashing plunge of the

ruined dome into the lake again would send a world of seething billows

lashing against the shores and shaking the foundations of our perch. By

and by, a loosened mass of the hanging shelf we sat on tumbled into the

lake, jarring the surroundings like an earthquake and delivering a

suggestion that may have been intended for a hint, and may not. We did

not wait to see.

We got lost again on our way back, and were more than an hour hunting

for the path. We were where we could see the beacon lantern at the look-

out house at the time, but thought it was a star and paid no attention

to it. We reached the hotel at two o’clock in the morning pretty well

fagged out.

Kilauea never overflows its vast crater, but bursts a passage for its

lava through the mountain side when relief is necessary, and then the

destruction is fearful. About 1840 it rent its overburdened stomach and

sent a broad river of fire careering down to the sea, which swept away

forests, huts, plantations and every thing else that lay in its path.

The stream was _five miles broad_, in places, and _two hundred feet

deep_, and the distance it traveled was forty miles. It tore up and bore

away acre-patches of land on its bosom like rafts—rocks, trees and all

intact. At night the red glare was visible a hundred miles at sea; and

at a distance of forty miles fine print could be read at midnight. The

atmosphere was poisoned with sulphurous vapors and choked with falling

ashes, pumice stones and cinders; countless columns of smoke rose up and

blended together in a tumbled canopy that hid the heavens and glowed

with a ruddy flush reflected from the fires below; here and there jets

of lava sprung hundreds of feet into the air and burst into rocket-

sprays that returned to earth in a crimson rain; and all the while the

laboring mountain shook with Nature’s great palsy and voiced its

distress in moanings and the muffled booming of subterranean thunders.

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Fishes were killed for twenty miles along the shore, where the lava

entered the sea. The earthquakes caused some loss of human life, and a

prodigious tidal wave swept inland, carrying every thing before it and

drowning a number of natives. The devastation consummated along the

route traversed by the river of lava was complete and incalculable. Only

a Pompeii and a Herculaneum were needed at the foot of Kilauea to make

the story of the irruption immortal.

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CHAPTER LXXVI.

We rode horseback all around the island of Hawaii (the crooked road

making the distance two hundred miles), and enjoyed the journey very

much. We were more than a week making the trip, because our Kanaka

horses would not go by a house or a hut without stopping—whip and spur

could not alter their minds about it, and so we finally found that it

economized time to let them have their way. Upon inquiry the mystery was

explained: the natives are such thorough-going gossips that they never

pass a house without stopping to swap news, and consequently their

horses learn to regard that sort of thing as an essential part of the

whole duty of man, and his salvation not to be compassed without it.

However, at a former crisis of my life I had once taken an aristocratic

young lady out driving, behind a horse that had just retired from a long

and honorable career as the moving impulse of a milk wagon, and so this

present experience awoke a reminiscent sadness in me in place of the

exasperation more natural to the occasion. I remembered how helpless I

was that day, and how humiliated; how ashamed I was of having intimated

to the girl that I had always owned the horse and was accustomed to

grandeur; how hard I tried to appear easy, and even vivacious, under

suffering that was consuming my vitals; how placidly and maliciously the

girl smiled, and kept on smiling, while my hot blushes baked themselves

into a permanent blood-pudding in my face; how the horse ambled from one

side of the street to the other and waited complacently before every

third house two minutes and a quarter while I belabored his back and

reviled him in my heart; how I tried to keep him from turning corners

and failed; how I moved heaven and earth to get him out of town, and did

not succeed; how he traversed the entire settlement and delivered

imaginary milk at a hundred and sixty-two different domiciles, and how

he finally brought up at a dairy depot and refused to budge further,

thus rounding and completing the revealment of what the plebeian service

of his life had been; how, in eloquent silence, I walked the girl home,

and how, when I took leave of her, her parting remark scorched my soul

and appeared to blister me all over: she said that my horse was a fine,

capable animal, and I must have taken great comfort in him in my

time—but that if I would take along some milk-tickets next time, and

appear to deliver them at the various halting places, it might expedite

his movements a little. There was a coolness between us after that.

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In one place in the island of Hawaii, we saw a laced and ruffled

cataract of limpid water leaping from a sheer precipice fifteen hundred

feet high; but that sort of scenery finds its stanchest ally in the

arithmetic rather than in spectacular effect. If one desires to be so

stirred by a poem of Nature wrought in the happily commingled graces of

picturesque rocks, glimpsed distances, foliage, color, shifting lights

and shadows, and falling water, that the tears almost come into his eyes

so potent is the charm exerted, he need not go away from America to

enjoy such an experience. The Rainbow Fall, in Watkins Glen (N.Y.), on

the Erie railway, is an example. It would recede into pitiable

insignificance if the callous tourist drew on arithmetic on it; but left

to compete for the honors simply on scenic grace and beauty—the grand,

the august and the sublime being barred the contest—it could challenge

the old world and the new to produce its peer.

In one locality, on our journey, we saw some horses that had been born

and reared on top of the mountains, above the range of running water,

and consequently they had never drank that fluid in their lives, but had

been always accustomed to quenching their thirst by eating dew-laden or

shower-wetted leaves. And now it was destructively funny to see them

sniff suspiciously at a pail of water, and then put in their noses and

try to take a _bite_ out of the fluid, as if it were a solid. Finding it

liquid, they would snatch away their heads and fall to trembling,

snorting and showing other evidences of fright. When they became

convinced at last that the water was friendly and harmless, they thrust

in their noses up to their eyes, brought out a mouthful of water, and

proceeded to _chew_ it complacently. We saw a man coax, kick and spur

one of them five or ten minutes before he could make it cross a running

stream. It spread its nostrils, distended its eyes and trembled all

over, just as horses customarily do in the presence of a serpent—and for

aught I know it thought the crawling stream _was_ a serpent.

In due course of time our journey came to an end at Kawaehae (usually

pronounced To-a-_hi_—and before we find fault with this elaborate

orthographical method of arriving at such an unostentatious result, let

us lop off the _ugh_ from our word “though”). I made this horseback trip

on a mule. I paid ten dollars for him at Kau (Kah-oo), added four to get

him shod, rode him two hundred miles, and then sold him for fifteen

dollars. I mark the circumstance with a white stone (in the absence of

chalk—for I never saw a white stone that a body could mark anything

with, though out of respect for the ancients I have tried it often

enough); for up to that day and date it was the first strictly

commercial transaction I had ever entered into, and come out winner. We

returned to Honolulu, and from thence sailed to the island of Maui, and

spent several weeks there very pleasantly. I still remember, with a

sense of indolent luxury, a picnicing excursion up a romantic gorge

there, called the Iao Valley. The trail lay along the edge of a brawling

stream in the bottom of the gorge—a shady route, for it was well roofed

with the verdant domes of forest trees. Through openings in the foliage

we glimpsed picturesque scenery that revealed ceaseless changes and new

charms with every step of our progress. Perpendicular walls from one to

three thousand feet high guarded the way, and were sumptuously plumed

with varied foliage, in places, and in places swathed in waving ferns.

Passing shreds of cloud trailed their shadows across these shining

fronts, mottling them with blots; billowy masses of white vapor hid the

turreted summits, and far above the vapor swelled a background of

gleaming green crags and cones that came and went, through the veiling

mists, like islands drifting in a fog; sometimes the cloudy curtain

descended till half the cañon wall was hidden, then shredded gradually

away till only airy glimpses of the ferny front appeared through it—then

swept aloft and left it glorified in the sun again. Now and then, as our

position changed, rocky bastions swung out from the wall, a mimic ruin

of castellated ramparts and crumbling towers clothed with mosses and

hung with garlands of swaying vines, and as we moved on they swung back

again and hid themselves once more in the foliage. Presently a verdure-

clad needle of stone, a thousand feet high, stepped out from behind a

corner, and mounted guard over the mysteries of the valley. It seemed to

me that if Captain Cook needed a monument, here was one ready

made—therefore, why not put up his sign here, and sell out the venerable

cocoanut stump?

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But the chief pride of Maui is her dead volcano of Haleakala—which

means, translated, “the house of the sun.” We climbed a thousand feet up

the side of this isolated colossus one afternoon; then camped, and next

day climbed the remaining nine thousand feet, and anchored on the

summit, where we built a fire and froze and roasted by turns, all night.

With the first pallor of dawn we got up and saw things that were new to

us. Mounted on a commanding pinnacle, we watched Nature work her silent

wonders. The sea was spread abroad on every hand, its tumbled surface

seeming only wrinkled and dimpled in the distance. A broad valley below

appeared like an ample checker-board, its velvety green sugar

plantations alternating with dun squares of barrenness and groves of

trees diminished to mossy tufts. Beyond the valley were mountains

picturesquely grouped together; but bear in mind, we fancied that we

were looking _up_ at these things—not down. We seemed to sit in the

bottom of a symmetrical bowl ten thousand feet deep, with the valley and

the skirting sea lifted away into the sky above us! It was curious; and

not only curious, but aggravating; for it was having our trouble all for

nothing, to climb ten thousand feet toward heaven and then have to look

_up_ at our scenery. However, we had to be content with it and make the

best of it; for, all we could do we could not coax our landscape down

out of the clouds. Formerly, when I had read an article in which Poe

treated of this singular fraud perpetrated upon the eye by isolated

great altitudes, I had looked upon the matter as an invention of his own

fancy.

I have spoken of the outside view—but we had an inside one, too. That

was the yawning dead crater, into which we now and then tumbled rocks,

half as large as a barrel, from our perch, and saw them go careering

down the almost perpendicular sides, bounding three hundred feet at a

jump; kicking up cast-clouds wherever they struck; diminishing to our

view as they sped farther into distance; growing invisible, finally, and

only betraying their course by faint little puffs of dust; and coming to

a halt at last in the bottom of the abyss, two thousand five hundred

feet down from where they started! It was magnificent sport. We wore

ourselves out at it.

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The crater of Vesuvius, as I have before remarked, is a modest pit about

a thousand feet deep and three thousand in circumference; that of

Kilauea is somewhat deeper, and _ten miles_ in circumference. But what

are either of them compared to the vacant stomach of Haleakala? I will

not offer any figures of my own, but give official ones—those of

Commander Wilkes, U.S.N., who surveyed it and testifies that it is

_twenty-seven miles in circumference_! If it had a level bottom it would

make a fine site for a city like London. It must have afforded a

spectacle worth contemplating in the old days when its furnaces gave

full rein to their anger.

Presently vagrant white clouds came drifting along, high over the sea

and the valley; then they came in couples and groups; then in imposing

squadrons; gradually joining their forces, they banked themselves

solidly together, a thousand feet under us, and _totally shut out land

and ocean_—not a vestige of _anything_ was left in view but just a

little of the rim of the crater, circling away from the pinnacle whereon

we sat (for a ghostly procession of wanderers from the filmy hosts

without had drifted through a chasm in the crater wall and filed round

and round, and gathered and sunk and blended together till the abyss was

stored to the brim with a fleecy fog). Thus banked, motion ceased, and

silence reigned. Clear to the horizon, league on league, the snowy floor

stretched without a break—not level, but in rounded folds, with shallow

creases between, and with here and there stately piles of vapory

architecture lifting themselves aloft out of the common plain—some near

at hand, some in the middle distances, and others relieving the monotony

of the remote solitudes. There was little conversation, for the

impressive scene overawed speech. I felt like the Last Man, neglected of

the judgment, and left pinnacled in mid-heaven, a forgotten relic of a

vanished world.

While the hush yet brooded, the messengers of the coming resurrection

appeared in the East. A growing warmth suffused the horizon, and soon

the sun emerged and looked out over the cloud-waste, flinging bars of

ruddy light across it, staining its folds and billow-caps with blushes,

purpling the shaded troughs between, and glorifying the massy vapor-

palaces and cathedrals with a wasteful splendor of all blendings and

combinations of rich coloring.

It was the sublimest spectacle I ever witnessed, and I think the memory

of it will remain with me always.

CHAPTER LXXVII.

I stumbled upon one curious character in the Island of Maui. He became a

sore annoyance to me in the course of time. My first glimpse of him was

in a sort of public room in the town of Lahaina. He occupied a chair at

the opposite side of the apartment, and sat eyeing our party with

interest for some minutes, and listening as critically to what we were

saying as if he fancied we were talking to him and expecting him to

reply. I thought it very sociable in a stranger. Presently, in the

course of conversation, I made a statement bearing upon the subject

under discussion—and I made it with due modesty, for there was nothing

extraordinary about it, and it was only put forth in illustration of a

point at issue. I had barely finished when this person spoke out with

rapid utterance and feverish anxiety:

“Oh, that was certainly remarkable, after a fashion, but you ought to

have seen _my_ chimney—you ought to have seen _my_ chimney, sir! Smoke!

I wish I may hang if—Mr. Jones, _you_ remember that chimney—_you_ must

remember that chimney! No, no—I recollect, now, you warn’t living on

this side of the island then. But I am telling you nothing but the

truth, and I wish I may never draw another breath if that chimney didn’t

smoke so that the smoke actually got _caked_ in it and I had to dig it

out with a pickaxe! You may smile, gentlemen, but the High Sheriff’s got

a hunk of it which I dug out before his eyes, and so it’s perfectly easy

for you to go and examine for yourselves.”

The interruption broke up the conversation, which had already begun to

lag, and we presently hired some natives and an out-rigger canoe or two,

and went out to overlook a grand surf-bathing contest.

Two weeks after this, while talking in a company, I looked up and

detected this same man boring through and through me with his intense

eye, and noted again his twitching muscles and his feverish anxiety to

speak. The moment I paused, he said:

“_Beg_ your pardon, sir, beg your pardon, but it can only be considered

remarkable when brought into strong outline by isolation. Sir,

contrasted with a circumstance which occurred in my own experience, it

instantly becomes commonplace. No, not that—for I will not speak so

discourteously of any experience in the career of a stranger and a

gentleman—but I am _obliged_ to say that you could not, and you _would_

not ever again refer to this tree as a _large_ one, if you could behold,

as I have, the great Yakmatack tree, in the island of Ounaska, sea of

Kamtchatka—a tree, sir, not one inch less than four hundred and fifteen

feet in solid diameter!—and I wish I may die in a minute if it isn’t so!

Oh, you needn’t look so questioning, gentlemen; here’s old Cap Saltmarsh

can say whether I know what I’m talking about or not. I showed him the

tree.”

_Captain Saltmarsh_.—“Come, now, cat your anchor, lad—you’re heaving too

taut. You _promised_ to show me that stunner, and I walked more than

eleven mile with you through the cussedest jungle _I_ ever see, a

hunting for it; but the tree you showed me finally warn’t as big around

as a beer cask, and _you_ know that your own self, Markiss.”

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“Hear the man talk! Of _course_ the tree was reduced that way, but

didn’t I _explain_ it? Answer me, didn’t I? Didn’t I say I wished you

could have seen it when _I_ first saw it? When you got up on your ear

and called me names, and said I had brought you eleven miles to look at

a sapling, didn’t I _explain_ to you that all the whale-ships in the

North Seas had been wooding off of it for more than twenty-seven years?

And did you s’pose the tree could last for-_ever_, con-_found_ it? I

don’t see why you want to keep back things that way, and try to injure a

person that’s never done _you_ any harm.”

Somehow this man’s presence made me uncomfortable, and I was glad when a

native arrived at that moment to say that Muckawow, the most

companionable and luxurious among the rude war-chiefs of the Islands,

desired us to come over and help him enjoy a missionary whom he had

found trespassing on his grounds.

I think it was about ten days afterward that, as I finished a statement

I was making for the instruction of a group of friends and

acquaintances, and which made no pretence of being extraordinary, a

familiar voice chimed instantly in on the heels of my last word, and

said:

“But, my dear sir, there was _nothing_ remarkable about that horse, or

the circumstance either—nothing in the world! I mean no sort of offence

when I say it, sir, but you really do not know anything whatever about

speed. Bless your heart, if you could only have seen my mare Margaretta;

_there_ was a beast!—_there_ was lightning for you! Trot! Trot is no

name for it—she flew! How she could whirl a buggy along! I started her

out once, sir—Colonel Bilgewater, _you_ recollect that animal perfectly

well—I started her out about thirty or thirty-five yards ahead of the

awfullest storm I ever saw in my life, and it chased us upwards of

eighteen miles! It did, by the everlasting hills! And I’m telling you

nothing but the unvarnished truth when I say that not one single _drop_

of rain fell on me—not a single drop, sir! And I swear to it! But my dog

was a-swimming behind the wagon all the way!”

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For a week or two I stayed mostly within doors, for I seemed to meet

this person everywhere, and he had become utterly hateful to me. But one

evening I dropped in on Captain Perkins and his friends, and we had a

sociable time. About ten o’clock I chanced to be talking about a

merchant friend of mine, and without really intending it, the remark

slipped out that he was a little mean and parsimonious about paying his

workmen. Instantly, through the steam of a hot whiskey punch on the

opposite side of the room, a remembered voice shot—and for a moment I

trembled on the imminent verge of profanity:

“Oh, my dear sir, really you expose yourself when you parade _that_ as a

surprising circumstance. Bless your heart and hide, you are ignorant of

the very A B C of meanness! ignorant as the unborn babe! ignorant as

unborn _twins_! You don’t know _anything_ about it! It is pitiable to

see you, sir, a well-spoken and prepossessing stranger, making such an

enormous pow-wow here about a subject concerning which your ignorance is

perfectly humiliating! Look me in the eye, if you please; look me in the

eye. John James Godfrey was the son of poor but honest parents in the

State of Mississippi—boyhood friend of mine—bosom comrade in later

years. Heaven rest his noble spirit, he is gone from us now. John James

Godfrey was hired by the Hayblossom Mining Company in California to do

some blasting for them—the “Incorporated Company of Mean Men,” the boys

used to call it.

“Well, one day he drilled a hole about four feet deep and put in an

awful blast of powder, and was standing over it ramming it down with an

iron crowbar about nine foot long, when the cussed thing struck a spark

and fired the powder, and scat! away John Godfrey whizzed like a

skyrocket, him and his crowbar! Well, sir, he kept on going up in the

air higher and higher, till he didn’t look any bigger than a boy—and he

kept going on up higher and higher, till he didn’t look any bigger than

a doll—and he kept on going up higher and higher, till he didn’t look

any bigger than a little small bee—and then he went out of sight!

Presently he came in sight again, looking like a little small bee—and he

came along down further and further, till he looked as big as a doll

again—and down further and further, till he was as big as a boy

again—and further and further, till he was a full-sized man once more;

and then him and his crowbar came a wh-izzing down and lit right exactly

in the same old tracks and went to r-ramming down, and r-ramming down,

and r-ramming down again, just the same as if nothing had happened! Now

do you know, that poor cuss warn’t gone only sixteen minutes, and yet

that Incorporated Company of Mean Men DOCKED HIM FOR THE LOST TIME!”

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I said I had the headache, and so excused myself and went home. And on

my diary I entered “another night spoiled” by this offensive loafer. And

a fervent curse was set down with it to keep the item company. And the

very next day I packed up, out of all patience, and left the Island.

Almost from the very beginning, I regarded that man as a liar

.................................

The line of points represents an interval of years. At the end of which

time the opinion hazarded in that last sentence came to be gratifyingly

and remarkably endorsed, and by wholly disinterested persons. The man

Markiss was found one morning hanging to a beam of his own bedroom (the

doors and windows securely fastened on the inside), dead; and on his

breast was pinned a paper in his own handwriting begging his friends to

suspect no innocent person of having any thing to do with his death, for

that it was the work of his own hands entirely. Yet the jury brought in

the astounding verdict that deceased came to his death “by the hands of

some person or persons unknown!” They explained that the perfectly

undeviating consistency of Markiss’s character for thirty years towered

aloft as colossal and indestructible testimony, that whatever statement

he chose to make was entitled to instant and unquestioning acceptance as

a _lie_. And they furthermore stated their belief that he was not dead,

and instanced the strong circumstantial evidence of his own word that he

_was_ dead—and beseeched the coroner to delay the funeral as long as

possible, which was done. And so in the tropical climate of Lahaina the

coffin stood open for seven days, and then even the loyal jury gave him

up. But they sat on him again, and changed their verdict to “suicide

induced by mental aberration”—because, said they, with penetration, “he

said he was dead, and he _was_ dead; and would he have told the truth if

he had been in his right mind? No, sir.”

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CHAPTER LXXIII.

After half a year’s luxurious vagrancy in the islands, I took shipping

in a sailing vessel, and regretfully returned to San Francisco—a voyage

in every way delightful, but without an incident: unless lying two long

weeks in a dead calm, eighteen hundred miles from the nearest land, may

rank as an incident. Schools of whales grew so tame that day after day

they played about the ship among the porpoises and the sharks without

the least apparent fear of us, and we pelted them with empty bottles for

lack of better sport. Twenty-four hours afterward these bottles would be

still lying on the glassy water under our noses, showing that the ship

had not moved out of her place in all that time. The calm was absolutely

breathless, and the surface of the sea absolutely without a wrinkle. For

a whole day and part of a night we lay so close to another ship that had

drifted to our vicinity, that we carried on conversations with her

passengers, introduced each other by name, and became pretty intimately

acquainted with people we had never heard of before, and have never

heard of since. This was the only vessel we saw during the whole lonely

voyage.

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We had fifteen passengers, and to show how hard pressed they were at

last for occupation and amusement, I will mention that the gentlemen

gave a good part of their time every day, during the calm, to trying to

sit on an empty champagne bottle (lying on its side), and thread a

needle without touching their heels to the deck, or falling over; and

the ladies sat in the shade of the mainsail, and watched the enterprise

with absorbing interest. We were at sea five Sundays; and yet, but for

the almanac, we never would have known but that all the other days were

Sundays too.

I was home again, in San Francisco, without means and without

employment. I tortured my brain for a saving scheme of some kind, and at

last a public lecture occurred to me! I sat down and wrote one, in a

fever of hopeful anticipation. I showed it to several friends, but they

all shook their heads. They said nobody would come to hear me, and I

would make a humiliating failure of it.

They said that as I had never spoken in public, I would break down in

the delivery, anyhow. I was disconsolate now. But at last an editor

slapped me on the back and told me to “go ahead.” He said, “Take the

largest house in town, and charge a dollar a ticket.” The audacity of

the proposition was charming; it seemed fraught with practical worldly

wisdom, however. The proprietor of the several theatres endorsed the

advice, and said I might have his handsome new opera-house at half

price—fifty dollars. In sheer desperation I took it—on credit, for

sufficient reasons. In three days I did a hundred and fifty dollars’

worth of printing and advertising, and was the most distressed and

frightened creature on the Pacific coast. I could not sleep—who could,

under such circumstances? For other people there was facetiousness in

the last line of my posters, but to me it was plaintive with a pang when

I wrote it:

“Doors open at 7½. The trouble will begin at 8.”

That line has done good service since. Showmen have borrowed it

frequently. I have even seen it appended to a newspaper advertisement

reminding school pupils in vacation what time next term would begin. As

those three days of suspense dragged by, I grew more and more unhappy. I

had sold two hundred tickets among my personal friends, but I feared

they might not come. My lecture, which had seemed “humorous” to me, at

first, grew steadily more and more dreary, till not a vestige of fun

seemed left, and I grieved that I could not bring a coffin on the stage

and turn the thing into a funeral. I was so panic-stricken, at last,

that I went to three old friends, giants in stature, cordial by nature,

and stormy-voiced, and said:

“This thing is going to be a failure; the jokes in it are so dim that

nobody will ever see them; I would like to have you sit in the

parquette, and help me through.”

They said they would. Then I went to the wife of a popular citizen, and

said that if she was willing to do me a very great kindness, I would be

glad if she and her husband would sit prominently in the left-hand

stage- box, where the whole house could see them. I explained that I

should need help, and would turn toward her and smile, as a signal, when

I had been delivered of an obscure joke—“and then,” I added, “don’t wait

to investigate, but _respond_!”

She promised. Down the street I met a man I never had seen before. He

had been drinking, and was beaming with smiles and good nature. He said:

“My name’s Sawyer. You don’t know me, but that don’t matter. I haven’t

got a cent, but if you knew how bad I wanted to laugh, you’d give me a

ticket. Come, now, what do you say?”

“Is your laugh hung on a hair-trigger?—that is, is it critical, or can

you get it off _easy_?”

My drawling infirmity of speech so affected him that he laughed a

specimen or two that struck me as being about the article I wanted, and

I gave him a ticket, and appointed him to sit in the second circle, in

the centre, and be responsible for that division of the house. I gave

him minute instructions about how to detect indistinct jokes, and then

went away, and left him chuckling placidly over the novelty of the idea.

I ate nothing on the last of the three eventful days—I only suffered. I

had advertised that on this third day the box-office would be opened for

the sale of reserved seats. I crept down to the theater at four in the

afternoon to see if any sales had been made. The ticket seller was gone,

the box-office was locked up. I had to swallow suddenly, or my heart

would have got out. “No sales,” I said to myself; “I might have known

it.” I thought of suicide, pretended illness, flight. I thought of these

things in earnest, for I was very miserable and scared. But of course I

had to drive them away, and prepare to meet my fate. I could not wait

for half-past seven—I wanted to face the horror, and end it—the feeling

of many a man doomed to hang, no doubt. I went down back streets at six

o’clock, and entered the theatre by the back door. I stumbled my way in

the dark among the ranks of canvas scenery, and stood on the stage. The

house was gloomy and silent, and its emptiness depressing. I went into

the dark among the scenes again, and for an hour and a half gave myself

up to the horrors, wholly unconscious of everything else. Then I heard a

murmur; it rose higher and higher, and ended in a crash, mingled with

cheers. It made my hair raise, it was so close to me, and so loud.

There was a pause, and then another; presently came a third, and before

I well knew what I was about, I was in the middle of the stage, staring

at a sea of faces, bewildered by the fierce glare of the lights, and

quaking in every limb with a terror that seemed like to take my life

away. The house was full, aisles and all!

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The tumult in my heart and brain and legs continued a full minute before

I could gain any command over myself. Then I recognized the charity and

the friendliness in the faces before me, and little by little my fright

melted away, and I began to talk. Within three or four minutes I was

comfortable, and even content. My three chief allies, with three

auxiliaries, were on hand, in the parquette, all sitting together, all

armed with bludgeons, and all ready to make an onslaught upon the

feeblest joke that might show its head. And whenever a joke did fall,

their bludgeons came down and their faces seemed to split from ear to

ear;

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Sawyer, whose hearty countenance was seen looming redly in the centre of

the second circle, took it up, and the house was carried handsomely.

Inferior jokes never fared so royally before. Presently I delivered a

bit of serious matter with impressive unction (it was my pet), and the

audience listened with an absorbed hush that gratified me more than any

applause; and as I dropped the last word of the clause, I happened to

turn and catch Mrs.—’s intent and waiting eye; my conversation with her

flashed upon me, and in spite of all I could do I smiled. She took it

for the signal, and promptly delivered a mellow laugh that touched off

the whole audience; and the explosion that followed was the triumph of

the evening. I thought that that honest man Sawyer would choke himself;

and as for the bludgeons, they performed like pile-drivers. But my poor

little morsel of pathos was ruined. It was taken in good faith as an

intentional joke, and the prize one of the entertainment, and I wisely

let it go at that.

All the papers were kind in the morning; my appetite returned; I had a

abundance of money. All’s well that ends well.

CHAPTER LXXIX.

I launched out as a lecturer, now, with great boldness. I had the field

all to myself, for public lectures were almost an unknown commodity in

the Pacific market. They are not so rare, now, I suppose. I took an old

personal friend along to play agent for me, and for two or three weeks

we roamed through Nevada and California and had a very cheerful time of

it. Two days before I lectured in Virginia City, two stagecoaches were

robbed within two miles of the town. The daring act was committed just

at dawn, by six masked men, who sprang up alongside the coaches,

presented revolvers at the heads of the drivers and passengers, and

commanded a general dismount. Everybody climbed down, and the robbers

took their watches and every cent they had. Then they took gunpowder and

blew up the express specie boxes and got their contents. The leader of

the robbers was a small, quick-spoken man, and the fame of his vigorous

manner and his intrepidity was in everybody’s mouth when we arrived.

The night after instructing Virginia, I walked over the desolate

“divide” and down to Gold Hill, and lectured there. The lecture done, I

stopped to talk with a friend, and did not start back till eleven. The

“divide” was high, unoccupied ground, between the towns, the scene of

twenty midnight murders and a hundred robberies. As we climbed up and

stepped out on this eminence, the Gold Hill lights dropped out of sight

at our backs, and the night closed down gloomy and dismal. A sharp wind

swept the place, too, and chilled our perspiring bodies through.

“I tell you I don’t like this place at night,” said Mike the agent.

“Well, don’t speak so loud,” I said. “You needn’t remind anybody that we

are here.”

Just then a dim figure approached me from the direction of Virginia—a

man, evidently. He came straight at me, and I stepped aside to let him

pass; he stepped in the way and confronted me again. Then I saw that he

had a mask on and was holding something in my face—I heard a click-click

and recognized a revolver in dim outline. I pushed the barrel aside with

my hand and said:

“Don’t!”

He ejaculated sharply:

“Your watch! Your money!”

I said:

“You can have them with pleasure—but take the pistol away from my face,

please. It makes me shiver.”

“No remarks! Hand out your money!”

“Certainly—I—”

“Put up your _hands_! Don’t you go for a weapon! Put ’em up! Higher!”

I held them above my head.

A pause. Then:

“_Are_ you going to hand out your money or _not_?”

I dropped my hands to my pockets and said:

Certainly! I—”

“Put up your hands! Do you want your head blown off? Higher!”

I put them above my head again.

Another pause.

Are you going to hand out your money or not? Ah-ah—again? Put up your

hands! By George, you want the head shot off you awful bad!”

“Well, friend, I’m trying my best to please you. You tell me to give up

my money, and when I reach for it you tell me to put up my hands. If you

would only—. Oh, now—don’t! All six of you at me! That other man will

get away while.—Now please take some of those revolvers out of my

face—_do_, if you _please_! Every time one of them clicks, my liver

comes up into my throat! If you have a mother—any of you—or if any of

you have ever _had_ a mother—or a—grandmother—or a—”

“Cheese it! _Will_ you give up your money, or have we got to—.

There—there—none of that! Put up your _hands_!”

“Gentlemen—I know you are gentlemen by your—”

“Silence! If you want to be facetious, young man, there are times and

places more fitting. _This_ is a serious business.”

“You prick the marrow of my opinion. The funerals I have attended in my

time were comedies compared to it. Now _I_ think—”

“Curse your palaver! Your money!—your money!—your money! Hold!—put up

your hands!”

“Gentlemen, listen to reason. You _see_ how I am situated—now _don’t_

put those pistols so close—I smell the powder.

“You see how I am situated. If I had four hands—so that I could hold up

two and—”

“Throttle him! Gag him! Kill him!”

“Gentlemen, _don’t_! Nobody’s watching the other fellow. Why don’t some

of you—. Ouch! Take it away, please!

“Gentlemen, you see that I’ve got to hold up my hands; and so I can’t

take out my money—but if you’ll be so kind as to take it out for me, I

will do as much for you some—”

“Search him Beauregard—and stop his jaw with a bullet, quick, if he wags

it again. Help Beauregard, Stonewall.”

Then three of them, with the small, spry leader, adjourned to Mike and

fell to searching him. I was so excited that my lawless fancy tortured

me to ask my two men all manner of facetious questions about their rebel

brother-generals of the South, but, considering the order they had

received, it was but common prudence to keep still. When everything had

been taken from me,—watch, money, and a multitude of trifles of small

value,—I supposed I was free, and forthwith put my cold hands into my

empty pockets and began an inoffensive jig to warm my feet and stir up

some latent courage—but instantly all pistols were at my head, and the

order came again:

“Be still! Put up your hands! And keep them up!”.

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They stood Mike up alongside of me, with strict orders to keep his hands

above his head, too, and then the chief highwayman said:

“Beauregard, hide behind that boulder; Phil Sheridan, you hide behind

that other one; Stonewall Jackson, put yourself behind that sage-bush

there. Keep your pistols bearing on these fellows, and if they take down

their hands within ten minutes, or move a single peg, let them have it!”

Then three disappeared in the gloom toward the several ambushes, and the

other three disappeared down the road toward Virginia.

It was depressingly still, and miserably cold. Now this whole thing was

a practical joke, and the robbers were personal friends of ours in

disguise, and twenty more lay hidden within ten feet of us during the

whole operation, listening. Mike knew all this, and was in the joke, but

I suspected nothing of it. To me it was most uncomfortably genuine. When

we had stood there in the middle of the road five minutes, like a couple

of idiots, with our hands aloft, freezing to death by inches, Mike’s

interest in the joke began to wane. He said:

“The time’s up, now, aint it?”

“No, you keep still. Do you want to take any chances with these bloody

savages?”

Presently Mike said:

“_Now_ the time’s up, anyway. I’m freezing.”

“Well freeze. Better freeze than carry your brains home in a basket.

Maybe the time _is_ up, but how do _we_ know?—got no watch to tell by. I

mean to give them good measure. I calculate to stand here fifteen

minutes or die. Don’t you move.”

So, without knowing it, I was making one joker very sick of his

contract. When we took our arms down at last, they were aching with cold

and fatigue, and when we went sneaking off, the dread I was in that the

time might not yet be up and that we would feel bullets in a moment, was

not sufficient to draw all my attention from the misery that racked my

stiffened body.

The joke of these highwayman friends of ours was mainly a joke upon

themselves; for they had waited for me on the cold hill-top two full

hours before I came, and there was very little fun in that; they were so

chilled that it took them a couple of weeks to get warm again. Moreover,

I never had a thought that they would kill me to get money which it was

so perfectly easy to get without any such folly, and so they did not

really frighten me bad enough to make their enjoyment worth the trouble

they had taken. I was only afraid that their weapons would go off

accidentally. Their very numbers inspired me with confidence that no

blood would be intentionally spilled. They were not smart; they ought to

have sent only _one_ highwayman, with a double-barrelled shot gun, if

they desired to see the author of this volume climb a tree.

However, I suppose that in the long run I got the largest share of the

joke at last; and in a shape not foreseen by the highwaymen; for the

chilly exposure on the “divide” while I was in a perspiration gave me a

cold which developed itself into a troublesome disease and kept my hands

idle some three months, besides costing me quite a sum in doctor’s

bills. Since then I play no practical jokes on people and generally lose

my temper when one is played upon me.

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When I returned to San Francisco I projected a pleasure journey to Japan

and thence westward around the world; but a desire to see home again

changed my mind, and I took a berth in the steamship, bade good-bye to

the friendliest land and livest, heartiest community on our continent,

and came by the way of the Isthmus to New York—a trip that was not much

of a pic-nic excursion, for the cholera broke out among us on the

passage and we buried two or three bodies at sea every day. I found home

a dreary place after my long absence; for half the children I had known

were now wearing whiskers or waterfalls, and few of the grown people I

had been acquainted with remained at their hearthstones prosperous and

happy—some of them had wandered to other scenes, some were in jail, and

the rest had been hanged. These changes touched me deeply, and I went

away and joined the famous Quaker City European Excursion and carried my

tears to foreign lands.

Thus, after seven years of vicissitudes, ended a “pleasure trip” to the

silver mines of Nevada which had originally been intended to occupy only

three months. However, I usually miss my calculations further than that.

MORAL.

If the reader thinks he is done, now, and that this book has no moral to

it, he is in error. The moral of it is this: If you are of any account,

stay at home and make your way by faithful diligence; but if you are “no

account,” go away from home, and then you will _have_ to work, whether

you want to or not. Thus you become a blessing to your friends by

ceasing to be a nuisance to them—if the people you go among suffer by

the operation.

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APPENDIX.

APPENDIX. A.

BRIEF SKETCH OF MORMON HISTORY.

Mormonism is only about forty years old, but its career has been full of

stir and adventure from the beginning, and is likely to remain so to the

end. Its adherents have been hunted and hounded from one end of the

country to the other, and the result is that for years they have hated

all “Gentiles” indiscriminately and with all their might. Joseph Smith,

the finder of the Book of Mormon and founder of the religion, was driven

from State to State with his mysterious copperplates and the miraculous

stones he read their inscriptions with. Finally he instituted his

“church” in Ohio and Brigham Young joined it. The neighbors began to

persecute, and apostasy commenced. Brigham held to the faith and worked

hard. He arrested desertion. He did more—he added converts in the midst

of the trouble. He rose in favor and importance with the brethren. He

was made one of the Twelve Apostles of the Church. He shortly fought his

way to a higher post and a more powerful—President of the Twelve. The

neighbors rose up and drove the Mormons out of Ohio, and they settled in

Missouri. Brigham went with them. The Missourians drove them out and

they retreated to Nauvoo, Illinois. They prospered there, and built a

temple which made some pretensions to architectural grace and achieved

some celebrity in a section of country where a brick court-house with a

tin dome and a cupola on it was contemplated with reverential awe. But

the Mormons were badgered and harried again by their neighbors. All the

proclamations Joseph Smith could issue denouncing polygamy and

repudiating it as utterly anti-Mormon were of no avail; the people of

the neighborhood, on both sides of the Mississippi, claimed that

polygamy was practised by the Mormons, and not only polygamy but a

little of everything that was bad. Brigham returned from a mission to

England, where he had established a Mormon newspaper, and he brought

back with him several hundred converts to his preaching. His influence

among the brethren augmented with every move he made. Finally Nauvoo was

invaded by the Missouri and Illinois Gentiles, and Joseph Smith killed.

A Mormon named Rigdon assumed the Presidency of the Mormon church and

government, in Smith’s place, and even tried his hand at a prophecy or

two. But a greater than he was at hand. Brigham seized the advantage of

the hour and without other authority than superior brain and nerve and

will, hurled Rigdon from his high place and occupied it himself. He did

more. He launched an elaborate curse at Rigdon and his disciples; and he

pronounced Rigdon’s “prophecies” emanations from the devil, and ended by

“handing the false prophet over to the buffetings of Satan for a

thousand years”—probably the longest term ever inflicted in Illinois.

The people recognized their master. They straightway elected Brigham

Young President, by a prodigious majority, and have never faltered in

their devotion to him from that day to this. Brigham had forecast—a

quality which no other prominent Mormon has probably ever possessed. He

recognized that it was better to move to the wilderness than _be_ moved.

By his command the people gathered together their meagre effects, turned

their backs upon their homes, and their faces toward the wilderness, and

on a bitter night in February filed in sorrowful procession across the

frozen Mississippi, lighted on their way by the glare from their burning

temple, whose sacred furniture their own hands had fired! They camped,

several days afterward, on the western verge of Iowa, and poverty, want,

hunger, cold, sickness, grief and persecution did their work, and many

succumbed and died—martyrs, fair and true, whatever else they might have

been. Two years the remnant remained there, while Brigham and a small

party crossed the country and founded Great Salt Lake City, purposely

choosing a land _which was outside the ownership and jurisdiction of the

hated American nation_. Note that. This was in 1847. Brigham moved his

people there and got them settled just in time to see disaster fall

again. For the war closed and Mexico ceded Brigham’s refuge to the

enemy—the United States! In 1849 the Mormons organized a “free and

independent” government and erected the “State of Deseret,” with Brigham

Young as its head. But the very next year Congress deliberately snubbed

it and created the “Territory of Utah” out of the same accumulation of

mountains, sage-brush, alkali and general desolation,—but made Brigham

Governor of it. Then for years the enormous migration across the plains

to California poured through the land of the Mormons and yet the church

remained staunch and true to its lord and master. Neither hunger,

thirst, poverty, grief, hatred, contempt, nor persecution could drive

the Mormons from their faith or their allegiance; and even the thirst

for gold, which gleaned the flower of the youth and strength of many

nations was not able to entice them! That was the final test. An

experiment that could survive that was an experiment with some substance

to it somewhere.

Great Salt Lake City throve finely, and so did Utah. One of the last

things which Brigham Young had done before leaving Iowa, was to appear

in the pulpit dressed to personate the worshipped and lamented prophet

Smith, and confer the prophetic succession, with all its dignities,

emoluments and authorities, upon “President Brigham Young!” The people

accepted the pious fraud with the maddest enthusiasm, and Brigham’s

power was sealed and secured for all time. Within five years afterward

he openly added polygamy to the tenets of the church by authority of a

“revelation” which he pretended had been received nine years before by

Joseph Smith, albeit Joseph is amply on record as denouncing polygamy to

the day of his death.

Now was Brigham become a second Andrew Johnson in the small beginning

and steady progress of his official grandeur. He had served successively

as a disciple in the ranks; home missionary; foreign missionary; editor

and publisher; Apostle; President of the Board of Apostles; President of

all Mormondom, civil and ecclesiastical; successor to the great Joseph

by the will of heaven; “prophet,” “seer,” “revelator.” There was but one

dignity higher which he _could_ aspire to, and he reached out modestly

and took that—he proclaimed himself a God!

He claims that he is to have a heaven of his own hereafter, and that he

will be its God, and his wives and children its goddesses, princes and

princesses. Into it all faithful Mormons will be admitted, with their

families, and will take rank and consequence according to the number of

their wives and children. If a disciple dies before he has had time to

accumulate enough wives and children to enable him to be respectable in

the next world any friend can marry a few wives and raise a few children

for him _after he is dead_, and they are duly credited to his account

and his heavenly status advanced accordingly.

Let it be borne in mind that the majority of the Mormons have always

been ignorant, simple, of an inferior order of intellect, unacquainted

with the world and its ways; and let it be borne in mind that the wives

of these Mormons are necessarily after the same pattern and their

children likely to be fit representatives of such a conjunction; and

then let it be remembered that _for forty years_ these creatures have

been driven, driven, driven, relentlessly! and mobbed, beaten, and shot

down; cursed, despised, expatriated; banished to a remote desert,

whither they journeyed gaunt with famine and disease, disturbing the

ancient solitudes with their lamentations and marking the long way with

graves of their dead—and all because they were simply trying to live and

worship God in the way which _they_ believed with all their hearts and

souls to be the true one. Let all these things be borne in mind, and

then it will not be hard to account for the deathless hatred which the

Mormons bear our people and our government.

That hatred has “fed fat its ancient grudge” ever since Mormon Utah

developed into a self-supporting realm and the church waxed rich and

strong. Brigham as Territorial Governor made it plain that Mormondom was

for the Mormons. The United States tried to rectify all that by

appointing territorial officers from New England and other anti-Mormon

localities, but Brigham prepared to make their entrance into his

dominions difficult. Three thousand United States troops had to go

across the plains and put these gentlemen in office. And after they were

in office they were as helpless as so many stone images. They made laws

which nobody minded and which could not be executed. The federal judges

opened court in a land filled with crime and violence and sat as holiday

spectacles for insolent crowds to gape at—for there was nothing to try,

nothing to do nothing on the dockets! And if a Gentile brought a suit,

the Mormon jury would do just as it pleased about bringing in a verdict,

and when the judgment of the court was rendered no Mormon cared for it

and no officer could execute it. Our Presidents shipped one cargo of

officials after another to Utah, but the result was always the same—they

sat in a blight for awhile they fairly feasted on scowls and insults day

by day, they saw every attempt to do their official duties find its

reward in darker and darker looks, and in secret threats and warnings of

a more and more dismal nature—and at last they either succumbed and

became despised tools and toys of the Mormons, or got scared and

discomforted beyond all endurance and left the Territory. If a brave

officer kept on courageously till his pluck was proven, some pliant

Buchanan or Pierce would remove him and appoint a stick in his place. In

1857 General Harney came very near being appointed Governor of Utah. And

so it came very near being Harney governor and Cradlebaugh judge!—two

men who never had any idea of fear further than the sort of murky

comprehension of it which they were enabled to gather from the

dictionary. Simply (if for nothing else) for the variety they would have

made in a rather monotonous history of Federal servility and

helplessness, it is a pity they were not fated to hold office together

in Utah.

Up to the date of our visit to Utah, such had been the Territorial

record. The Territorial government established there had been a hopeless

failure, and Brigham Young was the only real power in the land. He was

an absolute monarch—a monarch who defied our President—a monarch who

laughed at our armies when they camped about his capital—a monarch who

received without emotion the news that the august Congress of the United

States had enacted a solemn law against polygamy, and then went forth

calmly and married twenty-five or thirty more wives.

B. THE MOUNTAIN MEADOWS MASSACRE.

The persecutions which the Mormons suffered so long—and which they

consider they still suffer in not being allowed to govern

themselves—they have endeavored and are still endeavoring to repay. The

now almost forgotten “Mountain Meadows massacre” was their work. It was

very famous in its day. The whole United States rang with its horrors. A

few items will refresh the reader’s memory. A great emigrant train from

Missouri and Arkansas passed through Salt Lake City and a few

disaffected Mormons joined it for the sake of the strong protection it

afforded for their escape. In that matter lay sufficient cause for hot

retaliation by the Mormon chiefs. Besides, these one hundred and forty-

five or one hundred and fifty unsuspecting emigrants being in part from

Arkansas, where a noted Mormon missionary had lately been killed, and in

part from Missouri, a State remembered with execrations as a bitter

persecutor of the saints when they were few and poor and friendless,

here were substantial additional grounds for lack of love for these

wayfarers. And finally, this train was rich, very rich in cattle,

horses, mules and other property—and how could the Mormons consistently

keep up their coveted resemblance to the Israelitish tribes and not

seize the “spoil” of an enemy when the Lord had so manifestly “delivered

it into their hand?”

Wherefore, according to Mrs. C. V. Waite’s entertaining book, “The

Mormon Prophet,” it transpired that—

“A ‘revelation’ from Brigham Young, as Great Grand Archee or God, was

dispatched to President J. C. Haight, Bishop Higbee and J. D. Lee

(adopted son of Brigham), commanding them to raise all the forces they

could muster and trust, follow those cursed Gentiles (so read the

revelation), attack them disguised as Indians, and with the arrows of

the Almighty make a clean sweep of them, and leave none to tell the

tale; and if they needed any assistance they were commanded to hire the

Indians as their allies, promising them a share of the booty. They were

to be neither slothful nor negligent in their duty, and to be punctual

in sending the teams back to him before winter set in, for this was the

mandate of Almighty God.”

The command of the “revelation” was faithfully obeyed. A large party of

Mormons, painted and tricked out as Indians, overtook the train of

emigrant wagons some three hundred miles south of Salt Lake City, and

made an attack. But the emigrants threw up earthworks, made fortresses

of their wagons and defended themselves gallantly and successfully for

five days! Your Missouri or Arkansas gentleman is not much afraid of the

sort of scurvy apologies for “Indians” which the southern part of Utah

affords. He would stand up and fight five hundred of them.

At the end of the five days the Mormons tried military strategy. They

retired to the upper end of the “Meadows,” resumed civilized apparel,

washed off their paint, and then, heavily armed, drove down in wagons to

the beleaguered emigrants, bearing a flag of truce! When the emigrants

saw white men coming they threw down their guns and welcomed them with

cheer after cheer! And, all unconscious of the poetry of it, no doubt,

they lifted a little child aloft, dressed in white, in answer to the

flag of truce!

The leaders of the timely white “deliverers” were President Haight and

Bishop John D. Lee, of the Mormon Church. Mr. Cradlebaugh, who served a

term as a Federal Judge in Utah and afterward was sent to Congress from

Nevada, tells in a speech delivered in Congress how these leaders next

proceeded:

“They professed to be on good terms with the Indians, and represented

them as being very mad. They also proposed to intercede and settle the

matter with the Indians. After several hours parley they, having

(apparently) visited the Indians, gave the _ultimatum_ of the savages;

which was, that the emigrants should march out of their camp, leaving

everything behind them, even their guns. It was promised by the Mormon

bishops that they would bring a force and guard the emigrants back to

the settlements. The terms were agreed to, the emigrants being desirous

of saving the lives of their families. The Mormons retired, and

subsequently appeared with thirty or forty armed men. The emigrants were

marched out, the women and children in front and the men behind, the

Mormon guard being in the rear. When they had marched in this way about

a mile, at a given signal the slaughter commenced. The men were almost

all shot down at the first fire from the guard. Two only escaped, who

fled to the desert, and were followed one hundred and fifty miles before

they were overtaken and slaughtered. The women and children ran on, two

or three hundred yards further, when they were overtaken and with the

aid of the Indians they were slaughtered. Seventeen individuals only, of

all the emigrant party, were spared, and they were little children, the

eldest of them being only seven years old. Thus, on the 10th day of

September, 1857, was consummated one of the most cruel, cowardly and

bloody murders known in our history.”

The number of persons butchered by the Mormons on this occasion was _one

hundred and twenty_.

With unheard-of temerity Judge Cradlebaugh opened his court and

proceeded to make Mormondom answer for the massacre. And what a

spectacle it must have been to see this grim veteran, solitary and alone

in his pride and his pluck, glowering down on his Mormon jury and Mormon

auditory, deriding them by turns, and by turns “breathing threatenings

and slaughter!”

An editorial in the _Territorial Enterprise_ of that day says of him and

of the occasion:

“He spoke and acted with the fearlessness and resolution of a Jackson;

but the jury failed to indict, or even report on the charges, while

threats of violence were heard in every quarter, and an attack on the

U.S. troops intimated, if he persisted in his course.

“Finding that nothing could be done with the juries, they were

discharged with a scathing rebuke from the judge. And then, sitting as a

committing magistrate, _he commenced his task alone_. He examined

witnesses, made arrests in every quarter, and created a consternation in

the camps of the saints greater than any they had ever witnessed before,

since Mormondom was born. At last accounts terrified elders and bishops

were decamping to save their necks; and developments of the most

starling character were being made, implicating the highest Church

dignitaries in the many murders and robberies committed upon the

Gentiles during the past eight years.”

Had Harney been Governor, Cradlebaugh would have been supported in his

work, and the absolute proofs adduced by him of Mormon guilt in this

massacre and in a number of previous murders, would have conferred

gratuitous coffins upon certain citizens, together with occasion to use

them. But Cumming was the Federal Governor, and he, under a curious

pretense of impartiality, sought to screen the Mormons from the demands

of justice. On one occasion he even went so far as to publish his

protest against the use of the U.S. troops in aid of Cradlebaugh’s

proceedings.

Mrs. C. V. Waite closes her interesting detail of the great massacre

with the following remark and accompanying summary of the testimony—and

the summary is concise, accurate and reliable:

“For the benefit of those who may still be disposed to doubt the guilt

of Young and his Mormons in this transaction, the testimony is here

collated and circumstances given which go not merely to implicate but to

fasten conviction upon them by ‘confirmations strong as proofs of Holy

Writ:’

“1. The evidence of Mormons themselves, engaged in the affair, as shown

by the statements of Judge Cradlebaugh and Deputy U.S. Marshall Rodgers.

“2. The failure of Brigham Young to embody any account of it in his

Report as Superintendent of Indian Affairs. Also his failure to make any

allusion to it whatever from the pulpit, until several years after the

occurrence

“3. The flight to the mountains of men high in authority in the Mormon

Church and State, when this affair was brought to the ordeal of a

judicial investigation.

“4. The failure of the _Deseret News_, the Church organ, and the only

paper then published in the Territory, to notice the massacre until

several months afterward, and then only to deny that Mormons were

engaged in it.

“5. The testimony of the children saved from the massacre.

“6. The children and the property of the emigrants found in possession

of the Mormons, and that possession traced back to the very day after

the massacre.

“7. The statements of Indians in the neighborhood of the scene of the

massacre: these statements are shown, not only by Cradlebaugh and

Rodgers, but by a number of military officers, and by J. Forney, who

was, in 1859, Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Territory. To all

these were such statements freely and frequently made by the Indians.

“8. The testimony of R. P. Campbell, Capt. 2d Dragoons, who was sent in

the Spring of 1859 to Santa Clara, to protect travelers on the road to

California and to inquire into Indian depredations.”

C. CONCERNING A FRIGHTFUL ASSASSINATION THAT WAS NEVER CONSUMMATED

[If ever there was a harmless man, it is Conrad Wiegand, of Gold Hill,

Nevada. If ever there was a gentle spirit that thought itself unfired

gunpowder and latent ruin, it is Conrad Wiegand. If ever there was an

oyster that fancied itself a whale; or a jack-o’lantern, confined to a

swamp, that fancied itself a planet with a billion-mile orbit; or a

summer zephyr that deemed itself a hurricane, it is Conrad Wiegand.

Therefore, what wonder is it that when he says a thing, he thinks the

world listens; that when he does a thing the world stands still to look;

and that when he suffers, there is a convulsion of nature? When I met

Conrad, he was “Superintendent of the Gold Hill Assay Office”—and he was

not only its Superintendent, but its entire force. And he was a street

preacher, too, with a mongrel religion of his own invention, whereby he

expected to regenerate the universe. This was years ago. Here latterly

he has entered journalism; and his journalism is what it might be

expected to be: colossal to ear, but pigmy to the eye. It is extravagant

grandiloquence confined to a newspaper about the size of a double letter

sheet. He doubtless edits, sets the type, and prints his paper, all

alone; but he delights to speak of the concern as if it occupies a block

and employs a thousand men.

[Something less than two years ago, Conrad assailed several people

mercilessly in his little “People’s _Tribune_,” and got himself into

trouble. Straightway he airs the affair in the “Territorial Enterprise,”

in a communication over his own signature, and I propose to reproduce it

here, in all its native simplicity and more than human candor. Long as

it is, it is well worth reading, for it is the richest specimen of

journalistic literature the history of America can furnish, perhaps:]

From the _Territorial Enterprise_, Jan. 20, 1870.

SEEMING PLOT FOR ASSASSINATION MISCARRIED.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE ENTERPRISE: Months ago, when Mr. Sutro incidentally

exposed mining management on the Comstock, and among others roused me to

protest against its continuance, in great kindness you warned me that

any attempt by publications, by public meetings and by legislative

action, aimed at the correction of chronic mining evils in Storey

County, must entail upon me (a) business ruin, (b) the burden of all its

costs, (c) personal violence, and if my purpose were persisted in, then

(d) assassination, and after all nothing would be effected.

YOUR PROPHECY FULFILLING. In large part at least your prophecies have

been fulfilled, for (a) assaying, which was well attended to in the Gold

Hill Assay Office (of which I am superintendent), in consequence of my

publications, has been taken elsewhere, so the President of one of the

companies assures me. With no reason assigned, other work has been taken

away. With but one or two important exceptions, our assay business now

consists simply of the gleanings of the vicinity. (b) Though my own

personal donations to the People’s Tribune Association have already

exceeded $1,500, outside of our own numbers we have received (in money)

less than $300 as contributions and subscriptions for the journal. (c)

On Thursday last, on the main street in Gold Hill, near noon, with

neither warning nor cause assigned, by a powerful blow I was felled to

the ground, and while down I was kicked by a man who it would seem had

been led to believe that I had spoken derogatorily of him. By whom he

was so induced to believe I am as yet unable to say. On Saturday last I

was again assailed and beaten by a man who first informed me why he did

so, and who persisted in making his assault even after the erroneous

impression under which he also was at first laboring had been clearly

and repeatedly pointed out. This same man, after failing through

intimidation to elicit from me the names of our editorial contributors,

against giving which he knew me to be pledged, beat himself weary upon

me with a raw hide, I not resisting, and then pantingly threatened me

with permanent disfiguring mayhem, if ever again I should introduce his

name into print, and who but a few minutes before his attack upon me

assured me that the only reason I was “permitted” to reach home alive on

Wednesday evening last (at which time the PEOPLE’S TRIBUNE was issued)

was, that he deems me only half-witted, and be it remembered the very

next morning I was knocked down and kicked by a man who seemed to be

prepared for flight. [He sees doom impending:]

WHEN WILL THE CIRCLE JOIN? How long before the whole of your prophecy

will be fulfilled I cannot say, but under the shadow of so much

fulfillment in so short a time, and with such threats from a man who is

one of the most prominent exponents of the San Francisco mining-ring

staring me and this whole community defiantly in the face and pointing

to a completion of your augury, do you blame me for feeling that this

communication is the last I shall ever write for the Press, especially

when a sense alike of personal self-respect, of duty to this money-

oppressed and fear-ridden community, and of American fealty to the

spirit of true Liberty all command me, and each more loudly than love of

life itself, to declare the name of that prominent man to be JOHN B.

WINTERS, President of the Yellow Jacket Company, a political aspirant

and a military General? The name of his partially duped accomplice and

abettor in this last marvelous assault, is no other than PHILIP LYNCH,

Editor and Proprietor of the Gold Hill News.

Despite the insult and wrong heaped upon me by John B. Winters, on

Saturday afternoon, only a glimpse of which I shall be able to afford

your readers, so much do I deplore clinching (by publicity) a serious

mistake of any one, man or woman, committed under natural and not self-

wrought passion, in view of his great apparent excitement at the time

and in view of the almost perfect privacy of the assault, I am far from

sure that I should not have given him space for repentance before

exposing him, were it not that he himself has so far exposed the matter

as to make it the common talk of the town that he has horsewhipped me.

That fact having been made public, all the facts in connection need to

be also, or silence on my part would seem more than singular, and with

many would be proof either that I was conscious of some unworthy aim in

publishing the article, or else that my “non-combatant” principles are

but a convenient cloak alike of physical and moral cowardice. I

therefore shall try to present a graphic but truthful picture of this

whole affair, but shall forbear all comments, presuming that the editors

of our own journal, if others do not, will speak freely and fittingly

upon this subject in our next number, whether I shall then be dead or

living, for my death will not stop, though it may suspend, the

publication of the PEOPLE’S TRIBUNE. [The “non-combatant” sticks to

principle, but takes along a friend or two of a conveniently different

stripe:]

THE TRAP SET. On Saturday morning John B. Winters sent verbal word to

the Gold Hill Assay Office that he desired to see me at the Yellow

Jacket office. Though such a request struck me as decidedly cool in view

of his own recent discourtesies to me there alike as a publisher and as

a stockholder in the Yellow Jacket mine, and though it seemed to me more

like a summons than the courteous request by one gentleman to another

for a favor, hoping that some conference with Sharon looking to the

betterment of mining matters in Nevada might arise from it, I felt

strongly inclined to overlook what possibly was simply an oversight in

courtesy. But as then it had only been two days since I had been bruised

and beaten under a hasty and false apprehension of facts, my caution was

somewhat aroused. Moreover I remembered sensitively his contemptuousness

of manner to me at my last interview in his office. I therefore felt it

needful, if I went at all, to go accompanied by a friend whom he would

not dare to treat with incivility, and whose presence with me might

secure exemption from insult. Accordingly I asked a neighbor to

accompany me.

THE TRAP ALMOST DETECTED. Although I was not then aware of this fact, it

would seem that previous to my request this same neighbor had heard Dr.

Zabriskie state publicly in a saloon, that Mr. Winters had told him he

had decided either to kill or to horsewhip me, but had not finally

decided on which. My neighbor, therefore, felt unwilling to go down with

me until he had first called on Mr. Winters alone. He therefore paid him

a visit. From that interview he assured me that he gathered the

impression that he did not believe I would have any difficulty with Mr.

Winters, and that he (Winters) would call on me at four o’clock in my

own office.

MY OWN PRECAUTIONS. As Sheriff Cummings was in Gold Hill that afternoon,

and as I desired to converse with him about the previous assault, I

invited him to my office, and he came. Although a half hour had passed

beyond four o’clock, Mr. Winters had not called, and we both of us began

preparing to go home. Just then, Philip Lynch, Publisher of the Gold

Hill News, came in and said, blandly and cheerily, as if bringing good

news:

“Hello, John B. Winters wants to see you.”

I replied, “Indeed! Why he sent me word that he would call on me here

this afternoon at four o’clock!”

“O, well, it don’t do to be too ceremonious just now, he’s in my office,

and that will do as well—come on in, Winters wants to consult with you

alone. He’s got something to say to you.”

Though slightly uneasy at this change of programme, yet believing that

in an editor’s house I ought to be safe, and anyhow that I would be

within hail of the street, I hurriedly, and but partially whispered my

dim apprehensions to Mr. Cummings, and asked him if he would not keep

near enough to hear my voice in case I should call. He consented to do

so while waiting for some other parties, and to come in if he heard my

voice or thought I had need of protection.

On reaching the editorial part of the News office, which viewed from the

street is dark, I did not see Mr. Winters, and again my misgivings

arose. Had I paused long enough to consider the case, I should have

invited Sheriff Cummings in, but as Lynch went down stairs, he said:

“This way, Wiegand—it’s best to be private,” or some such remark.

[I do not desire to strain the reader’s fancy, hurtfully, and yet it

would be a favor to me if he would try to fancy this lamb in battle, or

the duelling ground or at the head of a vigilance committee—M. T.:]

I followed, and without Mr. Cummings, and without arms, which I never do

or will carry, unless as a soldier in war, or unless I should yet come

to feel I must fight a duel, or to join and aid in the ranks of a

necessary Vigilance Committee. But by following I made a fatal mistake.

Following was entering a trap, and whatever animal suffers itself to be

caught should expect the common fate of a caged rat, as I fear events to

come will prove.

Traps commonly are not set for benevolence. [His body-guard is shut

out:]

THE TRAP INSIDE. I followed Lynch down stairs. At their foot a door to

the left opened into a small room. From that room another door opened

into yet another room, and once entered I found myself inveigled into

what many will ever henceforth regard as a private subterranean Gold

Hill den, admirably adapted in proper hands to the purposes of murder,

raw or disguised, for from it, with both or even one door closed, when

too late, I saw that I could not be heard by Sheriff Cummings, and from

it, BY VIOLENCE AND BY FORCE, I was prevented from making a peaceable

exit, when I thought I saw the studious object of this “consultation”

was no other than to compass my killing, in the presence of Philip Lynch

as a witness, as soon as by insult a proverbially excitable man should

be exasperated to the point of assailing Mr. Winters, so that Mr. Lynch,

by his conscience and by his well known tenderness of heart toward the

rich and potent would be compelled to testify that he saw Gen. John B.

Winters kill Conrad Wiegand in “self-defence.” But I am going too fast.

OUR HOST. Mr. Lynch was present during the most of the time (say a

little short of an hour), but three times he left the room. His

testimony, therefore, would be available only as to the bulk of what

transpired. On entering this carpeted den I was invited to a seat near

one corner of the room. Mr. Lynch took a seat near the window. J. B.

Winters sat (at first) near the door, and began his remarks essentially

as follows:

“I have come here to exact of you a retraction, in black and white, of

those damnably false charges which you have preferred against me in

that— —infamous lying sheet of yours, and you must declare yourself

their author, that you published them knowing them to be false, and that

your motives were malicious.”

“Hold, Mr. Winters. Your language is insulting and your demand an

enormity. I trust I was not invited here either to be insulted or

coerced. I supposed myself here by invitation of Mr. Lynch, at your

request.”

“Nor did I come here to insult you. I have already told you that I am

here for a very different purpose.”

“Yet your language has been offensive, and even now shows strong

excitement. If insult is repeated I shall either leave the room or call

in Sheriff Cummings, whom I just left standing and waiting for me

outside the door.”

“No, you won’t, sir. You may just as well understand it at once as not.

Here you are my man, and I’ll tell you why! Months ago you put your

property out of your hands, boasting that you did so to escape losing it

on prosecution for libel.”

“It is true that I did convert all my immovable property into personal

property, such as I could trust safely to others, and chiefly to escape

ruin through possible libel suits.”

“Very good, sir. Having placed yourself beyond the pale of the law, may

God help your soul if you DON’T make precisely such a retraction as I

have demanded. I’ve got you now, and by—before you can get out of this

room you’ve got to both write and sign precisely the retraction I have

demanded, and before you go, anyhow—you — low-lived — lying —, I’ll

teach you what personal responsibility is outside of the law; and, by—,

Sheriff Cummings and all the friends you’ve got in the world besides,

can’t save you, you—, etc.! _No_, sir. I’m alone now, and I’m prepared

to be shot down just here and now rather than be villified by you as I

have been, and suffer you to escape me after publishing those charges,

not only here where I am known and universally respected, but where I am

not personally known and may be injured.”

I confess this speech, with its terrible and but too plainly implied

threat of killing me if I did not sign the paper he demanded, terrified

me, especially as I saw he was working himself up to the highest

possible pitch of passion, and instinct told me that any reply other

than one of seeming concession to his demands would only be fuel to a

raging fire, so I replied:

“Well, if I’ve got to sign—,” and then I paused some time. Resuming, I

said, “But, Mr. Winters, you are greatly excited. Besides, I see you are

laboring under a total misapprehension. It is your duty not to inflame

but to calm yourself. I am prepared to show you, if you will only point

out the article that you allude to, that you regard as ‘charges’ what no

calm and logical mind has any right to regard as such. Show me the

charges, and I will try, at all events; and if it becomes plain that no

charges have been preferred, then plainly there can be nothing to

retract, and no one could rightly urge you to demand a retraction. You

should beware of making so serious a mistake, for however honest a man

may be, every one is liable to misapprehend. Besides you assume that I

am the author of some certain article which you have not pointed out. It

is hasty to do so.”

He then pointed to some numbered paragraphs in a TRIBUNE article, headed

“What’s the Matter with Yellow Jacket?” saying “That’s what I refer to.”

To gain time for general reflection and resolution, I took up the paper

and looked it over for awhile, he remaining silent, and as I hoped,

cooling. I then resumed saying, “As I supposed. I do not admit having

written that article, nor have you any right to assume so important a

point, and then base important action upon your assumption. You might

deeply regret it afterwards. In my published Address to the People, I

notified the world that no information as to the authorship of any

article would be given without the consent of the writer. I therefore

cannot honorably tell you who wrote that article, nor can you exact it.”

“If you are not the author, then I do demand to know who is?”

“I must decline to say.”

“Then, by—, I brand you as its author, and shall treat you accordingly.”

“Passing that point, the most important misapprehension which I notice

is, that you regard them as ‘charges’ at all, when their context, both

at their beginning and end, show they are not. These words introduce

them: ‘Such an investigation [just before indicated], we think MIGHT

result in showing some of the following points.’ Then follow eleven

specifications, and the succeeding paragraph shows that the suggested

investigation ‘might EXONERATE those who are generally believed guilty.’

You see, therefore, the context proves they are not preferred as

charges, and this you seem to have overlooked.”

While making those comments, Mr. Winters frequently interrupted me in

such a way as to convince me that he was resolved not to consider

candidly the thoughts contained in my words. He insisted upon it that

they were charges, and “By—,” he would make me take them back as

charges, and he referred the question to Philip Lynch, to whom I then

appealed as a literary man, as a logician, and as an editor, calling his

attention especially to the introductory paragraph just before quoted.

He replied, “if they are not charges, they certainly are insinuations,”

whereupon Mr. Winters renewed his demands for retraction precisely such

as he had before named, except that he would allow me to state who did

write the article if I did not myself, and this time shaking his fist in

my face with more cursings and epithets.

When he threatened me with his clenched fist, instinctively I tried to

rise from my chair, but Winters then forcibly thrust me down, as he did

every other time (at least seven or eight), when under similar imminent

danger of bruising by his fist (or for aught I could know worse than

that after the first stunning blow), which he could easily and safely to

himself have dealt me so long as he kept me down and stood over me.

This fact it was, which more than anything else, convinced me that by

plan and plot I was purposely made powerless in Mr. Winters’ hands, and

that he did not mean to allow me that advantage of being afoot, which he

possessed. Moreover, I then became convinced, that Philip Lynch (and for

what reason I wondered) would do absolutely nothing to protect me in his

own house. I realized then the situation thoroughly. I had found it

equally vain to protest or argue, and I would make no unmanly appeal for

pity, still less apologize. Yet my life had been by the plainest

possible implication threatened. I was a weak man. I was unarmed. I was

helplessly down, and Winters was afoot and probably armed. Lynch was the

only “witness.” The statements demanded, if given and not explained,

would utterly sink me in my own self-respect, in my family’s eyes, and

in the eyes of the community. On the other hand, should I give the

author’s name how could I ever expect that confidence of the People

which I should no longer deserve, and how much dearer to me and to my

family was my life than the life of the real author to his friends. Yet

life seemed dear and each minute that remained seemed precious if not

solemn. I sincerely trust that neither you nor any of your readers, and

especially none with families, may ever be placed in such seeming direct

proximity to death while obliged to decide the one question I was

compelled to, viz.: What should I do—I, a man of family, and not as Mr.

Winters is, “alone.” [The reader is requested not to skip the

following.—M. T.:]

STRATEGY AND MESMERISM. To gain time for further reflection, and hoping

that by a seeming acquiescence I might regain my personal liberty, at

least till I could give an alarm, or take advantage of some momentary

inadvertence of Winters, and then without a cowardly flight escape, I

resolved to write a certain kind of retraction, but previously had

inwardly decided:

First.—That I would studiously avoid every action which might be

construed into the drawing of a weapon, even by a self-infuriated man,

no matter what amount of insult might be heaped upon me, for it seemed

to me that this great excess of compound profanity, foulness and epithet

must be more than a mere indulgence, and therefore must have some

object. “Surely in vain the net is spread in the sight of any bird.”

Therefore, as before without thought, I thereafter by intent kept my

hands away from my pockets, and generally in sight and spread upon my

knees.

Second.—I resolved to make no motion with my arms or hands which could

possibly be construed into aggression.

Third.—I resolved completely to govern my outward manner and suppress

indignation. To do this, I must govern my spirit. To do that, by force

of imagination I was obliged like actors on the boards to resolve myself

into an unnatural mental state and see all things through the eyes of an

assumed character.

Fourth.—I resolved to try on Winters, silently, and unconsciously to

himself a mesmeric power which I possess over certain kinds of people,

and which at times I have found to work even in the dark over the lower

animals.

Does any one smile at these last counts? God save you from ever being

obliged to beat in a game of chess, whose stake is your life, you having

but four poor pawns and pieces and your adversary with his full force

unshorn. But if you are, provided you have any strength with breadth of

will, do not despair. Though mesmeric power may not save you, it may

help you; try it at all events. In this instance I was conscious of

power coming into me, and by a law of nature, I know Winters was

correspondingly weakened. If I could have gained more time I am sure he

would not even have struck me.

It takes time both to form such resolutions and to recite them. That

time, however, I gained while thinking of my retraction, which I first

wrote in pencil, altering it from time to time till I got it to suit me,

my aim being to make it look like a concession to demands, while in fact

it should tersely speak the truth into Mr. Winters’ mind. When it was

finished, I copied it in ink, and if correctly copied from my first

draft it should read as follows. In copying I do not think I made any

material change.

COPY. To Philip Lynch, Editor of the Gold Hill News: I learn that Gen.

John B. Winters believes the following (pasted on) clipping from the

PEOPLE’S TRIBUNE of January to contain distinct charges of mine against

him personally, and that as such he desires me to retract them

unqualifiedly.

In compliance with his request, permit me to say that, although Mr.

Winters and I see this matter differently, in view of his strong

feelings in the premises, I hereby declare that I do not know those

“charges” (if such they are) to be true, and I hope that a critical

examination would altogether disprove them. CONRAD WIEGAND. Gold Hill,

January 15, 1870.

I then read what I had written and handed it to Mr. Lynch, whereupon Mr.

Winters said:

“That’s not satisfactory, and it won’t do;” and then addressing himself

to Mr. Lynch, he further said: “How does it strike you?”

“Well, I confess I don’t see that it retracts anything.”

“Nor do I,” said Winters; “in fact, I regard it as adding insult to

injury. Mr. Wiegand you’ve got to do better than that. You are not the

man who can pull wool over my eyes.”

“That, sir, is the only retraction I can write.”

“No it isn’t, sir, and if you so much as say so again you do it at your

peril, for I’ll thrash you to within an inch of your life, and, by—,

sir, I don’t pledge myself to spare you even that inch either. I want

you to understand I have asked you for a very different paper, and that

paper you’ve got to sign.”

“Mr. Winters, I assure you that I do not wish to irritate you, but, at

the same time, it is utterly impossible for me to write any other paper

than that which I have written. If you are resolved to compel me to sign

something, Philip Lynch’s hand must write at your dictation, and if,

when written, I can sign it I will do so, but such a document as you say

you must have from me, I never can sign. I mean what I say.”

“Well, sir, what’s to be done must be done quickly, for I’ve been here

long enough already. I’ll put the thing in another shape (and then

pointing to the paper); don’t you know those charges to be false?”

“I do not.”

“Do you know them to be true?”

“Of my own personal knowledge I do not.”

“Why then did you print them?”

“Because rightly considered in their connection they are not charges,

but pertinent and useful suggestions in answer to the queries of a

correspondent who stated facts which are inexplicable.”

“Don’t you know that I know they are false?”

“If you do, the proper course is simply to deny them and court an

investigation.”

“And do YOU claim the right to make ME come out and deny anything you

may choose to write and print?”

To that question I think I made no reply, and he then further said:

“Come, now, we’ve talked about the matter long enough. I want your final

answer—did you write that article or not?”

“I cannot in honor tell you who wrote it.”

“Did you not see it before it was printed?”

“Most certainly, sir.”

“And did you deem it a fit thing to publish?”

“Most assuredly, sir, or I would never have consented to its appearance.

Of its authorship I can say nothing whatever, but for its publication I

assume full, sole and personal responsibility.”

“And do you then retract it or not?”

“Mr. Winters, if my refusal to sign such a paper as you have demanded

must entail upon me all that your language in this room fairly implies,

then I ask a few minutes for prayer.”

“Prayer!—you, this is not your hour for prayer—your time to pray was

when you were writing those—lying charges. Will you sign or not?”

“You already have my answer.”

“What! do you still refuse?”

“I do, sir.”

“Take that, then,” and to my amazement and inexpressible relief he drew

only a rawhide instead of what I expected—a bludgeon or pistol. With it,

as he spoke, he struck at my left ear downwards, as if to tear it off,

and afterwards on the side of the head. As he moved away to get a better

chance for a more effective shot, for the first time I gained a chance

under peril to rise, and I did so pitying him from the very bottom of my

soul, to think that one so naturally capable of true dignity, power and

nobility could, by the temptations of this State, and by unfortunate

associations and aspirations, be so deeply debased as to find in such

brutality anything which he could call satisfaction—but the great hope

for us all is in progress and growth, and John B. Winters, I trust, will

yet be able to comprehend my feelings.

He continued to beat me with all his great force, until absolutely

weary, exhausted and panting for breath. I still adhered to my purpose

of non-aggressive defence, and made no other use of my arms than to

defend my head and face from further disfigurement. The mere pain

arising from the blows he inflicted upon my person was of course

transient, and my clothing to some extent deadened its severity, as it

now hides all remaining traces.

When I supposed he was through, taking the butt end of his weapon and

shaking it in my face, he warned me, if I correctly understood him, of

more yet to come, and furthermore said, if ever I again dared introduce

his name to print, in either my own or any other public journal, he

would cut off my left ear (and I do not think he was jesting) and send

me home to my family a visibly mutilated man, to be a standing warning

to all low-lived puppies who seek to blackmail gentlemen and to injure

their good names. And when he did so operate, he informed me that his

implement would not be a whip but a knife.

When he had said this, unaccompanied by Mr. Lynch, as I remember it, he

left the room, for I sat down by Mr. Lynch, exclaiming: “The man is

mad—he is utterly mad—this step is his ruin—it is a mistake—it would be

ungenerous in me, despite of all the ill usage I have here received, to

expose him, at least until he has had an opportunity to reflect upon the

matter. I shall be in no haste.”

“Winters is very mad just now,” replied Mr. Lynch, “but when he is

himself he is one of the finest men I ever met. In fact, he told me the

reason he did not meet you upstairs was to spare you the humiliation of

a beating in the sight of others.”

I submit that that unguarded remark of Philip Lynch convicts him of

having been privy in advance to Mr. Winters’ intentions whatever they

may have been, or at least to his meaning to make an assault upon me,

but I leave to others to determine how much censure an editor deserves

for inveigling a weak, non-combatant man, also a publisher, to a pen of

his own to be horsewhipped, if no worse, for the simple printing of what

is verbally in the mouth of nine out of ten men, and women too, upon the

street.

While writing this account two theories have occurred to me as possibly

true respecting this most remarkable assault: First—The aim may have

been simply to extort from me such admissions as in the hands of money

and influence would have sent me to the Penitentiary for libel. This,

however, seems unlikely, because any statements elicited by fear or

force could not be evidence in law or could be so explained as to have

no force. The statements wanted so badly must have been desired for some

other purpose. Second—The other theory has so dark and wilfully

murderous a look that I shrink from writing it, yet as in all

probability my death at the earliest practicable moment has already been

decreed, I feel I should do all I can before my hour arrives, at least

to show others how to break up that aristocratic rule and combination

which has robbed all Nevada of true freedom, if not of manhood itself.

Although I do not prefer this hypothesis as a “charge,” I feel that as

an American citizen I still have a right both to think and to speak my

thoughts even in the land of Sharon and Winters, and as much so

respecting the theory of a brutal assault (especially when I have been

its subject) as respecting any other apparent enormity. I give the

matter simply as a suggestion which may explain to the proper

authorities and to the people whom they should represent, a well

ascertained but notwithstanding a darkly mysterious fact. The scheme of

the assault may have been:

First—To terrify me by making me conscious of my own helplessness after

making actual though not legal threats against my life.

Second—To imply that I could save my life only by writing or signing

certain specific statements which if not subsequently explained would

eternally have branded me as infamous and would have consigned my family

to shame and want, and to the dreadful compassion and patronage of the

rich.

Third—To blow my brains out the moment I had signed, thereby preventing

me from making any subsequent explanation such as could remove the

infamy.

Fourth—Philip Lynch to be compelled to testify that I was killed by John

B. Winters in self-defence, for the conviction of Winters would bring

him in as an accomplice. If that was the programme in John B. Winters’

mind nothing saved my life but my persistent refusal to sign, when that

refusal seemed clearly to me to be the choice of death.

The remarkable assertion made to me by Mr. Winters, that pity only

spared my life on Wednesday evening last, almost compels me to believe

that at first he could not have intended me to leave that room alive;

and why I was allowed to, unless through mesmeric or some other

invisible influence, I cannot divine. The more I reflect upon this

matter, the more probable as true does this horrible interpretation

become.

The narration of these things I might have spared both to Mr. Winters

and to the public had he himself observed silence, but as he has both

verbally spoken and suffered a thoroughly garbled statement of facts to

appear in the Gold Hill News I feel it due to myself no less than to

this community, and to the entire independent press of America and Great

Britain, to give a true account of what even the Gold Hill News has

pronounced a disgraceful affair, and which it deeply regrets because of

some alleged telegraphic mistake in the account of it. [Who received the

erroneous telegrams?]

Though he may not deem it prudent to take my life just now, the

publication of this article I feel sure must compel Gen. Winters (with

his peculiar views about his right to exemption from criticism by me) to

resolve on my violent death, though it may take years to compass it.

Notwithstanding I bear him no ill will; and if W. C. Ralston and William

Sharon, and other members of the San Francisco mining and milling Ring

feel that he above all other men in this State and California is the

most fitting man to supervise and control Yellow Jacket matters, until I

am able to vote more than half their stock I presume he will be retained

to grace his present post.

Meantime, I cordially invite all who know of any sort of important

villainy which only can be cured by exposure (and who would expose it if

they felt sure they would not be betrayed under bullying threats), to

communicate with the PEOPLE’S TRIBUNE; for until I am murdered, so long

as I can raise the means to publish, I propose to continue my efforts at

least to revive the liberties of the State, to curb oppression, and to

benefit man’s world and God’s earth.

CONRAD WIEGAND.

[It does seem a pity that the Sheriff was shut out, since the good sense

of a general of militia and of a prominent editor failed to teach them

that the merited castigation of this weak, half-witted child was a thing

that ought to have been done in the street, where the poor thing could

have a chance to run. When a journalist maligns a citizen, or attacks

his good name on hearsay evidence, he deserves to be thrashed for it,

even if he is a “non-combatant” weakling; but a generous adversary would

at least allow such a lamb the use of his legs at such a time.—M. T.]