URSUS HORRIBILIS
I made inquiries as to my route, and found that the first habitation I
should reach was a ranch called the Grizzly-Bear House, about fifteen
miles off. The trail had been well traveled, and I had little difficulty
in finding my way. After a few hours’ walking, I was beginning to think
that the fifteen miles must be nearly up; and as I heard an occasional
crack of a rifle, I felt pretty sure I was getting near the end of my
journey.
The ground undulated like the surface of the ocean after a heavy gale of
wind, and as I rose over the top of one of the waves, I got a glimpse of
a log cabin a few hundred yards ahead of me, which, seen through the
lofty colonnade of stately pines, appeared no bigger than a rat-trap.
As I approached, I found it was the Grizzly-Bear House. There could be
no mistake about it, for a strip of canvas, on which “The Grizzly-Bear
House” was painted in letters a foot and a half high, was stretched
along the front of the cabin over the door; and that there might be no
doubt as to the meaning of this announcement, the idea was further
impressed upon one by the skin of an enormous grizzly bear, which,
spread out upon the wall, seemed to be taking the whole house into its
embrace.
I found half-a-dozen men standing before the door, amusing themselves by
shooting at a mark with their rifles. The distance was only about a
hundred yards, but even at that distance, when it comes to hitting a
card nailed to a pine-tree nine times out of ten, it is pretty good
shooting.
Before dark, four or five other travelers arrived, and about a dozen of
us sat down to supper together. The house was nothing more than a large
log cabin. At one end was the bar, a narrow board three feet long,
behind which were two or three decanters and some kegs of liquor, a few
cigars in tumblers, some odd bottles of champagne, and a box of tobacco.
A couple of benches and a table occupied the center of the house, and
sacks of flour and other provisions stood in the corners. Out in the
forest, behind the cabin, was a cooking-stove, with a sort of awning
over it. This was the kitchen; and certainly the cook could not complain
of want of room; but, judging from our supper, he was not called upon to
go through any very difficult maneuvers in the practice of his art. He
knocked off his rifle practice about half an hour before supper to go
and light the kitchen fire, and the fruits of his subsequent labors
appeared in a large potful of tea and a lot of beefsteaks. The bread was
uncommonly stale, from which I presumed that, when he did bake, he baked
enough to last for about a week.
After supper, every man lighted his pipe, and though all were
sufficiently talkative, the attention of the whole party became very
soon monopolized by two individuals, who were decidedly the lions of the
evening. One of them was a man from Illinois, who had been in the
Mexican war, and who no doubt thought he might have been a General
Scott, if he had only had the opportunity of distinguishing himself. He
commented on the tactics of the generals as if he knew more of warfare
than any of them; and the awful yarns he told of how he and the American
army had whipped the Mexicans, and given them “particular hell,” as he
called it, was enough to make a civilian’s hair stand on end. Some of
his hearers swallowed every word he said, without even making a wry face
at it; but as he tried to make out that all the victories were gained by
the Illinois regiment, in which he served as full private, two or three
of the party, who knew something of the history of the war, and came
from other States of the Union, had no idea of letting Illinois have all
the glory of the achievements, and disputed the correctness of his
statements. Illinois, however, was too many for them; he was not to be
stumped in that way; he had a stock of authentic facts on hand for any
emergency, with which he corroborated all his previous assertions. The
resistance he met with only stimulated him to greater efforts, and the
more one of his facts was doubted, the more incredible was the next;
till at last he detailed his confidential conversations with General
Taylor, and made himself out to be a sort of a fellow who swept Mexicans
off the face of the earth as a common man would kill mosquitoes.
He did not have all the talking to himself, however. One of the men who
kept the house was a bear-hunter by profession, and he had not hunted
grizzlies for nothing. He had tales to tell of desperate encounters and
hairbreadth escapes, to which the adventures of Baron Munchausen were
not a circumstance. He was a dry stringy-looking man, with light hair
and keen gray eyes. His features were rather handsome, and he had a
pleasing expression; but he was so dried up and tanned by exposure and
the hard life he led, that his face conveyed no idea of flesh. One would
rather have expected, on cutting into him, to find that he was composed
of gutta-percha, or something of that sort, and only colored on the
outside. He and Illinois listened to each other’s stories with silent
contempt; in fact, they pretended not to listen at all, but at the same
time each watched intently for the slightest halt in the other’s
narrative; and while the Illinois man was only taking breath during some
desperate struggle with the Mexicans, the hunter in a moment plunged
right into the middle of a bear-story, and was half eaten up by a
grizzly before we knew what he was talking about; and as soon as ever
that bear was disposed of, Illinois immediately went on with his story
as if he had never been interrupted.
The hunter had rather the best of it; his yarns were uncommonly tough
and hard of digestion, but there were no historical facts on record to
bring against him. He had it all his own way, for the only witnesses of
his exploits were the grizzlies, and he always managed to dispose of
them very effectually by finishing their career along with his story. He
showed several scars on different parts of his gutta-percha person which
he received from the paws of the grizzlies, and he was not the sort of
customer whose veracity one would care to question, especially as
implicit faith so much increased one’s interest in his adventures. One
man nearly got into a scrape by laughing at the most thrilling part of
one of his best stories. After firing twice at a bear without effect,
the bear, infuriated by the balls planted in his carcass, was rushing
upon him. He took to flight, and, loading as he ran, he turned and put a
ball into the bear’s left eye. The bear winked a good deal, but did not
seem to mind it much--he only increased his pace; so the hunter, loading
again, turned round and put a ball into his right eye; whereupon the
bear, now winking considerably with both eyes, put his nose to the
ground, and began to run him down by scent. At this critical moment, a
great stupid-looking lout, who had been sitting all night with his eyes
and mouth wide open, sucking in and swallowing everything that was said,
had the temerity to laugh incredulously. The hunter flared up in a
moment. “What are you a-laafin’ at?” he said. “D’ye mean to say I lie?”
“Oh,” said the other, “if you say it was so, I suppose it’s all right;
you ought to know best. But I warn’t laafin’ at you; I was laafin’ at
the bar.”
“What do you know about bars?” said the hunter, “Did you ever kill a
bar?”
The poor fellow had never killed a “bar,” so the hunter snuffed him out
with a look of utter contempt and pity, and went on triumphantly with
his story, which ended in his getting up a tree, where he sat and
peppered the bear as it went smelling round the stump, till it at last
fell mortally wounded, with I don’t know how many balls in its body.
The grizzlies are the commonest kind of bear found in California, and
are very large animals, weighing sometimes sixteen or eighteen hundred
pounds.[3]
Hunting them is rather dangerous sport, as they are extremely tenacious
of life, and when wounded invariably show fight. But unless molested
they do not often attack a man; in fact, they are hardly ever seen on
the trails during the day. At night, however, they prowl about, and
carry off whatever comes in their way. They had walked off with a young
calf from this ranch the night before, and the hunter was going out the
next day to wreak his vengeance upon them. A grizzly is well worth
killing, as he fetches a hundred dollars or more, according to his
weight. The meat is excellent, but it needs to be well spiced, for in
process of cooking it becomes saturated with bear’s grease. In the
mines, however, pomatum is an article unknown, and so no unpleasantly
greasy ideas occur to one while dining off a good piece of grizzly bear.
About ten o’clock, at the conclusion of a bear story, there was a
general move towards one corner of the cabin where there were a lot of
rifles, and where every man had thrown his roll of blankets. The floor
was swept, and each one, choosing his own location, spread his blankets
and lay down. Some slept in their boots, while others took them off, to
put under their heads by way of pillows. I was one of the latter number,
being rather partial to pillows; and selecting a spot for my head, where
it would be as far from other heads as possible, I lay down, and
stretching out my feet promiscuously, I was very soon in the land of
dreams, where I went through the whole Mexican campaign, and killed more
“bars” than ever the hunter had seen in his life.
People do not lie abed in the morning in California; perhaps they would
not anywhere, if they had no better beds than we had; so before daylight
there was a general resurrection, and a very general ablution was
performed in a tin basin which stood on a keg outside the cabin,
alongside of which was a barrel of water. Over the basin hung a very
small looking-glass, in which one could see one eye at a time; and
attached to it by a long string was a comb for the use of those
gentlemen who did not travel with their dressing-cases.
Some of the party, the warrior among the number, commenced the day by
taking a gin cocktail, the hunter acting as bar-keeper, while his
partner the cook, who had been up an hour before any of us, chopping
wood and lighting a fire, was laying the table for breakfast.
Breakfast was an affair of but very few moments, and as soon as it was
over, I set out in company with three or four of the party, who were
going the same way.
We crossed the north fork of the American River at Kelly’s Bar, a very
rocky little place, covered with a number of dilapidated tents. We had
the usual mountains to descend and ascend in crossing the river, but on
gaining the summit we found ourselves again in a beautiful rolling
country. Not far from the river was a very romantic little place called
Illinoistown, consisting of three shanties and a saw-mill. The pine
trees in the neighborhood were of an enormous size, and were being fast
converted into lumber, which was in great demand for various mining
operations, and sold at 120 dollars per thousand feet. We fared
sumptuously on stewed squirrels at a solitary shanty in the forest a few
miles farther on.
These little wayside inns, or “ranches,” as they are usually called in
the mines, are generally situated in a spot which offers some
capabilities of cultivation, and where water, the great desideratum in
the mountains, is to be had all the year. The owners employ themselves
in fencing-in and clearing the land, and by degrees give the place an
appearance of comfort and civilization. One finds such places in all the
different stages of improvement, from a small tent or log cabin, with
the wild forest around it as yet undisturbed, to good frame houses with
two or three rooms, a boarded floor, and windows, and surrounded by
several acres of cleared land under cultivation.
Oats and barley are the principal crops raised in the mountains. In some
of the little valleys a species of wild oats, which makes excellent hay,
grows very luxuriantly. In passing through one such place, where the
grasshoppers were in clouds, we found a number of Indian squaws catching
them with small nets attached to a short stick, in the style of an
angler’s landing-net. I believe they bruise them and knead them into a
paste, somewhat of the consistency of potted shrimps; it may be as
palatable also, but I cannot speak from experience on that point. My
companions, as we traveled on, branched off one by one to their
respective destinations, and I was again alone when I got to the ranch
where I intended to pass the night. It was somewhat the same style of
thing as the Grizzly-Bear House, but the house was larger, and the
accommodation more luxurious, inasmuch as we had canvas bunks or shelves
to sleep upon.
I went on next day along with a young miner from Georgia, who was also
bound for Nevada. We dined at a place where we crossed Bear River; and a
villainous bad dinner it was--nothing but bad salt pork, bad pickled
onions, and bad bread.
On resuming our journey, we were joined by a man who said he always
liked to have company on that road. Several robberies and murders had
been committed on it of late, and he very kindly pointed out to us, as
we passed it, the exact spot where, a few days before, one man had been
shot through the head, and another through the hat. One was robbed of
seventy-five cents, the other of eight hundred dollars.
It was a very romantic place, and well calculated for the operations of
the gentlemen of the road, being a little hollow darkened by the
spreading branches of a grove of oak trees; the underwood was thick and
very high, and as the trail twisted round trees and bushes, a traveler
could not see more than a few feet before or behind him. We had our
revolvers in readiness; but I was not very apprehensive, as three men,
all showing pistols in their belts, are rather more than those ruffians
generally care to tackle.
We arrived at Nevada City between five and six o’clock, when I took a
look round to find the most likely place for a good supper, being
particularly ravenous after the long walk and the salt-pork dinner. I
found a house bearing the sign of “Hotel de Paris,” and my choice was
made at once. As I had half an hour to wait for supper, I strolled about
the town to see what sort of a place it was. It is beautifully situated
on the hills bordering a small creek, and had once been surrounded by a
forest of magnificent pine trees, which, however, had been made to
become useful instead of ornamental, and nothing now remained to show
that they had existed but the numbers of stumps all over the hillsides.
The bed of the creek, which had once flowed past the town, was now
choked up with heaps of “tailings”--the washed dirt from which the gold
has been extracted--the white color of the dirt rendering it still more
unsightly. All the water of the creek was distributed among a number of
small troughs, carried along the steep banks on either side at different
elevations, for the purpose of supplying various quartz-mills and long
toms.
The town itself--or, I should say, the “City,” for from the moment of
its birth it has been called Nevada City--is, like all mining towns, a
mixture of staring white frame houses, dingy old canvas booths, and log
cabins.
The only peculiarity about the miners was the white mud with which they
were bespattered, especially those working in underground diggings, who
were easily distinguished by the quantity of dry white mud on the tops
of their hats.
The supper at the Hotel de Paris was the best-got-up thing of the kind I
had sat down to for some months. We began with soup--rather flimsy
stuff, but pretty good--then _bouilli_, followed by _filet-de-bœuf_,
with cabbage, carrots, turnips, and onions; after that came what the
landlord called a “god-dam rosbif,” with green peas, and the whole wound
up with a salad of raw cabbage, a cup of good coffee, and cognac. I did
impartial justice to every department, and rose from the table
powerfully refreshed.
The company were nearly all French miners, among whom was a young
Frenchman whom I had known in San Francisco, and whom I hardly
recognized in his miner’s costume.
We passed the evening together in some of the gambling-rooms, where we
heard pretty good music; and as there were no sleeping quarters to be
had at the house where I dined, I went to an American hotel close to it.
It was in the usual style of a boarding-house in the mines, but it was a
three-decker. All round the large sleeping apartment were three tiers of
canvas shelves, partitioned into spaces six feet long, on one of which I
laid myself out, choosing the top tier in case of accidents.
Next door was a large thin wooden building, in which a theatrical
company were performing. They were playing Richard, and I could hear
every word as distinctly as if I had been in the stage-box. I could even
fancy I saw King Dick rolling his eyes about like a man in a fit, when
he shouted for “A horse! a horse!” The fight between Richard and
Richmond was a very tame affair; they hit hard while they were at it,
but it was too soon over. It was one-two, one-two, a thrust, and down
went Dick. I heard him fall, and could hear him afterwards gasping for
breath and scuffling about on the stage in his dying agonies.
After King Richard was disposed of, the orchestra, which seemed to
consist of two fiddles, favored us with a very miscellaneous piece of
music. There was then an interlude performed by the audience, hooting,
yelling, whistling, and stamping their feet; and that being over, the
curtain rose, and we had Bombastes Furioso. It was very creditably
performed, but, under the peculiar circumstances of the case, it did not
sound to me nearly so absurd as the tragedy.
Some half-dozen men, the only occupants of the room besides myself, had
been snoring comfortably all through the performances, and now about a
dozen more came in and rolled themselves on to their respective shelves.
They had been at the theater, but I am sure they had not enjoyed it so
much as I did.