retreated. He was a lover of home and family, and so fell where he was
born. For he is still found here and there, all up and down the land,
as the Indian is still found, but he is no longer the majestic and
serene king of the world. His whole life has been disturbed, broken
up; and his temper ruined. He is a cattle thief now, and even a sheep
thief. In old age, he keeps close to his canyon by day, deep in the
impenetrable chaparral, and at night shuffles down hill to some
hog-pen, perfectly careless of dogs or shots, and, tearing out a
whole side of the pen, feeds his fill on the inmates.
One of the interior counties kept a standing reward for the capture of
an old grizzly of this character for several years. But he defied
everything and he escaped everything but old age. Some hunters finally
crept in to where the old king lay, nearly blind and dying of old age,
and dispatched him with a volley from several Winchester rifles. It
was found that he was almost toothless, his paws had been terribly
mutilated by numerous steel traps, and it is said that his kingly old
carcass had received nearly lead enough to sink a small ship. There
were no means of ascertaining his exact weight, but it was claimed
that skin, bone and bullets, as he was found, he would have weighed
well nigh a ton.
XIII.
THE BEAR WITH SPECTACLES.
And now let us go down to near the mouth of the Father of Waters, to
"Barra Tarra Land" or Barren Land, as it was called of old by
Cervantes, in the kingdom of Sancho Panza. Strange how little the
great men of the old world knew of this new world! In one of his plays
Shakespeare speaks of ships from Mexico; in another he means to
mention the Bermudas. Burns speaks of a Newfoundland dog as
"Whelped in a country far abroad
Where boatmen gang to fish for cod,"
and Byron gets in a whole lot about Daniel Boone; but as a rule we
were ignored.
Barra Tarra, so called, is the very richest part of this globe. It
must have been rich always, rich as the delta of the Nile; but now,
with the fertility of more than a dozen States dumped along there
annually, it is rich as cream is rich.
The fish, fowl, oysters of Barra Tarra--ah, the oysters! No oysters in
the world like these for flavor, size and sweetness. They are so
enormous in size that--but let me illustrate their size by an anecdote
of the war.
A Yankee captain, hungry and worn out hewing his way with his sword
from Chicago to the sea, as General Logan had put it, sat down in a
French restaurant in New Orleans, and while waiting for a plate of the
famous Barra Tarra raw oysters, saw that a French creole sitting at
the same little side table was turning over and over with his fork a
solitary and most tempting oyster of enormous size, eyeing it
ruefully.
"Why don't you eat him?"
"By gar! I find him too big for me. You like?"
"Certainly. Not too big for me. See this!" and snatching the fork from
the Frenchman the oyster was gone at a gulp.
The little Frenchman shrugged his shoulders, looked at the gallant
officer a moment and then said in a fit of enthusiastic admiration:
"By gar, Monsieur Capitaine, you are one mighty brave man! I did try
him t'ree times zat way, but he no stay."
The captain threw up his arms and--his oyster!--so runs the story.
The soil along the river bank is so rich that weeds, woods, vines,
trench close and hard on the heels of the plowman. A plantation will
almost perish from the earth, as it were, by a few years of
abandonment. And so it is that you see miles and miles on either
side--parishes on top of parishes, in fact--fast returning to
barbarism, dragging the blacks by thousands down to below the level of
brutes with them, as you descend from New Orleans toward the mouth of
the mighty river, nearly one hundred miles from the beautiful
"Crescent City." And, ah, the superstition of these poor blacks!
You see hundreds of little white houses, old "quarters," and all
tenantless now, save one or two on each plantation. Cheap sugar and
high wages, as compared with old times of slavery--but then the
enormous cost of keeping up the levees, and above all, the continued
peril to life and property, with a mile of swift, muddy water sweeping
seaward high above your head--these things are making a desert of the
richest lands on earth. We are gaining ground in the West, but we are
losing ground in the South, the great, silent South.
Of course, the world, we, civilization, will turn back to this
wondrous region some day, when we have settled the West; for the mouth
of the mightiest river on the globe is a fact; it is the mouth by
which this young nation was trained in its younger days, and we cannot
ignore it in the end, however willing we may be to do so now.
Strange how wild beasts and all sorts of queer creatures are
overrunning the region down there, too, growing like weeds, increasing
as man decreases. I found a sort of marsh bear here. He looks like the
sloth bear (Ursus Labiatus) of the Ganges, India, as you see him in
the Zoo of London, only he is not a sloth, by any means. The negroes
are superstitiously afraid of him, and their dogs, very numerous, and
good coon dogs, too, will not touch him. His feet are large and flat,
to accommodate him in getting over the soft ground, while his shaggy
and misshapen body is very thin and light. His color is as unlovely as
his shape--a sort of faded, dirty brown or pale blue, with a rim of
dirty white about the eyes that makes him look as if he wore
spectacles when he stops and looks at you.
As he is not fit to eat because he lives on fish and oysters,
sportsmen will not fire at him; and as the poor, superstitious,
voodoo-worshiping negroes, and their dogs, too, run away as soon as he
is seen, he has quite a habit of stopping and looking at you through
his queer spectacles as long as you are in sight. He looks to be a
sort of second-hand bear, his shaggy, faded, dirty coat of hair
looking as if he had been stuffed, like an old sofa, with the stuffing
coming out--a very second-hand appearance, to be sure.
Now, as I have always had a fondness for skins--having slept on them
and under them all my life, making both bed and carpet of them--I very
much wanted a skin of this queer marsh bear which the poor negroes
both adore and dread as a sort of devil. But, as no one liked him well
enough to kill him, I must do it myself; and with this object, along
with my duty to describe the drowning plantations, I left New Orleans
with Colonel Bloom, two good guns, and something to eat and to drink,
and swept down the great river to the landing in the outer edge of the
timber belt.
And how strange this landing! As a rule you have to climb up to the
shore from a ship. Here, after setting foot on the levee, we walked
down, down, down to reach the level land--a vast field of fevers.
I had a letter of introduction to the "preacher." He was a marvel of
rags, preached every day and night, up and down the river, and
received 25 cents a day from the few impoverished white planters, too
poor to get away, for his influence for good among the voodoo blacks.
Not that they could afford to care for the negroes, those few
discouraged and fever-stricken planters on their plantations of weeds
and water, but they must, now and then, have these indolent and
retrograding blacks to plant or cut down their cane, or sow and gather
their drowning patches of rice, and the preacher could preach them
into working a little, when right hungry.
The ragged black took my letter and pretended to read it. Poor fellow,
he could not read, but pride, or rather vanity, made him act a lie.
Seeing the fact, I contrived to tell him that it was from a colored
clergyman, and that I had come to get him and his dogs to help me
kill a bear. The blacks now turned white; or at least white around the
lips. The preacher shuddered and shrugged his shoulders and finally
groaned in his grief.
[Illustration: The bear was waiting there.--Page 111.]
Let us omit the mosquitoes, the miserable babies, nude as nature, and
surely very hungry in this beauteous place of fertility. They hung
about my door, a "quarters" cabin with grass knee high through the
cracks in the floor, like flies, till they got all my little store of
supplies, save a big flask of "provisions" which General Beauregard
had given me for Colonel Bloom, as a preventive against the deadly
fever. No, it was not whiskey, not all whiskey, at least, for it was
bitter as gall with quinine. I had to help the Colonel sample it at
first, but I only helped him sample it once. It tasted so vilely that
it seemed to me I should, as between the two, prefer fever.
And such a moon! The ragged minister stood whooping up his numerous
dogs and gathering his sullen clan of blacks to get that bear and that
promised $5.
Away from up toward New Orleans, winding, sweeping, surging, flashing
like a mighty sword of silver, the Father of Waters came through the
air, high above our heads and level with the topmost limit of his
artificial banks. The blacks were silent, ugly, sullen, and so the
preacher asked for and received the five silver dollars in advance.
This made me suspicious, and, out of humor, I went into my cabin and
took Colonel Bloom into a corner and told him what had been done. He
did not say one word but took a long drink of preventive against the
fever, as General Beauregard had advised and provided.
Then we set out for the woods, through weeds that reached to our
shoulders, the negroes in a string, slow, silent, sullen and ugly, the
brave bear dogs only a little behind the negroes. The preacher kept
muttering a monotonous prayer.
But that moon and that mighty sword of silver in the air, the silence,
the large solemnity, the queer line of black heads barely visible
above the sea of weeds! I was not right certain that I had lost any
bear as we came to the edge of the moss-swept cypress woods, for here
the negroes all suddenly huddled up and muttered and prayed with one
voice. Aye, how they prayed in their piteous monotone! How sad it all
was!
The dogs had sat down a few rods back, a line of black dots along the
path through the tall weeds, and did not seem to care for anything at
all. I had to lay my hand on the preacher's shoulder and ask him to
please get on; then they all started on together, and oh, the moon,
through the swaying cypress moss, the mighty river above!
It was with great effort that I got them to cross a foot-log that lay
across a lagoon only a little way in the moss-hung woods, the brave
dogs all the time only a short distance behind us still. It was a hot
night and the mosquitoes were terrible in the woods, but I doubt if
they bite the blacks as they did me. Surely not, else they would not
be even as nearly alive as they are.
Having got them across the lagoon, I gave them each 25 cents more, and
this made them want to go home. The dogs had all sat down in a queer
row on the foot-log. Such languor, such laziness, such idiotic
helplessness I never saw before, even on the Nile. The blacks, as well
as the dogs, seemed to be afraid to move now. The preacher again began
to mumble a prayer, and the whole pack with him; and then they prayed
again, this time not so loudly. And although there was melody of a
sort in their united voices, I am certain they used no words, at least
no words of any real language.
Suddenly the dogs got up and came across and hid among the men, and
the men huddled up close; for right there on the other end of the log,
with his broad right foot resting on it, was the shaggy little beast
we were hunting for. We had found our bear, or rather, he had found
us, and it was clear that he meant to come over and interview us at
once.
The preacher crouched behind me as I cocked and raised my gun, the
blacks hid behind the preacher, and I think, though I had not time to
see certainly, that the dogs hid behind the blacks.
I fired at the dim white spot on the bear's breast and sent shot after
shot into his tattered coat, for he was not ten lengths of an old
Kentucky ramrod distant, and he fell dead where he stood, and I went
over and dragged him safely up on the higher bank.
Then the wild blacks danced and sang and sang and danced, till one of
them slipped and fell into the lagoon. They fished him out and all
returned to where I was, with the dead bear, dogs and all in great
good spirits. Tying the bear's feet together with a withe they strung
him on a pole and we all went back home, the blacks singing all the
way some barbaric half French song at the top of their melodious
voices.
But Colonel Bloom was afraid that the one who had fallen in the river
might take the fever, and so as soon as we got safe back he drank what
was left in the bottle General Beauregard had sent him and he went to
sleep; while the superstitious blacks huddled together under the great
levee and skinned the bear in the silver moonlight, below the mighty
river. I gave them each a silver dollar--very bright was the brand new
silver from the mint of New Orleans, but not nearly so bright as the
moon away down there by the glowing rim of the Mexican seas where the
spectacled bear abides in the classic land, Barra Tarra, Kingdom of
Sancho Panza.
XIV.
THE BEAR-SLAYER OF SAN DIEGO.
Let us now leave the great grizzly and the little marsh bear in
spectacles behind us and tell about a boy, a bear-slayer; not about a
bear, mind you. For the little fish-eating black bear which he killed
and by which he got his name is hardly worth telling about. This bear
lives in the brush along the sea-bank on the Mexican and Southern
California coast and has huge feet but almost no hair. I don't know
any name for him, but think he resembles the "sun bear" (Ursus
Titanus) more than any other. His habit of rolling himself up in a
ball and rolling down hill after you is like that of the porcus or pig
bear.
You may not know that a bear, any kind of a bear, finds it hard work
running down hill, because of his short arms, so when a man who knows
anything about bears is pursued, or thinks he is pursued, he always
tries, if he knows himself, to run down hill. A man can escape almost
any bear by running down hill, except this little fellow along the
foothills by the Mexican seas. You see, he has good bear sense, like
the rest of the bear family, and gets along without regard to legs of
any sort, sometimes.
This boy that I am going to tell about was going to school on the
Mexican side of the line between the two republics, near San Diego,
California, when a she bear which had lost her cub caught sight of the
boys at play down at the bottom of a high, steep hill, and she rolled
for them, rolled right among the little, half-naked fellows, and
knocked numbers of them down. But before she could get the dust out of
her eyes and get up, this boy jumped on her and killed her with his
knife.
The governor remembered the boy for his pluck and presence of mind and
he was quite a hero and was always called "The Bear-Slayer" after
that.
Some rich ladies from Boston, hearing about his brave act, put their
heads together and then put their hands in their pockets and sent him
to a higher school, where the following incident took place.
I ought to mention that this little Mexican bear, though he has but
little hair on his body, has a great deal on his feet, making him look
as if he wore pantalets, little short pantalets badly frayed out at
the bottoms.
San Diego is one of the great new cities of Southern California. It
lies within only a few minutes' ride of Mexico. There is a pretty
little Mexican town on the line between Mexico and California--Tia
Juana--pronounced Te Wanna. Translated, the name means "Aunt Jane." In
the center of one of the streets stands a great gray stone monument,
set there by the government to mark the line between the United States
and Mexico.
To the south, several hundred miles distant, stretches the long Sea of
Cortez, as the conquerors of ancient Mexico once called the Gulf of
California. Beyond the Sea of Cortez is the long and rock-bound reach
of the west coast of Mexico. Then a group of little Central American
republics; then Colombia, Peru and so on, till at last Patagonia
points away like a huge giant's finger straight toward the South Pole.
But I must bear in mind that I set out in this story to tell you about
"The Bear-Slayer of San Diego," and the South Pole is a long way from
the subject in hand.
I have spoken of San Diego as one of the great new cities, and great
it is, but altogether new it certainly is not, for it was founded by a
Spanish missionary, known as Father Junipero, more than one hundred
years ago.
These old Spanish missionaries were great men in their day; brave,
patient and very self-sacrificing in their attempts to settle the
wild countries and civilize the Indians.
This Father Junipero walked all the way from the City of Mexico to San
Diego, although he was more than fifty years old; and finally, after
he had spent nearly a quarter of a century in founding missions up and
down the coast of California, he walked all the way back to Mexico,
where he died.
When it is added that he was a lame man, that he was more than
threescore and ten years of age, and that he traveled all the distance
on this last journey on foot and alone, with neither arms nor
provisions, trusting himself entirely to Providence, one can hardly
fail to remember his name and speak it with respect.
This new city, San Diego, with its most salubrious clime, is set all
over and about with waving green palms, with golden oranges, red
pomegranates, great heavy bunches of green and golden bananas, and
silver-laden olive orchards. The leaf of the olive is of the same
soft gray as the breast of the dove. As if the dove and the olive
branch had in some sort kept companionship ever since the days of the
deluge.
San Diego is nearly ten miles broad, with its base resting against the
warm, still waters of the Pacific Ocean. The most populous part of the
city is to the south, toward Mexico. Then comes the middle part of San
Diego City. This is called "the old town," and here it was that Father
Junipero planted some palm trees that stand to this day--so tall that
they almost seem to be dusting the stars with their splendid plumes.
Here also you see a great many old adobe houses in ruins, old forts,
churches, fortresses, barracks, built by the Mexicans nearly a century
ago, when Spain possessed California, and her gaudy banner floated
from Oregon to the Isthmus of Darien.
The first old mission is a little farther on up the coast, and the new
college, known as the San Diego College of Letters, is still farther
on up the warm sea bank. San Francisco lies several hundred miles on
up the coast beyond Los Angeles. Then comes Oregon, then Washington,
one of the newest States, and then Canada, then Alaska, and at last
the North Pole, which, by the way, is almost as far as the South Pole
from my subject: The Bear-Slayer of San Diego.
He was a little Aztec Indian, brown as a berry, slim and slender, very
silent, very polite and not at all strong.
It was said that he had Spanish blood in his veins, but it did not
show through his tawny skin. It is to be conceded, however, that he
had all the politeness and serene dignity of the proudest Spanish don
in the land.
He was now, by the kind favor of those good ladies who had heard of
his daring address in killing the bear with his knife, a student of
the San Diego College of Letters, where there were several hundred
other boys of all grades and ages, from almost all parts of the earth.
A good many boys came here from Boston and other eastern cities to
escape the rigors of winter. I remember one boy in particular from
Philadelphia. He was a small boy with a big nose, very bright and very
brave. He was not a friend of the little Aztec Indian, the Bear-Slayer
of San Diego. The name of this boy from Philadelphia was Peterson; the
Boston boys called him Bill Peterson. His name, perhaps, was William
P. Peterson; William Penn Peterson, most likely. But this is merely
detail, and can make but little difference in the main facts of the
case.
As I said before, these college grounds are on the outer edge of the
city. The ocean shuts out the world on the west, but the huge
chaparral hills roll in on the east, and out of these hills the
jack-rabbits come down in perfect avalanches at night, and devour
almost everything that grows.
Wolves howl from these hills of chaparral at night by hundreds, but
they are only little bits of shaggy, gray coyotes and do little or no
harm in comparison with the innumerable rabbits. For these big
fellows, on their long, bent legs, and with ears like those of a
donkey, can cut down with their teeth a young orchard almost in a
single night.
The new college, of course, had new grounds, new bananas, oranges,
olives, all things, indeed, that wealth and good taste could
contribute in this warm, sweet soil. But the rabbits! You could not
build a fence so high that they would not leap over it.
"They are a sort of Jumbo grasshopper," said the smart boy from
Boston.
The head gardener of the college campus and environment grew
desperate.
"Look here, sir," he said to the president, "these big-eared fellows
are lazy and audacious things. Why can't they live up in the
chaparral, as they did before we came here to plant trees and try to
make the world beautiful? Now, either these jack-rabbits must go or
we must go."
"Very well," answered the president. "Offer a reward for their ears
and let the boys destroy them."
"How much reward can I offer?"
"Five cents apiece, I think, would do," answered the head of the
college, as he passed on up the great stone steps to his study.
The gardener got the boys together that evening and said, "I will give
you five cents apiece for the ears of these dreadful rabbits."
"That makes ten cents for each rabbit, for each rabbit has two ears!"
shouted the smart boy from Boston.
Before the dumfounded gardener could protest, the boys had broken into
shouts of enthusiasm, and were running away in squads and in couples
to borrow, buy or beg firearms for their work.
The smart boy from Boston, however, with an eye to big profits and a
long job, went straight to the express office, and sent all the way
to the East for a costly and first-class shotgun.
The little brown Aztec Indian did nothing of that sort; he kept by
himself, kept his own counsel, and so far as any of the boys could
find out, paid no attention to the proffered reward for scalps.
Bill Peterson borrowed his older brother's gun and brought in two
rabbits the next day. The Boston boy, with an eye wide open to future
profits to himself, went with Peterson to the head gardener, and
holding up first one dead jack-rabbit by the ear, and then the other,
coolly and deliberately counted off four ears.
The gardener grudgingly counted out two dimes, and then, with a grunt
of satisfaction, carried away the two big rabbits by their long hind
legs.
As the weeks wore by, several other dead rabbits were reported, and
despite the grumbling of the head gardener, the tumultuous and merry
students had quite a revenue, and their hopes for the future were
high, especially when that artillery should arrive from Boston!
Meantime, the little brown Aztec boy had done nothing at all. However,
when Friday afternoon came, he earnestly begged, and finally obtained,
leave to go down to his home at Tia Juana. He wanted very much to see
his Mexican mother and his six little Mexican brothers, and his sixty,
more or less, little Mexican cousins.
But lo! on Saturday morning, bright and early, back came the little
Bear-Slayer, as he was called by the boys, and at his heels came
toddling and tumbling not only his six half-naked little brown
brothers, but dozens of his cousins.
Each carried a bundle on his back. These bundles were long, finely
woven bird-nets, and these nets were made of the fiber of the misnamed
century plant, the agave.
This queer looking line of barefooted, bareheaded, diminutive beings,
headed by the silent little Aztec, hastily dispersed itself along the
outer edge of the grounds next to the chaparral abode of the
jack-rabbits, and then, while grave professors leaned from their
windows, and a hundred curious white boys looked on, these little
brown fellows fastened all their long bird-nets together, and
stretched two wide wings out and up the hill.
Very quiet but very quick they were, and when all the nets had been
unwound and stretched out in a great letter V far up the hill, it was
seen that each brown boy had a long, heavy manzanita wood club in his
hand.
Suddenly and silently as they had come they all disappeared up and
over the hills beyond, and in the dense black chaparral.