When Mr. Harte found himself with a fresh palette and his particular
local color fading from the West, he did what he considered the only
safe thing, and carried his young impression away to be worked out
untroubled by any newer fact. He should have gone to Jimville. There he
would have found cast up on the ore-ribbed hills the bleached timbers of
more tales, and better ones.
You could not think of Jimville as anything more than a survival, like
the herb-eating, bony-cased old tortoise that pokes cheerfully about
those borders some thousands of years beyond his proper epoch.
Not that Jimville is old, but it has an atmosphere favorable to the type
of a half century back, if not "forty-niners," of that breed. It is said
of Jimville that getting away from it is such a piece of work that it
encourages permanence in the population; the fact is that most have been
drawn there by some real likeness or liking. Not however that I would
deny the difficulty of getting into or out of that cove of reminder, I
who have made the journey so many times at great pains of a poor body.
Any way you go at it, Jimville is about three days from anywhere in
particular. North or south, after the railroad there is a stage journey
of such interminable monotony as induces forgetfulness of all previous
states of existence.
The road to Jimville is the happy hunting ground of old stage-coaches
bought up from superseded routes the West over, rocking, lumbering, wide
vehicles far gone in the odor of romance, coaches that Vasquez has held
up, from whose high seats express messengers have shot or been shot as
their luck held. This is to comfort you when the driver stops to rummage
for wire to mend a failing bolt. There is enough of this sort of thing
to quite prepare you to believe what the driver insists, namely, that
all that country and Jimville are held together by wire.
First on the way to Jimville you cross a lonely open land, with a hint
in the sky of things going on under the horizon, a palpitant, white, hot
land where the wheels gird at the sand and the midday heaven shuts it in
breathlessly like a tent. So in still weather; and when the wind blows
there is occupation enough for the passengers, shifting seats to hold
down the windward side of the wagging coach. This is a mere trifle. The
Jimville stage is built for five passengers, but when you have seven,
with four trunks, several parcels, three sacks of grain, the mail and
express, you begin to understand that proverb about the road which has
been reported to you. In time you learn to engage the high seat beside
the driver, where you get good air and the best company. Beyond the
desert rise the lava flats, scoriae strewn; sharp-cutting walls of
narrow cañons; league-wide, frozen puddles of black rock, intolerable
and forbidding. Beyond the lava the mouths that spewed it out,
ragged-lipped, ruined craters shouldering to the cloud-line, mostly of
red earth, as red as a red heifer. These have some comforting of shrubs
and grass. You get the very spirit of the meaning of that country when
you see Little Pete feeding his sheep in the red, choked maw of an old
vent,--a kind of silly pastoral gentleness that glazes over an elemental
violence. Beyond the craters rise worn, auriferous hills of a quiet
sort, tumbled together; a valley full of mists; whitish green scrub; and
bright, small, panting lizards; then Jimville.
The town looks to have spilled out of Squaw Gulch, and that, in fact, is
the sequence of its growth. It began around the Bully Boy and Theresa
group of mines midway up Squaw Gulch, spreading down to the smelter at
the mouth of the ravine. The freight wagons dumped their loads as near
to the mill as the slope allowed, and Jimville grew in between. Above
the Gulch begins a pine wood with sparsely grown thickets of lilac,
azalea, and odorous blossoming shrubs.
Squaw Gulch is a very sharp, steep, ragged-walled ravine, and that part
of Jimville which is built in it has only one street,--in summer paved
with bone-white cobbles, in the wet months a frothy yellow flood. All
between the ore dumps and solitary small cabins, pieced out with tin
cans and packing cases, run footpaths drawing down to the Silver Dollar
saloon. When Jimville was having the time of its life the Silver Dollar
had those same coins let into the bar top for a border, but the
proprietor pried them out when the glory departed. There are three
hundred inhabitants in Jimville and four bars, though you are not to
argue anything from that.
Hear now how Jimville came by its name. Jim Calkins discovered the Bully
Boy, Jim Baker located the Theresa. When Jim Jenkins opened an
eating-house in his tent he chalked up on the flap, "Best meals in
Jimville, $1.00," and the name stuck.
There was more human interest in the origin of Squaw Gulch, though it
tickled no humor. It was Dimmick's squaw from Aurora way. If Dimmick had
been anything except New Englander he would have called her a mahala,
but that would not have bettered his behavior. Dimmick made a strike,
went East, and the squaw who had been to him as his wife took to drink.
That was the bald way of stating it in the Aurora country. The milk of
human kindness, like some wine, must not be uncorked too much in speech
lest it lose savor. This is what they did. The woman would have returned
to her own people, being far gone with child, but the drink worked her
bane. By the river of this ravine her pains overtook her. There Jim
Calkins, prospecting, found her dying with a three days' babe nozzling
at her breast. Jim heartened her for the end, buried her, and walked
back to Poso, eighteen miles, the child poking in the folds of his denim
shirt with small mewing noises, and won support for it from the
rough-handed folks of that place. Then he came back to Squaw Gulch, so
named from that day, and discovered the Bully Boy. Jim humbly regarded
this piece of luck as interposed for his reward, and I for one believed
him. If it had been in mediaeval times you would have had a legend or a
ballad. Bret Harte would have given you a tale. You see in me a mere
recorder, for I know what is best for you; you shall blow out this
bubble from your own breath.
You could never get into any proper relation to Jimville unless you
could slough off and swallow your acquired prejudices as a lizard does
his skin. Once wanting some womanly attentions, the stage-driver assured
me I might have them at the Nine-Mile House from the lady barkeeper. The
phrase tickled all my after-dinner-coffee sense of humor into an
anticipation of Poker Flat. The stage-driver proved himself really
right, though you are not to suppose from this that Jimville had no
conventions and no caste. They work out these things in the personal
equation largely. Almost every latitude of behavior is allowed a good
fellow, one no liar, a free spender, and a backer of his friends'
quarrels. You are respected in as much ground as you can shoot over, in
as many pretensions as you can make good.
That probably explains Mr. Fanshawe, the gentlemanly faro dealer of
those parts, built for the role of Oakhurst, going white-shirted and
frock-coated in a community of overalls; and persuading you that
whatever shifts and tricks of the game were laid to his deal, he could
not practice them on a person of your penetration. But he does. By his
own account and the evidence of his manners he had been bred for a
clergyman, and he certainly has gifts for the part. You find him always
in possession of your point of view, and with an evident though not
obtrusive desire to stand well with you. For an account of his killings,
for his way with women and the way of women with him, I refer you to
Brown of Calaveras and some others of that stripe. His improprieties had
a certain sanction of long standing not accorded to the gay ladies who
wore Mr. Fanshawe's favors. There were perhaps too many of them. On the
whole, the point of the moral distinctions of Jimville appears to be a
point of honor, with an absence of humorous appreciation that strangers
mistake for dullness. At Jimville they see behavior as history and judge
it by facts, untroubled by invention and the dramatic sense. You glimpse
a crude equity in their dealings with Wilkins, who had shot a man at
Lone Tree, fairly, in an open quarrel. Rumor of it reached Jimville
before Wilkins rested there in flight. I saw Wilkins, all Jimville saw
him; in fact, he came into the Silver Dollar when we were holding a
church fair and bought a pink silk pincushion. I have often wondered
what became of it. Some of us shook hands with him, not because we did
not know, but because we had not been officially notified, and there
were those present who knew how it was themselves. When the sheriff
arrived Wilkins had moved on, and Jimville organized a posse and brought
him back, because the sheriff was a Jimville man and we had to stand by
him.
I said we had the church fair at the Silver Dollar. We had most things
there, dances, town meetings, and the kinetoscope exhibition of the
Passion Play. The Silver Dollar had been built when the borders of
Jimville spread from Minton to the red hill the Defiance twisted
through. "Side-Winder" Smith scrubbed the floor for us and moved the bar
to the back room. The fair was designed for the support of the circuit
rider who preached to the few that would hear, and buried us all in
turn. He was the symbol of Jimville's respectability, although he was of
a sect that held dancing among the cardinal sins. The management took no
chances on offending the minister; at 11.30 they tendered him the
receipts of the evening in the chairman's hat, as a delicate intimation
that the fair was closed. The company filed out of the front door and
around to the back. Then the dance began formally with no feelings hurt.
These were the sort of courtesies, common enough in Jimville, that
brought tears of delicate inner laughter.
There were others besides Mr. Fanshawe who had walked out of Mr. Harte's
demesne to Jimville and wore names that smacked of the soil,--"Alkali
Bill," "Pike" Wilson, "Three Finger," and "Mono Jim;" fierce, shy,
profane, sun-dried derelicts of the windy hills, who each owned, or had
owned, a mine and was wishful to own one again. They laid up on the worn
benches of the Silver Dollar or the Same Old Luck like beached vessels,
and their talk ran on endlessly of "strike" and "contact" and "mother
lode," and worked around to fights and hold-ups, villainy, haunts, and
the hoodoo of the Minietta, told austerely without imagination.
Do not suppose I am going to repeat it all; you who want these things
written up from the point of view of people who do not do them every day
would get no savor in their speech.
Says Three Finger, relating the history of the Mariposa, "I took it
off'n Tom Beatty, cheap, after his brother Bill was shot."