FRIENDSHIP AMONG THE PIONEERS
In Bret Harte's stories woman is subordinated to man, and love is
subordinated to friendship. This is a strange reversal of modern notions,
but it was the reflection of his California experience,--reinforced,
possibly, by some predilection of his own. There is a significant remark
in a letter written by him from a town in Kansas where he once delivered a
lecture: "Of course, as in all such places, the women contrast poorly with
the men--even in feminine qualities. Somehow, a man here may wear fustian
and glaring colors, and paper collars, and yet keep his gentleness and
delicacy, but a woman in glaring 'Dolly-Vardens,' and artificial flowers,
changes natures with him at once."
Friendship between one man and another would seem to be the most unselfish
feeling of which a human being is capable. The only sentiment that can be
compared with it in this respect is that of patriotism, and even in
patriotism there is an instinct of self-preservation, or at least of
race-preservation. In modern times the place which the friend held in
classic times is taken by the wife; but in California, owing to the
absence of women and the exigencies of mining, friendship for a brief and
brilliant period, never probably to recur, became once more an heroic
passion.
That there was no exaggeration in Bret Harte's pictures of Pioneer
friendship might be shown by many extracts from contemporary observers,
but one such will suffice:--"Two men who lived together, slept in the same
cabin, ate together, took turns cooking and washing, tended on each
other in sickness, and toiled day in and day out side by side, and made an
equal division of their losses and gains, were regarded and generally
regarded themselves as having entered into a very intimate tie, a sort of
band of brotherhood, almost as sacred as that of marriage. The word
'partner,' or 'pard' as it was usually contracted, became the most
intimate and confidential term that could be used."[68]
Even in the cities friendship between men assumed a character which it had
nowhere except in California. Partners in business were partners in all
social and often in all domestic matters. They took their meals and their
pleasures together, and showed that interest in each other's welfare
which, at home, they would have expended upon wives and children. The
withdrawal of one member from a firm seemed like the breaking up of a
family. The citizens of San Francisco and Sacramento were all newcomers,
they were mostly strangers to one another; and every partnership, though
established primarily for business purposes, became a union of persons
bound together by a sense of almost feudal loyalty, confident of one
another's sympathy and support under all circumstances, and forming a
coherent group in a chaotic community.
In the mines the partnership relation was even more idyllic. Gold was
sought at first by the primitive method of pan-mining. The miners
travelled singly sometimes, but much more often in pairs, with knapsacks,
guns and frying-pans; and they used a wooden bowl, or a metal pan, and
sometimes an Indian wicker basket for washing the gravel or sand which was
supposed to contain gold. Even a family bread-pan might be made to serve
this purpose, and that was the article which the youthful miner, Jack
Fleming, borrowed from beautiful Tinka Gallinger, and so became possessed
in the end, not indeed of gold, but of something infinitely more
valuable,--Tinka herself, the Treasure of the Redwoods.
The operation of washing was thus described by a Pioneer: "The bowl is
held in both hands, whirled violently back and forth through a half
circle, and pitched this way and that sufficiently to throw off the earth
and water, while the gold mixed with black sand settles to the bottom. The
process is extremely tiresome, and involves all the muscles of the frame.
In its effect it is more like swinging a scythe than any other labor I
ever attempted."
This work was much less laborious when the miner had access to a current
of water, and in later times it was assisted by the use of a magnet to
draw away the iron of which the black sand was largely composed.
The bowl or pan stage was the first stage, and its tendency was to arrange
the miners in couples like that of Tennessee and his Partner. Next came
the use of the rocker or cradle,--the "golden canoe," as the Indians
called it. The rocker was an oblong box, open at the lower end, the upper
end being protected by a screen or grating. The screen intercepted all
pebbles and gravel, and the finer material, earth and sand, was swept
through the screen by the action of water thrown or directed against it.
The same water carried the earth through the box, and out at the lower
end; but the heavy sand, containing the gold, sank and was intercepted by
cleats nailed across the inside of the box. A rough cradle, formed from a
hollow log, would sell at one time for two hundred dollars.
This process required the services of four or five men, and in pursuing it
the miner ceased to be a vagrant. He acquired a habitation, more or less
permanent, and entered into various relationships with his fellows, which
finally included the lynching of a small portion of them. This is the life
described by Bret Harte in _The Luck of Roaring Camp_, _Left Out on Lone
Star Mountain_, and many other stories.
The rocker period lasted only about a year, and was succeeded by that of
the sluice, a sort of magnified rocker, fifty or even a hundred feet long.
The necessary stream of water was diverted from some river, or was
supplied by an artificial reservoir. It was the bursting of such a
reservoir, as the Reader may remember, that precipitated the romance in
the life of the Youngest Miss Piper.
But the evolution of the industry was not yet complete. The next step was
to explore the bed of a river by laboriously turning the stream aside.
This was accomplished by constructing a dam across the river, and
directing the water into a canal or flume prepared for it, thus leaving
the bed of the river bare, perhaps for miles. These operations required
the labor of many hands, and were extremely arduous and difficult. The dam
could be built, of course, only in the dry season, and the first autumnal
rains would be sure to send the stream back to its old channel. The coming
of the rainy season in California is extremely uncertain, and river-bed
mining was correspondingly precarious. Sometimes, great perseverance in
these attempts was rewarded by great success. In November, 1849, the
Swett's Bar Company, composed of seventy miners, succeeded in damming and
diverting the Sonora River after fifteen days of extreme exertion. Five
hours later the dam was swept away by a flood. The following summer the
same company, reduced to sixty members, constructed a second and larger
dam, which required sixty-nine days' labor. This also was swept away on
the very day of its completion. But the miners did not give up. The next
morning they began anew, the directors leading the way into the now
ice-cold water, and the rest of the company following, some fairly
shrieking with the contact. The dam was rebuilt as quickly as
possible,--and, again, the river brushed it aside. The third year, a
remnant of the company, some twenty-seven stubborn souls, for the fourth
time completed a dam. This time it stood fast, and before the rains set in
the persevering miners had obtained gold enough to make them all rich.
Men who had struggled, side by side, through such difficulties and
disappointments were bound by no common tie,--and the tie was a still
closer one when, as in the first idyllic days, the partnership consisted
of two members only.
Bret Harte has devoted to friendship four of his best stories, namely,
_Tennessee's Partner_, _Captain Jim's Friend_, _In the Tules_, _Uncle Jim
and Uncle Billy_. The subject is touched upon also in the story called
_Under the Eaves_.
Unquestionably the best of these stories is the first one, and if we
should also set this down as the best of all Bret Harte's stories, we
could not go far wrong. The author himself is said to have preferred it.
It is a complete tale and a dramatic one, and yet it has the simplicity of
an incident. There is not, one makes bold to say, a superfluous word in
it, and perhaps only one word which an exacting reader could wish to
change. The background of scenery that the story requires is touched in
with that deep but restrained feeling for nature, with that realization of
its awful beauty, when contrasted with the life of man, which is a
peculiar trait of modern literature. The Reader will remember that rough,
mean, kerosene-lighted, upper room in which the trial took place. "And
above all this, etched on the dark firmament, rose the Sierra, remote and
passionless, crowned with remoter, passionless stars."
The pathos of _Tennessee's Partner_ consists chiefly in the fact that
Tennessee, so far as we can judge him, was unworthy of his partner's
devotion. He was courageous and good-humored, to be sure, but he was a
robber, something of a drunkard, and inconsiderate enough to have run
off with his partner's wife. Had Tennessee been a model of all the
virtues, his partner's affection for him would have been a bestowal only
of what was due. It would not have been, as it was in fact, the
spontaneous outpouring of a generous and affectionate character. Whether
we consider that the partner saw in Tennessee something which was really
there, some divine spark or quality, known only to the God who created and
to the friend who loved him, or that in Tennessee he beheld an ideal of
his own creation, something different from the real man,--in either case
his affection is equally disinterested and noble.
Those who do not give the first place to _Tennessee's Partner_ would
probably assign it either to _The Luck of Roaring Camp_ or _The Outcasts
of Poker Flat_; but in both of those stories the element of accident is
utilized, though not improbably. It was more or less an accident that the
Luck was swept away by a flood; it was an accident that the Outcasts were
banished on the eve of a storm. But in _Tennessee's Partner_, there is no
accident. Given the characters, all the rest followed inevitably.
An acute, if somewhat degenerate critic, Mr. James Douglas, writing in the
"Bookman,"[69] presents the case against the _Luck_ and the _Outcasts_ in
its most extreme form: "There is no doubt that we have outgrown the art
which relies on picturesque lay figures grouped against a romantic
background.... In Bret Harte's best stories the presence of the scene
painter, the stage carpenter and the stage manager jars on our
consciousness.... Bret Harte takes Cherokee Sal, an Indian prostitute,
puts her in a degraded mining settlement, and sanctifies her by
motherhood. That is good art. He lets her die, while her child survives.
That is not so good. It is the pathos of accident. He sends the miners in
to see the child. That is good art. He makes the presence of the child
work a revolution in the camp. Strong men wash their faces and wear clean
shirts in order to be worthy of the child. That is not good art."
But here let us interrupt Mr. Douglas for a moment. It should be
remembered that the clean faces and clean shirts were not spontaneous
improvements. "Stumpy imposed a kind of quarantine upon those who aspired
to the honor and privilege of holding the Luck." Moreover, the miners of
Roaring Camp, like the miners generally in California, were no strangers
to clean shirts or clean faces. With few exceptions, they had been brought
up to observe the decencies of life, and if, in the wild freedom of the
mining camp, some of those decencies had been cast off, it was not
difficult to reclaim them.
However, let us hear Mr. Douglas out: "Finally he drowns the child and his
readers in a deluge of melodramatic sentiment. That is bad art.... The
_Outcasts_ might be analyzed in the same way. The whole tableau is
arranged with a barefaced resolution to draw your tears. You feel that
there is nothing inevitable in the isolation of the Outcasts, in the
snow-storm, in the suicide of the card-sharper, or in the
in-death-they-were-not-divided pathos of vice and virtue. And even
Miggles, I fear, will hardly bear a close examination. The assault and
battery on our emotions is too direct, too deliberate. We like to be
outflanked nowadays, and the old-fashioned frontal attack melts away
before our indulgent smiles with their high velocity and flat trajectory.
M'liss, alas! no longer moves us. We prefer 'What Maisie Knew' to what
M'liss didn't know."
But at this point the Reader may become a little impatient. What attention
should be paid to a critic who prefers the effeminate subtleties of Henry
James to the wholesome pathos of Bret Harte! And the man himself seems
to be conscious of his degeneracy, for he concludes by saying, with
admirable frankness, "Perhaps, after all, the fault is ours, not Bret
Harte's, and we ought to apologize for the sophisticated insidiousness of
our nerves."
One or two obvious remarks are suggested by Mr. Douglas's canon of romance
against realism. If it were adopted without qualification, sad havoc would
be made with established reputations. All the great tragedians from
AEschylus to Shakspere, and almost all the great story-tellers from Haroun
al Raschid to Daniel Defoe would suffer. Antigone, Juliet and Robinson
Crusoe were all the victims of accident. Moreover, without the element of
accident, or romance as Mr. Douglas calls it, life could not truly be
represented. What might conceivably happen, and what occasionally does
happen, are as much a part of life as is the thing which always happens.
Many a "Kentuck" was swept away by floods in California. To perish in a
snow-storm was by no means an unheard-of event. It was on the twenty-third
of November, 1850, that the Outcasts were exiled, and on that very day, as
the newspapers recorded soon afterward, a young man was frozen to death in
the snow while endeavoring to walk from Poor Man's Creek to Grass Valley.
One week later a miner from Virginia was frozen to death a few miles north
of Downieville; and Poker Flat and Downieville are in the same county.[70]
To know a man, we must know how he acts in the face of death as well as
how he appears in his shop or parlor; and therefore, unusual and tragic
events, as well as commonplace events, have their place in good art.
But the substratum of truth in Mr. Douglas's view seems to be this, that a
tragedy which results from the character of the hero or heroine is, other
things being equal, a higher form of art than the tragedy which results
wholly, or in part, from accident. If human passion can work out the
destiny desired by the author, without the intervention of fire, flood or
disease, without the help of any catastrophe quaintly known in the common
law as "the act of God," why so much the better. From this point of view,
we may fairly place _Tennessee's Partner_ even above _The Luck of Roaring
Camp_ and _The Outcasts of Poker Flat_.
It only remains to add that like most of Bret Harte's stories, as we have
seen, _Tennessee's Partner_ was suggested by a real incident, which,
however, ended happily; and the last chapter of the true story may be
gathered from a paragraph which appeared in the California newspapers in
June, 1903:--
"J. A. Chaffee, famous as the original of _Tennessee's Partner_, has been
brought to an Oakland Sanatorium. He has been living since 1849 in a small
Tuolumne county mining camp with his partner, Chamberlain. In the early
days he saved Chamberlain from the vigilance committee by a plea to Judge
Lynch when the vigilantes had a rope around the victim's throat. It was
the only instance on record in the county where the vigilantes gave way in
such a case. Chamberlain was accused of stealing the miners' gold, but
Chaffee cleared him, as every one believed Chaffee. The two men settled
down to live where they have remained ever since, washing out enough
placer gold to maintain them. Professor Magee of the University of
California found Chaffee sick in his cabin last week, and induced him to
come to Oakland for treatment. Chamberlain was left behind. Both men are
over eighty."
One who witnessed Chaffee's rescue of his partner gives some details of
the affair, which show how closely Bret Harte kept to the facts until he
saw occasion to depart from them. Chaffee had a donkey and a cart--the
only vehicle in the settlement, and he is described as standing before
the vigilance committee, "hat in hand, his bald head bare, his big
bandanna handkerchief hanging loosely about his neck."
Of the four stories especially devoted to friendship, the second is
_Captain Jim's Friend_, published in the year 1887. This is almost a
_reductio ad absurdum_ of _Tennessee's Partner_, for Captain Jim's friend,
Lacy Bassett, is a coward, a liar, and an impostor. In the end, Captain
Jim discovers this, and he endeavors to wipe out the disgrace which, he
thinks, Bassett has brought upon him by forcing the latter, at the point
of his pistol, to a more manly course of conduct. And yet, when Bassett
commits the dastardly act of firing at his life-long friend and
benefactor, the heroic Captain Jim feels not only that his own reputation
for "foolishness" is redeemed, but also, in his dying moments, he recurs
to his old affection for the man who shot him; and thus the tinge of
cynicism which the story would otherwise wear is removed.
The third story, _In the Tules_, is a recurrence to the theme of
_Tennessee's Partner_, the two leading characters being almost a
repetition of those in the earlier story. _In the Tules_ has not the
spontaneousness of its predecessor, not quite the same tragic reality; but
it is a noble story, nevertheless, and the climax forms one of those rare
episodes which raise one's idea of human nature.
In the fourth story, _Uncle Jim and Uncle Billy_, published much later,
Bret Harte takes the subject in a lighter vein. The sacrifice made to
friendship is not of life, but of fortune; and though, unquestionably,
some men would lay down their lives more easily than they would give up
their property, yet the sacrifice does not wear so tragic an aspect.
In _Left Out on Lone Star Mountain_, among the very best of the later
stories, we have a little group of miners held together, inspired, and
redeemed from selfishness by the youngest of their number, affectionately
spoken of as "The Old Man," one of those brilliant, fine, lovable
natures, rare but not unknown in real life, to which all the virtues seem
to come as easily as vice and weakness come to the generality of men.[71]
[Illustration: HE LOOKED CURIOUSLY AT HIS REFLECTION
From "Left Out on Lone Star Mountain"
E. Boyd Smith, del.]
The hero of this story plays a part much resembling that of the late James
G. Fair, United States Senator from California, and a leading man in the
State. Mr. Fair, who was of Scotch-Irish descent, crossed the Plains in
1850 with a company of men who were demoralized by their privations and
misfortunes. Though the youngest of the party, being but eighteen years
old, Fair, by mere force of natural fitness, became their leader; and it
was owing to his determined good nature, energy and high spirits that they
finally reached the Pacific Slope. A member of the band afterward wrote:
"My comrades became so peevish from the wear upon the system, and ... the
absence of accustomed comforts, that they were more like children than
men, and at times it was as much as the boy could do to keep them from
killing one another."[72]
The moral of Bret Harte's stories, it has often been said, is that even
bad men have a good side, and are frequently capable of performing noble
acts. But this, surely, is only a small part of the lesson, or rather of
the inspiration to be derived from his works. In fact most of his heroes
are not bad men, but good men. Would it not be far more true to say that
the moral of Bret Harte's stories is very nearly the same as the moral of
the New Testament, namely, that the best thing a man can do with his life
or anything else that he has, is to give it up,--for love, for honor, for
a child, for a friend!