“HURRAH FOR WASHOE!”
Placerville was busy as a hive of bees on a warm June afternoon. Its
hotels and restaurants were crowded to capacity. The saloons were doing
a rush business and the gambling halls teemed with a packed and jostling
humanity. Grocery stores bustled with the activity of clerks filling
orders, packing supplies, nailing up boxes, and sewing bales. The main
streets were filled with mixed crowds of miners, speculators, gamblers,
men of leisure then known as “bummers,” and such flotsam as is always
washed up in the stampede for a new mining camp.
Vaqueros drove loaded mules and burros through the streets with soft
liquid oaths of command. A sixteen-horse ore wagon, painted red, the bed
of it six feet deep, rumbled down the road with two “back-actions”
behind, each of these also filled with ore. They had come straight from
the diggings at Virginia City. Freight outfits were loading at stores
and wholesale liquor houses with supplies for the new camp. Men bought
and sold hurriedly. A hundred outfits were being roped up to cross the
Sierras to the Carson Valley. Ox teams swung into town and out again
with goods for the new district. Everywhere was that orderly confusion
of many cross currents of humanity moving to a common end.
That common end was Washoe.[2] The name was on every tongue. It
dominated every mind. All the able-bodied old prospectors who had come
round the Horn in the old days, who had followed the stampedes to Kern
River, the Fraser, and Told Bluff, were now headed as by one impulse for
the silver diggings at the foot of Mt. Davidson. Such rich grounds never
had been seen before. All one had to do was to pan the outcroppings and
grow rich in a few weeks. Hurrah for Washoe! Hip hip for the land of
golden dreams! Washoe or bust!
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[2] Nevada was commonly known as Washoe until its admission as a
territory under the Spanish name.—W. M. R.
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A canvas-covered emigrant wagon drawn by a pair of emaciated horses
moved slowly toward the hills. The driver was a bullet-headed young
fellow with sullen, close-set eyes. These were a peculiar
grayish-yellow, and the pupils were very small. He was unshaven, poorly
dressed, and far from clean. The hardship of a long overland trip had
undermined his self-respect and worn away the thin veneer of the man’s
civility.
At the crest of the first rise he turned in his seat and looked back
toward the town. “Good-bye, Hangtown,”[3] he shouted with an oath,
shaking his ragged whip.
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[3] In the early days Placerville was often called Hangtown.
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The skeleton horses crept up the road toward the mountains. Presently
evidence of the stampede to Washoe began to manifest itself. The prairie
schooner passed a broken-down stage, a smashed wheel, a splintered wagon
tongue snapped in the middle. An empty whisky barrel advertised one of
the chief staples of trade. A dead burro lay half buried in the mire.
The road had been a good one once. Perhaps it would be hard and firm
again after the slush from the rains had dried. Just now it was one to
try the patience of man and beast. There were stretches where even the
pack mules bogged down while Mexican drivers beat and hauled at them to
an accompaniment of excited curses in their native tongue.
A stage from Virginia City swung down the grade, “Pony” King on the box
holding the lines, his long whip crackling out snakelike toward the
leaders. The stage was not a handsome Concord, the pride of every
employee of the company, but one of the mud-wagons used as a substitute
when the roads were bad. A pack train of fifteen animals overtook the
covered wagon. These carried nothing but liquors—whisky, gin, lager
beer, brandy, some pipes of California wine, and a few baskets of
champagne. Foot travellers, carrying outfits on their backs, ploughed
wearily forward. Nothing but the wonders of the Comstock Lode could have
kept their tired legs moving through the mud.
At every gulch there was a bar, the fixtures improvised from a couple of
dry-goods boxes and a canvas top. Restaurants announced themselves every
few miles, as well as hotels, which had all necessary accommodations for
tired stampeders except food, beds, and bedding.
Later in the day the prairie schooner came into a region where patches
of snow began to appear in the hill crotches above. The grade was
stiffer and the poor horses made sorry progress. A dozen times they gave
up, exhausted. The driver beat them furiously with his whip and flung
raucous curses at them. From the wagon a big-eyed child and a wan-faced
woman dismounted to lighten the load. Once the woman timidly murmured a
protest at her husband’s brutality. Savagely he turned on her, snarling
his rage explosively.
She shrank back, afraid that he was going to use the whip on her.
“Don’t, Rob,” she begged, face white as the snow in the bank beside the
road.
A burro train swung round the bend, and the man flung away from her and
lashed the horses instead.
They camped that night at the mouth of a cañon and were on the road at
daybreak next morning. The travellers were well into the mountains now.
The spring rains had been heavy and had loosened the snow on the slopes.
Landslides were frequent and the air was filled with the thunder of
avalanches. The trail itself was treacherous. It was honeycombed with
chuck holes where the mules of pack outfits had broken through and
wallowed in the mud.
The American River plunged down a cañon beside the road. A growth of
heavy pines bordered the trail.
When the gaunt team dragged into the clearing at Strawberry Flat
hundreds of men and scores of teams were camped there for the night. The
animals were tied to the tongues and sides of the wagons and fed from
long feed-boxes. They were protected from the cold by heavy canvases
lined with blanket stuff. The men who handled the jerkline and the
blacksnake curled up under the wagons. Soon they were fast asleep,
oblivious to the soft snow that drifted in and wrapped them about.
The driver of the prairie schooner fed and watered the horses while his
wife made supper. She found dry wood for kindling in the wagon, and the
little girl, who was all thin arms and legs and wild flying hair,
gleefully cleared away snow from the spot selected. Soon a fire was
roaring and little Victoria was sniffing the savoury odour of a
jackrabbit stew.
She hopped up and down, first on one foot, then on the other.
“Goody, goody. Le’s hurry up’n eat, Sister Mollie,” she shouted, waving
a spoon excitedly.
After supper Robert Dodson disappeared into the nearest grog shop, and
his wife retired to the wagon and nursed a six-weeks-old baby. Victoria
washed the dishes, played around the fire, and after a time came
hop-skipping through the snowflakes to their canvas-covered home.
“Sister Mollie,” announced the child, climbing nimbly up from the
tongue, “when I’m big I’m gonna marry a prince, ’n he won’t _ever_ get
drunk ’n beat me like Rob does you.”
“Sh-h-h! You mustn’t say such things, Vicky,” the older sister
admonished.
“’N I’m gonna have shoes without holes in ’em ’n a dress not all patchy,
with gold spangles ’most all over it. ’N he’ll have a silver chariot ’n
great big white horses with long tails—not jus’ plugs like ours.”
Mollie sighed and caught the baby in her arms tighter, so that for a
moment the infant stirred restlessly in its sleep. She, too, had once
known dreams of the fairy prince who was to come riding gallantly into
her life and to carry her irresistibly into the Land of Romance.
From the tent barroom where her husband had gone came the words of a
drunken chorus:
“Exciting times all round the town,
Glory, Glory to Washoe,
Stocks are up and stocks are down,
Glory, Glory to Washoe.
Washoe! Washoe!
Bound for the land of Washoe,
And I own three feet
In the ‘Old Dead Beat,’
And I’m bound for the land of Washoe.”
Mollie recognized the voice of her husband and then his tipsy laugh. Her
slight body shivered underneath the thin shawl she was wearing.