How the First Generation Once Righted Itself
By some philosophers unhappiness is believed--rather than coming from
deprivation or infliction--to result from the individual's failure to
select from a number of possible occupations one that would afford him
entire satisfaction with life and himself. To this perverse blindness
they attribute the dissatisfaction with great wealth traditional of men
who have it. The fault, they contend, is not with wealth inherently.
The most they will admit against money is that the possession of much
of it tends to destroy that judicial calm necessary to a wise choice of
recreations; to incline the possessor, perhaps, toward those that are
unsalutary.
Concerning the old man that Billy Brue now sought with his news of
death, a philosopher of this school would unhesitatingly declare that
he had sounded the last note of human wisdom. Far up in some mountain
solitude old Peter Bines, multimillionaire, with a lone pack-mule to
bear his meagre outfit, picked up float-rock, tapped and scanned
ledges, and chipped at boulders with the same ardour that had fired him
in his penniless youth.
Back in 1850, a young man of twenty-four, he had joined the rush to
California, working his passage as deck-hand on a vessel that doubled
the Horn. Landing without capital at San Francisco, the little seaport
settlement among the shifting yellow sand-dunes, he had worked six
weeks along the docks as roustabout for money to take him back into the
hills whence came the big fortunes and the bigger tales of fortunes.
For six years he worked over the gravelly benches of the California
creeks for vagrant particles of gold. Then, in the late fifties, he
joined a mad stampede to the Frazer River gold-fields in British
Columbia, still wild over its first knowledge of silver sulphurets, he
was drawn back by the wonder-tales of the Comstock lode.
Joining the bedraggled caravan over the Carson trail, he continued his
course of bitter hardship in the Washoe Valley. From a patch of barren
sun-baked rock and earth, three miles long and a third of a mile wide,
high up on the eastern slope of Mount Davidson, he beheld more millions
taken out than the wildest enthusiast had ever before ventured to dream
of. But Peter Bines was a luckless unit of the majority that had
perforce to live on the hope produced by others' findings. The time for
his strike had not come.
For ten years more, half-clad in flannel shirt and overalls, he lived
in flimsy tents, tattered canvas houses, and sometimes holes in the
ground. One abode of luxury, long cherished in memory, was a
ten-by-twelve redwood shanty on Feather River. It not only boasted a
window, but there was a round hole in the "shake" roof, fastidiously
cut to fit a stove-pipe. That he never possessed a stove-pipe had made
this feature of the architecture not less sumptuous and engaging. He
lived chiefly on salt pork and beans, cooked over smoky camp-fires.
Through it all he was the determined, eager, confident prospector,
never for an instant prey to even the suggestion of a doubt that he
would not shortly be rich. Whether he washed the golden specks from the
sand of a sage-brush plain, or sought the mother-ledge of some
wandering golden child, or dug with his pick to follow a promising
surface lead, he knew it to be only the matter of time when his day
should dawn. He was of the make that wears unbending hope as its
birthright.
Some day the inexhaustible placer would be found; or, on a mountainside
where the porphyry was stained, he would carelessly chip off a fragment
of rock, turn it up to the sun, and behold it rich in ruby silver; or,
some day, the vein instead of pinching out would widen; there would be
pay ore almost from the grass-roots--rich, yellow, free-milling gold,
so that he could put up a little arastra, beat out enough in a week to
buy a small stamp-mill, and then, in six months--ten years more of this
fruitless but nourishing certainty were his,--ten years of the awful
solitudes, shared sometimes by his hardy and equally confident wife,
and, at the last, by his boy, who had become old enough to endure with
his father the snow and ice of the mountain tops and the withering heat
of the alkali wastes.
Footsore, hungry most of the time, alternately burned and frozen, he
lived the life cheerfully and tirelessly, with an enthusiasm that never
faltered.
When his day came it brought no surprise, so freshly certain had he
kept of its coming through the twenty years of search.
At his feet, one July morning in 1870, he noticed a piece of
dark-stained rock in a mass of driftstones. So small was it that to
have gone a few feet to either side would have been to miss it. He
picked it up and examined it leisurely. It was rich in silver.
Somewhere, then, between him and the mountain top was the parent stock
from which this precious fragment had been broken. The sun beat hotly
upon him as it had on other days through all the hard years when
certainty, after all, was nothing more than a temperamental faith. All
day he climbed and searched methodically, stopping at noon to eat with
an appetite unaffected by his prospect.
At sunset he would have stopped for the day, camping on the spot. He
looked above to estimate the ground he could cover on the morrow.
Almost in front of him, a few yards up the mountainside, he looked
squarely at the mother of his float: a huge boulder of projecting
silicate. It was there.
During the following week he ascertained the dimensions of his vein of
silver ore, and located two claims. He named them "The Stars and
Stripes" and "The American Boy," paying thereby what he considered
tributes, equally deserved, to his native land and to his only son,
Daniel, in whom were centred his fondest hopes.
A year of European travel had followed for the family, a year of
spending the new money lavishly for strange, long-dreamed-of
luxuries--a year in which the money was joyously proved to be real.
Then came a year of tentative residence in the East. That year was less
satisfactory. The novelty of being sufficiently fed, clad, and
sheltered was losing its fine edge.
Penniless and constrained to a life of privation, Peter Bines had been
strangely happy. Rich and of consequence in a community where the ways
were all of pleasantness and peace, Peter Bines became restless,
discontented, and, at last, unmistakably miserable.
"It can't be because I'm rich," he argued; "it's a sure thing my money
can't keep me from doin' jest what I want to do."
Then a suspicion pricked him; for he had, in his years of solitude,
formed the habit of considering, in a leisurely and hospitable manner,
even the reverse sides of propositions that are commonly accepted by
men without question.
"The money _can't_ prevent me from doin' what I jest want
to--certain--but, maybe, _don't_ it? If I didn't have it I'd fur sure
be back in the hills and happy, and so would Evalina, that ain't had
hardly what you could call a good day since we made the strike."
On this line of reasoning it took Peter Bines no long time to conclude
that he ought now to enjoy as a luxury what he had once been
constrained to as a necessity.
"Even when I was poor and had to hit the trail I jest loved them hills,
so why ain't it crafty to pike back to 'em now when I don't have to?"
His triumphant finale was:
"When you come to think about it, a rich man ain't really got any more
excuse fur bein' mis'able than a poor man has!"
Back to the big hills that called him had he gone; away from the cities
where people lived "too close together and too far apart;" back to the
green, rough earth where the air was free and quick and a man could see
a hundred miles, and the people lived far enough apart to be
neighbourly.
There content had blessed him again; content not slothful but inciting;
a content that embraced his own beloved West, fashioning first in fancy
and then by deed, its own proud future. He had never ceased to plan and
stimulate its growth. He not only became one with its manifold
interests, but proudly dedicated the young Daniel to its further
making. He became an ardent and bigoted Westerner, with a scorn for the
East so profound that no Easterner's scorn for the West hath ever by
any chance equalled it.
Prospecting with the simple outfit of old became his relaxation, his
sport, and, as he aged, his hobby. It was said that he had exalted
prospecting to the dignity of an art, and no longer hunted gold as a
pot-hunter. He was even reputed to have valuable deposits "covered,"
and certain it is that after Creede made his rich find on Mammoth
Mountain in 1890, Peter Bines met him in Denver and gave him
particulars about the vein which as yet Creede had divulged to no one.
Questioned later concerning this, Peter Bines evaded answering
directly, but suggested that a man who already had plenty of money
might have done wisely to cover up the find and be still about it; that
Nat Creede himself proved as much by going crazy over his wealth and
blowing out his brains.
To a tamely prosperous Easterner who, some years after his return to
the West, made the conventional remark, "And isn't it amazing that you
were happy through those hard years of toil when you were so poor?"
Peter Bines had replied, to his questioner's hopeless bewilderment:
"No. But it _is_ surprisin' that I kept happy after I got rich--after I
got what I wanted.
"I reckon you'll find," he added, by way of explaining, "that the
proportion of happy rich to unhappy rich is a mighty sight smaller than
the proportion of happy poor to the unhappy poor. I'm one of the former
minority, all right,--but, by cripes! it's because I know how to be
rich and still enjoy all the little comforts of poverty!"