AT THE GOLD MINES.
After a ten months’ cruise we went back to San Francisco with 500
barrels of oil and ten tons of abalones. My share of the proceeds
amounted to $250, having shipped on a “lay.” Mine was the fifteenth lay,
which gave me one barrel of oil out of every fifty and a similar
proportion in abalones. Then I looked around for something to do, didn’t
find it, spent a great deal of my money unnecessarily in so looking for
a job, shipped at last as cook on a coasting schooner, was discharged
before she left the wharf, my grade of culinary work not reaching to the
level of the captain’s refined taste.
I resolved to go to the mines. I went. By boat and stage, I got over the
two hundred miles intervening ’twixt San Francisco and the “diggings.” I
had friends on Hawkins’ Bar on the Tuolumne River in Tuolumne County.
Thither I went. When I “struck” Hawkins’ in 1858, it was on its last
legs. Still it boasted a store and a dozen houses. Golden hopes were
still anchored in the bed of the river. Expensive river claims were then
being worked from Red Mountain down to French Bar. But a premature rain
and consequent freshet swept the river that season from end to end with
the bosom of destruction, and sent for the winter the miners back to
their two dollar per day bank diggings. And from that time henceforward
the Bar steadily declined. The store was kept open for two seasons with
great loss to its proprietor. He was a new man. When he came to the Bar
the “boys” held a consultation on a big drift log. They concluded they
could go through him in one season, provided he gave credit. But he was
a discriminating man as regarded giving credit. So it required two
seasons to get through him. Then he moved away forever, and with tears
in his eyes at his losses. The Bar lingered on for several years.
Steadily it lessened in houses and population. The store was torn down
and the lumber carted away. In 1864 I made a pilgrimage thither and
found remaining one house and one man. That man was Smith. Alex. Smith,
a ’49er, a Baltimorean and a soldier during the Mexican war. Smith’s
house was high up on the hillside and his back yard brought up against
the camp graveyard. A score of Smith’s old companions there lay buried.
And here this man lived alone with the dead and the memories of the last
eighteen years. I said to him: “Smith, how do you stand it here? Do you
never get lonesome?”
“Well, yes; once in a while I do,” replied Smith; “but when I feel that
way I go up the hill and bring down a log for firewood.”
Smith was a philosopher, and thought that the best remedy for melancholy
is physical exertion.
Smith was one of the first settlers at Hawkins’ Bar; Smith could
remember when it contained a voting population of nearly eight hundred
souls; Smith knew every point on the river which had yielded richly;
Smith could show you Gawley’s Point, where Gawley pitched his tent in
’49 and buried under it his pickle jars full of gold dust. The
tradition of Hawkins was that Gawley used to keep a barrel of whiskey on
free tap in his tent. And that in the fall of 1850 Gawley, warned by the
experience of the previous rainy season, determined to lay in a winter’s
stock of provisions. But Gawley’s ideas as to the proper quantities of
food were vague. He had never before been a purveyor or provider on a
larger scale than that of buying a week’s “grub” at the Bar store. He
went to the trader and told him what he wanted. “Make out your order,”
said the merchant. Gawley gave it to him verbally. “I guess,” said he,
“I’ll have a sack of flour, ten pounds of bacon, ten of sugar, five of
coffee, three of tea, a peck of beans, a bag of salt and--and--a barrel
of whiskey!”
In 1870 I made another pilgrimage to Hawkins’ Bar. Smith was gone.
Nobody lived there. The fence of the camp graveyard was broken down. The
wooden headboards were lying prone to the earth. Some were split in two
and most of the inscriptions were being rapidly erased through the
action of the sun and rain. But one house was standing. It was the cabin
wherein had lived one Morgan Davis, the former custodian of the Hawkins’
Bar library. For as early as 1854 or ’55 the Hawkins’ Bar “boys” had
clubbed their funds, sent down to San Francisco and there purchased a
very respectable library. It was a good solid library, too, based on a
full set of American Encyclopedias and Humboldt and Lyell, and from such
and the like dispensers of heavy and nutritious mental food, rising into
the lighter desserts of poetry and novels. As late as 1858 the “boys”
were in the habit of replenishing their library with the latest
published scientific works, novels, and magazines.
But in ’70, on my last visit, the library was gone. Morgan was dead. His
cabin door had fallen from its hinges: a young oak tree had sprung up
and blocked the entrance. The flooring had been torn up. The window
sashes had been taken out. A dinner-pot and broken stove were all that
remained of Morgan’s cooking utensils. Some of the roofing had
disappeared. It was a ghostly place. The trails leading to and from the
Bar were fading out. Here, they were overgrown with brush. There, the
river in some higher rise had swept away the lower bank and left nought
but a confusion of rough rock over which was no semblance of a track. It
was at Hawkins that I had first “buckled to the mines.” My first
“buckling,” however, was in the capacity of a meat peddler. I became the
agent of a firm of butchers up on the mountain for distributing their
tough steaks to the Hawkins’ Bar miners. Through the instrumentality of
a horse, over whose back was slung a couple of huge panniers, I
continued the agency for a week. Then one morning the horse kicked up
his heels and ran away. As he ran, at every kick a raw and bloody steak
would fly out of the boxes, flash in the brilliant morning sunshine, and
then fall in the fine red dust of the mountain trail. I followed hard
after, gathering up these steaks as they fell, and when the burden
became too heavy I piled them up by the roadside in little heaps of
dusty, very dusty meat. At last, dusty, perspiring and distressed beyond
measure, I managed to catch that villainous horse. For he, after having
ejected nearly the whole load of meat, concluded to stop and be caught.
I loaded the panniers again with the dusty, carnivorous deposits, led
the horse down the steep trail to the river, then muddy and of a rich
coffee-color from up country mining sediment. Herein I washed my steaks,
rinsed them as well as I could of dust, and, as was then the custom,
hung up piece after piece in the gauze-curtained meat-safes at the
miner’s cabins. I think Hawkins’ got its share of grit that day in its
beef. Shortly afterward I went out of the beefsteak-distributing bureau.
Then I went into the service of the man who kept the Bar store, saloon,
and boarding-house. I was errand boy, barkeeper, bookkeeper,
woodchopper, assistant cook and general maid of all work, and possibly
worthlessness. One day the storekeeper’s horse, packed with miners’
supplies, was given into my charge to lead three miles up the river to
the camp of the Split-Rock River claim. The load was strapped to a
“cross-jack” saddle. It consisted mostly of flour, potatoes, bacon and a
demijohn of whiskey. I was advised by the merchant, on setting out, not
to let that horse get ahead of me. If he did it was prophesised that he
would run away, “sure pop.” But I had not gone forty rods from the store
when the beast made a rush, got ahead of me, tore the leading halter out
of my grasp and set off along the narrow mountain trail at the rate of
twenty knots per hour. I followed on a run of about ten knots per hour.
Hence the distance between us soon increased. As he ran the motion burst
the bag of flour, ditto the potatoes, and then the whiskey demijohn
broke. It was a fine sight. The flour rose in the air like a white cloud
above the horse, out of and above which flew potatoes, and the whole was
interspersed with jets of whiskey. It looked like a snow squall
travelling on horseback. When the animal had spilt all the flour, all
the potatoes and all the whiskey, he slowed up and allowed himself to be
caught. His mission was accomplished. I found remaining the saddle and
the empty potato sack. The trail was white with flour for a mile, and so
it remained for months afterward. I led the animal back to the store. My
heart was heavy and his load was light. The store-keeper gave me his
blessing. I did not thereafter long remain in the service of that
transportation bureau.
After this I borrowed a rocker and started to washing some river-bank
gravel. It took me several days to become in any degree skilled in the
use of the rocker. I had no teacher, and was obliged to become
acquainted with all its peculiarities by myself. First I set it on a
dead level. As it had no “fall” the sand would not run out. But the
hardest work of all was to dip and pour water from the dipper on the
gravel in the sieve with one hand and rock the cradle with the other.
There was a constant tendency on the part of the hand and arm employed
in pouring to go through the motion of rocking, and _vice versa_. The
hand and arm that rocked were more inclined to go through the motion of
pouring. I seemed cut up in two individuals, between whom existed a
troublesome and perplexing difference of opinion as to their respective
duties and functions. Such a conflict, to all intents and purposes, of
two different minds inside of and acting on one body, shook it up
fearfully and tore it all to pieces. I was as a house divided against
itself and could not stand. However, at last the physical and mental
elements thus warring with each other inside of me made up their
differences, and the left hand rocked the cradle peacefully while the
right hand poured harmoniously, and the result was about $1.50 per day.
Soon after I found my first mining partner. He wandered to the Bar, a
melancholy-looking man, with three dogs accompanying, and was always in
a chronic state of red bandana and nose-wiping. He and I joined forces
and went up the river to “crevice” among the rocks near the Split Rock
claim. He had all the skill, all the experience, and all the dogs, and I
all the general ignorance and incapacity. I deemed it a great advantage
to have thus secured a real “old miner” for a partner, and felt that
such a man must turn up gold.
We built ourselves a rude brush house on a shelf of the rocky ledge in a
canyon whose sides sloped at an angle of forty-five degrees. Even this
shelf was not level. It pitched toward the river, and there was so
little of it that during the night’s repose our legs stuck out of the
house-entrance. We were obliged to “chock” all our supply of provisions
in their respective packages to prevent them from rolling out of our
wigwams over the brink and into the Tuolumne. If a potato got loose it
ran like a “thing possessed” over the rocks and down into the muddy,
raging current. We were obliged to peg ourselves at night while sleeping
to prevent a like catastrophe. It was a permanent and laborious
existence at an angle of forty-five. To stand erect for any length of
time was very tiresome. More frequently, like Nebuchadnezzar, we lived
on all fours. “Crevicing” did not prove very profitable. By day the bare
rocks become heated by the sun to a blistering capacity. With pick and
sledge and crowbar and bent bits of hoop-iron we pried and pounded and
scraped, and scraped and pounded and pried all the hot day long, or
else were doubled up in all sorts of back-aching, back-breaking,
body-tiring positions, drawing up at arm’s-length from some deeper
“pothole” or crevice spoonful after spoonful of yellow mould. It did
hold considerable gold, and heavy gold too. But it took so long to get
the mould. This was in the latter part of September. The termination of
the dry season was reached. The first rain came. It came at night. It
drizzled through our brush house. It sent tiny streams down the rocky
mountain-sides, and some of these streams found their way under us. We
had lain and endured the rain from above dripping on our faces and
wetting our clothes. In those times one’s day suit served for a
nightgown. But when the aqueous enemy undermined our position we had to
turn out.
It blew a gale. How the wind howled and tore up the canyon! We tried to
kindle a fire. Match after match was blown out. Finally a blaze was
attained. Then the rains descended heavier than ever and put it out. The
chief misery was, we could not at night find our way out of the canyon
to any place of shelter. Nor could we walk at all to keep warm. There
was “standing room only.” All about us were the steeply inclined rocks,
molded into every irregularity of shape. We were obliged all through the
night to “stand and take it” as it came, shivering in our thin summer
clothing. With daylight we made our way to the camp of the Split
Rockers. They gave us some gin. It was common gin--very common gin--but
the comfortable and soothing remembrance of that gin after such a night
exists for me even unto this day. I wore a black cloth cap. The rain had
washed out the dye, and this dye had coursed over my brow and cheeks in
tiny rivulets of jet. I noticed that I seemed to be more than a usual
object of interest to those about me, and wondered, until a friend
advised me to consult a mirror. I did so, and found my face marked like
a railroad route map. Such was my inauguration in mining at Hawkins’
Bar. What glorious old times they were! What independence! What freedom
from the trammels and conventionalities of fashion! Who cared or
commented if we did turn up the bottoms of our pantaloons, or wear, for
coolness’ sake, our flannel shirts outside the trousers? Who then was so
much better than anybody else, when any man might strike it rich
to-morrow? Who would beg for work or truckle and fawn and curry favor of
an employer for the mere sake of retaining a situation and help that
same man to make money, when he could shoulder pick, shovel, and rocker,
go down to the river’s edge and make his two or three dollars per day?
Though even at that time this reputed three dollars was oftener one
dollar and a half.
Even then reports of the paying capacities of claims were as apt to be
watered as are stocks nowadays.