ONE DAY’S DIGGING.
We got out of our blankets heavily. Legs and back were apt to be a
little stiff in the morning. Or if not stiff, they lacked action.
Working all the day previous, possibly in the water, or with it
splashing all about, tugging at heavy boulders, shouldering wet sluices,
to say nothing of the regular pick-and-shovel exercise, would make
itself felt even when the limbs and blood were younger than now.
Dressing was a short job. A pair of damp overalls, a pair of socks, a
pair of shoes, or possibly the heavy rubber mining boots. Flannel shirts
we slept in. A face-swabbing with cold water in the tin basin outside
and a “lick and a promise” for the hair with the comb. That was about
all for week days. Vanity of apparel there was little for the working
miner. Who was there to dress for? Woman? The nearest was half a mile,
fifty years of age, and married. Then breakfast. The fire kindled in the
contrary little stove. Possibly it was necessary to attack with a axe
that dried old stump near by and hack off a few chips to cook with. The
miner’s wood-pile was generally small. He got in fuel on rainy days, or
at the odd intervals to be spared from work. You put on the worn tin
teapot, lowered the gauze-covered meat safe from the tree, cut a steak
from the chunk of bull mahogany within called beef, slung a dab of lard
in the frying-pan, put therein the meat and let it sizzle. Two or three
boiled potatoes might be sliced, fried more or less brown in the gravy,
and this, with bread and tea, formed the breakfast. The bread was the
bread of your own laborious baking, the loaf of an irregular shape, the
crust very hard and thick, the color often “pied,” being black where it
had burned, brown where it had baked, and of a pallid whiteness where it
had not baked at all. Within the loaf might be close, heavy, and in
color either a creamy or a canary yellow, in proportion to the improper
amount of yeast powder used.
The table is a broad shelf against the wall. There is no table-cloth.
You did not always wash up after breakfast, for the dishes, as they
stood, were all in place for dinner. Some fastidious miners washed their
dishes after each meal; most of us did not. It was too much to expect of
hard-worked humanity. The cabin door is open while you eat and from it
you look forth on the claim. There lies the bank of red earth as you
left it yesterday after the “cave.” There is the reservoir full of
coffee-colored ditch water which had run in during the night after being
used for washing in a dozen claims “up country.” Then you draw on those
damp, clammy rubber boots, either to the knee or hip high, the outside
splashed with the dried reddish mud, and smelling disagreeably of rubber
as you pulled them on and smelling worse as you became heated and
perspiring. In these you waddle to the claim. I forgot. Breakfast over,
one of the most important acts of the day was next on the programme.
That was the filling, lighting, and smoking of your pipe. Nothing could
hurry you through this performance. The filling was cut in slivers with
a careful and solemn consideration; the weed was carefully bestowed in
the bowl; the match was applied with a deliberation savoring of a
religious act; the first puff rose in the air as incense to the early
morn, and smoking thus you waddled in your big boots to the claim. There
you met your three partners, all likewise smoking. There they stand on
the bank, looking into the ground-sluice. There is no “good morning” or
other greeting: if anything, grunts. There lay the tools--shovels,
picks, crowbar, and sluice-fork--helplessly about, as left last evening.
A little muddy water trickles through the line of sluices. One of us
goes to the reservoir, a few hundred yards off, and turns on the water.
Another goes to the tail of the sluices with the sluice-fork. Then is
heard the clicking of the pick and the grating of the shovel against the
red dirt; down comes the muddy water over the bank and the day’s work
has fairly commenced.
We stand in a row, allowing sufficient room between each for swinging
the pick. We are undermining the bank, the water running at our feet and
between us and the bottom of the bank. Each chunk of red dirt dislodged
by the pick falls into the running water, and if it be hard and will not
readily dissolve it must be broken up by pick or shovel to keep the
stream clear and unimpeded. The large boulders are picked out by hand
and thrown behind us--not in disordered fashion, either. Room in the cut
is scarce and must be economized, so the ever-accumulating bowlder pile
is “faced up” with a neat wall, laid without mortar, but with some care
and skill. The bed-rock is under our feet. We are undermining the bank
and keeping the stream turned in as much as possible to the part
undermined. The gravel for a foot or six inches is pretty hard and the
stones here are harder and closer packed than those nearer the surface.
There the gravel is lighter. Many of the stones are light and rotten; a
blow with the pick dashes them to pieces. This streak just above the
ledge and for a few inches in the crevices of the ledge is our “pay
streak” where ages on ages ago some stream ran, depositing, as all
streams do, the heavier gravel on the bottom and the lighter above.
Occasionally the pick strikes a firmly embedded boulder hard and square
on its point, in such a way as to send the vibration like a shock along
the iron, up the handle and into one’s arm and “crazy-bone.” Our bank of
dirt is about eight feet in height. A few inches of the top is a dark
mould, below that is three or four feet of “hard-pan,” below the
“hard-pan” light sandy gravel and rotten boulders, and near the ledge is
the pay streak. This order of formation has varied as we have worked up
and into the bank. At first, near the river’s edge, there was only mould
on a very light alluvial sand. This was readily washed off and paid four
dollars or five dollars per day. A little farther back we struck the
edge of the red gravel streak. This for a time paid better. Farther
still came the deposit of light sandy gravel, and lastly came in the
accursed “hard-pan.”
Our claim, on being first prospected, was reported to pay three cents to
the pan from the top down. We believed it at first, not having learned
that “three cents to the pan from the top down” means the biggest kind
of luck. If you get an average of half a cent a pan from the top down,
and the dirt would wash easily, we should make money. It was hard even
for an “honest miner” to give as the result of a prospect anything less
than “three cents to the pan.” But “hard-pan” is our foe. “Hard-pan” is
the essence of brickbats. Its consistency is about that of chalk. It
seems the finest kind of sand cemented and pressed together. It can be
carved into any form with a knife. It takes as much time to work off a
square foot of hard-pan as ten square feet of soft gravel. When, after
half a day’s labor, we succeed in getting down a cave, it goes into the
ground-sluice in a few great lumps, which must be battered to pieces
with our picks before the water will slowly dissolve them into mud. And
it doesn’t hold a “color” of gold. The work in the ground-sluice goes on
hour after hour. Pick and shovel and scrape, scrape and shovel and pick,
the water meantime tumbling and roaring over the bank and making it
difficult for us to hear each others’ voices. The sun climbs higher and
gets hotter. The water pail is frequently visited. The backs of the gray
shirts are wet with perspiration. In an easy, companionable claim, where
the partners are all good fellows and on good terms and not too insane
in the matter of getting an enormous quantity of dirt through the
sluices each day, there may be more or less brief suspensions from the
work, when all hands lean on their shovels and talk politics, or horses,
or last night’s poker game, or have a short service of tobacco smoke,
with the usual solemn preliminaries of cutting the plug and filling
pipes. But if the majority of the “company” are a mean, crabbed,
close-fisted lot, the misery goes on without cessation.
A queerly assorted group are we thus laboring together. Jack Gwin’s
impelling hope and life’s idea is to earn enough to pay his passage home
to Philadelphia and buy him a suit of clothes. A decent suit he has not
owned these five years. He would be the terror and distress of his
relatives if ever he got back, for with him five dollars in his pocket
over expenses and sobriety are an impossibility. McFadden dreams of a
cabin, a cow, some geese and goats, a horse and a wife, and is in a fair
way of realizing them all. He saves most of his earnings, gets drunk
wisely only on holidays, pays his debts regularly, hates the English,
lives in that little black, brownish cabin up yonder, does all his
cooking in two tin pots, sleeps in one pair of ancient blankets and a
most disreputable bed quilt, and three dollars will cover the cost of
all his domestic fittings and utensils. Bill Furnea, a French Canadian,
has drifted here into this hole in the foothills very much as he drifted
into the world--without aim or object in life save present enjoyment. He
is a good worker and works because he was brought up to it and can’t
help it. He is a good boatman, a good logger, a skilled woodcutter, a
devotee of poker and generally a successful one, an entertaining scamp,
full of wit and originality, quick to take in the peculiarities and
eccentricities of others, something of a dandy, as far as dandyism can
be indulged in this out-of-the-way place, and a born scamp, glib of
tongue, unreliable, and socially the best man of the crowd.
It is near eleven o’clock. There stands in a cool corner of the claim
and carefully shielded from any stray flying pebble, a black bottle. It
is nearly full of whiskey--very common corn whiskey. It is most welcome
at this hour. Poison it may be, but a draught from the tin cup
brightens up and makes all things new. The sunshine is more cheerful.
All Nature smiles. The picks descend with increased force and a host of
new day-dreams start into being. It revives hope. It quenches despair.
It gilds the monotony of our lives. It was ever thus, and possibly ever
shall be, world without end. It is high noon. The sun is over our heads
and the shadows are at their shortest length. One of our number trudges
wearily up to the reservoir to shut off the water. So soon as its flow
lessens we trudge off in wet overalls or heavy rubbers to our respective
cabins. We are now ground-sluicing at or about the year 1860, when
miners generally had abandoned “cabining” in squads and each man kept
house by himself. Cause--general incompatibility of temper, temperament,
disposition, and habit. The sober miner found it disagreeable to live
permanently with the spreeing miner, and the miner nice in his domestic
economy and particular about his food soon became tired of a companion
who never aired his blankets and didn’t care whether his bread was light
or heavy, sweet or sour. Trudging to our cabins, we pick up the dried
twigs in our path. These are to kindle the dinner fire. Dinner is very
much like breakfast, beef or bacon, bread, tea, dried-apple sauce. The
boots are kicked off and thumped into a corner. The temperature is up to
that notch that induces perspiration without any exertion at all and the
ugly little stove makes it hotter still. We sit down to the noon meal in
a melting condition and rise from it in the same state. Dinner is eaten,
the “nooning” is over, back again to the claim, turn on the water, pick,
shovel, scrape, pry, toss back boulders and prop up sluices slipped
from their supports. Between two and three o’clock a snowy-white cloud
rises over a distant peak to the eastward. It seems like a great bank of
snow against the blue sky and the longer we look at it the farther we
seem to peer into its translucent, clear-white depths. It rises over
that peak at almost the same hour every afternoon and is almost of the
same shape. It is the condensed vapor of the snow melting on the higher
Sierra summits eighty-six miles distant. It is imposing in its silent
imperceptible rising, its wonderful whiteness, its majesty, its
distance. It seems a fit bed of snowy splendor for fairies or some sort
of ethereal beings to bask and revel in. It seems to be looking down
half in scorn half in pity at us four weary, miserable worms of the
dust, feebly pecking at a bit of mother earth, muddy, wet, and feebly
squirming in and about this bank of dirt.
At four o’clock there are longer pauses in our labors. There is more
leaning on shovels and more frequent glances at our timepiece, the sun,
as he sinks in the western heavens. The shadow of the hill opposite
creeps slowly down its side. It is a cool, welcome shadow. The strongest
worker secretly welcomes it. Though he be a “horse of a man,” his
muscles also feel the effects of the long day’s labor. It is more his
strong will than his body which keeps him swinging the pick. We are in
duty bound to work till six o’clock. Everybody works till six o’clock.
Everybody is more or less tired at four o’clock, but it is not the
capacity of the body for labor that fixes the time. It is custom, stupid
custom. The gauge is the limit of physical strength, not for the
weakest, but the strongest. The great, brawny-armed, big-boned Hercules
of our company doesn’t feel it much. He may walk three miles after
supper to the Bar store, play cards and drink whiskey till nine o’clock
and then walk back again and be up fresh for work next morning by 5:30
o’clock. This is 1860. In 1870 he showed it, however, and in the marks
of age was ten years ahead of his time. You can’t keep up this sort of
thing--digging, tugging, lifting, wet to the skin day after day, summer
and winter, with no interval of rest, but a steady drag twelve months of
the year--without paying for it. There’s dissipation in the use of
muscle as well as in the use of whiskey. Every old miner knows it now
and feels it. Don’t you? How does the muscle of forty-five years in 1882
compare with that of twenty-five in 1862? Of course, man must live by
the sweat of his brow, or the sweat of his brain, but many of you sweat
too long in those days, and I hear you all saying, “That’s so!” Start
anew the fire in the little stove; thump the wet boots in the corner;
drag yourself down to the spring a few hundred yards distant for a pail
of fresh water; hack a few more chips from the dried stump; mix some
flour, water, and yeast powder for the day’s baking; set down a minute
on your flour-barrel chair and look on your earthly possessions. The
worn and scarred trunk you brought years ago from the States; it holds
your best suit of a forgotten fashion, two or three white shirts, a
bundle of letters from home, a few photographs, a Bible, not worn out
with use, a quartz crystal, a few gold “specimens,” a tarantula’s nest,
the tail of a rattlesnake and six vests. Do you remember how vests would
accumulate in the mines? Pants, coat, everything else would wear
out--vests never.