THE COW FEVER.
About this time (1861) a cow fever began to rage throughout the State.
It got hold of people, and impressed them with a burning idea that the
road to fortune was a cow path, and that fortunes lay in keeping cattle.
The cow fever reached the seclusion of Swett’s Bar. We invested all our
spare cash in cows and waited for results. Cattle were spoken of as a
sure card for fortune. Keep cattle. Buy improved breeds. Raise them.
“Cross” them. Feed them for nothing on the native grass. Buy cows. Cows
give milk. People can live on milk. Milk then to us was a luxury. It
paid no milkman to travel up and down the rough and rocky ledges of the
Tuolumne ringing his bell at miners’ cabins half a mile apart. Indeed he
could not so travel without carrying his milk _à la_ panier on a
donkey’s back, and by the time it had reached its place of destination
it would have been agitated to butter. So all of us miners went in for
cows. Improved cows. We bought each an improved cow. We hauled this cow
by ropes across the raging, eddying, furious river to our side.
Frequently she arrived more dead than alive. Then came a season of hope
and expectation as to fortunes through cows. We arose at five in the
morning, built the fire for breakfast, went out and sought our cows,
generally feeding or reposing a mile or more from our cabins, caught
these cows, milked them, returned to the cabin, finished the cooking of
either a burned or cold breakfast, went forth and labored in the claim
till noon, came home, cooked dinner, went forth again, at 1 <small>P.M.</small>,
labored till six, went back to the cabins, chopped wood for fuel,
travelled 500 feet or yards to the spring for water, returned, mixed our
bread, put it in the oven, went out and milked the cow, then bent over
the hot stove for an hour until bread was baked, and then, heated,
flushed, perspiring, exhausted from the day’s labor, and with nerves
quivering by reason of such exhaustion, we arranged the miner’s table,
sat down to the meal, and wondered why we had so little appetite.
Keeping cows proved laborious work for miners. When, in addition to
kindling the fire in the morning, cooking your own breakfast, coming
home at night wet and tired after working all day in the ground-sluice,
then hacking away at some old stump to get wood enough to cook the
supper, travelling may be an eighth of a mile to the nearest spring for
a pail of water, and bending and bothering with meat-frying and
bread-making, you add, chasing night and morn, milk pail in hand, some
contrary cow all over the flat in order to milk her, you pile too heavy
a load on any man’s back. Because, in the matter of housekeeping, we had
ceased the co-operative system. We dwelt all apart, each a hermit in his
own cabin. We were diverse in habit, and could not get along with each
other’s peculiarities. The neat man couldn’t abide the slovenly man; the
economical man couldn’t sit patiently by and see his partner cut potato
parings a quarter of an inch in thickness; the nervous man was
exhausted by his partner’s whistling or snoring, and all these and
numberless other opposing peculiarities at last caused each man
hermit-like, to retire into his own cell.
We had other trouble with our cows, for they were ravenous after salt.
We neglected to “salt them.” Result: If any article containing the least
incrustation of salt was left outside our cabins, the entire herd would
gather about it at night, lick it, fight for its possession and keep up
a steady grunting, stamping, lowing, and bellowing. They would eat
clothing left out over night on the clothes-line to dry. In such manner
and for such reason also would they eat through the cotton walls of our
houses. Once, when away for three days attending a county convention at
Sonora, on returning to my lone cabin, I found it a scene of ruin and
desolation. A cow had eaten through the cloth wall on one side, and
eaten her way out at the other, and had stopped long enough inside to
eat up all my flour, rice and vegetables. Once, when moving my household
effects from one cabin to another, on a wheelbarrow, I left it near the
middle of the flat for a few minutes. On returning I saw a cow making
off with my best coat. She held it in her mouth by one sleeve. On seeing
me she started off on a run, still thus holding the sleeve in her mouth
and making violent efforts to eject it. The coat-sleeve was a ruin when
I did get it. She had chewed it for salt’s sake to the likeness of a
fish net. Keeping cows did not make our fortunes at Swett’s. Then
everybody said: “Keep hogs. They will feed on acorns and increase very
rapidly. In a few years the plains and hills will groan under the burden
of your pork.” So I bought hogs. I bought a sow and seven pigs. They
gave me much to think of. Before I had owned them a week complaints
concerning them came from neighboring miners, who owned no hogs. These
pigs of mine broke through the cloth walls of the cabins and would
consume the miner’s entire weekly stock of provisions in a few minutes.
Then they would go outside and root from out the hot coals--his “Dutch
oven,” wherein his bread was baking while he labored afar in his claim,
and this bread when cooled they would also devour. I had, on buying
these animals, engaged that they should “find themselves.”
There was no reasoning with the suffering miners in this matter. I
argued that my pigs had a right to run at large, and that they should
make their houses more secure. The miners argued that right or not
right, they would shoot my pigs even if found near their cabins. If that
was not sufficient, they might shoot me. Their positiveness in this
matter was of an intense and violent character. There was no such thing
as discussion with them on legal or equitable grounds. I think now that
I and the pigs had law and right on our side, but the miners were in the
majority and had might. Nor was this all. These pigs, seemingly
recognizing my ownership, came home at night to sleep. They slept in a
pile just outside my cabin door, and as the night air wafted down from
the higher Sierra summits became cooler, the pigs on the outside of the
pile became uncomfortable. Being uncomfortable they tried to get inside
the pile. This the warm pigs inside resisted. The resistance was
accompanied with squealing and grunting, which lasted all night long and
disturbed my sleep. This pig pile consisted of a rind of cold and
uncomfortable pigs and a core of warm and comfortable pigs, and there
was a continual effort on the part of the cold porcine rind to usurp the
places of the warm and comfortable porcine core. They gave me no rest,
for when, with the warm morning sun, this uproar ceased, there came the
season of complaint and threat from my plundered neighbors. Finally a
cold storm chilled half of these pigs to death. I sold the remainder as
quickly as possible to a ranchman who better understood the hog
business.
During the receding of the waters after one of the annual spring
freshets, I saw several hundred dollars in gold dust washed out near the
base of a pine tree on the river’s bank, between Hawkins’ and Swett’s
Bar, where probably it had years before been buried by some unknown
miner. That is, I saw it after it had been washed out and found by
another more fortunate miner. In all probability there are many
thousands of dollars in dust so dug by hard-working hands and so buried
in California, there to remain until the Last Day perhaps longer.
Where’s the utility of resurrecting the “Root of all Evil” on the Last
Day, just at the time when people in heaven or elsewhere are presumed to
be able to get along without it? Yet it is a mysterious Providence that
impels any poor fellow to dig his pile bury it for safekeeping, and then
go off and die in some out-of-the-way place without being able to leave
any will and testament as to the exact hole where his savings lay.
Regarding buried treasure, there is a hill near Jamestown concerning
which, years ago, there hovered a legend that it held somewhere
thousands of dollars in dust, buried in the early days by a lone miner,
who was, for his money’s sake, murdered in his cabin. They said that by
the roots of many trees on that hillside it had been unsuccessfully dug
for. Anyway, the miner left a memory and a hope behind him. That’s more
than many do. If you want to leave a lasting recollection of yourself
behind drop a hint from time to time ere you depart for “The Bright and
Shining Shore” that you have interred $10,000 somewhere in a quarter
section of land, you will then long be remembered and your money dug
for.