RED MOUNTAIN BAR.
The California mining camp was ephemeral. Often it was founded, built
up, flourished, decayed, and had weeds and herbage growing over its site
and hiding all of man’s work inside of ten years. Yet to one witnessing
these changes it seemed the life of a whole generation. Of such
settlements, Red Mountain Bar was one. Red Mountain lay three miles
above Swett’s Bar, “up river.” I lived “off and on” at the “Bar” in its
dying days. I saw it decay gently and peacefully. I saw the grass,
trees, and herbage gradually creep in and resume their sway all over its
site as they had done ere man’s interruption.
I lived there when the few “boys” left used daily, after the close of an
unsuccessful river season, to sit in a row on a log by the river’s edge,
and there, surveying their broken dam, would chant curses on their luck.
The Bar store was then still in existence. Thompson was its proprietor.
The stock on hand had dwindled down to whiskey. The bar and one filled
bottle alone survived. On rainy nights, when the few miners left would
gather about the stove Thompson would take down his fiddle, and fiddle
and sing, “What can’t be cured must be endured,” or, “The King into his
garden came; the spices smelt about the same”--a quotation of unknown
authorship. Of neighbors, living in their cabins strung along the banks
for half a mile above the store, there was Keen Fann, an aged mercantile
and mining Chinaman, with a colony about him of lesser and facially
indistinguishable countrymen of varying numbers. Second, “Old Harry,” an
aged negro, a skilled performer on the bugle and a singer, who offered
at times to favor us with what he termed a “little ditto.” He was the
Ethiopic king of a knot of Kanakas gathered about him. Third, “Bloody
Bill,” so-called from his frequent use of the sanguinary adjective, and,
as may be guessed, an Englishman. Fourth, an old Scotchman, one of the
Bar’s oldest inhabitants, who would come to the store with the little
bit of gold dust, gathered after a hard day’s “crevicing” complaining
that gold was getting as scarce as “the grace of God in the Heelands of
Scotland.” Fifth, McFarlane, a white-bearded old fellow, another
pioneer, who after a yearly venture into some strange and distant
locality to “change his luck,” was certain eventually to drift back
again to the Bar, which he regarded as home. Down the river, nestled
high up in a steep and picturesque gulch, stood the buckeye-embowered
cabin of old Jonathan Brown, the ditch tender, a great reader of weekly
“story papers,” who lived like a boy in the literature of the _Western
Frontier Penny Awful_, and who, coming to the store and perching himself
on the counter, would sometimes break out in remarks about how “Them
thar Indians got the better of ’em at last,” to the astonishment of the
“boys,” who imagined at first that he referred to Indians in the
locality, suggesting possibilities of a repetition of the great Oak Flat
uprising of 1850.
At the “top of the hill,” a mile and a half away, stood the “Yankee
Ranch,” kept by a bustling, uneasy, and rather uncomfortable man from
Massachusetts, aided by his good-natured, easy-going son-in-law. One
rainy winter’s day the “boys” congregated about Thompson’s store became
seized with a whim for the manufacture of little pasteboard men turning
grindstones, which, fastened to the stove, were impelled to action by
the ascending current of hot air. So they smoked their pipes, and
wrought all day until the area of stovepipe became thickly covered with
little pasteboard men busily turning pasteboard grindstones. Then,
George M. G., the son-in-law of the Yankee Ranch, came down the hill to
borrow an axe. George was of that temperament and inclination to be of
all things charmed with a warm stove on a cold, rainy day, a knot of
good fellows about it, a frequent pipe of tobacco, maybe an occasional
punch and the pleasing manufacture of hot-air-driven little pasteboard
men turning pasteboard grindstones. He forgot his axe--sat down and
began with the rest the manufacture of pasteboard men and grindstones.
And he kept on till a late hour of the night, and stayed at the Bar all
night and all the next day and that next night, until the stovepipe was
covered to its very top with little men, all working away for dear life
turning grindstones; and on the second day of his stay the exasperated
father-in-law suddenly appeared and delivered himself in impatient
invective with regard to such conduct on the part of a son-in-law sent
forty-eight hours previously to borrow an axe. Such was the circle oft
gathered on the long, rainy winter’s eve about the Thompson store stove.
All smoked. Keen Fann frequently dropped in. He stood respectfully, as
a heathen should in such a Christian assemblage, on its outer edge, or
humbly appropriated some unoccupied keg, and for the rest--grinned. From
his little piggy eyes to his double chin Keen’s face was a permanently
settled grin.
Keen Fann had learned about twenty words of English and would learn no
more. In his estimation, these twenty words, variously used, after a
sort of grammatical kaleidoscopic fashion, seemed adequate to convey
everything required. One of his presumed English expressions long
puzzled the boys. Asking the price of articles at the store he would
say: “Too muchee pollyfoot.” At last the riddle was correctly guessed.
He meant: “Too much profit.”
For protection Keen Fann built his house opposite the store. The
Mexicans were then attacking and robbing isolated bands of Chinamen. At
one bar a few miles below, then deserted by the whites, the Chinese had
inclosed their camp with a high stockade of logs. Yet one night they
were attacked. The Mexicans besieged their fortress for hours, peppering
them from the hillside with revolvers, and at last they broke through
the Mongolian works and bore off all their dust and a dozen or more
revolvers. Keen Fann’s castle was in dimensions not more than 12x15
feet, and in height two stories. Within it was partitioned off into
rooms not much larger than dry-goods boxes. The hallways were just wide
enough to squeeze through, and very dark. It was intensely labyrinthian,
and Keen was always making it more so by devising new additions. No
white man ever did know exactly where the structure began or ended. Keen
was a merchant, dealing principally in gin, fish, and opium. His store
was involved in this curious dwelling, all of his own construction. In
the store was a counter. Behind it there was just room for Keen to sit
down, and in front there was just room enough for the customer to turn
around. When Keen was the merchant he looked imposing in an immense pair
of Chinese spectacles. When he shook his rocker in the bank he took off
these spectacles. He was a large consumer of his own gin. I once asked
him the amount of his weekly allowance. “Me tink,” said he, “one gallun,
hap (half).” From the upper story of the castle protruded a huge
spear-head. It was made by the local blacksmith, and intended as a
menace to the Mexican bandits. As they grew bolder and more threatening,
Keen sent down to San Francisco and purchased a lot of old pawn-shop
revolvers. These being received, military preparation and drill went on
for several weeks by Keen and his forces. He practised at
target-shooting, aimed at the mark with both eyes shut, and for those in
its immediate vicinity with a most ominous and threatening waver of the
arm holding the weapon. It was prophesied that Keen would kill somebody
with that pistol. None ever expected that he would kill the proper
person. Yet he did. One night an alarm was given. Keen’s castle was
attacked. The “boys,” hearing the disturbance, grabbed their rifles and
pistols, and sallied from the store. The robbers, finding themselves in
a hornets’ nest, ran. By the uncertain light of a waning moon the Bar
was seen covered with Chinamen gabbling and wildly gesticulating. Over
the river two men were swimming. Keen, from the bank, pointed his
revolver at one, shut his eyes and fired. One of the men crawled out of
the water and tumbled in a heap among the boulders. The “boys” crossed,
and found there a strange white man, with Keen’s bullet through his
backbone.
I experienced about the narrowest escape of my life in a boat during a
freshet on the Tuolumne crossing. I counted myself a good river boatman,
and had just ferried over a Swett’s Bar miner. He had come to purchase a
gallon of the native juice of the grape, which was then grown, pressed
and sold at Red Mountain Bar. When he crossed with me he was loaded with
it. Some of it was outside of him in a demijohn and some of it was
inside. Indeed it was inside of us both. I set him across all right. On
returning, by taking advantage of a certain eddy, one could be rushed up
stream counter to the current coming down for a quarter of a mile, and
at a very rapid rate. It was very exciting thus to be carried in an
opposite direction, within ten feet of the great billowy swell coming
down. It was a sort of sliding down hill without the trouble of drawing
one’s sled up again. So I went up and down the stream. The Red Mountain
wine meantime was working. Night came on, a glorious moon arose over the
mountain tops, and I kept sliding up and down the Tuolumne. I became
more daring and careless. So that suddenly in the very fury of the
mid-stream billows I slipped off the stern sheets at a sudden dip of the
boat and fell into the river. I was heavily clad in flannels and mining
boots. Of my stay under water I recollect only the thought, “You’re in
for it this time. This is no common baptism.” The next I knew I was
clinging to a rock half a mile below the scene of the submergence. I
had been swept under water through the Willow Bar, the walls of whose
rocky channel, chiselled by the current of centuries, were narrower at
the top than on the river-bed, and through which the waters swept in a
succession of boils and whirlpools. Wet and dripping, I tramped to the
nearest cabin, a mile and a half distant, and stayed there that night.
Red Mountain Bar, on seeing the mishap, gave me up for lost--all but one
man, who was negative on that point for the reason, as he alleged, that
I was not destined to make the final exit by water. I reappeared the
next morning at the Bar. When I told the boys that I had been swept
through the Willow Bar they instituted comparisons of similarity in the
matter of veracity betwixt myself and Ananias of old. It was the current
impressions that no man could pass through the Willow Bar alive.
Chinese Camp, five miles distant, stood as the metropolis for Red
Mountain Bar. It contained but a few hundred people. Yet, in our
estimation at that time it bore the same relative importance that New
York does to some agricultural village a hundred miles way. Chinese Camp
meant restaurants, where we could revel in the luxury of eating a meal
we were not obliged to prepare ourselves, a luxury none can fully
appreciate save those who have served for years as their own cooks.
Chinese Camp meant saloons, palatial as compared with the Bar groggery;
it meant a daily mail and communication with the great world without; it
meant hotels, where strange faces might be seen daily; it meant,
perhaps, above all, the nightly fandango. When living for months and
years in such out-of-the-way nooks and corners as Red Mountain Bar, and
as were thousands of now forgotten and nameless flats, gulches, and bars
in California, cut off from all regular communication with the world,
where the occasional passage of some stranger is an event, the limited
stir and bustle of such a place as Chinese Camp assumed an increased
importance and interest. Chinese Camp Justice presided at our lawsuits.
Chinese Camp was the Mecca to which all hands resorted for the grand
blow-out at the close of the river mining season. With all their hard
work what independent times were those after all! True, claims were
uncertain as to yield; hopes of making fortunes had been given over. But
so long as $1.50 or $2 pickings remained on the banks men were
comparatively their own masters. There was none of the inexorable demand
of business consequent on situation and employment in the great city,
where, sick or well, the toilers must hie with machine-like regularity
at the early morning hour to their posts of labor. If the Red
Mountaineer didn’t “feel like work” in the morning he didn’t work. If he
preferred to commence digging and washing at ten in the morning instead
of seven, who should prevent him? If, after the morning labor, he
desired a _siesta_ till two in the afternoon, it was his to take.
Of what Nature could give there was much at the Bar to make pleasant
man’s stay on earth, save a great deal of cash. We enjoyed a mild
climate--no long, hard winters to provide against; a soil that would
raise almost any vegetable, a necessity or luxury, with very little
labor; grapes or figs, apples or potatoes; land to be had for the
asking; water for irrigation accessible on every hand; plenty of
pasture room; no crowding. A quarter of a section of such soil and
climate, within forty miles of New York City, would be worth millions.
Contrast such a land with the bleak hills about Boston, where half the
year is spent in a struggle to provide for the other half. Yet we were
all anxious to get away. Our heaven was not at Red Mountain. Fortunes
could not be digged there. We spent time and strength in a scramble for
a few ounces of yellow metal, while in the spring time the vales and
hillsides covered with flowers argued in vain that they had the greatest
rewards for our picks and shovels. But none listened. We grovelled in
the mud and stones of the oft-worked bank. Yearly it responded less and
less to our labors. One by one the “old-timers” left. The boarding-house
of Dutch Bill at the farther end of the Bar long stood empty, and the
meek-eyed and subtle Chinaman stole from its sides board after board;
the sides skinned off, they took joist after joist from the framework.
None ever saw them so doing. Thus silently and mysteriously, like a
melting snowbank, the great, ramshackle boarding house disappeared,
until naught was left save the chimney. And that also vanished brick by
brick. All of which material entered into the composition and
construction of that irregularly built, smoke-tanned Conglomerate of
Chinese huts clustered near the Keen Fann castle.
“Old Grizzly” McFarlane went away. So did Bloody Bill. So the Bar’s
population dwindled. Fewer travellers, dot-like, were seen climbing the
steep trail o’er Red Mountain. Miller, the Chinese Camp news-agent, who,
with mailbags well filled with the New York papers, had for years
cantered from Red Mountain to Morgan’s Bar, emptying his sack as he
went at the rate of fifty and twenty-five cents per sheet, paid the Bar
his last visit and closed out the newspaper business there forever. Then
the County Supervisors abolished it as an election precinct, and its
name no longer figured in the returns. No more after the vote was polled
and the result known did the active and ambitious partisan mount his
horse and gallop over the mountain to Sonora, the county seat, twenty
miles away, to deliver the official count, signed, sealed and attested
by the local Red Mountain Election Inspectors. Finally the Bar dwindled
to Thompson, Keen Fann and his Mongolian band. Then Thompson left. Keen
Fann grieved at losing his friend and protector. He came on the eve of
departure to the dismantled store. Tears were in his eyes. He presented
Thompson with a basket of tea and a silver half-dollar, and bade him
farewell in incoherent and intranslatable words of lamenting polyglot
English.