“JIMTOWN.”
On those hot July and August afternoons, when the air simmered all along
the heated earth, and I was trying to keep awake in my seminary on the
hill, and wrestling with the mercury at 100 deg. and my sixty polyglot
pupils, the grown up “boys” would be tilted back in their chairs under
the portico and against the cool brick wall of the Bella Union. They did
not work, but they spun yarns. How half the boys lived was a mystery--as
much a mystery, I do believe, to themselves as any one else. Some owned
quartz claims, some horses, and all ran regularly for office. They
belonged to the stamp of men who worked and mined in earlier times, but
come what might, they had resolved to work in that way no longer. And
when such resolve is accompanied by determination and an active,
planning, inventive brain, the man gets along somehow. It is speculation
that makes fortunes, and plan, calculation, and forethought for
speculation, require leisure of body. A hard-working, ten-hour-per-day
digging, delving miner works all his brains out through his fingers’
ends. He has none left to speculate with. When I was mining at Swett’s
Bar, there came one day to my cabin a long, lean, lank man looking for a
lost cow. The cow and the man belonged near Jacksonville, twelve miles
up the Tuolumne. I dined that man principally off some bread of my own
making, and I had the name then of making the best bread of any one in
the house, where I lived alone. After dinner the man sat himself down on
one boulder and I on another, and I asked him if he had a good claim.
That roused him to wrath. He had, it seems, just reached the last point
of his disgust for hard work and mining. Said he: “Don’t talk to me of a
good claim; don’t. It sounds like speaking of a good guillotine, or a
beautiful halter, or an elegant rack you’re about to be stretched on.”
He had gone through his probation of hard work with his hands and had
just resolved to let them rest and give his head a chance to speculate.
So he did. I don’t know that he ever met the cow again, but eight or
nine years after I met him in the Legislature of California. He sat in
the biggest chair there, and was Lieutenant-Governor of the State.
In 1860 the certain class of men of whom I speak were in a transition
state. They had left off working with their hands and they were waiting
for something to turn up on which to commence working with their heads.
While thus waiting they became boys and played. The climate and
surroundings were eminently favorable to this languid, loafing condition
of existence, no long, sharp winters forcing people to bestir themselves
and provide against its severities; little style to keep up; few
families to maintain; no disgrace for a man to cook his own victuals;
houses dropping to pieces; little new paint anywhere to make one’s eyes
smart; gates dropping from their hinges; few municipal improvements,
with accompanying heavy taxes, and that bright summer sun for months and
months shining over all and tempting everybody to be permanently tired
and seek the shade. The boys forgot their years; they dreamed away their
days; they gossipped all the cool night; they shook off dignity; they
played; they built waterwheels in the ditch running by the Bella Union
door; they instituted ridiculous fictions and converted them into
realities; they instituted a company for the importation of smoke in
pound packages into Jamestown; Muldoon was President and the “Doctor”
Secretary. It was brought by a steamer up Wood’s Creek; the steamer was
wrecked on a dam a mile below town; the company met day after day in old
Nielsen’s saloon to consult; the smoke was finally taken to Jamestown
and sold; the proceeds were stored in sacks at the express office; there
was an embezzlement consequent on the settlement; the money, all in
ten-cent pieces, was finally deposited in the big wooden mortar over
Baker’s drug store; this the “Doctor” was accused of embezzling, having
time after time climbed up the mortar and abstracted the funds dime
after dime and spent them for whiskey. Then came a lawsuit. Two mule
teams freighted with lawyers for the plaintiff and defendant were coming
from Stockton, and the Pound Package Smoke Company met day after day in
preparation for the great trial. This fiction lasted about four months,
and amused everybody except Captain James S----, an ex-Sheriff of the
county, who, being a little deaf, and catching from time to time words
of great financial import regarding the Pound Package Jamestown Smoke
Company, as they dropped from Muldoon’s and the “Doctor’s” mouths, and
being thereby time after time misled into a temporary belief that this
fiction was a reality, and so often becoming irritated at finding
himself ridiculously mistaken, burst out upon these two worthies one
day with all the wrath becoming the dignity of a Virginia gentleman, and
denounced them profanely and otherwise for their frivolity and
puerility.
Another specimen thinker and speculator of that era was Carroll. He,
too, had forever thrown aside pick and shovel, and when I met him he was
a confirmed “tilter-back” under the Bella Union portico. Carroll was the
theorist of Jamestown. He broached new ones daily; he talked them to
everybody in Jamestown, and after making clean work of that hamlet would
go up to Sonora and talk there, and lastly published them in the _Union
Democrat_. Said Carroll one Monday morning to the Presbyterian domine:
“Mr. H----, I heard your sermon yesterday on ‘Heaven.’ You argue, I
think, that heaven is really a place. I think it ought to be a place,
too. I’ve been thinking about it all night. I’m satisfied not only that
it is a place, but that I’ve got at the locality, or at least have
approximated to it. I’ve reasoned this out on purely scientific data,
and here they are. We have an atmosphere, and they say it is from
thirty-three to forty-five miles high. Angels only live in heaven, and
angels have wings. If angels have wings, it’s proof that they must have
an atmosphere to fly in. Now, the only atmosphere we are sure of is that
around the earth. Therefore, putting all these facts and conclusions
together, I’ve proved to myself that heaven must be from thirty-three to
forty-five miles from the ground we stand on.”
On commencing my pedagogical career, I rented a room of Carroll. He
owned at that time a quantity of real estate in Jamestown, some of
which, including the premises I occupied, was falling rapidly and
literally on his hands. The house I lived in was propped up several
feet from the ground. The neighbors’ chickens fed under this house from
the crumbs swept through the cracks in the floor. It was an easy house
to sweep clean. Rumor said that during my landlord’s occupancy of these
rooms many chickens had strangely disappeared, and that pistol shots had
been heard from the interior of the house. The floor cracks did show
powder marks, and there was an unaccountable quantity of feathers
blowing about the yard. In a conversation with my landlord he admitted
that his boomerang could beat a six-shooter in fetching a chicken. Then
he showed me his boomerang, which was of accidental construction, being
the only remaining leg and round of an oaken arm-chair. Properly shied,
he said, it would kill a chicken at twenty yards. French Joe, who kept
the grocery next to Keefe’s saloon, and it was in Jimtown a current
report that Carroll and Joe had once invited the Catholic priest, Father
A----, from Sonora to dinner; that the backbone of this dinner was a
duck; that at or about this time Mrs. Hale, five doors down the street,
had missed one of her flock of ducks; that on the morning of the dinner
in question a strong savor of parboiling duck permeated all that part of
Jamestown lying between Joe’s and Mrs. Hale’s; that Mrs. Hale smelt it;
that putting two and two--cause and effect and her own
suspicions--together, she armed herself with her bun-tormentor fork and
going from her back yard to the little outdoor kitchen in Joe’s back
yard found a pot over a fire and her presumed duck parboiling in it; and
that, transfixing this duck on her tormentor, she bore it home, and the
priest got no duck for dinner.
Carroll’s mortal aversion was the hog. His favorite occupation for ten
days in the early spring was gardening, and his front fence was illy
secured against hogs, for Carroll, though a man of much speculative
enterprise, was not one whose hands always seconded the work of his
head. There was not a completed thing on his premises, including a well
which he had dug to the depth of twelve feet and which he had then
abandoned forever. The hogs would break through his fence and root up
his roses, and the well caving in about the edges became a yawning gulf
in his garden, and during the rainy season it partly filled up with
water, and a hog fell in one night and, to Carroll’s joy, was drowned.
Men did their best in the dead of a rainy night to get the poor animal
out, but a hog is not a being possessed of any capacity for seconding or
furthering human attempts at his own rescue. So he drowned, and was
found the morning after a grand New Year’s ball at the Bella Union Hall
hanging by Joyce’s clothes-line over the middle of the street between
the Bella Union and the Magnolia. The next night they put him secretly
in the cart of a fish-peddler who had come up with salmon from the lower
San Joaquin, and this man unwittingly hauled the hog out of town.
About four weeks after this transaction, coming home one dark, rainy
night, I heard a great splashing in the well, and called out to Carroll
that he had probably caught another hog. He came out with a lantern and
both of us peering over the brink of the cavity saw, not as we expected,
a hog, but a man, a friend of Carroll’s, up to his chest in the water.
He was a miner from Campo Seco, who, on visiting Jimtown on one of his
three months periodical sprees, had called on Carroll, and on leaving
had mistaken the route to the gate and walked into the well. We fished
him out with much difficulty, and on gaining the brink he came near
precipitating us and himself into the unfinished chasm through the
unsteadiness of his perpendicular. As we turned to leave, looking down
the well by the lantern’s flash I saw what appeared to be another man
half floating on the surface. There was a coat and at the end of it a
hat, and I remarked, “Carroll, there is another man down your well.” The
rescued miner looked down also, and chattered as he shivered with cold,
“Why, s-s-so there is!” We were really horrified until we discovered the
supposed corpse to be only Lewellyn’s coat with his hat floating at the
end of it, which he had taken off in his endeavor to clamber out.
Carroll, unfortunately, allowed his mind to wander and stray overmuch in
the maze of theological mysteries and its (to him) apparent
contradictions. He instituted a private and personal quarrel between
himself and his Creator, and for years he obtruded his quarrel into all
manner of places and assemblages. He arrived at last at that point where
many do under similar circumstances--a belief in total annihilation
after death, and this serving to make him more miserable than ever, his
only relief was to convert others to the same opinion and make them as
wretched as himself. Occasionally he succeeded. He came to me one day
and on his face was the grin of a fiend. “I’ve got Cummings,” said he.
“Cummings thought this morning he was a good Methodist, but I’ve been
laboring with him for weeks. I’ve convinced him of the falsity of it
all. I knocked his last plank of faith from under him to-day. He hasn’t
now a straw to cling to, and he’s as miserable as I am.”
“But with Mullins,” he remarked afterward, “I’ve slipped up on him. I
wrought three weeks with Mullins; took him through the Bible, step by
step--unconverted him steadily as we went along--got him down to the
last leaf in the last chapter of the last book of Revelations, and
there, fool like, I let up on him to go home to supper. And do you know
when I tackled him next morning, to close out Mullins’ faith in the
religion of his fathers, I found Mullins, in my absence, had got scared.
He’d galloped in belief way back to Genesis, and now, I’ve got all that
job to do over again.”
There was a great deal of life in those little mining camps in Tuolumne
County like Jamestown. They might not have the population of a single
block in New York City, but there was a far greater average of mental
activity, quickness, and intelligence to the man, at least so far as
getting the spice out of life was concerned.
The social life of a great city may be much more monotonous through that
solitude imposed by great numbers living together. Everybody at these
camps knew us, and we knew everybody, and were pretty sure of meeting
everybody we knew. In the town one is not sure of meeting an
acquaintance socially, save by appointment. There are few loafing or
lounging resorts; people meet in a hurry and part in a hurry. Here in
New York I cross night and morning on a ferry with five hundred people,
and of these 495 do not speak or know each other.
Four hundred of these people will sit and stare at each other for half
an hour, and all the time wish they could talk with some one. And many
of these people are so meeting, so crossing, so staring, and so longing
to talk year in and year out. There is no doctor’s shop where the
impromptu symposium meets daily in the back room, as ours did at Doc
Lampson’s in Montezuma, or Baker’s in Jamestown, or Dr. Walker’s in
Sonora. There’s no reception every evening at the Camp grocery as there
used to be at “Bill Brown’s” in Montezuma. There’s no lawyer’s office,
when he feels privileged to drop in as we did at Judge Preston’s in
Jamestown, or Judge Quint’s in Sonora. There’s no printing office and
editorial room all in one on the ground floor whereinto the “Camp
Senate,” lawyer, Judge, doctor, merchant and other citizens may daily
repair in the summer’s twilight, tilted back in the old hacked arm
chairs on the front portico, and discuss the situation as we used to
with A. N. Francisco of the _Union Democrat_ in Sonora, and as I presume
the relics of antiquity and “’49” do at that same office to-day. These
are a few of the features which made “Camp” attractive. These furnished
the social anticipations which lightened our footsteps over those miles
of mountain, gulch, and flat. Miles are nothing, distance is nothing,
houses a mile apart and “Camps” five miles apart are nothing when people
you know and like live in those camps and houses at the end of those
miles. An evening at the Bella Union saloon in “Jimtown” was a circus.
Because men of individuality, character, and originality met there. They
had something to say. Many of them had little to do, and, perhaps, for
that very reason their minds the quicker took note of so many of those
little peculiarities of human nature, which when told, or hinted, or
suggested prove the sauce piquant to conversation.
When Brown, the lawyer, was studying French and read his Telemaque aloud
by his open office window in such a stentorian voice as to be heard over
a third of the “camp,” and with never a Frenchman at hand to correct his
pronunciation, which he manufactured to suit himself as he went along,
it was a part of the Bella Union circus to hear “Yank” imitate him. When
old Broche, the long, thin, bald-headed French baker, who never would
learn one word of English, put on his swallow-tailed Sunday coat, which
he had brought over from La Belle France, and lifted up those coat tails
when he tripped over the mud-puddles as a lady would her skirts, it was
a part of the Bella Union circus to see “Scotty” mimic him. When John
S----, the Virginian, impressively and loudly swore that a Jack-rabbit
he had killed that day leaped twenty-five feet in the air on being shot,
and would then look around the room as if he longed to find somebody who
dared dispute his assertion, while his elder brother, always at his
elbow in supporting distance, also glared into the eyes of the company,
as though he also longed to fight the somebody who should dare discredit
“Brother John’s” “whopper,” it was a part of the circus to see the
“boys” wink at each other when they had a chance. When one heard and saw
so many of every other man’s peculiarities, oddities, and mannerisms,
save his own, set off and illustrated while the man was absent, and knew
also that his own, under like circumstances, had been or would be
brought out on exhibition, it made him feel that it was somewhat
dangerous to feel safe on the slim and slippery ice of
self-satisfaction and self-conceit. People in great cities haven’t so
much time to make their own fun and amusement, as did the residents of
so many of those lazy, lounging, tumbling-down, ramshackle “camps” of
the era of “1863” or thereabouts.
People in the city have more of their fun manufactured for them at the
theatres of high and low degree. Yet it was wonderful how in “camp” they
managed to dig so many choice bits and specimens out of the vein of
varied human nature which lay so near them. Whenever I visited “Jimtown”
my old friend Dixon would take me into his private corner to tell me
“the last” concerning a character who was working hard on an unabridged
copy of Webster’s Dictionary in the endeavor to make amends for a woeful
lack of grammatical knowledge, the result of a neglected education.
“He’s running now on two words,” Dixon would say, “and these are
‘perseverance’ and ‘assiduity.’ We hear them forty times a day, for he
lugs them in at every possible opportunity, and, indeed, at times when
there is no opportunity. He came to business the other morning a little
unwell, and alluded to his stomach as being ‘in a chaotic state.’ And,
sir, he can spell the word ‘particularly’ with six i’s. How he does it I
can’t tell; but he can.”