PROSPECTING.
The failure of the Copperhead Claim and the collapse of Copperhead City
did not discourage me. The flame only burned the brighter to go forth
and unearth the veins of mineral wealth which imagination showed me
lying far and near in this land still of such recent settlement.
This was in 1863-64. The great silver leads of Nevada had but recently
been discovered. The silver excitement was at its height. People were
thinking that barely the threshold of the mineral richness of the
Pacific slope had been reached and that untold treasure underground
awaited the prospector’s exploration north, south, and east, so far as
he could go.
Fired with this all-pervading thought I projected one of the grandest of
my failures. I organized the “Mulford Mining, Prospecting, and Land
Company,” whose intent was to take up and hold all the mineral veins I
found and secure all desirable locations I might come upon for farms,
town sites, and other purposes.
“Holding” a mineral vein, or whatever I might imagine to be a mineral
vein, could be done after the proper notices were put up, by performing
on such veins one day’s work a month, and such “day’s work” was supposed
to be done by turning up a few shovelfuls of dirt on the property.
My Company consisted of thirty members, who lived at varying distances
apart, within and without the county of Tuolumne. For my services as
general prospector, discoverer, and holder of all properties accumulated
(by myself) I was to receive from each member three dollars per month.
I fixed this princely stipend myself, being then ever in fear that I
should overcharge others for services rendered.
By dint of great exertion, I succeeded in getting one-third of the
members together one hot summer afternoon in a Montezuma grocery. I
unfolded then the Company’s Constitution and By-Laws, written by myself
at great length on several sheets of foolscap pasted together. I read
the document. It provided for the Company a President, Secretary,
Treasurer, and Board of Directors. It set forth their duties and my
duties as “General Prospector.” I was particularly stringent and rigid
regarding myself and my responsibilities to the Company.
The fragment of the new Company present assented to everything, paid in
their first installment of three dollars, and bade me go forth and
“strike something rich” as quickly as possible.
I went forth at first afoot with the few dollars paid me. I subsisted in
a hap-hazard--indeed I must say beggarly fashion, stopping with mining
friends and dependent to great extent on their hospitality, while I
“held” the few claims I had already found and found others in their
neighborhood.
At last I found a man who subscribed the use of a horse for the summer
in consideration of being enrolled as a shareholder. On similar terms I
gained a saddle, a shot-gun, a dog, and some provisions. This put the
“Company” on a more stable footing, for I was now no longer dependent on
house or hospitality, and could stop wherever night overtook me, and
wood, water, and grass were at hand.
My horse I think was the slowest of his kind in the Great West, and my
gun kicked so vigorously when discharged that I frequently sustained
more injury than the game aimed at.
My field of operations extended over 150 miles of country, from the foot
hills of the Sierras to their summits and beyond in the Territory of
Nevada. Land, wood, water, grass, and game, if found, were free in every
direction. The country was not fenced in, the meaning of “trespassing”
on land was unknown--in fact it was then really a free country--a term
also not altogether understood in the older States, where if you build a
camp-fire in a wood lot you run some risk from the farmer who owns it,
and his bulldog.
Sometimes, I would be a week or ten days without seeing a human face. A
roof rarely covered me. I would camp one day near a mountain summit
looking over fifty or sixty miles of territory and the next at its base
with a view bounded by a wall of rock a few hundred yards distant.
Sometimes I was very lonesome and uneasy at night in these mountain
solitudes. I longed generally about sundown for some one to talk to.
Anything human would answer such purpose then. In the bright clear
morning the lonesome feeling was all gone. There was companionship then
in the trees, the clouds, the mountain peaks, far and near, yet there
were times when the veriest clod was better than all of these.
Sometimes nothing but another human tongue will answer our needs, though
it be a very poor one.
The first evening I spent alone in the forest, I left my dog “Put” to
guard the camp. He wanted to follow me. I drove him back. He went back
like a good dog and ate up most of my bacon which I had not hung high
enough on the tree. By this experience I learned to hang my bacon
higher. Wisdom must always be paid for.
I journeyed in the primeval forests of the Sierras. The primeval forest
is dismal and inconvenient to travel through with fallen and rotten tree
trunks interlacing each other in every direction. I have travelled half
a day and found myself farther than ever from the place I wanted to
reach. I have made at eve a comfortable camp under a great tree and when
all arrangements were completed scrabbled out of it precipitately and
packed my baggage elsewhere on looking up and seeing directly above me a
huge dead limb hanging by a mere splinter, ready to fall at any moment
and impale me. I think I know just how Damocles felt in that sword and
hair business. Wolves sometimes frightened me at night exceedingly with
their howlings. Bands of then unwarlike Indians also scared me. They
were Utes fishing in the Walker River. Five years previous they had been
hostile. Once I stumbled on one of their camps on the river bank. Before
I could sneak off unseen one of them came up to me, announcing himself
as the chief. He wanted to know who I was, where I came from, and where
I was going. I answered all the questions this potentate asked me,
acceded to his request for some “hoggadi” (tobacco), and when I found
myself half a mile distant from His Majesty with a whole skin and all of
my worldly goods intact, believed more firmly than ever in a kind and
protecting Providence. I don’t suppose I stood in any real danger, but a
lone man in a lone country with an average of one white settler to every
five square miles of territory won’t naturally feel as easy in such
circumstances as at his own breakfast table.
I learned never to pass a spot having wood, water, and grass after four
o’clock in the afternoon, but make my camp for the night there. I
learned on staking my horse out, not to give him pasture too near my
camp-fire, for more than once in changing his base for a better mouthful
of grass, has he dragged the lariat over my temporary possessions,
upsetting coffee-pot and frying-pan and knocking the whole camp endways.
I learned to camp away from the main road or trail leading over the
mountains to Nevada, for it was beset by hungry, ragged men who had
started afoot for the silver mines with barely a cent in their pockets,
trusting to luck to get through, and who stumbling on my camp must be
fed. You can’t sit and eat in your own out-door kitchen and see your
fellow-beings eye you in hunger. But they ate me at times out of house
and home, and the provision laid in for a week would not last three days
with such guests. An old Frenchman so found me one day at dinner. He was
starved. I kept my fresh meat in a bag. I handed him the bag and told
him to broil for himself over the coals. Then I hauled off in the bush a
little while to look at some rock. When I returned the bag was empty;
two pounds of beef were inside the Frenchman and he didn’t seem at all
abashed or uneasy. These experiences taught me that charity and sympathy
for others must be kept under some government or our own meal bags,
bread bags, and stomachs may go empty.
Grizzlies were common in those mountain solitudes, but I never saw one
nor the track of one, nor even thought of them near as much as I would
now, if poking about in the chaparral as I did then. I was camped near a
sheep herder one evening, when, seeing my fire about a quarter of a mile
from his cabin, he came to me and said, “Young man, this isn’t a good
place to stop in over night. You’re right in the track of the grizzlies.
They’ve killed twenty-six of my sheep inside of three weeks. You’d
better sleep in my barn.” I did so.
I learned never to broil a steak on a green pitch-pine branch till I got
accustomed to the flavor of the turpentine which the heat would distil
and the meat absorb.
I learned that when you have nothing for breakfast and must kill the
only robin in sight or go without him, that robin will be ten times
shyer and harder to coax within gunshot than when you don’t hunger for
him.
I was not strong physically, and indeed far from being a well man. It
was only the strong desire of finding a fortune in a mineral vein, that
gave me strength at all. Once I was sick for three days, camped near a
mountain top, and though it was June, every day brought a snow squall. A
prospector from Silver City stumbled on my camp one day and declared he
would not stay in such a place for all the silver in Nevada. The wind
blew from a different quarter about every hour, and no matter where I
built my fire, managed matters so as always to drive the smoke in my
face. It converted me for a time into a belief of the total depravity of
inanimate things.
I pre-empted in the name of the Company some of the grandest scenery in
the world--valleys seldom trodden by man, with clear mountain streams
flowing through them--lakes, still unnamed, reflecting the mountain
walls surrounding them a thousand or more feet in height, and beautiful
miniature mountain parks. In pre-empting them their commercial value
entered little into my calculations. Sentiment and the picturesque, did.
Claimants stronger than I, had firmer possession of these gems of the
Sierras. The chief was snow, under which they were buried to the depth
of ten or fifteen feet, seven months at least out of the twelve.
When once a month I came out of the mountains and put in an appearance
among my shareholders, my horse burdened with blankets, provisions,
tools, the frying-pan and tin coffee-pot atop of the heap, I was
generally greeted with the remark, “Well, struck anything yet?” When I
told my patrons of the land sites I had gained for them so advantageous
for summer pasturages, they did not seem to catch my enthusiasm. They
wanted gold, bright yellow gold or silver, very rich and extending deep
in the ground, more than they did these Occidental Vales of Cashmere, or
Californian Lakes of Como. They were sordid and sensible. I was romantic
and ragged. They were after what paid. I was after what pleased.
The monthly three-dollar assessment from each shareholder came harder
and harder. I dreaded to ask for it. Besides, two-thirds of my company
were scattered over so much country that the time and expense of
collecting ate up the amount received, a contingency I had not foreseen
when I fixed my tax rate.
At last the end came. The man who subscribed the use of his horse,
wanted him back. I gave him up. This dismounted the Company. Operations
could not be carried on afoot over a territory larger than the State of
Connecticut. I had indeed found several mineral veins, but they were in
that numerous catalogue of “needing capital to develop them.” The
General Prospector also needed capital to buy a whole suit of clothes.
I was obliged to suspend operations. When I stopped the Company stopped.
Indeed I did not find out till then, that I was virtually the whole
“Company.”