HIGH LIFE.
The “Company” died its peaceful death where I brought up when the horse
was demanded of me in Eureka Valley, some 8,000 feet above the sea
level, at Dave Hays’ mountain ranch and tavern on the Sonora and Mono
road. This was a new road built by the counties of Stanislaus, Tuolumne
and Mono to rival the Placerville route, then crowded with teams
carrying merchandise to Virginia City. The Mono road cost three years of
labor, and was a fine piece of work. It ran along steep mountain sides,
was walled in many places fifteen or twenty feet in height for hundreds
of yards, crossed creeks and rivers on a number of substantial bridges,
and proved, like many another enterprise undertaken in California, a
failure. In Eureka Valley I spent the winter of 1864-65. I had the
company of two men, Dave Hays and Jack Welch, both good mountaineers,
good hunters, good miners, ranchmen, hotel-keepers, good men and true at
anything they chose to turn their hands to. Both are deserving of a fair
share of immortal fame. Hays had most of his toes frozen off at the
second joint a winter or two afterward, as he had become over-confident
and thought he could risk anything in the mountains. He was belated one
winter night crossing the “Mountain Brow,” distant some forty miles
east of Eureka Valley. Over the “Brow” swept the coldest of winds, and
Hays betook himself for shelter to a sort of cave, and when he emerged
in the morning he was as good as toeless. In point of weather the Sierra
summits are fearfully deceitful. You may cross and find it as fair as an
October day in New England. In two hours a storm may come up, the air be
filled with fine minute particles of snow blown from the surrounding
peaks, and these striking against you like millions on millions of fine
needle-points will carry the heat from your body much faster than the
body can generate it. I was once nearly frozen to death in one of these
snow-driving gales when less than three miles from our house. Hays built
the house we lived in and it would have been a credit to any architect.
It was fifty feet in length by eighteen in width, and made of logs,
squared and dovetailed at the ends. It was intended for a “road house.”
Hays was landlord, cook, chambermaid, and barkeeper. I have known him to
cook a supper for a dozen guests and when they were bestowed in their
blankets, there being no flour for breakfast, he would jump on horseback
and ride to Niagara creek, twelve miles distant, supply himself and ride
back to cook the breakfast.
When the winter set in at Eureka Valley, and it set in very early, it
commenced snowing. It never really stopped snowing until the next
spring. There were intervals of more or less hours when it did not snow,
but there was always snow in the air; always somewhere in the heavens
that grayish-whitey look of the snow cloud; always that peculiar chill
and smell, too, which betoken snow. It snowed when we went to bed; it
was snowing when we got up; it snowed all day, or at intervals during
the day; it was ever monotonously busy, busy; sometimes big flakes,
sometimes little flakes coming down, down, down; coming deliberately
straight down, or driving furiously in our faces, or crossing and
recrossing in zigzag lines. The snow heavens seemed but a few feet above
the mountain-tops; they looked heavy and full of snow, and gave one a
crushing sensation. We seemed just between two great bodies of snow, one
above our heads, one lying on the ground.
Our house, whose ridge-pole was full eighteen feet from the ground,
began gradually to disappear. At intervals of three or four days it was
necessary to shovel the snow from the roof, which would otherwise have
been crushed in. This added to the accumulation about us. Snow covered
up the windows and mounted to the eaves. The path to the spring was
through a cut high above our heads. That to the barn was through another
similar. Snow all about us lay at an average depth of eight feet. Only
the sloping roof of the house was visible, and so much in color did it
assimilate with the surrounding rocks, pines, and snow that one
unacquainted with the locality might have passed within a few feet of it
without recognizing it as a human residence.
December, January, February, and March passed, and we heard nothing from
the great world outside of and below us. We arose in the morning,
cooked, ate our breakfast, got out fencing stuff till dinner time, going
and returning from our work on snowshoes, and digging in the snow a pit
large enough to work in. We ate our noon beans, returned to work, skated
back to the house by half-past two to get in firewood for the night,
and at half-past three or four the dark winter’s day was over, and we
had fifteen hours to live through before getting the next day’s meagre
allowance of light, for Eureka Valley is a narrow cleft in the mountains
not over a quarter of a mile in width, and lined on either side by
ridges 1,500 to 2,000 feet in height. The sun merely looked in at the
eastern end about nine <small>A.M.</small>, said “good day,” and was off again. We
rolled in sufficient firewood every night to supply any civilized family
for a week. Two-thirds of the caloric generated went up our chimney. It
did not have far to go, either. The chimney was very wide and very low.
At night a person unacquainted with the country might have tumbled into
the house through that chimney. The winds of heaven did tumble into it
frequently, scattering ashes and sometimes cinders throughout the
domicil. Sometimes they thus assailed us while getting breakfast. We
consumed ashes plentifully in our breakfasts; we drank small charcoal in
our coffee; we found it in the bread. On cold mornings the flapjacks
would cool on one side ere they were baked on the other. A warm meal was
enjoyed only by placing the tin coffee-cup on the hot coals after
drinking, and a similar process was necessary with the other viands. The
“other viands” were generally bread, bacon, beans, and beef. It was
peculiar beef. It was beef fattened on oak leaves and bark. Perhaps some
of you California ancients may recollect the two consecutive rainless
summers of “’63” and “’64,” when tens of thousands of cattle were driven
from the totally dried-up plains into the mountains for feed.
During those years, at the Rock River ranch in Stanislaus County, where
the plains meet the first hummocks of the Nevada foothills, I have seen
that long, lean line of staggering, starving, dying kine stretching away
as far as the eye could reach, and at every hundred yards lay a dead or
dying animal. So they went for days, urged forward by the vaquero’s lash
and their own agony for something to eat. Even when they gained the
grass of the mountains it was only to find it all eaten off and the
ground trodden to a dry, red, powdery dust by the hungry legions which
had preceded them. It was a dreadful sight, for those poor brutes are as
human in their sufferings through deprivation of food and water, when at
night they lay down and moaned on the parched red earth, as men, women,
and children would be. Well, the strongest survived and a portion
reached the country about Eureka Valley. They came in, fed well during
the summer, and one-third at least never went out again. The vaqueros
could not keep them together in that rough country. They wandered about,
climbed miles of mountain-sides, found little plateaus or valleys hidden
away here or there, where they feasted on the rich “bunch grass.” They
gained, by devious windings, high mountain-tops and little nooks quite
hidden from their keepers’ eyes and quite past finding out. The herdsmen
could not collect or drive them all out in the fall. They were left
behind. All went well with them until the first snows of winter. Then
instinctively those cattle sought to make their way out of the mountain
fastnesses. Instinctively, too, they travelled westward toward the
plains. And at the same time the first fall of snow was covered with
tracks of deer, bear and Indians, all going down to the warmer regions.
But the cattle were too late. Their progress was slow. More and more
snow came and they were stopped. Some thus impeded trod down the snow
into a corral, round which they tramped and tramped until they froze to
death. Some of these cattle were thus embayed along the track of the
Sonora and Mono road, and the white man making his way out was obliged
to turn aside, for the wide, sharp-horned beast “held the fort” and
threatened impalement to all that entered. Others, finding the south and
sunny sides of the mountains, lived there until February, browsing on
the oak leaves and bark. These we killed occasionally and buried the
meat in the snow about our house. But it was beef quite juiceless,
tasteless, tough and stringy. It was literally starvation beef for those
who ate it, and the soup we made from it was in color and consistency a
thin and almost transparent fluid.
Foxes in abundance were about us, and they stayed all winter. They were
of all shades of color from red to grayish black. Now a story was
current in the mountains that black-fox skins commanded very high
prices, say from $80 to $100 each, and that “silvery-grays” would bring
$25 or $30. So we bought strychnine, powdered bits of beef therewith,
scattered them judiciously about the valley, and were rewarded with
twenty or thirty dead foxes by spring. It required many hours’ labor to
dress a skin properly, for the meat and fat must be carefully scraped
away with a bit of glass, and if that happened to cut through the hide
your skin is good for nothing. Certainly, at very moderate wages, each
skin cost $7 or $8 in the labor required to trap, or poison it, if you
please, and to cure and dress it afterward. When the gentle spring-time
came and access was obtained to certain opulent San Francisco furriers,
we were offered $1.50 for the choicest skins and 37-1/2 cents for the
ordinary ones. Whereat the mountaineer got on his independence, refused
to sell his hard-earned peltries at such beggarly prices, and kept them
for his own use and adornment.
Then our dogs too would wander off, eat the strychnined fox bait, and
become dead dogs. We had five when the winter commenced, which number in
the spring was reduced to one--the most worthless of all, and the very
one which we prayed might get poisoned. These dogs had plenty of
oak-bark fattened beef at home. They were never stinted in this respect.
What we could not eat--and the most of the beef we cooked we couldn’t
eat--we gave freely to our dogs. But that wouldn’t content the dog. Like
man, he had the hunting instinct in his nature. He wanted something new;
something rich, rare, racy, with a spice of adventure in it; something
he couldn’t get at home. He wanted to find a bit of frozen beef in some
far-off romantic spot a mile or two from the house and this on finding
he would devour, under the impression that stolen waters are sweet, and
poisoned beef eaten in secret is pleasant. And then he would lay himself
down by the frozen brookside and gently breathe his life away; or come
staggering, shaking, trembling home, under the action of the drug, and
thus dashing in our domestic circle scatter us to the four corners of
the big log house, thinking him a mad dog. I lost thus my own dog,
“Put,” named briefly after General Israel Putnam of the Revolution, a
most intelligent animal of some hybrid species; a dog that while alone
in the mountains I could leave to guard my camp, with a certainty that
he would devour every eatable thing left within his reach ere my return,
and meet me afterward wagging his tail and licking his chops, with that
truthful, companionable expression in his eye, which said plainer than
words: “I’ve done it again, but it was so good.” I shall never own
another dog like “Put,” and I never want to. He would climb a tree as
far as one could hang a bit of bacon upon it. He would in lonesome
places keep me awake all night, growling and barking at imaginary
beasts, and then fraternize with the coyotes and invite them home to
breakfast. Near the Big Meadows, in Mono County, a disreputable female
coyote came down from a mountain side and followed “Put,” one morning as
I journeyed by on my borrowed steed, howling, yelping, and filling the
surrounding air with a viragoish clamor. I presume it was another case
of abandonment.
It was a winter of deathly quiet in Eureka Valley. Enveloped in snow, it
lay in a shroud. Occasionally a tempest would find its way into the
gorge and rampage around for a while, roaring through the pines and
dislodging the frozen lumps of snow in their branches, which whirled
down, bang! bang! bang! like so many rocks on our housetop. Sometimes we
heard the rumble of rocks or snowslides tumbling from the mountains. But
usually a dead, awful quiet prevailed. It wore on one worse than any
uproar. No sound from day to day of rumble or rattle of cart or wagon,
no church bells, no milkman’s bell, no gossip or chatter of inhabitants,
no street for them to walk down or gossip in, none of the daily clamor
of civilized life save what we made ourselves. It was a curious
sensation to see one or both of my two companions at a distance from
the house. They looked such insignificant specks in the whitened valley.
And to meet the same man after four or five hours of absence and to know
that he had nothing new to tell, that he hadn’t been anywhere in a
certain sense, since without neighbors’ houses or neighboring villages
there was “nowhere” to get that sort of bracing-up that one derives from
any sort of companionship.
We were very cozy and comfortable during those long winter nights,
seated in the red glare of our rudely-built, wide-mouthed fireplace. But
sometimes, on a clear moonlight night, I have, for the sake of change,
put on the snowshoes and glided a few hundred yards away from the house.
In that intense and icy silence the beating of one’s heart could be
distinctly heard, and the crunching of the snow under foot sounded harsh
and disagreeable. All about the myriads of tall pines in the valley and
on the mountain-side were pointing straight to the heavens, and the
crags in black shadow above and behind them maintained also the same
stern, unyielding silence. The faintest whisper of a breeze would have
been a relief. If you gained an elevation it was but to see and feel
more miles on miles of snow, pines, peaks, and silence. Very grand, but
a trifle awful; it seemed as if everything must have stopped. In such
isolation it was difficult to realize that miles away were crowded,
babbling, bustling, rallying, roaring cities, full of men and women, all
absorbed and intent on such miserably trifling things as boots and
shoes, pantaloons and breakfasts, suppers, beds, corsets, and cucumbers.
We were outside of creation. We had stepped off. We seemed in the dread,
dreary outer regions of space, where the sun had not warmed things into
life. It was an awful sort of church and a cold one. It might not make a
sceptic devotional; it would certainly cause him to wonder where he came
from or where he was going to. A half-hour of this cold, silent Sierran
winter morning was quite enough of the sublime. It sent one back to the
fireside with an increased thankfulness for such comforts as coffee,
tobacco, and warm blankets.