AN EARLY CALIFORNIA CANVASS.
Previous to this election which did not elect me, Williams and I
canvassed the county together. He aspired to the office of Sheriff. We
mounted our horses, and with long linen dusters on our backs and bottles
of whiskey in our pockets, rode first to Spring Gulch, consisting of two
groceries, six saloons, an empty hotel, twenty miners’ cabins, a seedy
school-house, a seedier church, the hillsides around denuded of earth,
torn and scarred by years of hydraulic washing, and showing great
patches of bare yellow ledge covered with heaps of boulders. The few men
met were in coarse, ragged, gray shirts and mud-stained duck pants, had
a worn, worked-out look; over all shining the hot afternoon sun, the
heated atmosphere quivering and rising, behind the hill-bounded horizon,
a snow-white mass of cloud which, at precisely the same hour every
afternoon, attains the same altitude, then gradually sinks. The eye
gazes steadily upon it; there are seen great hollows and depths of
shining whiteness. It is the vapor coming from the melting snow on the
Sierra peaks eighty miles away. The few loungers about the Washington
Saloon see William Saunders and myself riding down the hill. Our dusters
and clean linen proclaim us as “candidates.” Candidates means drinks.
There is a gradual concentration of unemployed seediness at the
Washington. We dismount; soon the coveted and cheering bottle is placed
on the bar; a line of tumblers in skirmishing order form behind it;
every one within sight and hearing is called up; a pause of glad
anticipation ensues while the glasses are being filled; the precision of
bar-room etiquette is strictly observed, that not a drop be swallowed
until all are ready; then the dozen tumblers are simultaneously raised;
the standing toast “Here’s luck,” and the reviving alcohol fulfils its
mission. This is electioneering.
Sam White is the Bismarck of our interests in Spring Gulch. He is the
standing delegate to the County Convention from this precinct. He goes
by virtue of a paying claim, a capacity for venturing among the rocks
and shoals of saloons, gaming tables and innumerable calls to drink,
without losing his head. He can drink deeply, quietly, and fearfully; he
can drink himself into noise and turbulence and still keep a set of
sober faculties in reserve underneath. We hold a short cabinet meeting
with Sam behind the barn. He sees clearly the political complexion of
Spring Gulch. Bob O’Leary is doubtful, but may be bought; Jack Shear and
Tom Mead must be braced up to allegiance by whiskey; Miles and O’Gorman
are mad because a favorite of theirs could not get the nomination for
Supervisor last year, and won’t vote anyhow; Bob Jones is favorable to
us, but wants to leave before the primary meeting comes off; the rest
are sure for us or sure against us.
We visit the Franklin House just opposite. The political candidate’s
money must not all be spent in one house. This is one of the fundamental
principles in electioneering. Every saloon controls a few votes, or
rather a few whiskey-sodden organizations, who are voted like machines.
The solemn ordeal of an American treat is again witnessed. Jim Brown
becomes affectionately and patriotically drunk, and as we ride away
loudly proclaims himself a “white man and in favor of a white man’s
government.”
We feel that Spring Gulch is secure. We carry it in our pocket. We ride
a couple of miles over the ridge to Six-Bit Gulch. Red crags tower
upward for hundreds of feet; a rivulet flows along, and on a little flat
under a spreading live-oak is an old log cabin. In front is a bit of
vegetable garden inclosed by old sluice lumber. High up in the branches
overhead a gauze-covered meat-safe; on the trunk is nailed a
coffee-mill; under it hangs a frying-pan; close by the washtub and
wash-board a few fowl peck about; the quail in a clump of chaparral near
by are querously twittering, scolding and fluttering, and making the
preliminary arrangements for their night’s rest.
Sam Lugar, gray and worn, resident in this gulch for the last sixteen
years, sits outside the door smoking his evening pipe.
A hundred yards above is the residence of the “Judge,” another
hard-working, whiskey-drinking hermit. A glance within shows the Judge
eating his evening meal. A child is playing about on the mud floor,
whose creamy complexion and bright bead-like eyes indicate its Indian
origin. Hanging above the fire-place are a gun, an Indian bow, a quiver
full of glass-tipped arrows; on the shelf bits of gold-studded quartz, a
bunch of crystals, petrifactions, and curiously-shaped stones found by
the “Judge” from time to time in his diggings. There are boxes full of
old magazines and newspapers; on the rude window-sill a coverless,
well-worn copy of Shakespeare. The Judge is tall, straight, and sallow
in complexion. He has lived on this spot since 1849. Six-Bit Gulch was
very rich. He has torn up virgin gold in the grass roots. He lives now
on recollections of the flush times. Present failures and long past
successes form the staple of his conversation. His mining is merely
secondary to another occupation, the great aspiration of his life--to
beat a poker game over in Spring Gulch. He has been unsuccessfully
trying this for the last seven years. A bundle of aboriginal duskiness
enveloped in a bright calico gown, hanging about her adipose
proportions, stirs as we enter. That is the Judge’s wife--a squaw. Her
family down to the third generation, are camped in the brush hard by.
They visit the Judge at stated intervals, and at such times the family
expenses are trebled. The gray shirt and duck pants tied at the waist
with a string constitute the Judge’s only dress-suit. On the floor near
him is a shapeless, wet mass of India rubber boots, shirt and pants,
drenched and splashed with yellow mud. This man was once a spruce clerk
in a New England store. At seventeen, the set and whiteness of his
collars, the fit of his boots, the arrangement of hair and neck-tie were
subjects of long and painful consideration before the mirror. He had his
chosen one among the village girls; he saw her regularly home from the
Sunday-evening prayer-meetings. The great gold fever of 1848 seized him.
He saw a vision: A few months picking up nuggets in California; a
triumphant return home; a wedding; a stylish mansion; a fast horse; a
front pew; termination, a marble monument in the Terryville cemetery:
“Beloved and respected by all who knew him, he sleeps in hope of a still
brighter immortality.”
We stop at the “Judge’s” for the night. Wife and child are sent off to
the Indian camp in the chaparral. Sam Lugar drops in after supper. The
Judge is an incessant talker. The bottles and glasses are placed on the
table. The Judge becomes fatherly as to counsel and admonition against
excess in drink. Also against gambling. He has peculiar theological
views. Moses, he says, was a keen old miner. He and Aaron put up a plan
to gain all the gold in the Israelites’ possession. While Moses was on
Mount Sinai receiving the stone tables, Aaron was counselling the making
and worship of the golden calf. By such means did he concentrate in a
lump all the Jews’ jewelry. What then? Moses comes down, sees the calf,
gets angry, breaks into pieces, burns it up. But what becomes of the
gold? Didn’t Moses and Aaron sneak around that night and “pan it out” of
the ashes?
The Judge is his own theologian.
We visit Price, of Hawkins’ Bar. Price is now the sole constituency of
Hawkins’. He ran this bar in its golden infancy; he saw it in its youth;
he is steadfast to it in its decay. Thirty-four years ago, eight hundred
men lived here; the Tuolumne banks were lined with them, shaking their
cradles. From the top of yonder red hill the combined grating of the
pebbles shaken in hundreds of rocker-sieves sounded like the crash of
machinery in a cotton mill.
Old Hawkins first discovered gold here. Price tells of the pickle-jars
full he had buried under the floor of his cabin. The secret could not be
kept. They came trooping down the steep Red Mountain trail, blankets
and tools on their backs, footsore, weary, thirsty, hungry--but hungrier
still for gold. They put up tents and brush houses, or crept, slept and
cooked under projecting rocks; they stood all day in ice-cold water;
they overworked bodies hitherto unused to manual labor; they blistered
delicate hands; they lived on bacon and heavy bread of their own making;
they drank raw whiskey by the quart; they died, and were buried almost
where they died, in nameless graves. Up yonder, but a few yards in the
rear of Price’s cabin, is the old camp graveyard. The fence is rotting
away and stands at various angles. The inscriptions on the headboards
are half effaced by time and the elements. Some are split and have
fallen down. Read “Jacob Peiser, æt. 27.” He died close by in the gulch
hard by, with a pistol-bullet through him. A dispute over a claim.
“Samuel Purdy, 31.” Drowned trying to cross the river during a freshet.
“John Wilkins, æt. 35.” Killed by a cave in the bank claim about a
hundred yards away. “Samuel Johnson, æt. 25.” He dove with a sand bag to
stop a great leak in the Ford Chann’s head wall, and he stopped the leak
in part with his own body, for the stream sucked him in the crevice and
he never came up alive. “John Weddell, 35.” Blown up by the premature
explosion of a blast in the Split Rock quartz claim. “Abram Hewison,
45.” Delirium tremens, stark mad at midnight, jumped into the river from
the point yonder, where the stream whirls round the bend with tremendous
force and then rushes down toward the long deep cañon a mile away in a
succession of great white crested billows, whose sad, never-ceasing
murmur seems an eternal requiem for those lying here.
Price has seen all this. That was the climax of his life. Price’s heaven
is not in the future. It is in the past. It is embraced in a period
about twenty-five years ago, when he made “an ounce per day.” Those, he
remarks, were times worth living for. Eight hundred souls then at
Hawkins’; five gambling houses in full blast every night; music,
dancing, and fandangos at either end of the bar.
The river roars unvexed toward the sea. It has burst through its dams
and choked the races with sand. The scars and furrows on the hill sides
are quite hidden by the thickly growing vegetation; young oaks and pines
are coming up in the place of the old. Trail and road are overgrown with
brush. Among the rank weeds we stumble on traces of man’s former
presence--the top of a saloon counter, the mahogany leg and faded green
cushion of a billiard table, rusty tin ware, broken picks and shovels, a
few rude stone chimneys, about whose blackened fire-places years ago
gathered the hopeful, sanguine men of “’49.” It is so still. The
declining afternoon sun is throwing long shadows from the mountains on
the other bank. Slowly they creep up and shade the steeps on our side.
Every moan and babble of the Tuolumne falls distinctly on the ear.
“Civilization” here put in a transient appearance. It scarred the hill
sides with pits and furrows dug for gold. It cut down the wide-spreading
symmetrical oaks. It forced the Tuolumne through race and flume from its
channels. It built gaudy temples dedicated to the worship of Bacchus,
resplendent with mirrors, pictures, and cut-glassware, located on the
very site where a few months previous stood the Indian’s smoking
wigwam. It brought toiling men, hard-fisted, awkward, ungainly, clumsy,
with all grace and suppleness worked out of them and strong only to lift
and dig. It brought all manner of men, educated and ignorant, cultivated
and coarse, yet for whom Christian training, Christian Church, Christian
Bible, Christian spire in city, town, and village pointing heavenward,
had failed to convince that gold was not the chief aim and end of all
human effort. By day there was labor drudging, labor spasmodic, a few
prizes, many blanks, some hope, much more discouragement. By night,
revelry, carousal, gambling, oaths, recklessness, pistol shots, knife
thrusts, bloodshed, death. Bird and beast fled affrighted to lonelier
and more secure retreats before the advent of the raging, cruel animal
man.
But now civilization has flown and nature seems easier and somewhat
improved by its absence. Price is ours. He will walk nine miles on
election day to Chinese Camp, the nearest precinct, to deposit a ballot
for us. An order on the proprietor of the Phœnix Saloon for a generous
supply of whiskey stimulates his devotion to his country. What a
glorious land of liberty is this! See in the clear azure sky above us,
floating a mere speck, the eagle, the bird of freedom! He poises himself
for a swoop. He comes rushing down on quivering pinion. Nearer! nearer!
It is a turkey buzzard, who has scented a dead horse.
Constituencies can only be found where civilization rages.