RECENT ANTIQUITY.
I was soon to leave for the Eastern States. When I realized that I was
going, I found to my surprise that I had made a home in California, that
it was an old home and about it clung all the memories and associations
of an old home.
I wanted to visit the mines and take a farewell look at the camps where
I had lived and worked in a period now fast becoming “old times,” and I
went.
The term antiquity is relative in its character. Twenty years may
involve an antiquity as much as 200 or 2,000. Indeed, as regards
sensation and emotion, the more recent antiquity is the more strongly is
it realized and more keenly felt. Standing to-day on the hillside and
looking down on the site of the camp where you mined twenty-five years
ago, and then going down that hill and treading over that site, now
silent and deserted, and you realize, so to speak, a live antiquity. So
far as ancient Greece or Rome are concerned, their histories would make
no different impression on us if dated 600 years ago or 6,000. We are
imposed upon by these rows of ciphers. They convey really no sense of
time’s duration. They are but mathematical sounds. We know only that
these nations and these men and women lived, ate, slept, drank,
quarrelled, coveted, loved, hated, and died a long time ere we were
born and that of it all we have but fragments of their history, or
rather fragments of the history of a few prominent individuals.
But when you stand alone at Dry Bar, where you mined when it was a
lively camp in 1857, with its score of muddy sluice streams coursing
hither and thither, its stores, its saloons, its hotel and its express
office, and see now but one rotting pine-log cabin, whose roof has
tumbled in and whose sides have tumbled out; where all about is a silent
waste of long-worked-off banks or bare ledge and piles of boulders in
which the herbage has taken root; where every mark of the former houses
and cabins has disappeared, save a mound here, or a pile of stone
indicating a former chimney there, you have a lively realization of
antiquity, though it be a recent one. You knew the men who lived here;
you worked with them; you know the sites of the houses in which they
lived; you have an event and a memory for every acre of territory
hereabout. Down there, where the river narrows between those two high
points of rock, once stood a rickety bridge. It became more and more
shaky and dangerous, until one day Tom Wharton, the Justice of the
Peace, fired by a desire _pro bono publico_ and rather more than his
ordinary quantity of whiskey, cut the bridge away with his axe and it
floated down stream. Over yonder, on that sandy point, was the richest
claim on the bar.
Will you go down to Pot-Hole Bar, two miles below? The trail ran by the
river. But freshet after freshet has rushed over the bank and wiped out
the track made by the footprints of a few years. There is no trace of
the trail. The chaparral has grown over and quite closed it up. Here
and there is a faint trace, and then it brings up short against a young
pine or a buckeye, the growth of the last ten years. Yet in former days
this path ranked in your mind of the importance of a town street. You
had no idea how quickly nature, if left alone, will restore things to
what we term “primitive conditions.” If a great city was deserted in
these foothills, within twenty years’ time the native growths would
creep down and in upon it, start plantations of chaparral in the
streets, festoon the houses with vines, while winged seeds would fill
the gutters and cornices with verdure. It is a hard struggle through the
undergrowth to Pot-Hole Bar. No man lives there now. No man goes there.
Even the boulder piles and bare ledges of fifteen years ago, marking the
scarifying work of your race on mother earth’s face, are now mounds
overgrown with weeds. What solitude of ancient ruined cities equals
this? Their former thousands are nothing to you as individuals; but you
knew all the boys at Pot-Hole. It was a favorite after-supper trip from
Dry Bar to Pot-Hole to see how the “boys” were getting on, and vice
versa from Pot-Hole to Dry Bar.
A cotton-tail rabbit sends a flash of white through the bushes. His
family now inhabits Pot-Hole. They came back after all of your
troublesome race had left, and very glad were the “cotton-tails” of the
riddance. There is a broken shovel at your feet and near by in the long
grass you see the fragment of a sluice’s false bottom, bored through
with anger holes to catch the gold and worn quite thin by the attrition
of pebble and boulder along its upper surface. This is about the only
vestige of the miner’s former work. Stop! On the hillside yonder is a
mound-like elevation and beyond that a long green raised line. One marks
the reservoir and the other the ditch. It was the Pot-Hole Company’s
reservoir, built after they had concluded to take water from the ditch
and wash off a point of gravel jutting toward the river. They had washed
it all off by 1856, and then the company disbanded and went their
respective ways. Pot-Hole lay very quiet for a couple of years, but
little doing there save rocker washing for grub and whiskey by four or
five men who had concluded that “grub and whiskey” was about all in life
worth living for. A “slouchy” crowd, prone to bits of rope to tie up
their suspenders, unshaven faces, and not a Sunday suit among them.
They pottered about the bar and the bank, working sometimes in concert
and then quarrelling, and every man betaking himself to his private
rocker, pick, and shovel for a few days or weeks and coming together
again, as compelled by necessity. One of them commenced picking into a
slim streak of gravel at the base of the red hard-pan bank left by the
pot-holers. It paid to the pan first two cents and a little farther in
three, and a little farther seven, and then the gold became coarser and
heavier and it yielded a bit to the pan. The blue ledge “pitched in,”
the gravel streak grew wider and richer, the crowd took up the whole
face of the bank, 150 feet to the man, and found they had struck
fortunes. And then they worked at short intervals and “went it” at long
ones, and all save four drank themselves to death within four years.
They have all long since gone. They are scattered for the most part you
know not where. Two are living in San Francisco and are now men of
might and mark. Another you have heard of far away in the Eastern
States, living in a remote village, whose name is never heard of outside
the county bounds. One has been reported to you as “up North somewhere;”
another down in Arizona “somewhere,” and three you can locate in the
county. That is but seven out of the one hundred who once dwelt here and
roundabout. Now that recollection concentrates herself you do call to
mind two others--one died in the county almshouse and another became
insane and was sent to Stockton. That is all. Nine out of the one
hundred that once resided at Dry Bar. It is mournful. The river
monotonously drones, gurgles, and murmurs over the riffle. The sound is
the same as in ’58. A bird on the opposite bank gives forth, at regular
intervals, a loud querulous cry. It was a bird of the same species whose
note so wore on the nerves of Mike McDonald as he lay dying of
consumption in a big house which stood yonder, that, after
anathematizing it, he would beseech his watcher to take a gun and blow
the “cussed” thing’s head off. Perhaps it is the same bird. The
afternoon shadows are creeping down the mountain side. The outline of
the hills opposite has not at all changed, and there, down by the bank,
is the enormous fragment of broken rock against which Dick Childs built
his brush shelter for the summer and out of which he was chased by a
sudden fall rise of the river. But it is very lonesome with all these
people here so vivid in memory, yet all gone, and never, never to come
back.
You wonder if any of the “old crowd” now living, live over as you do the
past life here; if a single one within the last ten years has ever
revisited the spot; or if any of them have any desire to revisit it.
Some of them did so once. There was Jake Bennett. As late as ’62, Jake,
who had removed to the next county, would come every summer on a
pilgrimage to “see the boys,” and the boys at Dry Bar were even then
sadly reduced in number, for the camp ran down very quickly within the
four years dating from ’58. But Jake was faithful to old memories and
associations, and proved it by the ten-miles’ walk he was obliged to
take to reach Dry Bar. Dry Bar was never on a regular stage route. Jake
was an ex-Philadelphian and called rest “west” and violin “wiolin.” But
no one comes here now, at least on any such errand. It’s a troublesome
and rather expensive locality to reach and mere sentiment does not pay.
The nearest resident is a Missouri hog-rancher, whose house is above on
the hill a couple of miles away. He neither knows nor cares for Dry
Bar’s former history. He came here but ten years ago. His half-wild
swine are ambushed about in the shelter of the elder and buckeye bushes,
and frightened at your approach plunge snorting into the deeper
thickets.
Here it is. The remains of your own cabin chimney, a pile of
smoke-blackened stones in the tall grass. Of the cabin every vestige has
disappeared. You built that chimney yourself. It was an awkward affair,
but it served to carry out the smoke, and when finished you surveyed it
with pleasure and some pride, for it was your chimney. Have you ever
felt “snugger” and more cozy and comfortable since than you did on the
long, rainy winter nights, when, the supper finished and the crockery
washed, you and your “pard” sat by the glowing coals and prepared your
pipes for the evening smoke? There were great hopes and some great
strikes on Dry Bar in those days; that was in ’52. Mining was still in
the pan, rocker and long tom era; sluices were just coming in.
Hydraulicking 100-foot banks and washing hills off the face of the earth
had not been thought of. The dispute as to the respective merits of the
long vs. the short-handled shovel was still going on. A gray or red
shirt was a badge of honor. The deep river-beds were held to contain
enormous store of golden nuggets. River mining was in its wing and
coffer-dam phase.
Perhaps the world then seemed younger to you than now? Perhaps your mind
then set little store on this picturesque spot, so wrapped were you in
visions of the future? Perhaps then you wrote regularly to that girl in
the States--your first heart’s-trouble--and your anticipation was fixed
entirely on the home to be built up there on the gold you were to dig
here? Perhaps the girl never married you, the home was never built and
nothing approaching the amount of _oro_ expected dug out. You held,
then, Dry Bar in light estimation. It was for you only a temporary
stopping place, from which you wished to get its gold as quickly as you
could and get away from as soon as possible. You never expected Dry Bar,
its memories and associations thus to make for themselves a “local
habitation and a name” in your mind. We live sometimes in homes we do
not realize until much of their material part has passed away. A horned
toad scuttles along the dry grass and inflates himself to terrify you as
you approach. Those rat-like ground squirrels are running from hole to
hole, like gossiping neighbors, and “chipping” shrilly at each other.
These are old summer acquaintances at Dry Bar.
Is it with a feeling of curiosity you take up one of those stones
handled by you thirty-one years ago and wonder how like or unlike you
may be to yourself at that time? Are you the same man? Not the same
young man, certainly. The face is worn; the eyes deeper set; the hair
more or less gray and there are lines and wrinkles where none existed
then. But that is only the outside of your “soul case.” Suppose that
you, the John Doe of 1883, could and should meet the John Doe of 1853?
Would you know him? Would you agree on all points with him? Could you
“get” along with him? Could you “cabin” with him? Could you “summer and
winter” with him? Would the friends of the John Doe of ’53, who piled up
that chimney, be the friends of the present John Doe, who stands
regarding its ruins? Are the beliefs and convictions of that J. Doe
those of this J. Doe? Are the jokes deemed so clever by that J. Doe
clever to this J. Doe? Are the men great to that J. Doe great to the
present J. Doe? Does he now see the filmly, frothy fragments of scores
of pricked bubbles sailing away and vanishing in air? If a man die shall
he live again? But how much of a man’s mind may die out and be
supplanted by other ideas ere his body goes back to dust? How much of
this J. Doe belongs to that J. Doe, and how much of the same man is
there standing here?