The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Writings

Let me first give an idea of the country which these people recreated, and the civilization they displaced. For more than three hundred years California was of all Christian countries the least known. The glow and glamour of Spanish tradition and discovery hung about it. There was an English map in which it was set down as an island. There was the Rio de Los Reyes ¹—a kind of gorgeous Mississippi—leading directly to the heart of the Continent, which De Fonte² claimed to have discovered. There was the Anian passage—a prophetic forecast of the Pacific Railroad—through which Maldonado³ declared that he sailed to the North Atlantic. Another Spanish discoverer brought his mendacious personality directly from the Pacific, by way of Columbia River, to Lake Ontario; ⁴ on which, I am rejoiced to say, he found a Yankee vessel from Boston, whose captain informed him that he had come up from the Atlantic only a few days before him! Along the long line of iron-bound coast the old freebooters chased the timid Philippine galleons, and in its largest bay, beside the present gateway of the West,—San Francisco,—Sir Francis Drake lay for two weeks and scraped the barnacles from his adventurous keels.⁵ It is only within the past twenty-five years, that a company of gold-diggers, turning up the ocean sands near Port Umpqua, came upon some large cakes of wax deeply imbedded in the broken and fire-scarred ribs of a wreck of ancient date. The Californian heart was at once fired at the discovery, and in a few weeks a hundred men or more were digging, burrowing, and scraping for the lost treasure of the Philippine galleon. At last they found—what think you?—a few cutlasses with an English stamp upon their blades. The enterprising and gallant—and slightly piratical—Sir Francis Drake had been there before them!

Yet they were peaceful, pastoral days for California. Through the great central valley the Sacramento poured an unstained current into a majestic bay, ruffled by no keels and fretted by no wharves. The Angelus bell rung at San Bernardino, and, taken up by every Mission tower along the darkening coast, called the good people to prayer and sleep before nine o’clock every night. Leagues of wild oats, progenitors of those great wheat fields that now drug the markets, hung their idle heads on the hillsides; vast herds of untamed cattle, whose hides and horns alone made the scant commerce of those days, wandered over the illimitable plains, knowing no human figure but that of the yearly riding vaquero on his unbroken mustang, which they regarded as the early aborigines did the Spanish cavalry, as one individual creation. Around the white walls of the Mission buildings were clustered the huts of the Indian neophytes, who dressed neatly, but not expensively, in mud. Presidios garrisomed by a dozen raw militia-men kept the secular order, and in the scattered pueblos rustic alcaldes dispensed, like Sancho Panza,⁶ proverbial wisdom and practical equity to the bucolic litigants. In looking over some Spanish law papers, one day, I came upon a remarkable instance of the sagacity of Alcalde⁷ Felipe Gomez of Santa Barbara. An injured wife accused her husband of serenading the wife of another. The faithless husband and his too seductive guitar were both produced in court. “Play,” said the alcalde to the gay Lothario.⁸ The unfortunate man was obliged to repeat his amorous performance of the preceding night. “I find nothing here,” said the excellent alcalde after a moment’s pause, “but an infamous voice and an execrable style. I dismiss the complaint of the Señora, but I shall hold the Señor on the charge of vilely disturbing the peace of Santa Barbara.”

They were happy, tranquil days. The proprietors of the old ran chos ruled in a patriarchal style, and lived to a patriarchal age. On a soil half tropical in its character, in a climate wholly original in its practical conditions, a soft-handed Latin race slept and smoked the half year’s sunshine away, and believed that they had discovered a new Spain! They awoke from their dream only to find themselves strangers on their own soil, foreigners in their own country, ignorant even of the treasure they had been sent to guard. A political and social earthquake, more powerful than any physical convulsions they had ever known, shook the foundation of the land, and in the disrupted strata and rent fissures the treasure suddenly glittered before their eyes.

Though the change came upon them suddenly, it had been prefigured by a chain of circumstances whose logical links future historians will not overlook. It was not the finding of a few grains of gold by a day laborer at Sutter’s Mill,⁹ but that for years before the way had been slowly opened and the doors unlocked to the people who were to profit by this discovery. The real pioneers of the lawless, irreligious band whose story I am repeating were the oldest and youngest religions known. Do Americans ever think that they owe their right to California to the Catholic Church and the Mormon brotherhood? Yet Father Junipero Serra ringing his bell in the heathen wilderness of Upper California, and Brigham Young leading his half famished legions from Nauvoo to Salt Lake,¹⁰ were the two great commanders of the Argonauts of ’49. All that western emigration which, prior to the gold discovery, penetrated the Oregon and California valleys and half Americanized the Coast, would have perished by the way, but for the providentially created oasis of Salt Lake City. The halting trains of alkali-poisoned oxen, the footsore and despairing teamsters, gathered rest and succor from the Mormon settlement. The British frigate that sailed into the port of Monterey a day or two late, saw the American flag that had, under this providence, crossed the continent, flying from the Cross of the Cathedral! A day sooner, and this story might have been an English record.

Were our friends, the Argonauts, at all affected by these coincidences? I think not. They had that lordly contempt for a southern, soft-tongued race which belonged to their Anglo-Saxon lineage. They were given to no superstitious romance, exalted by no special mission, stimulated by no high ambition; they were skeptical of even the existence of the golden fleece¹¹ until they saw it. Equal to their fate, they accepted with a kind of heathen philosophy whatever it might bring. “If there isn’t any gold, what are you going to do with these sluice-boxes?” said a newly arrived emigrant to his friend. “They will make first-class coffins,” answered the friend, with the simple directness of a man who has calculated all his chances. If they did not burn their vessels behind them, like Pizarro,¹² they at least left the good ship Argo dismantled and rotting at their Colchian wharf. Sailors were shipped only for the outward voyage; nobody expected to return, even those who anticipated failure. Fertile in expedients, they twisted their failures into a certain sort of success. Until recently, there stood in San Francisco a house of the early days whose foundations were built entirely of plug tobacco in boxes. The consignee had found a glut in the tobacco market, but lumber for foundations was at a tremendous premium!¹³ An Argonaut just arriving was amazed at recognizing in the boatman who pulled him ashore, and who charged him the modest sum of fifty dollars for the performance, a brother classmate of Oxford. “Were you not,” he asked eagerly, “senior wrangler in ’43?” “Yes,” said the other significantly, “but I also pulled stroke oar against Cambridge.” If the special training of years sometimes failed to procure pecuniary recognition, an idle accomplishment, sometimes even a physical peculiarity, succeeded. At my first breakfast in a restaurant on Long Wharf, I was haunted during the meal by a shadowy resemblance which the waiter who took my order bore to a gentleman to whom in my boyhood I had looked up as a mirror of elegance, urbanity, and social accomplishment. Fearful lest I should insult the waiter—who carried a revolver—by this reminiscence, I said nothing to him; but a later inquiry of the proprietor proved that my suspicions were correct. “He’s mighty handy,” said the man, “and kin talk elegant to a customer as is waiting for his cakes, and make him kinder forget he ain’t sarved.” With an earnest desire to restore my old friend to his former position, I asked if it would not be possible to fill his place. “I’m afraid not,” said the proprietor with a sudden suspicion, and he added significantly, “I don’t think you’d suit.” It was this wonderful adaptability, perhaps influenced by a climate that produced fruit out of season, that helped the Argonauts to success, or mitigated their defeats. A now distinguished lawyer, remarkable for his Herculean build, found himself on landing without a cent—rather let me say without twenty dollars—to pay the porterage of his trunk to the hotel. Shouldering it, he was staggering from the landing, when a stranger stepped towards him, remarking he had not “half a load,” quietly added his own valise to the lawyer’s burden, and handing him ten dollars and his address, departed before the legal gentleman could recover from his astonishment. The valise, however, was punctually delivered, and the lawyer often congratulated himself on the comparative ease with which he won his first fee.

Much of the easy adaptability was due to the character of the people. What that character was, perhaps it would not be well to say. At least I should prefer to defer criticism until I could add to the calmness the safe distance of the historian. You will find some of their peculiarities described in the frank autobiographies of those two gentlemen who executed a little commission for Macbeth in which Banquo was concerned.¹⁴ In distant parts of the continent they had left families, creditors, and in some instances even officers of justice, perplexed and lamenting. There were husbands who had deserted their own wives,—and in some extreme cases even the wives of others,—for this haven of refuge. Nor was it possible to tell from their superficial exterior, or even their daily walk and action, whether they were or were not named in the counts of this general indictment. Some of the best men had the worst antecedents, some of the worst rejoiced in a spotless puritan pedigree. “The boys seem to have taken a fresh deal all round,” said Mr. John Oakhurst one day to me, with the easy confidence of a man who was conscious of his ability to win my money, “and there is no knowing whether a man will turn up knave or king.” It is relevant to this anecdote that Mr. John Oakhurst himself came of a family whose ancestors regarded games of chance as sinful, because they were trifling and amusing, but who had never conceived they might be made the instruments of successful speculation and even tragic earnestness. “To think,” said Mr. Oakhurst, as he rose from a ten minutes’ sitting with a gain of five thousand dollars,—“to think there’s folks as believes that keerds is a waste of time.”

Such were the character and the antecedents of the men who gave the dominant and picturesque coloring to the life of that period. Doubtless the papers of the ancient Argo showed a cleaner bill of moral health, but doubtless no type of adventure more distinct or original. I would not have it inferred that there was not a class, respectable in numbers as in morals, among and yet distinct from these. But they have no place here save as a background to the salient outlines and deeply etched figures of the Argonauts. Character ruled, and the strongest was not always the best. Let me bring them a little nearer. Let me sketch two pictures of them: one in their gathered concourse in their city by the sea, one in their lonely scattered cabins in the camps of the Sierras.

It is the memorable winter of ’52, a typical Californian winter—unlike anything known to most of my readers; a winter from whose snowy nest in the Sierras the fluttering, new-fledged Spring freed itself without a struggle. It is a season of falling rains and springing grasses, of long nights of shower, and days of cloud and sunshine. There are hours when the quickening earth seems to throb beneath one’s feet, and the blue eyes of heaven to twinkle through its misty lashes. High up in the Sierras, unsunned depths of snow form the vast reservoirs that later will flood the plains, causing the homesick wanderers on the low-lands to look with awe upon a broad expanse of overflow, a lake that might have buried the State of Massachusetts in its yellow depths. The hillsides are gay with flowers, and, as in the old fairy story, every utterance of the kindly Spring falls from her lips to the ground in rubies and emeralds. And yet it is called “a hard season,” and flour is fifty dollars a barrel. In San Francisco it has been raining steadily for two weeks. The streets are almost impassable with mud, and over some of the more dangerous depths planks are thrown. There are few street lamps, but the shops are still lighted, and the streets are full of long-bearded, long-booted men, eager for some new excitement, their only idea of recreation from the feverish struggle of the day. Perhaps it is a passing carriage—a phenomenal carriage, one of the half dozen known in the city—that becoming helplessly mired is instantly surrounded by a score of willing hands whose owners are only too happy to be rewarded by a glimpse of a female face through the window, even though that face be haggard, painted, or gratuitously plain. Perhaps it is in the little theater, where the cry of a baby in the audience brings down a tumultuous encore from the whole house. Perhaps it is in the gilded drinking saloon, into which some one rushes with arms extended at right angles, and conveys in that one pantomimic action the signal of the semaphore telegraph on Telegraph Hill¹⁵ that a sidewheel steamer has arrived, and that there are “letters from home.” Perhaps it is the long queue that afterwards winds and stretches from the Post Office half a mile away. Perhaps it is the eager men who, following it rapidly down, bid fifty, a hundred, two hundred, three hundred, and five hundred dollars for favored places in the line. Perhaps it is the haggard man who nervously tears open his letter and after a moment’s breathless pause faints and falls senseless beside his comrades. Or perhaps it is a row and a shot in the streets, but in ’52 this was hardly an excitement.

The gambling-saloon is always the central point of interest. There are four of them,—the largest public buildings in the city,—thronged and crowded all night. They are approached by no mysterious passage or guarded entrance, but are frankly open to the street, with the further invitation of gilding, lights, warmth, and music. Strange to say, there is a quaint decorum about them. They are the quietest halls in San Francisco. There is no drunkenness, no quarreling, scarcely any exultation or disappointment. Men who have already staked their health and fortune in this emigration are but little affected by the lesser stake on red or black, or the turn of a card. Business men who have gambled all day in their legitimate enterprise find nothing to excite them unduly here. In the intervals of music, a thoughtful calm pervades the vast assembly; people move around noiselessly from table to table, as if Fortune were nervous as well as fickle; a cane falling upon the floor causes every one to look up, a loud laugh or exclamation excites a stare of virtuous indignation. The most respectable citizens, though they might not play, are to be seen here of an evening. Old friends, who perhaps parted at the church door in the States, meet here without fear and without reproach. Even among the players are represented all classes and conditions of men. One night at a faro table a player suddenly slipped from his seat to the floor, a dead man. Three doctors, also players, after a brief examination, pronounced it disease of the heart. The coroner, sitting at the right of the dealer, instantly impaneled the rest of the players, who, laying down their cards, briefly gave a verdict in accordance with the facts, and went on with their game!

I do not mean to say that, under this surface calm, there was not often the intensest feeling. There was a Western man, who, having made a few thousands in the mines, came to San Francisco to take the Eastern steamer home. The night before he was to sail, he entered the Arcade saloon, and seating himself at a table in sheer listlessness, staked a twenty-dollar gold piece on the game. He won. He won again without removing his stake. It was, in short, that old story told so often—how in two hours he won a fortune, how an hour later he rose from the table a ruined man. Well—the steamer sailed without him. He was a simple man, knowing little of the world, and his sudden fortune and equally sudden reverse almost crazed him. He dared not write to the wife who awaited him; he had not pluck enough to return to the mines and build his fortune up anew. A fatal fascination held him to the spot. He took some humble occupation in the city, and regularly lost his scant earnings where his wealth had gone before. His ragged figure and haggard face appeared as regularly as the dealer at the table. So, a year passed. But if he had forgotten the waiting wife, she had not forgotten him. With infinite toil she at last procured a passage to San Francisco, and was landed with her child penniless upon its wharf. In her sore extremity she told her story to a passing stranger—the last man, perhaps, to have met—Mr. John Oakhurst, a gambler! He took her to a hotel, and quietly provided for her immediate wants. Two or three evenings after this, the Western man, still playing at the same table, won some trifling stake three times in succession, as if Fortune were about to revisit him. At this moment, Mr. Oakhurst clapped him on the shoulder. “I will give you,” he said, quietly, “three thousand dollars for your next play.” The man hesitated. “Your wife is at the door,” continued Mr. Oakhurst sotto voce. “Will you take it? Quick!” The man accepted. But the spirit of the gambler was strong within him, and as Mr. Oakhurst perhaps fully expected, he waited to see the result of the play. Mr. Oakhurst lost! With a look of gratitude the man turned to Oakhurst and seizing the three thousand dollars hurried away, as if fearful he might change his mind. “That was a bad spurt of yours, Jack,” said a friend innocently, not observing the smile that had passed between the dealer and Jack. “Yes,” said Jack coolly, “but I got tired of seein’ that chap around.” “But,” said his friend in alarm, “you don’t mean to say that you”—and he hesitated. “I mean to say, my dear boy,” said Jack, “that this yer little deal was a put-up job betwixt the dealer and me. It’s the first time,” he added seriously, with an oath which I think the recording angel instantly passed to Jack’s credit, “it’s the first time as I ever played a game that wasn’t on the square.”

The social life of that day was peculiar. Gentlemen made New Year’s calls in long boots and red flannel shirts. In later days the wife of an old pioneer used to show a chair with a hole through its cushion made by a gentleman caller who, sitting down suddenly in bashful confusion, had exploded his revolver. The best-dressed men were gamblers; the best-dressed ladies had no right to that title. At balls and parties dancing was tabooed, owing to the unhappy complications which arose from the disproportionate number of partners to the few ladies that were present. The ingenious device of going through a quadrille with a different partner for each figure sprang from the fertile brain of a sorely beset San Francisco belle. The wife of an army officer told me that she never thought of returning home with the same escort, and not unfre quently was accompanied with what she called a “full platoon.” “I never knew before,” she said, “what they meant by ‘the pleasure of your company.’ ” In the multiplicity of such attentions surely there was safety.

Such was the urban life of the Argonauts—its salient peculiarities softened and subdued by the constant accession of strangers from the East and the departure of its own citizens for the interior. As each succeeding ocean steamer brought fresh faces from the East, a corresponding change took place in the type and in the manners and morals. When fine clothes appeared upon the streets and men swore less frequently, people began to put locks on their doors and portable property was no longer out at night. As fine houses were built, real estate rose, and the dwellers in the old tents were pushed from the contiguity of their richer brothers. San Francisco saw herself naked, and was ashamed. The old Argonau tic brotherhood, with its fierce sincerity, its terrible directness, its pathetic simplicity, was broken up. Some of the members were content to remain in a Circean palace of material and sensuous delight, ¹⁶ but the type was transferred to the mountains, and thither I propose to lead you.

It is a country unlike any other. Nature here is as rude, as inchoate, as unfinished, as the life. The people seem to have come here a thousand years too soon, and before the great hostess was ready to receive them. The forests, vast, silent, damp with their undergrowth of gigantic ferns, recall a remote carboniferous epoch. The trees are monstrous, somber, and monotonously alike. Everything is new, crude, and strange. The grass blades are enormous and far apart, there is no carpet to the soil; even the few Alpine flowers are odorless and bizarre. There is nothing soft, tender, or pastoral in the landscape. Nature affects the heroics rather than the bucolics. Theocritus himself could scarcely have given melody to the utterance of these Aetnean herdsmen, with their brierwood pipes, and their revolvers slung at their backs. There are vast spaces of rock and cliff, long intervals of ravine and cañon, and sudden and awful lapses of precipice. The lights and shadows are Rembrandtish, and against this background the faintest outline of a human figure stands out starkly.

They lived at first in tents, and then in cabins. The climate was gracious, and except for the rudest purposes of shelter from the winter rains, they could have slept out of doors the year round, as many preferred to do. As they grew more ambitious, perhaps a small plot of ground was enclosed and cultivated; but for the first few years they looked upon themselves as tenants at will, and were afraid of putting down anything they could not take away. Chimneys to their cabins were for a long time avoided as having this objectionable feature. Even at this day, deserted mining-camps are marked by the solitary adobe chimneys still left standing where the frame of the original cabin was moved to some newer location. Their housekeeping was of the rudest kind. For many months the frying-pan formed their only available cooking-utensil. It was lashed to the wandering miner’s back, like the troubadour’s guitar. He fried his bread, his beans, his bacon, and occasionally stewed his coffee, in this single vessel. But that Nature worked for him with a balsamic air and breezy tonics, he would have succumbed. Happily his meals were few and infrequent; happily the inventions of his mother East were equal to his needs. His progressive track through these mountain solitudes was marked with tin cans bearing the inscriptions: “Cove Oysters,” “Shaker Sweet Corn,” “Yeast Powder,” “Boston Crackers,” and the like. But in the hour of adversity and the moment of perplexity, his main reliance was beans! It was the sole legacy of the Spanish California. The conqueror and the conquered fraternized over their frijoles.

The Argonaut’s dress was peculiar. He was ready if not skillful with his needle, and was fond of patching his clothes until the original material disappeared beneath a cloud of amendments. The flour-sack was his main dependence. When its contents had sustained and comforted the inner man, the husk clothed the outer one. Two gentlemen of respectability in earlier days lost their identity in the labels somewhat conspicuously borne on the seats of their trousers, and were known to the camp in all seriousness as “Genesee Mills” and “Eagle Brand.” In the Southern mines a quantity of seamen’s clothing, condemned by the Navy Department and sold at auction, was bought up, and for a year afterwards the somber woodland shades of Stanislaus and Merced were lightened by the white ducks and blue and white shirts of sailor landsmen. It was odd that the only picturesque bit of color in their dress was accidental, and owing to a careless, lazy custom. Their handkerchiefs of coarse blue, green, or yellow bandanna were for greater convenience in hot weather knotted at the ends and thrown shawlwise around the shoulders. Against a background of olive foliage, the effect was always striking and kaleidoscopic. The soft felt, broad-brimmed hat, since known as the California hat, was their only head-covering. A tall hat on anybody but a clergyman or a gambler would have justified a blow.

They were singularly handsome, to a man. Not solely in the muscular development and antique grace acquired through open-air exercise and unrestrained freedom of limb, but often in color, expression, and even softness of outline. They were mainly young men, whose beards were virgin, soft, silken, and curling. They had not always time to cut their hair, and this often swept their shoulders with the lovelocks of Charles II.¹⁷ There were faces that made one think of Delaroche’s Savior.¹⁸ There were dashing figures, bold-eyed, jauntily insolent, and cavalierly reckless, that would have delighted Meissonier.¹⁹ Add to this the foreign element of Chilian and Mexican, and you have a combination of form and light and color unknown to any other modern English-speaking community. At sunset on the red mountain road, a Mexican pack-train perhaps slowly winds its way toward the plain. Each animal wears a gaily colored blanket beneath its pack saddle; the leading mule is musical with bells, and brightly caparisoned; the muleteers wear the national dress, with striped serape of red and black, deerskin trousers open from the knee, and fringes with bullion buttons, and have on each heel a silver spur with rowels three inches in diameter. If they were thus picturesque in external magnificence, no less romantic were they in expression and character. Their hospitality was barbaric, their generosity spontaneous. Their appreciation of merit always took the form of pecuniary testimonials, whether it was a church and parsonage given to a favorite preacher, or the Danaë-like shower of gold²⁰ they rained upon the pretty person of a popular actress. No mendicant had to beg; a sympathizing bystander took up a subscription in his hat. Their generosity was emulative and cumulative. During the great War of the Rebellion, the millions gathered in the Treasury of the Sanitary Commission²¹ had their source in a San Francisco bar room. “It’s mighty rough on those chaps who are wounded,” said a casual drinker, “and I’m sorry for them.” “How much are you sorry?” asked a gambler. “Five hundred dollars,” said the first speaker aggressively. “I’ll see that five hundred dollars, and go a thousand better!” said the gambler, putting down the money. In half an hour fifteen thousand dollars was telegraphed to Washington from San Francisco, and this great national charity—open to North and South alike, afterwards reinforced by three millions of California gold—sprang into life.

They were splendidly loyal in their friendships. Perhaps the absence of female society and domestic ties turned the current of their tenderness and sentiment towards each other. To be a man’s “partner” signified something more than a common pecuniary or business interest; it was to be his friend through good or ill report, in adversity or fortune, to cleave to him and none other—to be ever jealous of him! There were Argonauts who were more faithful to their partners than, I fear, they had ever been to their wives; there were partners whom even the grave could not divide—who remained solitary and loyal to a dead man’s memory. To insult a man’s partner was to insult him; to step between two partners in a quarrel was attended with the same danger and uncertainty that involves the peacemaker in a conjugal dispute. The heroic possibilities of a Damon and a Pythias were always present;²³ there were men who had fulfilled all those conditions, and better still without a knowledge or belief that they were classical, with no mythology to lean their backs against, and hardly a conscious appreciation of a later faith that is symbolized by sacrifice. In these unions there were the same odd combinations often seen in the marital relations: a tall and a short man, a delicate sickly youth and a middle-aged man of powerful frame, a grave reticent nature and a spontaneous exuberant one. Yet in spite of these incongruities there was always the same blind unreasoning fidelity to each other. It is true that their zeal sometimes outran their discretion. There is a story extant that a San Francisco stranger, indulging in some free criticism of religious denominations, suddenly found himself sprawling upon the floor with an irate Kentuckian, revolver in hand, standing over him. When an explanation was demanded by the crowd, the Kentuckian pensively returned his revolver to his belt. “Well, I ain’t got anythin’ agin the stranger, but he said somethin’ a minit ago agin Quakers, and I want him to understand that my pardner is a Quaker, and—a peaceful man!”

There was a woman of this class who lived in a little mining-camp in the Sierras. Her husband was a Texan—a good-humored giant, who had won the respect of the camp probably quite as much by his amiable weakness as by his great physical power. She was an Eastern woman; had been, I think, a schoolmistress, and had lived in cities up to the time of her marriage and emigration. She was not, perhaps, personally attractive; she was plain and worn beyond her years, and her few personal accomplishments—a slight knowledge of French and Italian, music, the Latin classification of plants, natural philosophy, and Blair’s Rhetoric²⁴—did not tell upon the masculine inhabitants of Ringtail Cañon. Yet she was universally loved, and Aunt Ruth, as she was called, or “Old Ma’am Richards,” was lifted into an idealization of the aunt, mother, or sister of every miner in the camp. She reciprocated in a thousand kindly ways, mending the clothes, ministering to the sick, and even answering the long home letters of the men.

Presently she fell ill. Nobody knew exactly what was the matter with her, but she pined slowly away. When the burthen of her household tasks was lifted from her shoulders, she took to long walks, wandering over the hills, and was often seen upon the highest ridge at sunset, looking toward the east. Here at last she was found senseless,—the result, it was said, of over exertion, and she was warned to keep her house. So she kept her house, and even went so far as to keep her bed. One day, to everybody’s astonishment, she died. “Do you know what they say Ma’am Richards died of?” said Yuba Bill to his partner. “The doctor says she died of nostalgia,” said Bill. “What blank thing is nostalgia?” asked the other. “Well, it’s a kind o’ longin’ to go to heaven!” Perhaps he was right.

As a general thing the Argonauts were not burthened with sentiment, and were utterly free from its more dangerous ally, sentimentalism. They took a sardonic delight in stripping all meretricious finery from their speech; they had a sarcastic fashion of eliminating everything but the facts from poetic or imaginative narrative. With all that terrible directness of statement which was habitual to them, when they indulged in innuendo it was significantly cruel and striking. In the early days, Lynch law punished horse-stealing with death. A man one day was arrested and tried for this offense. After hearing the evidence, the jury duly retired to consult upon their verdict. For some reason—perhaps from an insufficiency of proof, perhaps from motives of humanity, perhaps because the census was already showing an alarming decrease in the male population—the jury showed signs of hesitation. The crowd outside became inpatient. After waiting an hour, the ringleader put his head into the room and asked if the jury had settled upon a verdict. “No,” said the foreman. “Well,” answered the leader, “take your own time, gentlemen; only remember that we’re waitin’ for this yer room to lay out the corpse in!”

Their humor was frequent, although never exuberant or spontaneous, and always contained a certain percentage of rude justice or morality under its sardonic exterior. The only ethical teaching of those days was through a joke or a sarcasm. While camps were moved by an epigram, the rude equity of Judge Lynch was swayed by a witticism. Even their pathos, which was more or less dramatic, partook of this quality. The odd expression, the quaint fancy, or even the grotesque gesture that rippled the surface consciousness with a smile, a moment later touched the depths of the heart with a sense of infinite sadness. They indulged sparingly in poetry and illustration, using only its rude, inchoate form of slang. Unlike the meaningless cues and catch-words of an older civilization, their slang was the condensed epigrammatic illustration of some fact, fancy, or perception. Generally it had some significant local derivation. The half-yearly drought brought forward the popular adjuration “dry up” to express the natural climax of evaporated fluency. “Played out” was a reminiscence of the gambling-table, and expressed that hopeless condition of affairs when even the operations of chance are suspended. To “take stock” in any statement, theory, or suggestion indicates a pecuniary degree of trustful credulity. One can hardly call that slang, even though it came from a gambler’s lips, which gives such a vivid condensation of death and the reckoning hereafter as was conveyed in the expression, “handing in your checks.” In those days the slang was universal; there was no occasion to which it seemed inconsistent. Thomas Starr King once told me that, after delivering a certain controversial sermon, he overheard the following dialogue between a parishioner and his friend. “Well,” said the enthusiastic parishioner, referring to the sermon, “what do you think of King now?” “Think of him?” responded the friend, “why, he took every trick!”²⁵

Sometimes, through the national habit of amusing exaggeration or equally grotesque understatement, certain words acquired a new significance. I remember the first night I spent in Virginia City was at a new hotel which had been but recently opened. After I had got comfortably to bed, I was aroused by the noise of scuffling and shouting below, punctuated by occasional pistol shots. In the morning I made my way to the bar-room, and found the landlord behind his counter with a bruised eye, a piece of court plaster extending from his cheek to his forehead, yet withal a pleasant smile upon his face. Taking my cue from this I said to him: “Well, landlord, you had rather a lively time here last night.” “Yes,” he replied, pleasantly. “It was rather a lively time!” “Do you often have such lively times in Virginia City?” I added, emboldened by his cheerfulness. “Well, no,” he said, reflectively; “the fact is we’ve only just opened yer, and last night was about the first time that the boys seemed to be gettin’ really acquainted!”

The man who objected to join in a bear hunt because “he hadn’t lost any bears lately,” and the man who replied to the tourist’s question “if they grew any corn in that locality” by saying “not a d—d bit, in fact scarcely any,” offered easy examples of this characteristic anti-climax and exaggeration. Often a flavor of gentle philosophy mingled with it. “In course I’d rather not drive a male team,” said a teamster to me. “In course I’d rather run a bank or be President: but when you’ve lived as long as I have, stranger, you’ll find that in this yer world a man don’t always get his ‘drathers.’ ” Often a man’s trade or occupation lent a graphic power to his speech. On one occasion an engineer was relating to me the particulars of a fellow workman’s death by consumption. “Poor Jim,” he said, “he got to running slower and slower, until one day—he stopped on his center!” What a picture of the helpless hitch in this weary human machine! Sometimes the expression was borrowed from another’s profession. At one time there was a difficulty in a surveyor’s camp between the surveyor and a Chinaman. “If I was you,” said a sympathizing teamster to the surveyor, “I’d jest take that chap and theodolite him out o’ camp.” Sometimes the slang was a mere echo of the formulas of some popular excitement or movement. During a camp-meeting in the mountains, a teamster who had been swearing at his cattle was rebuked for his impiety by a young woman who had just returned from the meeting. “Why, Miss,” said the astonished teamster, “you don’t call that swearing, do you? Why, you ought to hear Bill Jones exhort the impenitent mule!”

But can we entirely forgive the Argonaut for making his slang gratuitously permanent, for foisting upon posterity, who may forget these extenuating circumstances, such titles as “One Horse Gulch,” “Poker Flat,” “Greaser Cañon,” “Fiddletown,” “Murderer’s Bar,” and “Dead Broke”? The map of California is still ghastly with this unhallowed christening. A tourist may well hesitate to write “Dead Broke” at the top of his letter, and any stranger would be justified in declining an invitation to “Murderer’s Bar.” It seemed as if the early Californian took a sardonic delight in the contrast which these names offered to the euphony of the old Spanish titles. It is fortunate that with few exceptions the counties of the State still bear the soft Castilian labials and gentle vowels: Tuolumne, Tulare, Yolo, Calaveras, Sonoma, Tehema, Siskyou, and Mendocino, to say nothing of the glorious company of the Apostles who perpetually praise California through the Spanish Catholic calendar. Yet wherever a saint dropped a blessing, some sinner afterwards squatted with an epithet. Extremes often meet. The omnibuses in San Francisco used to run from Happy Valley to the Mission Dolores.²⁶ You had to go to Blaises first before you could get to Purissima. Yet I think the ferocious directness of these titles was preferable to the pinchbeck elegance of “Copperopolis,” “Argentinia,” the polyglot monstrosities of “Oroville,” of “Placerville,” or the remarkable sentiment of “Romeosburgh” and “Julietstown.” Sometimes the national tendency to abbreviation was singularly shown. “James-town,” near Sonora, was always known as “Jimtown,”²⁷ and “Mo quelumne Hill,” after first suffering phonetic torture by being spelt with a “k,” was finally drawn and quartered and now appears on the stage-coach as “Mok Hill.” There were some names that defied all conjecture. The Pioneer coaches changed horses at a place called “Paradox.” Why Paradox? No one could tell.

I wish I could say that the Spaniard fared any better than his language at the hands of the Argonauts. He was called a “Greaser,” an unctuous reminiscence of the Mexican war, and applied erroneously to the Spanish Californian, who was not a Mexican. The pure blood of Castile ran in his veins. He held his lands sometimes by royal patent of Charles V.²⁸ He was grave, simple, and confiding. He accepted the Argonaut’s irony as sincere, he permitted him to squat on his lands, he allowed him to marry his daughter. He found himself, in a few years, laughed at, landless, and alone. In his sore extremity he entered into a defensive alliance with some of his persecutors, and avenged himself after an extraordinary fashion. In all matters relating to early land grants he was the evergreen witness; his was the only available memory, his the only legal testimony, on the Coast. Perhaps strengthened by this repeated exercise, his memory became one of the most extraordinary, his testimony the most complete and corroborative, known to human experience. He recalled conversations, official orders, and precedents of fifty years ago as if they were matters of yesterday. He produced grants, diseños,²⁹ signatures, and letters with promptitude and despatch. He evolved evidence from his inner consciousness, and in less than three years Spanish land titles were lost in hopeless confusion and a cloud of witnesses. The wily Argonauts cursed the aptness of their pupil.

Yet, before taking leave of the Spanish American, it is well to recall a single figure. It is that of the earliest pioneer known to Californian history. He comes to us toiling over a southern plain—an old man, weak, emaciated, friendless, and alone. He has left his weary muleteers and acolytes a league behind him, and has wandered on without scrip or wallet, bearing only a crucifix and a bell. It is a characteristic plain, one that tourists do not usually penetrate: scorched yet bleak, windswept, blasted and baked to its very foundations, and cracked into gaping chasms. As the pitiless sun goes down, the old man staggers forward and falls utterly exhausted. He lies there all night. Towards morning he is found by some Indians, a feeble, simple race, who in unconth kindness offer him food and drink. But before he accepts either, he rises to his knees, and there says matins and baptizes them in the Catholic faith. And then it occurs to him to ask them where he is, and he finds that he has penetrated into the unknown land. This was Padre Junipero Serra,³² and the sun arose that morning on Christian California. Weighed by the usual estimates of success, his mission was a failure. The heathen stole his provisions and massa cred his acolytes. It is said that the good fathers themselves sometimes confounded baptism and bondage, and laid the foundation of peonage; but in the bloodstained and tear-blotted chronicle of early California, there is no more heroic figure than the thin, travel-worn, self-centered, self-denying Franciscan friar.

If I have thus far refrained from eulogizing the virtues of another characteristic figure, it is because he came later. The Heathen Chinee was not an Argonaut. But he brought into the Argonaut’s new life an odd conservatism. Quiet, calm, almost philosophic, but never obtrusive or aggressive, he never flaunted his three thousand years in the face of the men of to-day; he never obtruded his extensive mythology before men who were skeptical of even one God. He accepted at once a menial position with dignity and self-respect. He washed for the whole community, and made cleanliness an accessible virtue. He brought patience and novelty into the kitchen; he brought silence, obedience, and a certain degree of intelligence into the whole sphere of domestic service. He stood behind your chair, quiet, attentive, but uncommunicative. He waited upon you at table with the air of the man who, knowing himself superior, could not jeopardize his position. He worshipped the devil in your household with a frank sincerity and openness that shamed your own covert and feeble attempts in that direction. Although he wore your clothes, spoke your language, and imitated your vices, he was always involved in his own Celestial atmosphere. He consorted only with his fellows, consumed his own peculiar provisions, bought his goods of the Chinese companies, and when he died, his bones were sent to China! He left no track, trace, or imprint on the civilization. He claimed no civil right; he wanted no franchise. He took his regular beatings calmly; he submitted to scandalous extortion from state and individual with tranquility; he bore robbery and even murder with stoical fortitude. Perhaps it was well that he did. Christian civilization, which declared by statute that his testimony was valueless; which intimated by its practice that the same vices in a pagan were worse than in a Christian; which regarded the frailty of his women as being especially abominable and his own gambling propensities as something originally bad, taught him at least the Christian virtues of patience and resignation.

Did he ever get even with the Christian Argonauts? I am inclined to think that he did. Indeed, in some instances I may say that I know that he did. He had a universal, simple way of defrauding the customs. He filled the hollows of bamboo chairs with opium, and, sitting calmly on them, conversed with dignity with custom-house officials. He made the amplitude of his sleeve and trouser useful as well as ornamental on similar occasions. He evaded the state poll tax by taking the name and assuming the exact facial expression of some brother Celestial who had already paid. He turned his skill as a horticulturist to sinful account by investing rose bushes with imitations of that flower made out of carrots and turnips. He acquired Latin and Greek with peculative rather than scholastic intent, and borrowed fifty dollars from a Californian clergyman while he soothed his ear with the Homeric accents. But perhaps his most successful attempt at balancing his account with a Christian civilization was his career as a physician.

One day he opened a doctor’s office in San Francisco. By the aid of clever confederates, miraculous cures were trumpeted through the land, until people began to flock to his healing ministration. His doorways were beset by an army of invalids. Two interpreters, like the angels in the old legend, listened night and day to the ills told by the people that crowded this Hygeian temple. ³³ They translated into the common tongue the words of wisdom that fell from the oracular lips of this slant-eyed Apollo.³⁴ Doctor Lipotai was eminently successful. Presently, however, there were Chinese doctors on every corner. A sign with the proper monosyllables, a pig-tail and an interpreter, were the only stock in trade required. The pagan knew that no one would stop to reason. The ignorant heathen was aware that no one would stop to consider what superior opportunities the Chinese had for medical knowledge over the practitioners of his own land. This debased old idolater knew that these intelligent Christians would think that it might be magic, and so would come. And they did come. And he gave them green tea for tubercular consumption, ginger for aneurism, and made them smell punk for dropsy. The treatment was harmless, but wearisome. Suddenly, a well-known Oriental scholar published a list of the remedies ordinarily used in the Chinese medical practice. I regret to say that for obvious reasons I cannot repeat the unsavory list here. It was enough, however, to produce the ordinary symptoms of sea-sickness among the doctor’s patients. The celestial star at once began to wane. The oracle ceased to be questioned. The sibyls got off their tripods. And Doctor Lipotai, with a half million in his pocket, returned to his native rice and the naïve simplicity of Chinese Camp.

And with this receding figure bringing up the rear of the procession, I close my review of the Argonauts of ’49. In their rank and file there may be many who are personally known to some of my hearers. There may be gaps which the memory of others can supply. There are homes all over the world whose vacant places never can be filled; there are graves all over California on whose nameless mounds no one shall weep. I have said that it is not a pretty story. I should like to end it with a flourish of trumpets, but the band has gone on before, and the dust of the highway is beginning to hide them from my view. They are marching on to their city by the sea—to that great lodestone hill that Sindbad³⁵ saw, which they call “Lone Mountain.” There, waiting at its base, one may fancy the Argo is still lying, and that when the last Argonaut shall have passed in, she too will spread her white wings and slip unnoticed through the Golden Gate that opens in the distance.