Prentice Mulford's story: life by land and sea

CHAPTER XVI.

THE COW FEVER.

About this time (1861) a cow fever began to rage throughout the State. It got hold of people, and impressed them with a burning idea that the road to fortune was a cow path, and that fortunes lay in keeping cattle. The cow fever reached the seclusion of Swett’s Bar. We invested all our spare cash in cows and waited for results. Cattle were spoken of as a sure card for fortune. Keep cattle. Buy improved breeds. Raise them. “Cross” them. Feed them for nothing on the native grass. Buy cows. Cows give milk. People can live on milk. Milk then to us was a luxury. It paid no milkman to travel up and down the rough and rocky ledges of the Tuolumne ringing his bell at miners’ cabins half a mile apart. Indeed he could not so travel without carrying his milk à la panier on a donkey’s back, and by the time it had reached its place of destination it would have been agitated to butter. So all of us miners went in for cows. Improved cows. We bought each an improved cow. We hauled this cow by ropes across the raging, eddying, furious river to our side. Frequently she arrived more dead than alive. Then came a season of hope and expectation as to fortunes through cows. We arose at five in the morning, built the fire for breakfast, went out and sought our cows, generally feeding or reposing a mile or more from our cabins, caught these cows, milked them, returned to the cabin, finished the cooking of either a burned or cold breakfast, went forth and labored in the claim till noon, came home, cooked dinner, went forth again, at 1 P.M., labored till six, went back to the cabins, chopped wood for fuel, travelled 500 feet or yards to the spring for water, returned, mixed our bread, put it in the oven, went out and milked the cow, then bent over the hot stove for an hour until bread was baked, and then, heated, flushed, perspiring, exhausted from the day’s labor, and with nerves quivering by reason of such exhaustion, we arranged the miner’s table, sat down to the meal, and wondered why we had so little appetite.

Keeping cows proved laborious work for miners. When, in addition to kindling the fire in the morning, cooking your own breakfast, coming home at night wet and tired after working all day in the ground-sluice, then hacking away at some old stump to get wood enough to cook the supper, travelling may be an eighth of a mile to the nearest spring for a pail of water, and bending and bothering with meat-frying and bread-making, you add, chasing night and morn, milk pail in hand, some contrary cow all over the flat in order to milk her, you pile too heavy a load on any man’s back. Because, in the matter of housekeeping, we had ceased the co-operative system. We dwelt all apart, each a hermit in his own cabin. We were diverse in habit, and could not get along with each other’s peculiarities. The neat man couldn’t abide the slovenly man; the economical man couldn’t sit patiently by and see his partner cut potato parings a quarter of an inch in thickness; the nervous man was exhausted by his partner’s whistling or snoring, and all these and numberless other opposing peculiarities at last caused each man hermit-like, to retire into his own cell.

We had other trouble with our cows, for they were ravenous after salt. We neglected to “salt them.” Result: If any article containing the least incrustation of salt was left outside our cabins, the entire herd would gather about it at night, lick it, fight for its possession and keep up a steady grunting, stamping, lowing, and bellowing. They would eat clothing left out over night on the clothes-line to dry. In such manner and for such reason also would they eat through the cotton walls of our houses. Once, when away for three days attending a county convention at Sonora, on returning to my lone cabin, I found it a scene of ruin and desolation. A cow had eaten through the cloth wall on one side, and eaten her way out at the other, and had stopped long enough inside to eat up all my flour, rice and vegetables. Once, when moving my household effects from one cabin to another, on a wheelbarrow, I left it near the middle of the flat for a few minutes. On returning I saw a cow making off with my best coat. She held it in her mouth by one sleeve. On seeing me she started off on a run, still thus holding the sleeve in her mouth and making violent efforts to eject it. The coat-sleeve was a ruin when I did get it. She had chewed it for salt’s sake to the likeness of a fish net. Keeping cows did not make our fortunes at Swett’s. Then everybody said: “Keep hogs. They will feed on acorns and increase very rapidly. In a few years the plains and hills will groan under the burden of your pork.” So I bought hogs. I bought a sow and seven pigs. They gave me much to think of. Before I had owned them a week complaints concerning them came from neighboring miners, who owned no hogs. These pigs of mine broke through the cloth walls of the cabins and would consume the miner’s entire weekly stock of provisions in a few minutes. Then they would go outside and root from out the hot coals—his “Dutch oven,” wherein his bread was baking while he labored afar in his claim, and this bread when cooled they would also devour. I had, on buying these animals, engaged that they should “find themselves.”

There was no reasoning with the suffering miners in this matter. I argued that my pigs had a right to run at large, and that they should make their houses more secure. The miners argued that right or not right, they would shoot my pigs even if found near their cabins. If that was not sufficient, they might shoot me. Their positiveness in this matter was of an intense and violent character. There was no such thing as discussion with them on legal or equitable grounds. I think now that I and the pigs had law and right on our side, but the miners were in the majority and had might. Nor was this all. These pigs, seemingly recognizing my ownership, came home at night to sleep. They slept in a pile just outside my cabin door, and as the night air wafted down from the higher Sierra summits became cooler, the pigs on the outside of the pile became uncomfortable. Being uncomfortable they tried to get inside the pile. This the warm pigs inside resisted. The resistance was accompanied with squealing and grunting, which lasted all night long and disturbed my sleep. This pig pile consisted of a rind of cold and uncomfortable pigs and a core of warm and comfortable pigs, and there was a continual effort on the part of the cold porcine rind to usurp the places of the warm and comfortable porcine core. They gave me no rest, for when, with the warm morning sun, this uproar ceased, there came the season of complaint and threat from my plundered neighbors. Finally a cold storm chilled half of these pigs to death. I sold the remainder as quickly as possible to a ranchman who better understood the hog business.

During the receding of the waters after one of the annual spring freshets, I saw several hundred dollars in gold dust washed out near the base of a pine tree on the river’s bank, between Hawkins’ and Swett’s Bar, where probably it had years before been buried by some unknown miner. That is, I saw it after it had been washed out and found by another more fortunate miner. In all probability there are many thousands of dollars in dust so dug by hard-working hands and so buried in California, there to remain until the Last Day perhaps longer. Where’s the utility of resurrecting the “Root of all Evil” on the Last Day, just at the time when people in heaven or elsewhere are presumed to be able to get along without it? Yet it is a mysterious Providence that impels any poor fellow to dig his pile bury it for safekeeping, and then go off and die in some out-of-the-way place without being able to leave any will and testament as to the exact hole where his savings lay. Regarding buried treasure, there is a hill near Jamestown concerning which, years ago, there hovered a legend that it held somewhere thousands of dollars in dust, buried in the early days by a lone miner, who was, for his money’s sake, murdered in his cabin. They said that by the roots of many trees on that hillside it had been unsuccessfully dug for. Anyway, the miner left a memory and a hope behind him. That’s more than many do. If you want to leave a lasting recollection of yourself behind drop a hint from time to time ere you depart for “The Bright and Shining Shore” that you have interred $10,000 somewhere in a quarter section of land, you will then long be remembered and your money dug for.

CHAPTER XVII.

RED MOUNTAIN BAR.

I lived there when the few “boys” left used daily, after the close of an unsuccessful river season, to sit in a row on a log by the river’s edge, and there, surveying their broken dam, would chant curses on their luck. The Bar store was then still in existence. Thompson was its proprietor. The stock on hand had dwindled down to whiskey. The bar and one filled bottle alone survived. On rainy nights, when the few miners left would gather about the stove Thompson would take down his fiddle, and fiddle and sing, “What can’t be cured must be endured,” or, “The King into his garden came; the spices smelt about the same”—a quotation of unknown authorship. Of neighbors, living in their cabins strung along the banks for half a mile above the store, there was Keen Fann, an aged mercantile and mining Chinaman, with a colony about him of lesser and facially indistinguishable countrymen of varying numbers. Second, “Old Harry,” an aged negro, a skilled performer on the bugle and a singer, who offered at times to favor us with what he termed a “little ditto.” He was the Ethiopic king of a knot of Kanakas gathered about him. Third, “Bloody Bill,” so-called from his frequent use of the sanguinary adjective, and, as may be guessed, an Englishman. Fourth, an old Scotchman, one of the Bar’s oldest inhabitants, who would come to the store with the little bit of gold dust, gathered after a hard day’s “crevicing” complaining that gold was getting as scarce as “the grace of God in the Heelands of Scotland.” Fifth, McFarlane, a white-bearded old fellow, another pioneer, who after a yearly venture into some strange and distant locality to “change his luck,” was certain eventually to drift back again to the Bar, which he regarded as home. Down the river, nestled high up in a steep and picturesque gulch, stood the buckeye-embowered cabin of old Jonathan Brown, the ditch tender, a great reader of weekly “story papers,” who lived like a boy in the literature of the Western Frontier Penny Awful, and who, coming to the store and perching himself on the counter, would sometimes break out in remarks about how “Them thar Indians got the better of ’em at last,” to the astonishment of the “boys,” who imagined at first that he referred to Indians in the locality, suggesting possibilities of a repetition of the great Oak Flat uprising of 1850.

At the “top of the hill,” a mile and a half away, stood the “Yankee Ranch,” kept by a bustling, uneasy, and rather uncomfortable man from Massachusetts, aided by his good-natured, easy-going son-in-law. One rainy winter’s day the “boys” congregated about Thompson’s store became seized with a whim for the manufacture of little pasteboard men turning grindstones, which, fastened to the stove, were impelled to action by the ascending current of hot air. So they smoked their pipes, and wrought all day until the area of stovepipe became thickly covered with little pasteboard men busily turning pasteboard grindstones. Then, George M. G., the son-in-law of the Yankee Ranch, came down the hill to borrow an axe. George was of that temperament and inclination to be of all things charmed with a warm stove on a cold, rainy day, a knot of good fellows about it, a frequent pipe of tobacco, maybe an occasional punch and the pleasing manufacture of hot-air-driven little pasteboard men turning pasteboard grindstones. He forgot his axe—sat down and began with the rest the manufacture of pasteboard men and grindstones. And he kept on till a late hour of the night, and stayed at the Bar all night and all the next day and that next night, until the stovepipe was covered to its very top with little men, all working away for dear life turning grindstones; and on the second day of his stay the exasperated father-in-law suddenly appeared and delivered himself in impatient invective with regard to such conduct on the part of a son-in-law sent forty-eight hours previously to borrow an axe. Such was the circle oft gathered on the long, rainy winter’s eve about the Thompson store stove. All smoked. Keen Fann frequently dropped in. He stood respectfully, as a heathen should in such a Christian assemblage, on its outer edge, or humbly appropriated some unoccupied keg, and for the rest—grinned. From his little piggy eyes to his double chin Keen’s face was a permanently settled grin.

Keen Fann had learned about twenty words of English and would learn no more. In his estimation, these twenty words, variously used, after a sort of grammatical kaleidoscopic fashion, seemed adequate to convey everything required. One of his presumed English expressions long puzzled the boys. Asking the price of articles at the store he would say: “Too muchee pollyfoot.” At last the riddle was correctly guessed. He meant: “Too much profit.”

For protection Keen Fann built his house opposite the store. The Mexicans were then attacking and robbing isolated bands of Chinamen. At one bar a few miles below, then deserted by the whites, the Chinese had inclosed their camp with a high stockade of logs. Yet one night they were attacked. The Mexicans besieged their fortress for hours, peppering them from the hillside with revolvers, and at last they broke through the Mongolian works and bore off all their dust and a dozen or more revolvers. Keen Fann’s castle was in dimensions not more than 12x15 feet, and in height two stories. Within it was partitioned off into rooms not much larger than dry-goods boxes. The hallways were just wide enough to squeeze through, and very dark. It was intensely labyrinthian, and Keen was always making it more so by devising new additions. No white man ever did know exactly where the structure began or ended. Keen was a merchant, dealing principally in gin, fish, and opium. His store was involved in this curious dwelling, all of his own construction. In the store was a counter. Behind it there was just room for Keen to sit down, and in front there was just room enough for the customer to turn around. When Keen was the merchant he looked imposing in an immense pair of Chinese spectacles. When he shook his rocker in the bank he took off these spectacles. He was a large consumer of his own gin. I once asked him the amount of his weekly allowance. “Me tink,” said he, “one gallun, hap (half).” From the upper story of the castle protruded a huge spear-head. It was made by the local blacksmith, and intended as a menace to the Mexican bandits. As they grew bolder and more threatening, Keen sent down to San Francisco and purchased a lot of old pawn-shop revolvers. These being received, military preparation and drill went on for several weeks by Keen and his forces. He practised at target-shooting, aimed at the mark with both eyes shut, and for those in its immediate vicinity with a most ominous and threatening waver of the arm holding the weapon. It was prophesied that Keen would kill somebody with that pistol. None ever expected that he would kill the proper person. Yet he did. One night an alarm was given. Keen’s castle was attacked. The “boys,” hearing the disturbance, grabbed their rifles and pistols, and sallied from the store. The robbers, finding themselves in a hornets’ nest, ran. By the uncertain light of a waning moon the Bar was seen covered with Chinamen gabbling and wildly gesticulating. Over the river two men were swimming. Keen, from the bank, pointed his revolver at one, shut his eyes and fired. One of the men crawled out of the water and tumbled in a heap among the boulders. The “boys” crossed, and found there a strange white man, with Keen’s bullet through his backbone.

I experienced about the narrowest escape of my life in a boat during a freshet on the Tuolumne crossing. I counted myself a good river boatman, and had just ferried over a Swett’s Bar miner. He had come to purchase a gallon of the native juice of the grape, which was then grown, pressed and sold at Red Mountain Bar. When he crossed with me he was loaded with it. Some of it was outside of him in a demijohn and some of it was inside. Indeed it was inside of us both. I set him across all right. On returning, by taking advantage of a certain eddy, one could be rushed up stream counter to the current coming down for a quarter of a mile, and at a very rapid rate. It was very exciting thus to be carried in an opposite direction, within ten feet of the great billowy swell coming down. It was a sort of sliding down hill without the trouble of drawing one’s sled up again. So I went up and down the stream. The Red Mountain wine meantime was working. Night came on, a glorious moon arose over the mountain tops, and I kept sliding up and down the Tuolumne. I became more daring and careless. So that suddenly in the very fury of the mid-stream billows I slipped off the stern sheets at a sudden dip of the boat and fell into the river. I was heavily clad in flannels and mining boots. Of my stay under water I recollect only the thought, “You’re in for it this time. This is no common baptism.” The next I knew I was clinging to a rock half a mile below the scene of the submergence. I had been swept under water through the Willow Bar, the walls of whose rocky channel, chiselled by the current of centuries, were narrower at the top than on the river-bed, and through which the waters swept in a succession of boils and whirlpools. Wet and dripping, I tramped to the nearest cabin, a mile and a half distant, and stayed there that night. Red Mountain Bar, on seeing the mishap, gave me up for lost—all but one man, who was negative on that point for the reason, as he alleged, that I was not destined to make the final exit by water. I reappeared the next morning at the Bar. When I told the boys that I had been swept through the Willow Bar they instituted comparisons of similarity in the matter of veracity betwixt myself and Ananias of old. It was the current impressions that no man could pass through the Willow Bar alive.

Chinese Camp, five miles distant, stood as the metropolis for Red Mountain Bar. It contained but a few hundred people. Yet, in our estimation at that time it bore the same relative importance that New York does to some agricultural village a hundred miles way. Chinese Camp meant restaurants, where we could revel in the luxury of eating a meal we were not obliged to prepare ourselves, a luxury none can fully appreciate save those who have served for years as their own cooks. Chinese Camp meant saloons, palatial as compared with the Bar groggery; it meant a daily mail and communication with the great world without; it meant hotels, where strange faces might be seen daily; it meant, perhaps, above all, the nightly fandango. When living for months and years in such out-of-the-way nooks and corners as Red Mountain Bar, and as were thousands of now forgotten and nameless flats, gulches, and bars in California, cut off from all regular communication with the world, where the occasional passage of some stranger is an event, the limited stir and bustle of such a place as Chinese Camp assumed an increased importance and interest. Chinese Camp Justice presided at our lawsuits. Chinese Camp was the Mecca to which all hands resorted for the grand blow-out at the close of the river mining season. With all their hard work what independent times were those after all! True, claims were uncertain as to yield; hopes of making fortunes had been given over. But so long as $1.50 or $2 pickings remained on the banks men were comparatively their own masters. There was none of the inexorable demand of business consequent on situation and employment in the great city, where, sick or well, the toilers must hie with machine-like regularity at the early morning hour to their posts of labor. If the Red Mountaineer didn’t “feel like work” in the morning he didn’t work. If he preferred to commence digging and washing at ten in the morning instead of seven, who should prevent him? If, after the morning labor, he desired a siesta till two in the afternoon, it was his to take.

Of what Nature could give there was much at the Bar to make pleasant man’s stay on earth, save a great deal of cash. We enjoyed a mild climate—no long, hard winters to provide against; a soil that would raise almost any vegetable, a necessity or luxury, with very little labor; grapes or figs, apples or potatoes; land to be had for the asking; water for irrigation accessible on every hand; plenty of pasture room; no crowding. A quarter of a section of such soil and climate, within forty miles of New York City, would be worth millions. Contrast such a land with the bleak hills about Boston, where half the year is spent in a struggle to provide for the other half. Yet we were all anxious to get away. Our heaven was not at Red Mountain. Fortunes could not be digged there. We spent time and strength in a scramble for a few ounces of yellow metal, while in the spring time the vales and hillsides covered with flowers argued in vain that they had the greatest rewards for our picks and shovels. But none listened. We grovelled in the mud and stones of the oft-worked bank. Yearly it responded less and less to our labors. One by one the “old-timers” left. The boarding-house of Dutch Bill at the farther end of the Bar long stood empty, and the meek-eyed and subtle Chinaman stole from its sides board after board; the sides skinned off, they took joist after joist from the framework. None ever saw them so doing. Thus silently and mysteriously, like a melting snowbank, the great, ramshackle boarding house disappeared, until naught was left save the chimney. And that also vanished brick by brick. All of which material entered into the composition and construction of that irregularly built, smoke-tanned Conglomerate of Chinese huts clustered near the Keen Fann castle.

“Old Grizzly” McFarlane went away. So did Bloody Bill. So the Bar’s population dwindled. Fewer travellers, dot-like, were seen climbing the steep trail o’er Red Mountain. Miller, the Chinese Camp news-agent, who, with mailbags well filled with the New York papers, had for years cantered from Red Mountain to Morgan’s Bar, emptying his sack as he went at the rate of fifty and twenty-five cents per sheet, paid the Bar his last visit and closed out the newspaper business there forever. Then the County Supervisors abolished it as an election precinct, and its name no longer figured in the returns. No more after the vote was polled and the result known did the active and ambitious partisan mount his horse and gallop over the mountain to Sonora, the county seat, twenty miles away, to deliver the official count, signed, sealed and attested by the local Red Mountain Election Inspectors. Finally the Bar dwindled to Thompson, Keen Fann and his Mongolian band. Then Thompson left. Keen Fann grieved at losing his friend and protector. He came on the eve of departure to the dismantled store. Tears were in his eyes. He presented Thompson with a basket of tea and a silver half-dollar, and bade him farewell in incoherent and intranslatable words of lamenting polyglot English.

CHAPTER XVIII.

MY CALIFORNIA SCHOOL.

Before the doctor lay one thin book. It turned out to be a spelling book. The doctor opened it, glared on me leisurely, and finally said: “Spell cat.” I did so. “Spell hat.” I spelled. “Rat,” said the doctor, with a look of explosive fierceness and in a tone an octave higher. I spelled, and then remarked: “But, doctor, you surely must know that I can spell words of one syllable?” “I don’t,” he shouted, and propounded “mat” for me to spell, with an increase of energy in his voice, and so went on until I had so spelled long enough to amuse him and the other two trustee triflers. Then he shut the book, saying: “Young man, you’ll do for our camp. I wouldn’t teach that school for $5,000 a year; and there are two boys you’ll have for scholars that I advise you to kill, if possible, the first week. Let’s all go over and take a drink.”

My school house was the church, built and paid for partly by the gamblers and partly by the good people of Jimtown “for the use of all sects” on Sundays, and for educational purposes on week days.

I was shut up in that little church six hours a day with sixty children and youths, ranging from four to eighteen years of age. In summer it was a fiercely hot little church. The mercury was always near 90 by noon, and sometimes over 100, and you could at times hear the shingles split and crack on the roof of the cathedral. A few years of interior California summers’ suns will turn unpainted boards and shingles almost as black as charcoal.

The majority of my pupils’ parents being from New England and North America, they brought and carried into effect all their North American ideas of education. The California summer heat is, I think, unfit for educational purposes. It is too hot to herd sixty restless children together six hours a day. They proved this in several cases. Some fell sick suddenly. Some fainted. But this made no difference. The school went on in all its misery. I sent a fainting child home one day, and the father returned with it an hour afterward. He was fierce, and said he wanted his child kept in school when he sent it to school.

This was in California’s early days. My scholars were the children of the Argonauts, and in some cases had come out with them. There was then no regular system of text-books. Publishers had not commenced making fortunes by getting out a new school-book system every three years.

My scholars came, bringing a great variety of school-books. They brought “Pike’s Arithmetic,” which had come over the plains, and “Smith’s Geography,” which had sailed around Cape Horn. Seldom were two alike. But the greatest variety lay in grammars. There was a regular museum of English grammars, whose authors fought each other with different rules and called the various parts of speech by different names. I accounted for the great variety of grammars on the supposition that it is or was the ambition of a large proportion of schoolmasters to write a work on grammar before they died and say: “I have left another grammar to bless and confuse posterity.”

Besides bringing grammars, most of the boys brought dogs. Dogs of many breeds and sizes hovered around the school-house. They wanted frequently to come in, and did often come in, to sneak under the seats and lay themselves at their masters’ feet. I had frequently to kick or order them out, and I noticed that whenever a dog was chased out he would take the longest road to get out and under as many seats as possible, in order to receive as many kicks as possible from the youthful owners of the other dogs.

I could not so organize a battalion of ten different grammars as to act in concert on my grammar class of twenty pupils. So I put them all on the retired list and tried to teach this so-called “science” orally. I chalked the rules on the blackboard, as well as the names of the different parts of speech. I made my scholars commit these to memory, standing, although I will not argue that memory takes any stronger grip on a thing while the pupil stands. At last I taught a few with good memories to “parse.” I worked hard with that grammar class, and was very proud of their proficiency until I found that after months of this drilling they neither spoke nor wrote any better English than before. However, I lost nothing by this experience, for it helped me to the conviction I have held to ever since, that the entire grammar system and method does very little to make one habitually use correct language, and that a taste for reading and constant association with correct English-speaking people does a great deal. As for spending time in “parsing,” I think it would be better to use that force in learning the boy to shoe horses and the girl to make bread, or let the girl shoe the horses if she wants to and the boy make the bread.

The labor of teaching the alphabet to ten infants, calling them up once an hour “to say their letters,” is, in my estimation, greater than that of swinging a pick in the surface gold “diggings.” I have tried both, and infinitely prefer the pick. It is not so much work when you are employed with them as when you are occupied with the other pupils. Then these poor little alphabetical cherubs can do nothing but squirm on their low benches, catch flies, pinch each other, make and project spit-balls and hold up their hands for another drink of water. I could not let them out of doors to play in the sand, where they should have been, because the North American parent would have considered himself as defrauded of a part of his infant’s schooling were they not imprisoned the whole six hours.

Neither can you set a child to studying A or M or any other letter. There is not an idea in A or B. During the two years of my administration I wrought with one child who never could get successfully beyond F. Her parents questioned my ability as a teacher. Some days she would repeat the whole alphabet correctly. I would go home with a load off my mind. The next day her mind would relapse into an alphabetical blank after F. She grew to be an eyesore to me. The sight of her at last made me sick.

I held public examinations every six months, and was careful to do all the examining myself. An interloper among the audience I invited did me great damage on one of these memorized performances by asking a simple arithmetical question of the show-off geographical boy. The urchin was brilliant in dealing with boundary lines, capes, and islands, but his head was one that mathematics could not readily be injected into. On the other hand, my specimen grammarian was as likely to describe an island as a body of land surrounded—by land as by water. I had no heart to find fault with this poor barefooted urchin who, when in class, was always trying to stand on one leg like a crane, and sending his right big toe on exploring scratching expeditions up his left trouser. He had been born and brought up in an inland country, where no body of water was to be seen save an occasional fleeting mud puddle; and what earthly conception could he form of the ocean and its islands?

But the parents who attended these exhibitions of stuffed memories were struck at the proficiency of the progeny, and retired with the impression that their children knew a great deal because they had parroted off so much that was all Greek to them; and after I had been in this occupation a year I would sit in my empty theological school-house when they had gone and try and convict myself as a profound humbug, and one, too, compelled, in order to get a living, to encourage and foster a system which had so much humbug in it.

The California schools were not then “graded.” They were conducted on the “go-as-you-please” plan, sometimes going as the teachers pleased, sometimes as the parents pleased, sometimes as the pupils pleased. The parents of the youthful brains I was trying to develop into future statesmen and presidents wanted me to teach many things. One father wished his son taught Latin. It is bringing extremes pretty near each other to teach Latin and A B C’s. But I “taught” the young man Latin as I was “taught” many things at school. I started him committing to memory the Latin declensions and conjugations, and then heard him “say his lesson.” If he got anything out of it I didn’t know what it was, except tough work. He never reached any translations of the classics, for several reasons.

Another father was annoyed because I exercised his son mathematically in what, in those days, were called “vulgar fractions.” “I don’t want,” said he, “my son to have anything to do with fractions, anyway. They’re no use in bizness. Ennything over half a cent we call a cent on the books, and ennything under it we don’t call nothin’. But I want Thomas to be well grounded in ‘tare and tret.’”

So I grounded Thomas in ‘tare and tret.’ He grew up, took to evil ways, and was hung by a vigilance committee somewhere in Southern California. A boy who stammered very badly was sent me. I was expected to cure him. Five or six of my pupils were Mexicans, and spoke very little English.

One of my hardest trials was a great stout boy, so full of vitality that he could not remain quiet at his desk. I could not blame him. He had force enough inside of him to run a steam engine. It would have vent in some direction. But it would not expend itself in “learning lessons.” He would work his books into a mass of dog’s ears. His writing book was ever in mourning with ink stains. His face was generally inky. His inkstand was generally upset. He would hold a pen as he would a pitchfork. He seemed also to give out his vitality when he came to school and infect all the others with it. He was not a regular scholar. He was sent only when it was an “off day” on his father’s “ranch.” In the scholastic sense he learned nothing.

But that boy at the age of fifteen would drive his father’s two-horse wagon, loaded with fruit and vegetables, 150 miles from California to Nevada over the rough mountain roads of the Sierras, sell the produce to the silver miners of Aurora and adjacent camps, and return safely home. He was obliged in places to camp out at night, cook for himself, look out for his stock, repair harness or wagon and keep an eye out for skulking Indians, who, if not “hostile,” were not saints. When it came to using the hand and the head together he had in him “go,” “gumption” and executive ability, and none of my “teaching” put it where it was in him, either. He may have grown up “unpolished,” but he is one of the kind who are at this moment hiring polished and scholarly men to do work for them on very small wages.

I do not despise “polish” and “culture” but is there not an education now necessary which shall give the child some clearer idea of the manner in which it must cope with the world in a few years? The land to-day is full of “culture” at ten dollars a week. Culture gives polish to the blade. But it is not the process which makes the hard, well-tempered steel.

The “smartest” boy in my school gave me even more trouble than the son of the rancher. He could commit to memory as much in ten minutes as the others could in an hour, and the balance of the time he was working off the Satanism with which he was filled. His memory was an omnivorous maw. It would take in anything and everything with the smallest amount of application. It would have required two-thirds of my time to feed this voracious and mischievous little monster with books for his memory to devour.

But he was not the boy to drive a team through a wild country and dispose of the load in Nevada, though he could on such a trip have committed to memory several hundred words per day on any subject, whether he understood it or not.

My young lady pupils also gave me a great deal of trouble. They were very independent, and for this reason: Girls, even of fifteen, were very scarce then in the mines. So were women of any marriageable age. There were ten men to one woman. The result was that anything humanly feminine was very valuable, much sought after and made much of by men of all ages. My girls of fifteen, as to life and association, were grown-up women. Young miners and middle-aged, semi-baldheaded miners, who did not realize how many of their years had slipped away since they came out from the “States,” took these girls to balls and whirled them by night over the dusty roads of Tuolumne County in dusty buggies.

It was difficult for one lone man, and he only a schoolmaster, to enforce discipline with these prematurely matured children, who had an average of two chances a month to marry, and who felt like any other woman their power and influence with the other sex. Half of them did have a prospective husband in some brawny pick-slinger, who never went abroad without a battery of portable small artillery slung at his waist, and who was half-jealous, half-envious of the schoolmaster for what he considered the privilege of being in the same room with his future wife six hours a day.

One needs to live in a country where there is a dearth of women to realize these situations. When my school was dismissed at four o’clock P.M., all the unemployed chivalry of “Jimtown” massed on the street corner at the Bella Union saloon to see this coveted bevy of California rosebuds pass on their way home. The Bella Union, by the way, was only a few yards from the church. Extremes got very close together in these mining camps. But the frequenters of the Bella Union, who gambled all night on the arid green baize of the monte table, had more than half paid for that church, and, I infer, wanted it in sight so that no other persuasion should run off with it. I was glad when these girls got married and entered another school of life, where I knew within a year’s time they were likely to have a master.

I was once “barred out” at the close of a summer term. This was a fashion imported from the extreme southwestern part of what some call “Our Beloved Union.” Returning from dinner I found the doors and windows of the university closed against me. I parleyed at one of the windows a few feet from the ground. I was met by a delegation of the two biggest boys. They informed me I could get in by coming out with a disbursement of $2.50, to treat the school to nuts, candies, and cakes. I did not accede, smashed the window and went in. Most of the undergraduates went suddenly out. I clinched with the biggest boy. The other, like a coward, ran away. The two together could easily have mastered me. Order was restored. The mutiny did not hang well together. It was not a good “combine.” The Northern-bred scholars did not quite understand this move, and did not really enter heartily into it. Their backing had been forced by the two big boys, and therefore had not good stuff in it.

The big boy had a cut face. So had I. His still bigger brother met me a few days after and wanted to pick a quarrel with me about the affair. A quarrel with his class always lay within easy approach of knife or pistol. Besides, I was a Yankee. He was a Texan. And this was in 1862, when the two sections in California were neighbors, but not very warm friends, and about equal in numbers.

I was discreet with this gentleman, if not valorous, and think under the same circumstances now I should take the same course. I do not believe in taking great risks with a ruffian because he abuses you.

My successor, poor fellow, did not get off as easily as I did. He corrected the son of another gentleman from the South. The gentleman called at the school-house the next day, asked him to the door and cracked his skull with the butt of his revolver. The risks then of imparting knowledge to the young were great. School teaching now in the mines is, I imagine, a tame affair compared with that past, so full of golden dreams and leaden realities.

If I could have taken that portion of my scholars who were beyond the A, B, C business to a shady grove of live oaks near by and talked to them for an hour or two a day, devoting each day to some special subject, at the same time encouraging questions from them, I believe I could have woke up more that was sleeping in their minds in a week than I did in a month by the cut-and-dried system I was obliged to follow. I would have taken them out of sight of the school-house, the desks and all thereunto appertaining, which to most children suggests a species of imprisonment. I think that amount of time and effort is enough in one day for both teacher and pupil. It would not be trifling work if one’s heart was in it, short as the time employed may seem, because a teacher must teach himself to teach. Knowing a thing is not always being able to make it plain to others. The gifted dunderhead who tried to teach me to play whist commenced by saying: “Now that’s a heart, and hearts is trumps, you know,” and went on with the game, deeming he had made things clear enough for anybody.

Would not one topic to talk about be enough for one day? Take the motive power of steam the first day, the cause of rain the second, the flight of birds and their structure for flying the third, the making of soil and its removal from mountain to plain the fourth, a talk on coal or some other kind of mining the fifth, and so on. Would not subjects continually suggest themselves to the interested teacher? And if you do get one idea or suggestion per day in the scholar’s mind, is not that a good day’s work? How many of us wise, grown-up people can retire at night saying, “I have learned a new thing to-day?”

But I am theorizing. I have placed myself in the ranks of those disagreeable, meddlesome people who are never satisfied with present methods. So I will say that I do not imagine that my suggestions will revolutionize our educational system, based rather heavily on the idea that youth is the time, and the only time, to learn everything, and also to learn a great many things at a time. In after years, when we settle down to our work, we try, as a rule, to learn but one thing at a time. How would a man stagger along if it was required of him five days out of seven to learn a bit of painting, then of horseshoeing, then of printing, and top off with a slice of elocution? It seems to me like an overcrowding of the upper intellectual story.

CHAPTER XIX.

“JIMTOWN.”

On those hot July and August afternoons, when the air simmered all along the heated earth, and I was trying to keep awake in my seminary on the hill, and wrestling with the mercury at 100 deg. and my sixty polyglot pupils, the grown up “boys” would be tilted back in their chairs under the portico and against the cool brick wall of the Bella Union. They did not work, but they spun yarns. How half the boys lived was a mystery—as much a mystery, I do believe, to themselves as any one else. Some owned quartz claims, some horses, and all ran regularly for office. They belonged to the stamp of men who worked and mined in earlier times, but come what might, they had resolved to work in that way no longer. And when such resolve is accompanied by determination and an active, planning, inventive brain, the man gets along somehow. It is speculation that makes fortunes, and plan, calculation, and forethought for speculation, require leisure of body. A hard-working, ten-hour-per-day digging, delving miner works all his brains out through his fingers’ ends. He has none left to speculate with. When I was mining at Swett’s Bar, there came one day to my cabin a long, lean, lank man looking for a lost cow. The cow and the man belonged near Jacksonville, twelve miles up the Tuolumne. I dined that man principally off some bread of my own making, and I had the name then of making the best bread of any one in the house, where I lived alone. After dinner the man sat himself down on one boulder and I on another, and I asked him if he had a good claim. That roused him to wrath. He had, it seems, just reached the last point of his disgust for hard work and mining. Said he: “Don’t talk to me of a good claim; don’t. It sounds like speaking of a good guillotine, or a beautiful halter, or an elegant rack you’re about to be stretched on.” He had gone through his probation of hard work with his hands and had just resolved to let them rest and give his head a chance to speculate. So he did. I don’t know that he ever met the cow again, but eight or nine years after I met him in the Legislature of California. He sat in the biggest chair there, and was Lieutenant-Governor of the State.

In 1860 the certain class of men of whom I speak were in a transition state. They had left off working with their hands and they were waiting for something to turn up on which to commence working with their heads. While thus waiting they became boys and played. The climate and surroundings were eminently favorable to this languid, loafing condition of existence, no long, sharp winters forcing people to bestir themselves and provide against its severities; little style to keep up; few families to maintain; no disgrace for a man to cook his own victuals; houses dropping to pieces; little new paint anywhere to make one’s eyes smart; gates dropping from their hinges; few municipal improvements, with accompanying heavy taxes, and that bright summer sun for months and months shining over all and tempting everybody to be permanently tired and seek the shade. The boys forgot their years; they dreamed away their days; they gossipped all the cool night; they shook off dignity; they played; they built waterwheels in the ditch running by the Bella Union door; they instituted ridiculous fictions and converted them into realities; they instituted a company for the importation of smoke in pound packages into Jamestown; Muldoon was President and the “Doctor” Secretary. It was brought by a steamer up Wood’s Creek; the steamer was wrecked on a dam a mile below town; the company met day after day in old Nielsen’s saloon to consult; the smoke was finally taken to Jamestown and sold; the proceeds were stored in sacks at the express office; there was an embezzlement consequent on the settlement; the money, all in ten-cent pieces, was finally deposited in the big wooden mortar over Baker’s drug store; this the “Doctor” was accused of embezzling, having time after time climbed up the mortar and abstracted the funds dime after dime and spent them for whiskey. Then came a lawsuit. Two mule teams freighted with lawyers for the plaintiff and defendant were coming from Stockton, and the Pound Package Smoke Company met day after day in preparation for the great trial. This fiction lasted about four months, and amused everybody except Captain James S——, an ex-Sheriff of the county, who, being a little deaf, and catching from time to time words of great financial import regarding the Pound Package Jamestown Smoke Company, as they dropped from Muldoon’s and the “Doctor’s” mouths, and being thereby time after time misled into a temporary belief that this fiction was a reality, and so often becoming irritated at finding himself ridiculously mistaken, burst out upon these two worthies one day with all the wrath becoming the dignity of a Virginia gentleman, and denounced them profanely and otherwise for their frivolity and puerility.

Another specimen thinker and speculator of that era was Carroll. He, too, had forever thrown aside pick and shovel, and when I met him he was a confirmed “tilter-back” under the Bella Union portico. Carroll was the theorist of Jamestown. He broached new ones daily; he talked them to everybody in Jamestown, and after making clean work of that hamlet would go up to Sonora and talk there, and lastly published them in the Union Democrat. Said Carroll one Monday morning to the Presbyterian domine: “Mr. H——, I heard your sermon yesterday on ‘Heaven.’ You argue, I think, that heaven is really a place. I think it ought to be a place, too. I’ve been thinking about it all night. I’m satisfied not only that it is a place, but that I’ve got at the locality, or at least have approximated to it. I’ve reasoned this out on purely scientific data, and here they are. We have an atmosphere, and they say it is from thirty-three to forty-five miles high. Angels only live in heaven, and angels have wings. If angels have wings, it’s proof that they must have an atmosphere to fly in. Now, the only atmosphere we are sure of is that around the earth. Therefore, putting all these facts and conclusions together, I’ve proved to myself that heaven must be from thirty-three to forty-five miles from the ground we stand on.”

On commencing my pedagogical career, I rented a room of Carroll. He owned at that time a quantity of real estate in Jamestown, some of which, including the premises I occupied, was falling rapidly and literally on his hands. The house I lived in was propped up several feet from the ground. The neighbors’ chickens fed under this house from the crumbs swept through the cracks in the floor. It was an easy house to sweep clean. Rumor said that during my landlord’s occupancy of these rooms many chickens had strangely disappeared, and that pistol shots had been heard from the interior of the house. The floor cracks did show powder marks, and there was an unaccountable quantity of feathers blowing about the yard. In a conversation with my landlord he admitted that his boomerang could beat a six-shooter in fetching a chicken. Then he showed me his boomerang, which was of accidental construction, being the only remaining leg and round of an oaken arm-chair. Properly shied, he said, it would kill a chicken at twenty yards. French Joe, who kept the grocery next to Keefe’s saloon, and it was in Jimtown a current report that Carroll and Joe had once invited the Catholic priest, Father A——, from Sonora to dinner; that the backbone of this dinner was a duck; that at or about this time Mrs. Hale, five doors down the street, had missed one of her flock of ducks; that on the morning of the dinner in question a strong savor of parboiling duck permeated all that part of Jamestown lying between Joe’s and Mrs. Hale’s; that Mrs. Hale smelt it; that putting two and two—cause and effect and her own suspicions—together, she armed herself with her bun-tormentor fork and going from her back yard to the little outdoor kitchen in Joe’s back yard found a pot over a fire and her presumed duck parboiling in it; and that, transfixing this duck on her tormentor, she bore it home, and the priest got no duck for dinner.

Carroll’s mortal aversion was the hog. His favorite occupation for ten days in the early spring was gardening, and his front fence was illy secured against hogs, for Carroll, though a man of much speculative enterprise, was not one whose hands always seconded the work of his head. There was not a completed thing on his premises, including a well which he had dug to the depth of twelve feet and which he had then abandoned forever. The hogs would break through his fence and root up his roses, and the well caving in about the edges became a yawning gulf in his garden, and during the rainy season it partly filled up with water, and a hog fell in one night and, to Carroll’s joy, was drowned.

Men did their best in the dead of a rainy night to get the poor animal out, but a hog is not a being possessed of any capacity for seconding or furthering human attempts at his own rescue. So he drowned, and was found the morning after a grand New Year’s ball at the Bella Union Hall hanging by Joyce’s clothes-line over the middle of the street between the Bella Union and the Magnolia. The next night they put him secretly in the cart of a fish-peddler who had come up with salmon from the lower San Joaquin, and this man unwittingly hauled the hog out of town.

About four weeks after this transaction, coming home one dark, rainy night, I heard a great splashing in the well, and called out to Carroll that he had probably caught another hog. He came out with a lantern and both of us peering over the brink of the cavity saw, not as we expected, a hog, but a man, a friend of Carroll’s, up to his chest in the water. He was a miner from Campo Seco, who, on visiting Jimtown on one of his three months periodical sprees, had called on Carroll, and on leaving had mistaken the route to the gate and walked into the well. We fished him out with much difficulty, and on gaining the brink he came near precipitating us and himself into the unfinished chasm through the unsteadiness of his perpendicular. As we turned to leave, looking down the well by the lantern’s flash I saw what appeared to be another man half floating on the surface. There was a coat and at the end of it a hat, and I remarked, “Carroll, there is another man down your well.” The rescued miner looked down also, and chattered as he shivered with cold, “Why, s-s-so there is!” We were really horrified until we discovered the supposed corpse to be only Lewellyn’s coat with his hat floating at the end of it, which he had taken off in his endeavor to clamber out.

Carroll, unfortunately, allowed his mind to wander and stray overmuch in the maze of theological mysteries and its (to him) apparent contradictions. He instituted a private and personal quarrel between himself and his Creator, and for years he obtruded his quarrel into all manner of places and assemblages. He arrived at last at that point where many do under similar circumstances—a belief in total annihilation after death, and this serving to make him more miserable than ever, his only relief was to convert others to the same opinion and make them as wretched as himself. Occasionally he succeeded. He came to me one day and on his face was the grin of a fiend. “I’ve got Cummings,” said he. “Cummings thought this morning he was a good Methodist, but I’ve been laboring with him for weeks. I’ve convinced him of the falsity of it all. I knocked his last plank of faith from under him to-day. He hasn’t now a straw to cling to, and he’s as miserable as I am.”

“But with Mullins,” he remarked afterward, “I’ve slipped up on him. I wrought three weeks with Mullins; took him through the Bible, step by step—unconverted him steadily as we went along—got him down to the last leaf in the last chapter of the last book of Revelations, and there, fool like, I let up on him to go home to supper. And do you know when I tackled him next morning, to close out Mullins’ faith in the religion of his fathers, I found Mullins, in my absence, had got scared. He’d galloped in belief way back to Genesis, and now, I’ve got all that job to do over again.”

There was a great deal of life in those little mining camps in Tuolumne County like Jamestown. They might not have the population of a single block in New York City, but there was a far greater average of mental activity, quickness, and intelligence to the man, at least so far as getting the spice out of life was concerned.

The social life of a great city may be much more monotonous through that solitude imposed by great numbers living together. Everybody at these camps knew us, and we knew everybody, and were pretty sure of meeting everybody we knew. In the town one is not sure of meeting an acquaintance socially, save by appointment. There are few loafing or lounging resorts; people meet in a hurry and part in a hurry. Here in New York I cross night and morning on a ferry with five hundred people, and of these 495 do not speak or know each other.

Four hundred of these people will sit and stare at each other for half an hour, and all the time wish they could talk with some one. And many of these people are so meeting, so crossing, so staring, and so longing to talk year in and year out. There is no doctor’s shop where the impromptu symposium meets daily in the back room, as ours did at Doc Lampson’s in Montezuma, or Baker’s in Jamestown, or Dr. Walker’s in Sonora. There’s no reception every evening at the Camp grocery as there used to be at “Bill Brown’s” in Montezuma. There’s no lawyer’s office, when he feels privileged to drop in as we did at Judge Preston’s in Jamestown, or Judge Quint’s in Sonora. There’s no printing office and editorial room all in one on the ground floor whereinto the “Camp Senate,” lawyer, Judge, doctor, merchant and other citizens may daily repair in the summer’s twilight, tilted back in the old hacked arm chairs on the front portico, and discuss the situation as we used to with A. N. Francisco of the Union Democrat in Sonora, and as I presume the relics of antiquity and “’49” do at that same office to-day. These are a few of the features which made “Camp” attractive. These furnished the social anticipations which lightened our footsteps over those miles of mountain, gulch, and flat. Miles are nothing, distance is nothing, houses a mile apart and “Camps” five miles apart are nothing when people you know and like live in those camps and houses at the end of those miles. An evening at the Bella Union saloon in “Jimtown” was a circus. Because men of individuality, character, and originality met there. They had something to say. Many of them had little to do, and, perhaps, for that very reason their minds the quicker took note of so many of those little peculiarities of human nature, which when told, or hinted, or suggested prove the sauce piquant to conversation.

When Brown, the lawyer, was studying French and read his Telemaque aloud by his open office window in such a stentorian voice as to be heard over a third of the “camp,” and with never a Frenchman at hand to correct his pronunciation, which he manufactured to suit himself as he went along, it was a part of the Bella Union circus to hear “Yank” imitate him. When old Broche, the long, thin, bald-headed French baker, who never would learn one word of English, put on his swallow-tailed Sunday coat, which he had brought over from La Belle France, and lifted up those coat tails when he tripped over the mud-puddles as a lady would her skirts, it was a part of the Bella Union circus to see “Scotty” mimic him. When John S——, the Virginian, impressively and loudly swore that a Jack-rabbit he had killed that day leaped twenty-five feet in the air on being shot, and would then look around the room as if he longed to find somebody who dared dispute his assertion, while his elder brother, always at his elbow in supporting distance, also glared into the eyes of the company, as though he also longed to fight the somebody who should dare discredit “Brother John’s” “whopper,” it was a part of the circus to see the “boys” wink at each other when they had a chance. When one heard and saw so many of every other man’s peculiarities, oddities, and mannerisms, save his own, set off and illustrated while the man was absent, and knew also that his own, under like circumstances, had been or would be brought out on exhibition, it made him feel that it was somewhat dangerous to feel safe on the slim and slippery ice of self-satisfaction and self-conceit. People in great cities haven’t so much time to make their own fun and amusement, as did the residents of so many of those lazy, lounging, tumbling-down, ramshackle “camps” of the era of “1863” or thereabouts.

People in the city have more of their fun manufactured for them at the theatres of high and low degree. Yet it was wonderful how in “camp” they managed to dig so many choice bits and specimens out of the vein of varied human nature which lay so near them. Whenever I visited “Jimtown” my old friend Dixon would take me into his private corner to tell me “the last” concerning a character who was working hard on an unabridged copy of Webster’s Dictionary in the endeavor to make amends for a woeful lack of grammatical knowledge, the result of a neglected education. “He’s running now on two words,” Dixon would say, “and these are ‘perseverance’ and ‘assiduity.’ We hear them forty times a day, for he lugs them in at every possible opportunity, and, indeed, at times when there is no opportunity. He came to business the other morning a little unwell, and alluded to his stomach as being ‘in a chaotic state.’ And, sir, he can spell the word ‘particularly’ with six i’s. How he does it I can’t tell; but he can.”

CHAPTER XX.

THE ROMANCE OF AH SAM AND HI SING.

Hi Sing was the handmaid of old Ching Loo. Her face was broad, her nose flat, her girth extensive, her gait a waddle, her attire a blue sacque reaching from neck to knee, blue trousers, brass rings on wrist and ankle, and wooden shoes, whose clattering heels betrayed their owner’s presence, even as the shaken tail of the angry rattlesnake doth his unpleasant proximity. She had no education, no manners, no accomplishments, no beauty, no grace, no religion, no morality; and for this and more Ah Sam loved her. Hi Sing was virtually a slave, having several years previously, with many other fair and fragile sisters, been imported to California by Ching Loo; and not until meeting Ah Sam did she learn that it was her right and privilege in this land of occasional laws and universal liberty to set up for herself, become her own mistress and marry and unmarry whenever opportunity offered.

But Ching Loo had noticed, with a suspicious eye, the growing intimacy between Ah Sam and Hi Sing; and arguing therefrom results unprofitable to himself, he contrived one night to have the damsel packed off to another town, which happened at that time to be my place of residence; and it is for this reason that the woof of my existence temporarily crossed that of Ah Sam and Hi Sing.

Ah Sam following up his love, and discovering in me an old friend, who had endured and survived a whole winter of his cookery at Swett’s Bar, told me his troubles; and I, resolving to repay evil with good, communicated the distressed Mongolian’s story to my chosen and particular companion, a lean and cadaverous attorney, with whom fees had ceased to be angels’ visits, and who was then oscillating and hovering between two plans—one to run for the next State Legislature; the other to migrate to Central America, and found a new republic. Attorney, Spoke on hearing Ah Sam’s case, offered to find the maid, rescue her from her captors, and marry her to him permanently and forever in consideration of thirty American dollars; to which terms the Mongolian assenting, Spoke and myself, buckling on our arms and armor, proceeded to beat up the filthy purlieus of “Chinatown;” and about midnight we found the passive Hi Sing hidden away in a hen-coop, whither she had been conveyed by the confederates of Ching Loo.

We bore Hi Sing—who was considerably alarmed, neither understanding our language nor our purpose—to Spoke’s office, and then it being necessary to secure the services of a magistrate in uniting the couple, I departed to seek the Justice of the Peace, who was still awake—for Justice rarely slept in camp at that hour, but was commonly engaged at the Bella Union playing poker, whilst Spoke sought after the groom, Ah Sam, whom he found in a Chinese den stupidly drunk from smoking opium, having taken such means to wear the edge off his suspense while we were rescuing his affianced. Not only was he stupidly but perversely drunk; but he declared in imperfect English that he had concluded not to marry that night, to which observation Attorney Spoke, becoming profane, jerked him from the cot whereon he lay, and grasping him about the neck with a strangulating hold, bore him into the street and toward his office, intimating loudly that this business had been proceeded with too far to be receded from, and that the marriage must be consummated that night with or without the consent of the principals. Ah Sam resigned himself to matrimony. The office was reached, the door opened and out in the darkness bolted the bride, for she knew not what these preparations meant, or whether she had fallen among friends or enemies. After a lively chase we cornered and caught her; and having thus at last brought this refractory couple together we placed them in position, and the Justice commenced the ceremony by asking Hi Sing if she took that man for her lawful wedded husband, which interrogatory being Chaldaic to her, she replied only by an unmeaning and unspeculative stare. Spoke, who seemed destined to be the soul and mainspring of this whole affair, now threw light on the Mongolian intellect by bringing into play his stock of Chinese English, and translating to her the language of the Justice thus: “You like ’um he, pretty good?” Upon which her face brightened, and she nodded assent. Then turning to the groom, he called in a tone fierce and threatening, “You like ’um she?” and Ah Sam—who was now only a passive object in the hands of Spoke, forced and galvanized into matrimony—dared not do otherwise than give in his adhesion, upon which the Justice pronounced them man and wife; whereupon two Virginians present with their violins (all Virginians fiddle and shoot well) struck up the “Arkansas Traveller;” and the audience—which was now large, every bar-room in Jamestown having emptied itself to witness our Chinese wedding—inspired by one common impulse, arose and marched seven times about the couple. Ah Sam was now informed that he was married “American fashion,” and that he was free to depart with his wedded encumbrance. But Ah Sam, whose intoxication had broken out in full acquiescence with these proceedings, now insisted on making a midnight tour of all the saloons in camp, and treating everybody to the deathly whiskey vended by them, to which the crowd—who never objected to the driving of this sort of nails in their own coffins—assented, and the result of it was (Ah Sam spending his money very freely) that when daylight peeped over the eastern hills the Bella Union saloon was still in full blast; and while the Justice of the Peace was winning Spoke’s thirty hard-earned dollars in one corner, and the two Virginians still kept the “Arkansas Traveller” going on their violins in another, Stephen Scott (afterward elected to Congress) was weeping profusely over the bar, and on being interrogated as to the cause of his sadness by General Wyatt, ex-member of the State Senate, Scott replied that he could never hear played the air of “Home, Sweet Home” without shedding tears.

Ah Sam departed with his bride in the morning, and never were a man’s prospects brighter for a happy honeymoon until the succeeding night, when he was waylaid by a band of disguised white men in the temporary service and pay of old Ching Loo; and he and Hi Sing were forced so far apart that they never saw each other again.

Ah Sam returned to the attorney, apparently deeming that some help might be obtained in that quarter; but Spoke intimated that he could no longer assist him, since it was every man’s special and particular mission to keep his own wife after being married; although he added, for Ah Sam’s comfort, that this was not such an easy matter for the Americans themselves, especially in California.

Upon this Ah Sam apparently determined to be satisfied with his brief and turbulent career in matrimony; and betaking himself again to Swett’s Bar cooked in such a villainous fashion and desperate vigor, finding thereby a balm for an aching heart, that in a twelvemonth several stalwart miners gave up their ghosts through indigestion, and the little graveyard on the red hill thereby lost forever its distinctive character of affording a final resting place only to those who had died violent deaths.