CHAPTER XXI.

ON A JURY.

Year after year, and term after term, the great case of Table Mountain Tunnel vs. New York Tunnel, used to be called in the Court held at Sonora, Tuolumne County. The opposing claims were on opposite sides of the great mountain wall, which here described a semicircle. When these two claims were taken up, it was supposed the pay streak followed the Mountain’s course; but it had here taken a freak to shoot straight across a flat formed by the curve. Into this ground, at first deemed worthless, both parties were tunnelling. The farther they tunnelled, the richer grew the pay streak. Every foot was worth a fortune. Both claimed it. The law was called upon to settle the difficulty. The law was glad, for it had then many children in the county who needed fees. Our lawyers ran their tunnels into both of these rich claims, nor did they stop boring until they had exhausted the cream of that pay streak. Year after year, Table Mountain vs. New York Tunnel Company was tried, judgment rendered first for one side and then for the other, then appealed to the Supreme Court, sent back, and tried over, until, at last, it had become so encumbered with legal barnacles, parasites, and cobwebs, that none other than the lawyers knew or pretended to know aught of the rights of the matter. Meantime, the two rival companies kept hard at work, day and night. Every ounce over the necessary expense of working their claims and feeding and clothing their bodies, went to maintain lawyers. The case became one of the institutions of the county. It outlived several judges and attorneys. It grew plethoric with affidavits and other documentary evidence. Men died, and with their last breath left some word still further to confuse the great Table Mountain vs. New York Tunnel case. The county town throve during this yearly trial. Each side brought a small army of witnesses, who could swear and fill up any and every gap in their respective chains of evidence. It involved the history, also, of all the mining laws made since “’49.” Eventually, jurors competent to try this case became very scarce. Nearly every one had “sat on it,” or had read or heard or formed an opinion concerning it, or said they had. The Sheriff and his deputies ransacked the hills and gulches of Tuolumne for new Table Mountain vs. New York Tunnel jurors. At last, buried in an out-of-the-way gulch, they found me. I was presented with a paper commanding my appearance at the county town, with various pains and penalties affixed, in case of refusal. I obeyed. I had never before formed the twelfth of a jury. In my own estimation, I rated only as the twenty-fourth. We were sworn in: sworn to try the case to the best of our ability; it was ridiculous that I should swear to this, for internally I owned I had no ability at all as a juror. We were put in twelve arm-chairs. The great case was called. The lawyers, as usual, on either side, opened by declaring their intentions to prove themselves all right and their opponents all wrong. I did not know which was the plaintiff, which the defendant. Twenty-four witnesses on one side swore to something, to anything, to everything; thirty-six on the other swore it all down again. They thus swore against each other for two days and a half. The Court was noted for being an eternal sitter. He sat fourteen hours per day. The trial lasted five days. Opposing counsel, rival claimants, even witnesses, all had maps, long, brilliant, parti-colored maps of their claims, which they unrolled and held before us and swung defiantly at each other. The sixty witnesses testified from 1849 up to 1864. After days of such testimony, as to ancient boundary lines and ancient mining laws, the lawyers on either side, still more to mystify the case, caucused the matter over and concluded to throw out about half of such testimony as being irrelevant. But they could not throw it out of our memories. The “summing up” lasted two days more. By this time, I was a mere idiot in the matter. I had, at the start, endeavored to keep some track of the evidence, but they managed to snatch every clue away as fast as one got hold of it. We were “charged” by the judge and sent to the jury room. I felt like both a fool and a criminal. I knew I had not the shadow of an opinion or a conclusion in the matter. However, I found myself not alone. We were out all night. There was a stormy time between the three or four jurymen who knew or pretended to know something of the matter. The rest of us watched the controversy, and, of course, sided with the majority. And, at last, a verdict was agreed upon. It has made so little impression on my mind that I forget now whom it favored. It did not matter. Both claims were then paying well, and this was a sure indication that the case would go to the Supreme Court. It did. This was in 1860. I think it made these yearly trips up to 1867. Then some of the more obstinate and combative members of either claim died, and the remainder concluded to keep some of the gold they were digging instead of paying it out to fee lawyers. The Table Mountain vs. New York Tunnel case stopped. All the lawyers, save two or three, emigrated to San Francisco or went to Congress. I gained but one thing from my experience in the matter—an opinion. It may or may not be right. It is that juries in most cases are humbugs.

CHAPTER XXII.

SOME CULINARY REMINISCENCES.

I lived once with an unbalanced cook. Culinarily he was not self-poised. He lacked judgment. He was always taking too large cooking contracts. He was for a time my partner. He was a lover of good living and willing to work hard for it over a cook stove. He would for a single Sunday’s dinner plan more dishes than his mind could eventually grasp or his hands handle. And when he had exhausted the whole of the limited gastronomical repertoire within our reach he would be suddenly inspired with a troublesome propensity to add hash to the programme. In cooking, as I have said, he lost his balance. His imagination pictured more possibilities than his body had strength to carry out. So busied in getting up a varied meal, he would in a few minutes’ leisure attempt to shave himself or sew on shirt or pantaloon buttons. This put too many irons in the fire. A man who attempts to shave while a pot is boiling over or a roast requiring careful watching is in the oven, will neither shave nor cook well. He will be apt to leave lather where it is not desirable, as he sometimes did. Trousers-buttons are not good in soup. I do not like to see a wet shaving brush near a roast ready to go into the oven. The æsthetic taste repudiates these hints at combination. Then sometimes, in the very crisis of a meal, he became flurried. He rushed about in haste overmuch, with a big spoon in one hand and a giant fork in the other, looking for missing stove-covers and pot-lids, seldom found until the next day, and then in strange places. Nothing is well done which is done in a hurry, especially cooking. Some argue that men and women put their magnetic and sympathetic influences in the food they prepare. If a man kneading bread be in a bad temper he puts bad temper in the bread, and that bad temper goes into the person who eats it. Or if he be dyspeptic he kneads dyspepsia in his dough. It is awful to think what we may be eating. I think the unbalanced cook puts flurries in his stews, for I felt sometimes as if trying to digest a whirlwind after eating this man’s dinners. He ruled the house. I was his assistant. I was his victim. I was the slave of the spit, and the peon of the frying-pan. When his energies culminated and settled on hash, when already the stove-top was full of dishes in preparation, I was selected as the proper person to chop the necessary ingredients. We had neither chopping-knife nor tray. The mining stores then did not contain such luxuries. This to him made no difference. He was a man who rose superior to obstacles, circumstances, and chopping trays. He said that hash could be chopped with a hatchet on a flat board. He planned; I executed. He theorized and invented; I put his inventions in practice. But never successfully could I chop a mass of beef and boiled potatoes with a hatchet on a flat board. The ingredients during the operation would expand and fall over the edge of the board. Or the finer particles would violently fly off at each cut of the hatchet, and lodge on the beds or other unseemly places.

I do not favor a dinner of many courses, especially if it falls to my lot to prepare these courses. Few cooks enjoy their own dinners. For two reasons: First—They eat them in anticipation. This nullifies the flavor of the reality. Second—The labor of preparation fatigues the body and takes the keen edge from the appetite. You are heated, flushed, exhausted, and the nerves in a twitter. The expected relish palls and proves a myth. Ladies who cook will corroborate my testimony on this point. It is a great, merciful and useful vent for a woman that a man can come forward able and willing to sympathize with her in regard to this and other trials of domestic life. Having kept my own house for years I know whereof I speak. Two hours’ work about a hot stove exhausts more than four hours’ work out of doors. Americans in Europe are shocked or pretend to be at sight of women doing men’s work in the fields. They are much better off than the American woman, five-sixths of whose life is spent in the kitchen. The outdoor woman shows some blood through the tan on her cheeks. The American kitchen housewife is sallow and bleached out. I have in Vienna seen women mixing mortar and carrying bricks to the sixth story of an unfinished house, and laying bricks, too. These women were bare-legged to the knee, and their arms and legs were muscular. They mixed their mortar with an energy suggestive of fearful consequences to an ordinary man of sedentary occupations. They could with ease have taken such a man and mixed him with their mortar. Coarse, were they? Yes, of course they were. But if I am to choose between a coarse woman, physically speaking, and one hot-housed and enervated to that extent that she cannot walk half a mile in the open air, but requires to be hauled, I choose the coarse-grained fibre.

I once lived near a literary cook. It was to him by a sort of natural heritage that fell the keeping of the Hawkins Bar Library, purchased by the “boys” way back in the A.D. eighteen hundred and fifties. The library occupied two sides of a very small cabin, and the man who kept it lived on or near the other two sides. There, during nights and rainy days, he read and ate. His table, a mere flap or shelf projecting from the wall, was two-thirds covered with books and papers, and the other third with a never-cleared-off array of table furniture, to wit: A tin plate, knife, fork, tin cup, yeast-powder can, pepper-box, ditto full of sugar, ditto full of salt, a butter-plate, a bottle of vinegar and another of molasses, and may be, on occasions, one of whiskey. On every book and paper were more or less of the imprint of greasy fingers, or streaks of molasses. The plate, owing to the almost entire absence of the cleansing process, was even imbedded in a brownish, unctuous deposit, the congealed oleaginous overflow of months of meals. There he devoured beef and lard, bacon and beans and encyclopedias, Humboldt’s “Cosmos” and dried apples, novels and physical nourishment at one and the same time. He went long since where the weary cease from troubling, and the wicked, let us hope, are at rest. Years ago, passing through the deserted Bar, I peeped in at Morgan’s cabin. A young oak almost barred the door, part of the roof was gone, the books and shelves had vanished; naught remained but the old miner’s stove and a few battered cooking utensils. I had some thought at the time of camping for the night on the Bar, but this desolate cabin and its associations of former days contrasted with the loneliness and solitude of the present proved too much for me. I feared the possible ghost of the dead librarian, and left for a populated camp. Poor fellow! While living, dyspepsia and he were in close embrace. A long course of combined reading and eating ruined his digestion. One thing at a time; what a man does he wants to do with all his might.

Eggs in the early days were great luxuries. Eggs then filled the place of oysters. A dish of ham and eggs was one of the brilliant anticipations of the miner resident in some lonesome gulch when footing it to the nearest large camp. A few enterprising and luxurious miners kept hens and raised chickens. The coons, coyotes, and foxes were inclined to “raise” those chickens too. There was one character on Hawkins Bar whose coop was large and well stocked. Eggs were regularly on his breakfast-table, and he was the envy of many. Generous in disposition, oft he made holiday presents of eggs to his friends. Such a gift was equivalent to that of a turkey in older communities. One foe to this gentleman’s peace and the security of his chickens alone existed. That foe was whiskey. For whenever elevated and cheered by the cup which does inebriate, he would in the excess of his royal nature call his friends about him, even after midnight, and slay and eat his tenderest chickens. Almost so certain as Kip got on a spree there came a feast and consequent midnight depletion of his chicken-coop—a depletion that was mourned over in vain when soberer and wiser counsels prevailed. The pioneer beefsteaks of California were in most cases cut from bulls which had fought bull-fights all the way up from Mexico. Firm in fibre as they were, they were generally made firmer still by being fried in lard. The meat was brought to the table in a dish covered with the dripping in which it had hardened. To a certain extent the ferocity and combativeness of human nature peculiar to the days of “’49” were owing to obstacles thrown in the way of easy digestion by bull beef fried to leather in lard. Bad bread and bull beef did it. The powers of the human system were taxed to the uttermost to assimilate these articles. The assimilation of the raw material into bone, blood, nerve, muscle, sinew and brain was necessarily imperfect. Bad whiskey was then called upon for relief. This completed the ruin. Of course men would murder each other with such warring elements inside of them.

The ideas of our pioneer cooks and housekeepers regarding quantities, kinds, and qualities of provisions necessary to be procured for longer or shorter periods, were at first vague. There was an Argonaut who resided at Truetts’ Bar, and, in the fall of 1850, warned by the dollar a pound for flour experience of the past winter, he resolved to lay in a few months’ provisions. He was a lucky miner. Were there now existing on that bar any pioneers who lived there in ’49, they would tell you how he kept a barrel of whiskey in his tent on free tap. Such men are scarce and win name and fame. Said he to the Bar trader when the November clouds began to signal the coming rains, “I want to lay in three months’ provisions.” “Well, make out your order,” said the storekeeper. This troubled G——. At length he gave it verbally thus: “I guess I’ll have two sacks of flour, a side of bacon, ten pounds of sugar, two pounds of coffee, a pound of tea, and—and—a barrel of whiskey.”

My own experience taught me some things unconsidered before. Once, while housekeeping, I bought an entire sack of rice. I had no idea then of the elastic and durable properties of rice. A sack looked small. The rice surprised me by its elasticity when put on to boil. Rice swells amazingly. My first pot swelled up, forced off the lid and oozed over. Then I shoveled rice by the big spoonful into everything empty which I could find in the cabin. Still it swelled and oozed. Even the washbasin was full of half-boiled rice. Still it kept on. I saw then that I had put in too much—far too much. The next time I tried half the quantity. That swelled, boiled up, boiled over and also oozed. I never saw such a remarkable grain. The third time I put far less to cook. Even then it arose and filled the pot. The seeds looked minute and harmless enough before being soaked. At last I became disgusted with rice. I looked at the sack. There was the merest excavation made in it by the quantity taken out. This alarmed me. With my gradually decreasing appetite for rice, I reflected and calculated that it would take seven years on that Bar ere I could eat all the rice in that sack. I saw it in imagination all boiled at once and filling the entire cabin. This determined my resolution. I shouldered the sack, carried it back to the store and said: “See here! I want you to exchange this cereal for something that won’t swell so in the cooking. I want to exchange it for something which I can eat up in a reasonable length of time.”

The storekeeper was a kind and obliging man. He took it back. But the reputation, the sting of buying an entire sack of rice remained. The “boys” had “spotted” the transaction. The merchant had told them of it. I was reminded of that sack of rice years afterward.

CHAPTER XXIII.

THE COPPER FEVER.

But the copper fever raged in the beginning. Gold was temporarily thrown in the shade. Miners became speedily learned in surface copper indications. The talk far and wide was of copper “carbonates,” oxides, “sulphurets,” “gosson.” Great was the demand for scientific works on copper. From many a miner’s cabin was heard the clink of mortar and pestle pounding copper rock, preparatory to testing it. The pulverized rock placed in a solution of diluted nitric acid, a knife blade plunged therein and coming out coated with a precipitation of copper was exhibited triumphantly as a prognosticator of coming fortune from the newly found lead. The fever flew from one remote camp to another. A green verdigris stain on the rocks would set the neighborhood copper crazy. On the strength of that one “surface indication” claims would be staked out for miles, companies formed, shafts in flinty rock sunk and cities planned. Nitric acid came in great demand. It was upset. It yellowed our fingers, and burned holes in our clothes. But we loved it for what it might prove to us. A swarm of men learned in copper soon came from San Francisco. They told all about it, where the leads should commence, in what direction they should run, how they should “dip,” what would be the character of the ore, and what it would yield. We, common miners, bowed to their superior knowledge. We worshipped them. We followed them. We watched their faces as they surveyed the ground wherein had been found a bit of sulphuret or a green stained ledge, to get at the secret of their superior right under ground. It took many months, even years for the knowledge slowly to filter through our brains that of these men nine-tenths had no practical knowledge of copper or any other mining. The normal calling of one of the most learned of them all, I found out afterward to be that of a music teacher. Old S——, the local geologist of Sonora, who had that peculiar universal genius for tinkering at anything and everything from a broken wheelbarrow to a clock and whose shop was a museum of stones, bones and minerals collected from the vicinity, “classified,” and named, some correctly and some possibly otherwise, took immediately on himself the mantle of a copper prophet, and saw the whole land resting on a basis of rich copper ore. He advised in season and out of season, in his shop and in the street, that all men, and especially young men, betake themselves to copper mining. It was, he said, a sure thing. It needed only pluck, patience, and perseverance. “Sink,” he said, “sink for copper. Sink shafts wherever indications are found. Sink deep. Don’t be discouraged if the vein does not appear at twenty, thirty, sixty or an hundred feet.”

And they did sink. For several years they sunk shafts all over our county and in many another counties. In remote gulches and cañons they sunk and blasted and lived on pork and beans week in and week out and remained all day underground, till the darkness bleached their faces. They sunk and sunk and saw seldom the faces of others of their kind, and no womankind at all. They lived coarsely, dressed coarsely, and no matter what they might have been, felt coarsely and in accordance, acted coarsely. They sunk time and money and years and even health and strength, and in nineteen cases out of twenty found nothing but barren rock or rock bearing just enough mineral not to pay.

I took the copper fever with the rest. In a few weeks I became an “expert” in copper. I found two veins on my former gold claim at Swett’s Bar. I found veins everywhere. I really did imagine that I knew a great deal about copper-mining, and being an honest enthusiast was all the more dangerous. The banks of the Tuolumne became at last too limited as my field for copper exploration and discovery. I left for the more thickly populated portion of the county, where there being more people, there was liable to be more copper, and where the Halsey Claim was located. The “Halsey” was having its day then as the King claim of the county. It had really produced a few sacks of ore, which was more than any other Tuolumne copper claim had done, and on the strength of this, its value was for a few months pushed far up into high and airy realms of finance.

I told some of my acquaintances in Sonora that I could find the “continuation” of the Halsey lead. They “staked” me with a few dollars, in consideration of which I was to make them shareholders in whatever I might find. Then I went forth into the chapparal to “prospect.” The Halsey claim lay about a mile east of Table Mountain near Montezuma, a mining camp then far in its decline. Table Mountain is one of the geological curiosities, if not wonders of Tuolumne and California. As a well-defined wall it is forty miles long. Through Tuolumne it is a veritable wall, from 250 to 600 feet in height, flat as a floor on the top. That top has an average width of 300 yards. The “table” is composed of what we miners call “lava.” It is a honey-combed, metallic-looking rock, which on being struck with a sledge emits a sulphurous smell. The sides to the ungeological eye seem of a different kind of rock. But parts of the sides are not of rock at all—they are of gravel. On the eastern slope you may see from the old Sonora stage road two parallel lines, perhaps 200 feet apart, running along the mountain side. Mile after mile do these marks run, as level and exact as if laid there by the surveyor. Climb up to them and you find these lines enlarged to a sort of shelf or wave-washed and indented bank of hard cement, like gravel. You may crawl under and sit in the shade of an overhanging roof of gravel, apparently in some former age scooped out by the action of waves. Not only on the Table Mountain sides do you find these lines, but where Table Mountain merges into the plains about Knight’s Ferry will you see these same water marks running around the many low conical hills.

A geological supposition. That’s what water seems to have done outside of Table Mountain. Were I a geologist I should say that here had been a lake—maybe a great lake—which at some other time had suddenly from the first mark been drained down to the level of the second, and from that had drained off altogether. Perhaps there was a rise in the Sierra Nevada, and everything rising with it, the lake went up too suddenly on one side and so the waters went down on the other. Inside of Table Mountain there is an old river bed, smoothly washed by the currents of perhaps as many if not more centuries than any river now on earth has seen, and this forms a layer or core of gold-bearing gravel. In some places it has paid richly: in more places it has not paid at all.

I said to myself: “This Halsey lead, like all the leads of this section, runs northeast and southwest.” (N. B.—Three years afterward we found there were no leads at all in that section.) “The Halsey lead must run under Table Mountain and come out somewhere on the other side.” So I took the bearings of the Halsey lead, or what I then supposed were the bearings, for there wasn’t any lead anyway, with a compass. I aimed my compass at a point on the ledge of the flat summit of Table Mountain. I hit it. Then I climbed up over the two water shelves or banks to that point. This was on the honey-combed lava crags. From these crags one could see afar north and south. South, over Tuolumne into Mariposa the eye following the great white quartz outcrop of the Mother or Mariposa lead. North was Bear Mountain, the Stanislaus River and Stanislaus County. This view always reminded me of the place where one very great and very bad historical personage of the past as well as the present showed another still greater and much better Being all the kingdoms of the earth. For the earth wasn’t all laid out, pre-empted and fenced in those days, and its kingdoms were small. Then I ran my lines over the flat top of Table Mountain, southeast and northwest. So they said ran all the copper leads, commencing at Copperopolis. So then we believed, while tossing with the copper fever. Certainly they ran somewhere, and ran fast too, for we never caught any paying copper vein in Tuolumne County, at least any that paid—except to sell.

I aimed my compass down the other side of the mountain. There, when the perpendicular lava rock stopped pitching straight up and down, sometimes fifty, sometimes two hundred feet, was a dense growth of chaparral—the kind of chaparral we called “chemisal.” I got into the chemisal. Here the compass was of no more use than would be a certificate of Copperhead copper stock to pay a board bill. It was a furry, prickly, blinding, bewildering, blundering, irritating growth, which sent a pang through a man’s heart and a pricker into his skin at every step. At last, crawling down it on all-fours, for I could not walk, dirty, dusty, thirsty, and perspiring, I lit on a rock, an outcrop of ledge. It was gray and moss grown. It hid and guarded faithfully the treasure it concealed. Like Moses, I struck the rock with my little hatchet. The broken piece revealed underneath a rotten, sandy-like, spongy formation of crumbling, bluish, greenish hue. It was copper! I had struck it! I rained down more blows! Red oxides, green carbonates, gray and blue sulphurets! I had found the Copperhead lead! I was rich. I got upon that rock and danced! Not a graceful, but an enthusiastic pas seul. I deemed my fortune made. I was at last out of the wilderness! But I wasn’t.

CHAPTER XXIV.

RISE AND FALL OF COPPERHEAD CITY.

I trudged back nine miles to Sonora, my pockets full of “specimens” from the newly discovered claim, my head a cyclone of copper-hued air castles. I saw the “boys.” I was mysterious. I beckoned them to retired spots. I showed them the ores. I told them of the find. They were wild with excitement. They were half crazed with delight. And in ten minutes some of them went just as far into the domains of unrest and unhappiness for fear some one might find and jump the claim ere I got back to guard it. The Copperhead Company was organized that night. The “Enthusiast,” a man who lived in the very top loft of copper insanity, was sent down with me to superintend the sinking of the shaft. The secret was soon out. Shares in the vein were eagerly coveted. I sold a few feet for $500 and deemed I had conferred a great favor on the buyer in letting it go so cheaply. I lived up, way up, in tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of dollars. The “company” in Sonora met almost every night to push things while the Enthusiast and myself blasted and burrowed in the rock. By day they exhausted their spare cash in horse hire, riding down to the claim in hope of being on hand when the next blast should reveal a bed of ore, immense in breadth and unfathomable in depth.

My Company was made up chiefly of lawyers, doctors, politicians, and editors. They never realized how much they were indebted to me. For four months I made them feel rich,—and if a man feels rich, what more should he want? For a millionaire can do no more than feel rich.

Feeling certain that the Copperhead was a very rich claim, and that other rich claims would be developed from the “extensions,” and that a bustling town would be the result, I pre-empted a section of the land which I deemed most valuable, on which it was intended that “Copperhead City” should be built. This “city” I partly laid out. I think this was the third city I had laid out in California. There is a sepulchral and post-mortem suggestion in the term “laid out” which is peculiarly applicable to all the “cities” which I attempted to found, and which “cities” invariably foundered. Actuated, also, at that time, by those business principles so largely prevalent in most Christian communities, I “claimed” the only spring of good drinking water in the neighborhood of my “city.” My intent in this was in time to realize a profit from the indirect sale of this water to such of the future “city’s” population as might want water—not to sell it by the glass or gallon, of course; but if there was to be a “city” it would need water-works. The water-works would necessarily lie on my land. I would not be guilty of the inhumanity of selling water to parch-tongued people, but I proposed that the “city” should buy of me the ground out of which came the water.

But one house was ever erected in Copperhead City proper, and that had but one room. But three men ever lived in it. Yet the city was thickly populated. It was located in a regular jungle, so far as a jungle is ever attained in California, and seemed the head-centre and trysting-place of all the rattlesnakes, coons, skunks, owls, and foxes on the west side of Table Mountain. When the winter wore off and the warm California spring wore on and merged into the summer heat of May, and the pools made by the winter rains dried up, I think all the rattlesnakes and copperheads for miles around went for my pre-empted spring of pure water. The “city,” I mean the house, was located within a few feet of the spring. Returning thither at noon for dinner, I have started half a dozen snakes from the purlieus and suburbs of that spring. Snakes get dry like human beings. Snakes love water. Snakes, poor things, can’t get anything else to drink, and must fill up on water. These were sociable snakes. When startled at our approach they would not run away from our society. No. They preferred to remain in the “city,” and so, in many instances they ran under the house. It is not pleasant at night to feel that you are sleeping over a veteran rattler four feet long, with a crown of glory on his tail in the shape of fourteen or fifteen rattles. You won’t crawl under your house to evict such a rattlesnake, either. Skunks inhabited our “city,” also. Skunks know their power—their peculiar power.

The evening gloaming seems the favorite time for the skunk to go abroad. He or she loves the twilight. There must be a vein of sentiment in these far-smelling creatures. I have in the early evening travelled up the only street our “city” ever laid out—a trail—and ahead of me on that trail I have seen a skunk. I was willing he should precede me. In the matter of rankness I was perfectly willing to fall a long way behind him. Now, if you have studied skunks you will know that it is far safer to remain in the skunk’s rear than to get ahead of him, because when he attacks with his favorite aromatic means of offensive defence he projects himself forward (as it were). I have then, in my city, had a skunk keep the trail about fifty feet ahead of me at a pace which indicated little alarm at my presence, and, do my best, I could not frighten the animal, nor could I get ahead of him or her. If I ran he ran; if I walked he concurred in rapidity of pace. I dared not approach too near the animal. I would rather break in upon the “sacred divinity” which, they say, “doth hedge a king” than transgress the proper bounds to be observed with reference to a skunk. Let a king do his best, and he cannot punish an intruder as can a skunk.

The skunk is really a pretty creature. Its tail droops over its back, like the plumes of the Knight of Navarre. It is an object which can really be admired visually at a distance. Do not be allured by him to too near approach. “Beware! he’s fooling thee!”

At last it dawned upon the collective mind of the Copperhead Company that their Superintendent, the Enthusiast, was digging too much and getting down too little. They accepted his resignation. It mattered little to him, for by this time his mind was overwhelmed by another stupendous mining scheme, to which the Copperhead was barely a priming. He had the happy talent of living in these golden visions which, to him, were perfect realities. He held the philosophy that the idea, the hope, the anticipation of a thing is sometimes more “the thing” than the thing itself. The Enthusiast’s rich mines lay principally in his head, but his belief in them gave him as much pleasure as if they really existed. It was like marrying, sometimes. The long-sought-for, longed-for, wished-for wife, or husband, turns out, as a reality, a very different being from what he or she was deemed while in process of being longed and sought for. The long-longed-for may have been estimated an angel. The angel, after wedlock, may prove to have been a myth. The reality may be a devil, or within a few shades or degrees of a devil.

So the shaft was sunk, as they said, properly and scientifically, by the new Superintendent. The rock got harder as we went down, the ore less, the vein narrower, the quantity of water greater, the progress slower, the weekly expenses first doubled and then trebled, the stock became less coveted, and as to reputed value, reached that fatal dead level which really means that it is on its downward descent. The shareholders’ faces became longer and longer at their weekly Sunday afternoon meetings in the Sonora Court-house.

The Copperhead Claim and Copperhead City subsided quietly. The shareholders became tired of mining for coin to pay assessments out of their own pockets. They came at last to doubt the ever-glowing hopeful assertion of the Enthusiast that from indications he knew the “ore was forming.” The inevitable came. Copperhead City was deserted by its human inhabitants. The skunk, the snake, the squirrel, the woodpecker, and the buzzard came again into full possession, and I bitterly regretted that I had not sold more at ten dollars a foot when I found the stock a drug at ten cents.

CHAPTER XXV.

PROSPECTING.

“Holding” a mineral vein, or whatever I might imagine to be a mineral vein, could be done after the proper notices were put up, by performing on such veins one day’s work a month, and such “day’s work” was supposed to be done by turning up a few shovelfuls of dirt on the property.

My Company consisted of thirty members, who lived at varying distances apart, within and without the county of Tuolumne. For my services as general prospector, discoverer, and holder of all properties accumulated (by myself) I was to receive from each member three dollars per month.

I fixed this princely stipend myself, being then ever in fear that I should overcharge others for services rendered.

By dint of great exertion, I succeeded in getting one-third of the members together one hot summer afternoon in a Montezuma grocery. I unfolded then the Company’s Constitution and By-Laws, written by myself at great length on several sheets of foolscap pasted together. I read the document. It provided for the Company a President, Secretary, Treasurer, and Board of Directors. It set forth their duties and my duties as “General Prospector.” I was particularly stringent and rigid regarding myself and my responsibilities to the Company.

The fragment of the new Company present assented to everything, paid in their first installment of three dollars, and bade me go forth and “strike something rich” as quickly as possible.

I went forth at first afoot with the few dollars paid me. I subsisted in a hap-hazard—indeed I must say beggarly fashion, stopping with mining friends and dependent to great extent on their hospitality, while I “held” the few claims I had already found and found others in their neighborhood.

At last I found a man who subscribed the use of a horse for the summer in consideration of being enrolled as a shareholder. On similar terms I gained a saddle, a shot-gun, a dog, and some provisions. This put the “Company” on a more stable footing, for I was now no longer dependent on house or hospitality, and could stop wherever night overtook me, and wood, water, and grass were at hand.

My horse I think was the slowest of his kind in the Great West, and my gun kicked so vigorously when discharged that I frequently sustained more injury than the game aimed at.

My field of operations extended over 150 miles of country, from the foot hills of the Sierras to their summits and beyond in the Territory of Nevada. Land, wood, water, grass, and game, if found, were free in every direction. The country was not fenced in, the meaning of “trespassing” on land was unknown—in fact it was then really a free country—a term also not altogether understood in the older States, where if you build a camp-fire in a wood lot you run some risk from the farmer who owns it, and his bulldog.

Sometimes, I would be a week or ten days without seeing a human face. A roof rarely covered me. I would camp one day near a mountain summit looking over fifty or sixty miles of territory and the next at its base with a view bounded by a wall of rock a few hundred yards distant. Sometimes I was very lonesome and uneasy at night in these mountain solitudes. I longed generally about sundown for some one to talk to. Anything human would answer such purpose then. In the bright clear morning the lonesome feeling was all gone. There was companionship then in the trees, the clouds, the mountain peaks, far and near, yet there were times when the veriest clod was better than all of these. Sometimes nothing but another human tongue will answer our needs, though it be a very poor one.

The first evening I spent alone in the forest, I left my dog “Put” to guard the camp. He wanted to follow me. I drove him back. He went back like a good dog and ate up most of my bacon which I had not hung high enough on the tree. By this experience I learned to hang my bacon higher. Wisdom must always be paid for.

I journeyed in the primeval forests of the Sierras. The primeval forest is dismal and inconvenient to travel through with fallen and rotten tree trunks interlacing each other in every direction. I have travelled half a day and found myself farther than ever from the place I wanted to reach. I have made at eve a comfortable camp under a great tree and when all arrangements were completed scrabbled out of it precipitately and packed my baggage elsewhere on looking up and seeing directly above me a huge dead limb hanging by a mere splinter, ready to fall at any moment and impale me. I think I know just how Damocles felt in that sword and hair business. Wolves sometimes frightened me at night exceedingly with their howlings. Bands of then unwarlike Indians also scared me. They were Utes fishing in the Walker River. Five years previous they had been hostile. Once I stumbled on one of their camps on the river bank. Before I could sneak off unseen one of them came up to me, announcing himself as the chief. He wanted to know who I was, where I came from, and where I was going. I answered all the questions this potentate asked me, acceded to his request for some “hoggadi” (tobacco), and when I found myself half a mile distant from His Majesty with a whole skin and all of my worldly goods intact, believed more firmly than ever in a kind and protecting Providence. I don’t suppose I stood in any real danger, but a lone man in a lone country with an average of one white settler to every five square miles of territory won’t naturally feel as easy in such circumstances as at his own breakfast table.

I learned never to pass a spot having wood, water, and grass after four o’clock in the afternoon, but make my camp for the night there. I learned on staking my horse out, not to give him pasture too near my camp-fire, for more than once in changing his base for a better mouthful of grass, has he dragged the lariat over my temporary possessions, upsetting coffee-pot and frying-pan and knocking the whole camp endways. I learned to camp away from the main road or trail leading over the mountains to Nevada, for it was beset by hungry, ragged men who had started afoot for the silver mines with barely a cent in their pockets, trusting to luck to get through, and who stumbling on my camp must be fed. You can’t sit and eat in your own out-door kitchen and see your fellow-beings eye you in hunger. But they ate me at times out of house and home, and the provision laid in for a week would not last three days with such guests. An old Frenchman so found me one day at dinner. He was starved. I kept my fresh meat in a bag. I handed him the bag and told him to broil for himself over the coals. Then I hauled off in the bush a little while to look at some rock. When I returned the bag was empty; two pounds of beef were inside the Frenchman and he didn’t seem at all abashed or uneasy. These experiences taught me that charity and sympathy for others must be kept under some government or our own meal bags, bread bags, and stomachs may go empty.

Grizzlies were common in those mountain solitudes, but I never saw one nor the track of one, nor even thought of them near as much as I would now, if poking about in the chaparral as I did then. I was camped near a sheep herder one evening, when, seeing my fire about a quarter of a mile from his cabin, he came to me and said, “Young man, this isn’t a good place to stop in over night. You’re right in the track of the grizzlies. They’ve killed twenty-six of my sheep inside of three weeks. You’d better sleep in my barn.” I did so.

I learned never to broil a steak on a green pitch-pine branch till I got accustomed to the flavor of the turpentine which the heat would distil and the meat absorb.

I learned that when you have nothing for breakfast and must kill the only robin in sight or go without him, that robin will be ten times shyer and harder to coax within gunshot than when you don’t hunger for him.

I was not strong physically, and indeed far from being a well man. It was only the strong desire of finding a fortune in a mineral vein, that gave me strength at all. Once I was sick for three days, camped near a mountain top, and though it was June, every day brought a snow squall. A prospector from Silver City stumbled on my camp one day and declared he would not stay in such a place for all the silver in Nevada. The wind blew from a different quarter about every hour, and no matter where I built my fire, managed matters so as always to drive the smoke in my face. It converted me for a time into a belief of the total depravity of inanimate things.

I pre-empted in the name of the Company some of the grandest scenery in the world—valleys seldom trodden by man, with clear mountain streams flowing through them—lakes, still unnamed, reflecting the mountain walls surrounding them a thousand or more feet in height, and beautiful miniature mountain parks. In pre-empting them their commercial value entered little into my calculations. Sentiment and the picturesque, did. Claimants stronger than I, had firmer possession of these gems of the Sierras. The chief was snow, under which they were buried to the depth of ten or fifteen feet, seven months at least out of the twelve.

When once a month I came out of the mountains and put in an appearance among my shareholders, my horse burdened with blankets, provisions, tools, the frying-pan and tin coffee-pot atop of the heap, I was generally greeted with the remark, “Well, struck anything yet?” When I told my patrons of the land sites I had gained for them so advantageous for summer pasturages, they did not seem to catch my enthusiasm. They wanted gold, bright yellow gold or silver, very rich and extending deep in the ground, more than they did these Occidental Vales of Cashmere, or Californian Lakes of Como. They were sordid and sensible. I was romantic and ragged. They were after what paid. I was after what pleased.

The monthly three-dollar assessment from each shareholder came harder and harder. I dreaded to ask for it. Besides, two-thirds of my company were scattered over so much country that the time and expense of collecting ate up the amount received, a contingency I had not foreseen when I fixed my tax rate.

At last the end came. The man who subscribed the use of his horse, wanted him back. I gave him up. This dismounted the Company. Operations could not be carried on afoot over a territory larger than the State of Connecticut. I had indeed found several mineral veins, but they were in that numerous catalogue of “needing capital to develop them.” The General Prospector also needed capital to buy a whole suit of clothes.

I was obliged to suspend operations. When I stopped the Company stopped. Indeed I did not find out till then, that I was virtually the whole “Company.”

CHAPTER XXVI.

HIGH LIFE.

The “Company” died its peaceful death where I brought up when the horse was demanded of me in Eureka Valley, some 8,000 feet above the sea level, at Dave Hays’ mountain ranch and tavern on the Sonora and Mono road. This was a new road built by the counties of Stanislaus, Tuolumne and Mono to rival the Placerville route, then crowded with teams carrying merchandise to Virginia City. The Mono road cost three years of labor, and was a fine piece of work. It ran along steep mountain sides, was walled in many places fifteen or twenty feet in height for hundreds of yards, crossed creeks and rivers on a number of substantial bridges, and proved, like many another enterprise undertaken in California, a failure. In Eureka Valley I spent the winter of 1864-65. I had the company of two men, Dave Hays and Jack Welch, both good mountaineers, good hunters, good miners, ranchmen, hotel-keepers, good men and true at anything they chose to turn their hands to. Both are deserving of a fair share of immortal fame. Hays had most of his toes frozen off at the second joint a winter or two afterward, as he had become over-confident and thought he could risk anything in the mountains. He was belated one winter night crossing the “Mountain Brow,” distant some forty miles east of Eureka Valley. Over the “Brow” swept the coldest of winds, and Hays betook himself for shelter to a sort of cave, and when he emerged in the morning he was as good as toeless. In point of weather the Sierra summits are fearfully deceitful. You may cross and find it as fair as an October day in New England. In two hours a storm may come up, the air be filled with fine minute particles of snow blown from the surrounding peaks, and these striking against you like millions on millions of fine needle-points will carry the heat from your body much faster than the body can generate it. I was once nearly frozen to death in one of these snow-driving gales when less than three miles from our house. Hays built the house we lived in and it would have been a credit to any architect. It was fifty feet in length by eighteen in width, and made of logs, squared and dovetailed at the ends. It was intended for a “road house.” Hays was landlord, cook, chambermaid, and barkeeper. I have known him to cook a supper for a dozen guests and when they were bestowed in their blankets, there being no flour for breakfast, he would jump on horseback and ride to Niagara creek, twelve miles distant, supply himself and ride back to cook the breakfast.

When the winter set in at Eureka Valley, and it set in very early, it commenced snowing. It never really stopped snowing until the next spring. There were intervals of more or less hours when it did not snow, but there was always snow in the air; always somewhere in the heavens that grayish-whitey look of the snow cloud; always that peculiar chill and smell, too, which betoken snow. It snowed when we went to bed; it was snowing when we got up; it snowed all day, or at intervals during the day; it was ever monotonously busy, busy; sometimes big flakes, sometimes little flakes coming down, down, down; coming deliberately straight down, or driving furiously in our faces, or crossing and recrossing in zigzag lines. The snow heavens seemed but a few feet above the mountain-tops; they looked heavy and full of snow, and gave one a crushing sensation. We seemed just between two great bodies of snow, one above our heads, one lying on the ground.

Our house, whose ridge-pole was full eighteen feet from the ground, began gradually to disappear. At intervals of three or four days it was necessary to shovel the snow from the roof, which would otherwise have been crushed in. This added to the accumulation about us. Snow covered up the windows and mounted to the eaves. The path to the spring was through a cut high above our heads. That to the barn was through another similar. Snow all about us lay at an average depth of eight feet. Only the sloping roof of the house was visible, and so much in color did it assimilate with the surrounding rocks, pines, and snow that one unacquainted with the locality might have passed within a few feet of it without recognizing it as a human residence.

December, January, February, and March passed, and we heard nothing from the great world outside of and below us. We arose in the morning, cooked, ate our breakfast, got out fencing stuff till dinner time, going and returning from our work on snowshoes, and digging in the snow a pit large enough to work in. We ate our noon beans, returned to work, skated back to the house by half-past two to get in firewood for the night, and at half-past three or four the dark winter’s day was over, and we had fifteen hours to live through before getting the next day’s meagre allowance of light, for Eureka Valley is a narrow cleft in the mountains not over a quarter of a mile in width, and lined on either side by ridges 1,500 to 2,000 feet in height. The sun merely looked in at the eastern end about nine A.M., said “good day,” and was off again. We rolled in sufficient firewood every night to supply any civilized family for a week. Two-thirds of the caloric generated went up our chimney. It did not have far to go, either. The chimney was very wide and very low. At night a person unacquainted with the country might have tumbled into the house through that chimney. The winds of heaven did tumble into it frequently, scattering ashes and sometimes cinders throughout the domicil. Sometimes they thus assailed us while getting breakfast. We consumed ashes plentifully in our breakfasts; we drank small charcoal in our coffee; we found it in the bread. On cold mornings the flapjacks would cool on one side ere they were baked on the other. A warm meal was enjoyed only by placing the tin coffee-cup on the hot coals after drinking, and a similar process was necessary with the other viands. The “other viands” were generally bread, bacon, beans, and beef. It was peculiar beef. It was beef fattened on oak leaves and bark. Perhaps some of you California ancients may recollect the two consecutive rainless summers of “’63” and “’64,” when tens of thousands of cattle were driven from the totally dried-up plains into the mountains for feed.

During those years, at the Rock River ranch in Stanislaus County, where the plains meet the first hummocks of the Nevada foothills, I have seen that long, lean line of staggering, starving, dying kine stretching away as far as the eye could reach, and at every hundred yards lay a dead or dying animal. So they went for days, urged forward by the vaquero’s lash and their own agony for something to eat. Even when they gained the grass of the mountains it was only to find it all eaten off and the ground trodden to a dry, red, powdery dust by the hungry legions which had preceded them. It was a dreadful sight, for those poor brutes are as human in their sufferings through deprivation of food and water, when at night they lay down and moaned on the parched red earth, as men, women, and children would be. Well, the strongest survived and a portion reached the country about Eureka Valley. They came in, fed well during the summer, and one-third at least never went out again. The vaqueros could not keep them together in that rough country. They wandered about, climbed miles of mountain-sides, found little plateaus or valleys hidden away here or there, where they feasted on the rich “bunch grass.” They gained, by devious windings, high mountain-tops and little nooks quite hidden from their keepers’ eyes and quite past finding out. The herdsmen could not collect or drive them all out in the fall. They were left behind. All went well with them until the first snows of winter. Then instinctively those cattle sought to make their way out of the mountain fastnesses. Instinctively, too, they travelled westward toward the plains. And at the same time the first fall of snow was covered with tracks of deer, bear and Indians, all going down to the warmer regions. But the cattle were too late. Their progress was slow. More and more snow came and they were stopped. Some thus impeded trod down the snow into a corral, round which they tramped and tramped until they froze to death. Some of these cattle were thus embayed along the track of the Sonora and Mono road, and the white man making his way out was obliged to turn aside, for the wide, sharp-horned beast “held the fort” and threatened impalement to all that entered. Others, finding the south and sunny sides of the mountains, lived there until February, browsing on the oak leaves and bark. These we killed occasionally and buried the meat in the snow about our house. But it was beef quite juiceless, tasteless, tough and stringy. It was literally starvation beef for those who ate it, and the soup we made from it was in color and consistency a thin and almost transparent fluid.

Foxes in abundance were about us, and they stayed all winter. They were of all shades of color from red to grayish black. Now a story was current in the mountains that black-fox skins commanded very high prices, say from $80 to $100 each, and that “silvery-grays” would bring $25 or $30. So we bought strychnine, powdered bits of beef therewith, scattered them judiciously about the valley, and were rewarded with twenty or thirty dead foxes by spring. It required many hours’ labor to dress a skin properly, for the meat and fat must be carefully scraped away with a bit of glass, and if that happened to cut through the hide your skin is good for nothing. Certainly, at very moderate wages, each skin cost $7 or $8 in the labor required to trap, or poison it, if you please, and to cure and dress it afterward. When the gentle spring-time came and access was obtained to certain opulent San Francisco furriers, we were offered $1.50 for the choicest skins and 37-1/2 cents for the ordinary ones. Whereat the mountaineer got on his independence, refused to sell his hard-earned peltries at such beggarly prices, and kept them for his own use and adornment.

Then our dogs too would wander off, eat the strychnined fox bait, and become dead dogs. We had five when the winter commenced, which number in the spring was reduced to one—the most worthless of all, and the very one which we prayed might get poisoned. These dogs had plenty of oak-bark fattened beef at home. They were never stinted in this respect. What we could not eat—and the most of the beef we cooked we couldn’t eat—we gave freely to our dogs. But that wouldn’t content the dog. Like man, he had the hunting instinct in his nature. He wanted something new; something rich, rare, racy, with a spice of adventure in it; something he couldn’t get at home. He wanted to find a bit of frozen beef in some far-off romantic spot a mile or two from the house and this on finding he would devour, under the impression that stolen waters are sweet, and poisoned beef eaten in secret is pleasant. And then he would lay himself down by the frozen brookside and gently breathe his life away; or come staggering, shaking, trembling home, under the action of the drug, and thus dashing in our domestic circle scatter us to the four corners of the big log house, thinking him a mad dog. I lost thus my own dog, “Put,” named briefly after General Israel Putnam of the Revolution, a most intelligent animal of some hybrid species; a dog that while alone in the mountains I could leave to guard my camp, with a certainty that he would devour every eatable thing left within his reach ere my return, and meet me afterward wagging his tail and licking his chops, with that truthful, companionable expression in his eye, which said plainer than words: “I’ve done it again, but it was so good.” I shall never own another dog like “Put,” and I never want to. He would climb a tree as far as one could hang a bit of bacon upon it. He would in lonesome places keep me awake all night, growling and barking at imaginary beasts, and then fraternize with the coyotes and invite them home to breakfast. Near the Big Meadows, in Mono County, a disreputable female coyote came down from a mountain side and followed “Put,” one morning as I journeyed by on my borrowed steed, howling, yelping, and filling the surrounding air with a viragoish clamor. I presume it was another case of abandonment.

It was a winter of deathly quiet in Eureka Valley. Enveloped in snow, it lay in a shroud. Occasionally a tempest would find its way into the gorge and rampage around for a while, roaring through the pines and dislodging the frozen lumps of snow in their branches, which whirled down, bang! bang! bang! like so many rocks on our housetop. Sometimes we heard the rumble of rocks or snowslides tumbling from the mountains. But usually a dead, awful quiet prevailed. It wore on one worse than any uproar. No sound from day to day of rumble or rattle of cart or wagon, no church bells, no milkman’s bell, no gossip or chatter of inhabitants, no street for them to walk down or gossip in, none of the daily clamor of civilized life save what we made ourselves. It was a curious sensation to see one or both of my two companions at a distance from the house. They looked such insignificant specks in the whitened valley. And to meet the same man after four or five hours of absence and to know that he had nothing new to tell, that he hadn’t been anywhere in a certain sense, since without neighbors’ houses or neighboring villages there was “nowhere” to get that sort of bracing-up that one derives from any sort of companionship.

We were very cozy and comfortable during those long winter nights, seated in the red glare of our rudely-built, wide-mouthed fireplace. But sometimes, on a clear moonlight night, I have, for the sake of change, put on the snowshoes and glided a few hundred yards away from the house. In that intense and icy silence the beating of one’s heart could be distinctly heard, and the crunching of the snow under foot sounded harsh and disagreeable. All about the myriads of tall pines in the valley and on the mountain-side were pointing straight to the heavens, and the crags in black shadow above and behind them maintained also the same stern, unyielding silence. The faintest whisper of a breeze would have been a relief. If you gained an elevation it was but to see and feel more miles on miles of snow, pines, peaks, and silence. Very grand, but a trifle awful; it seemed as if everything must have stopped. In such isolation it was difficult to realize that miles away were crowded, babbling, bustling, rallying, roaring cities, full of men and women, all absorbed and intent on such miserably trifling things as boots and shoes, pantaloons and breakfasts, suppers, beds, corsets, and cucumbers. We were outside of creation. We had stepped off. We seemed in the dread, dreary outer regions of space, where the sun had not warmed things into life. It was an awful sort of church and a cold one. It might not make a sceptic devotional; it would certainly cause him to wonder where he came from or where he was going to. A half-hour of this cold, silent Sierran winter morning was quite enough of the sublime. It sent one back to the fireside with an increased thankfulness for such comforts as coffee, tobacco, and warm blankets.

CHAPTER XXVII.

LEAVING HIGH LIFE.

Near the end of March I resolved to leave Eureka Valley. Sonora, Tuolumne County, was fifty-six miles distant. That was my goal. Thirty miles of the way lay over deep snow, and was to be travelled over on snowshoes. The Norwegian snowshoe is a long wooden skate or runner, turned up at the forward end, greased on the lower side, with a strap in the middle to hold the foot. The Indian snowshoe is a flat network, fastened to a frame, in shape something like an enlarged tennis racket. It is like locomotion shod with a couple of market-baskets. The principal use of the pole, carried in the hands with the Norwegian shoe, is to serve as a brake and helm while going downhill. Some put it under the arm and others straddle it while making a descent. The arm position is the most dignified. The legs must be kept straddled at a ridiculous distance apart, and the first few days’ practice seems to split a person nearly in two. If, with the Indian snowshoe, you tumble down on a hillside it is almost impossible to get up again, and the unfortunate must remain in a recumbent position very much like that assumed by the heathen when they go down on all fours before their god, until some one unstraps his shoes. I preferred the Norwegian shoe. The first pair I ever used I made one evening about dusk. I was going toward Eureka Valley from Sonora, and had met the first fallen snow. From a mere crisp it grew deeper and deeper. I found a pile of “shakes”—long, rough shingles used in the mountains—and made my shoes from two of them. They were not more than a quarter the proper length. They kept me busy the rest of the night picking myself up. I think I must have fallen down some four hundred times. When we came to a down grade they went of their own accord and ran away with me. Sometimes but one shoe would slip off and glide down a bank, sometimes two, sometimes all of us went together, balance-pole included, and a bag I had lashed to my back would swing over my head and bang me in the face. It was a lively night’s entertainment for only one man in the heart of the wilderness. There was no monotony about it; nothing tedious or depressing. Just as fast as I recovered from one fall and started I got the next. I swore a good deal. There was not anything else to be said. One couldn’t argue with—things. It was the only recreation afforded by that phase of the trip. To have kept one’s temper and remained expletiveless would have been to burst. I avoided the superior and more expensive epithets as much as possible and confined myself to second-rate strong language. But when I started for my final trip out of the mountains, I had become a tolerable snowshoe amateur. A pack was lashed to my back. It held a blanket, some meat, bread, coffee, sugar, one fox skin and my worldly wardrobe. The morning light had not dawned when I started.

After a couple of miles’ advance my feet felt like lumps of ice. I examined my boots. The leather was frozen hard and stiff. The pain was too great for endurance. I made my way back to the house, found Hays and Welch at breakfast, removed my boots and stockings, and saw three waxy-looking toes, the right big one included. They were frozen. The heat of the fire produced additional twinges, like boring with red-hot knitting-needles. I wrapped some thicknesses of flannel around both boots, put them on again, and made another start. Eureka Valley soon disappeared behind me. I never saw it again, and probably never shall. But its picture is indelibly graven on my memory. We lived in the gem of the locality. All the landscape gardening skill in the world could produce nothing to equal it. A clear crystal stream ran by the door. The grove was a natural park, level as a floor, with pines all about, 150 feet high. We had a cascade and little miniature mountains of rock, with oak and pines springing from their crevices. No tame tree could be coaxed to grow as did these wild ones of the mountains. Some were independent of soil altogether, and flourished vigorously rooted in rocky fissures. We had the tiniest of meadows concealed behind these little mountains of our domain. Other grassy plateaus were perched sixty or eighty feet over our heads on the mountain. Nor was this all at once revealed. It required half a day to get over all the labyrinth of meadow, mount, and dale within half a mile of our house. All this was set in a gigantic frame—the dark green, thickly-wooded mountain-sides running up 2,000 feet above our heads, while to the eastward through the narrow gorge rose bare peaks twenty and thirty miles away, from whose tops, on sunshiny, breezy mornings, the snow could be seen driving in immense vapor-like clouds and tinged a roseate hue. People who visit the Yosemite have seen but one of the thousand pictures set in the Sierras.

It was my calculation to get to Hulse’s empty log-house, twelve miles distant, and camp there that night; but my progress was very slow. The road for miles ran along a steep mountain-side. It was buried many feet in snow. It was all a sheet of snow inclined at an angle most difficult to travel. In places acres of snow had slipped in a body from above, covering the ordinary level five or six feet in depth. These accumulations, while coming down, would have brushed a human being away with the facility with which a cart-load of sand dumped on your cellar-door would overwhelm a fly. I saw whole groves of pines whose trunks had been cut off by these slips ten or twelve feet from the roots. I felt small and insignificant, and speculated whether, after all, I was of any more importance than a fly or any other bug in the sum total of things generally. I thought of how much more importance a man was in a newspaper office than in the solitude of these mountains. Then the sun hurried toward the west and the cold blue and brassy tints of the winter’s eve merged together. The route along the “River Hill” side became steeper and steeper, the snow more hummocky from successive slides and the way more disorganized. It was very slippery. The snow had an ice finish on the surface like a hard coating of enamel. I took off the snowshoes and bore them and the balancing-pole on my shoulders, picking my way laboriously, step by step. Below me extended a very long, smooth, steep slide, like a white Mansard roof, several hundred feet in height. Finally I was obliged to stamp an indentation in the enamelled surface at every step, with my heels, to secure footing. The slippery and regularly graded descent below broke off occasionally into precipices of fifty or sixty feet in height. A person slipping here would, of course, accomplish portions of the descent on mere empty air. The trouble was not so much in getting through the air as in bringing up after going through. A fall never hurts anybody. It’s the sudden stoppage when you’re through. I expected momentarily to slip. The sun was rapidly going down and I felt a tendency to follow suit. At the point where I did slip the view was magnificent. Over full thirty miles of peak and pine the setting sun was shedding. I saw these peaks disappear like a flash. The grand curtain of Nature was not rung down at the call of night. It was I who fell before the curtain. I went down perhaps three hundred feet of the incline, generally in a sitting position. My long Norwegian snowshoes, jerked from my grasp, sailed down ahead of me, one diverging a little to the right, the other to the left, and the balancing pole scooting straight ahead. All of us went together with a beautiful uniformity and regularity of formation. The whole descent of 300 feet did not occupy more than six seconds, yet in that brief space of time my mind appeared to photograph on itself at least a dozen phases of the situation and as many past memories and future possibilities. I saw the stumps seeming to rush past me uphill, while I was really rushing past them downhill, and the reflection came to me that if I collided with even one of them the result would be worse for me than the stump. This did not comfort me. As each successive stump hurried up the mountain I said, by the unspoken operation of thought, “There goes another stump. A miss is as good as a mile. I may bring up in one piece yet, though, if I go off one of these precipices, I may make my last appearance on any stage in several pieces.” I remember, also, the sensation caused by the seat of my outside pantaloons tearing out through the excessive friction. I had on two pairs of pantaloons when I started. I thought, also, during all these risks and lightning-like escapades of my far-away Eastern home, of the girls I had left behind years before, of the dear old cool stone door-steps on the sycamore-embowered Main street of our village, on which the girls used to sit on warm summer and Sunday nights. Yes, in this inappreciable space of time and under such extraordinary conditions I thought of this, and even wondered if the other fellow sat there now with his arm hidden in the darkness of the hall, where they kept no lamp in summer for fear of drawing mosquitoes, trying to reach round that girl. The human mind is certainly a wonderful piece of business. I think the more it is shocked, agitated, and stirred up at certain intervals the faster it works and the more it takes cognizance of. The man who month in and month out moves backward and forward in a groove of habit is apt to think the same old thoughts over and over again in the same old way. The man who is beaten and banged about from pillar to post and Dan to Beersheba, who is continually tumbling into new events and situations, is liable to think a great many new things and think of them in many new ways. From a mundane consideration of time on this slide I soon reached my destination. Regarding my own mental sensations, the trip seemed one of many minutes. It was not the bottom of the hill where I stopped. The bottom of that hill terminated in the Stanislaus River, and was preceded by a precipice 200 feet high. Had I gone off that my journey downward would have been accomplished on a basis of three of the four elements known to the ancients, namely, earth, air, and water, and from all accounts, and my own impressions of my deserts at that period, it might have ultimately terminated in fire. The snow was soft where I brought up. I stopped. “It is good for me to be here,” I said; “here will I pass the night.” I possessed a little mountain wisdom, and foresaw the impossibility and inutility of making the ascent that night. I had belted to my waist a sharp hatchet. Around me were many dead pine limbs, projecting from the snow. The mountain-side exposure was southern. About the roots of a great pine on the little plateau where I had brought up the snow had partly melted away. I enlarged the cavity, using the hatchet as pick and shovel. I made my home for the night in this cavity. Kindling a fire with my dead branches, I chopped directly into it the thick dry bark of the pine. This supply of fuel alone was plentiful and lasted me the entire night. I disclaim here all intent of posing in print as a hero, for on many occasions I am disgusted by my mental and physical cowardice. But on this particular night, and it was a very long one, I felt no fear; I spent it very pleasantly. I cooked and ate, and drank my coffee with a relish, born of mountain air and exercise. My coffee-pot was another peripatetic appurtenance belted to my waist. Culinarily, I was for myself a travelling boarding-house, being guest, landlord and chambermaid all in one. The fire blazed cheerfully, and the fully-seasoned oak branches soon made a bed of solid live coals. My snow hole at the tree’s base slowly enlarged as it melted away. The hillside being inclined carried away all the moisture. After supper I sang. I felt that here I could sing in safety and without damage to other ears, because no one could hear me. Music hath charms to soothe, and all that, but it must not be savage music. Mine at that time was savage. It is now. If I feel a tendency to inflict any vocal misery on mankind, I go forth into solitude, and commit the outrage on inanimate defenseless objects which cannot strike back. After singing, I spoke all the pieces of my schoolboy days. I quoted Shakespeare, and really admired myself in Hamlet’s soliloquy. I never heard a more satisfactory rendition. This was another piece of consideration for my fellow-beings. Others, less sensitive to the ill they may do, rush on the stage and torture audiences. After the dramatic performance I rehearsed my political speech. I was even coming from the mountains with full intent to stand, or rather run, for the Legislature from Tuolumne County, which I did, greatly to the misery of the party. The speech was impromptu. So the long night wore away. The day became overcast. The winds occasionally stirred and moaned through the lofty pines above me. Then they sank to soft mournful whispering music and ceased. The snapping of the fire sounded sharply in the solitude. From the river far below came a confused, murmuring, babbling sound like the clamor of some vast, distant multitude, and this seemed varied at times by cries weird and louder. Lumps of frozen snow fell from treetops far and near, and as they struck branch after branch sounded like the plunging of horses in the drifts. I dozed fitfully and awoke with the red coals staring me in the face and the startling realization that the elements were preparing for a heavy storm.