The Silverado Squatters
by
Robert Louis Stevenson
Part 1 out of 2
Transcribed from the 1906 Chatto & Windus edition by David Price,
email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
The scene of this little book is on a high mountain. There are,
indeed, many higher; there are many of a nobler outline. It is no
place of pilgrimage for the summary globe-trotter; but to one who
lives upon its sides, Mount Saint Helena soon becomes a centre of
interest. It is the Mont Blanc of one section of the Californian
Coast Range, none of its near neighbours rising to one-half its
altitude. It looks down on much green, intricate country. It
feeds in the spring-time many splashing brooks. From its summit
you must have an excellent lesson of geography: seeing, to the
south, San Francisco Bay, with Tamalpais on the one hand and Monte
Diablo on the other; to the west and thirty miles away, the open
ocean; eastward, across the corn-lands and thick tule swamps of
Sacramento Valley, to where the Central Pacific railroad begins to
climb the sides of the Sierras; and northward, for what I know, the
white head of Shasta looking down on Oregon. Three counties, Napa
County, Lake County, and Sonoma County, march across its cliffy
shoulders. Its naked peak stands nearly four thousand five hundred
feet above the sea; its sides are fringed with forest; and the
soil, where it is bare, glows warm with cinnabar.
Life in its shadow goes rustically forward. Bucks, and bears, and
rattle-snakes, and former mining operations, are the staple of
men's talk. Agriculture has only begun to mount above the valley.
And though in a few years from now the whole district may be
smiling with farms, passing trains shaking the mountain to the
heart, many-windowed hotels lighting up the night like factories,
and a prosperous city occupying the site of sleepy Calistoga; yet
in the mean time, around the foot of that mountain the silence of
nature reigns in a great measure unbroken, and the people of hill
and valley go sauntering about their business as in the days before
the flood.
To reach Mount Saint Helena from San Francisco, the traveller has
twice to cross the bay: once by the busy Oakland Ferry, and again,
after an hour or so of the railway, from Vallejo junction to
Vallejo. Thence he takes rail once more to mount the long green
strath of Napa Valley.
In all the contractions and expansions of that inland sea, the Bay
of San Francisco, there can be few drearier scenes than the Vallejo
Ferry. Bald shores and a low, bald islet inclose the sea; through
the narrows the tide bubbles, muddy like a river. When we made the
passage (bound, although yet we knew it not, for Silverado) the
steamer jumped, and the black buoys were dancing in the jabble; the
ocean breeze blew killing chill; and, although the upper sky was
still unflecked with vapour, the sea fogs were pouring in from
seaward, over the hilltops of Marin county, in one great,
shapeless, silver cloud.
South Vallejo is typical of many Californian towns. It was a
blunder; the site has proved untenable; and, although it is still
such a young place by the scale of Europe, it has already begun to
be deserted for its neighbour and namesake, North Vallejo. A long
pier, a number of drinking saloons, a hotel of a great size, marshy
pools where the frogs keep up their croaking, and even at high noon
the entire absence of any human face or voice--these are the marks
of South Vallejo. Yet there was a tall building beside the pier,
labelled the Star Flour Mills; and sea-going, full-rigged ships lay
close along shore, waiting for their cargo. Soon these would be
plunging round the Horn, soon the flour from the Star Flour Mills
would be landed on the wharves of Liverpool. For that, too, is one
of England's outposts; thither, to this gaunt mill, across the
Atlantic and Pacific deeps and round about the icy Horn, this crowd
of great, three-masted, deep-sea ships come, bringing nothing, and
return with bread.
The Frisby House, for that was the name of the hotel, was a place
of fallen fortunes, like the town. It was now given up to
labourers, and partly ruinous. At dinner there was the ordinary
display of what is called in the west a TWO-BIT HOUSE: the
tablecloth checked red and white, the plague of flies, the wire
hencoops over the dishes, the great variety and invariable vileness
of the food and the rough coatless men devoting it in silence. In
our bedroom, the stove would not burn, though it would smoke; and
while one window would not open, the other would not shut. There
was a view on a bit of empty road, a few dark houses, a donkey
wandering with its shadow on a slope, and a blink of sea, with a
tall ship lying anchored in the moonlight. All about that dreary
inn frogs sang their ungainly chorus.
Early the next morning we mounted the hill along a wooden footway,
bridging one marish spot after another. Here and there, as we
ascended, we passed a house embowered in white roses. More of the
bay became apparent, and soon the blue peak of Tamalpais rose above
the green level of the island opposite. It told us we were still
but a little way from the city of the Golden Gates, already, at
that hour, beginning to awake among the sand-hills. It called to
us over the waters as with the voice of a bird. Its stately head,
blue as a sapphire on the paler azure of the sky, spoke to us of
wider outlooks and the bright Pacific. For Tamalpais stands
sentry, like a lighthouse, over the Golden Gates, between the bay
and the open ocean, and looks down indifferently on both. Even as
we saw and hailed it from Vallejo, seamen, far out at sea, were
scanning it with shaded eyes; and, as if to answer to the thought,
one of the great ships below began silently to clothe herself with
white sails, homeward bound for England.
For some way beyond Vallejo the railway led us through bald green
pastures. On the west the rough highlands of Marin shut off the
ocean; in the midst, in long, straggling, gleaming arms, the bay
died out among the grass; there were few trees and few enclosures;
the sun shone wide over open uplands, the displumed hills stood
clear against the sky. But by-and-by these hills began to draw
nearer on either hand, and first thicket and then wood began to
clothe their sides; and soon we were away from all signs of the
sea's neighbourhood, mounting an inland, irrigated valley. A great
variety of oaks stood, now severally, now in a becoming grove,
among the fields and vineyards. The towns were compact, in about
equal proportions, of bright, new wooden houses and great and
growing forest trees; and the chapel bell on the engine sounded
most festally that sunny Sunday, as we drew up at one green town
after another, with the townsfolk trooping in their Sunday's best
to see the strangers, with the sun sparkling on the clean houses,
and great domes of foliage humming overhead in the breeze.
This pleasant Napa Valley is, at its north end, blockaded by our
mountain. There, at Calistoga, the railroad ceases, and the
traveller who intends faring farther, to the Geysers or to the
springs in Lake County, must cross the spurs of the mountain by
stage. Thus, Mount Saint Helena is not only a summit, but a
frontier; and, up to the time of writing, it has stayed the
progress of the iron horse.
PART I--IN THE VALLEY
CHAPTER I--CALISTOGA
It is difficult for a European to imagine Calistoga, the whole
place is so new, and of such an accidental pattern; the very name,
I hear, was invented at a supper-party by the man who found the
springs.
The railroad and the highway come up the valley about parallel to
one another. The street of Calistoga joins the perpendicular to
both--a wide street, with bright, clean, low houses, here and there
a verandah over the sidewalk, here and there a horse-post, here and
there lounging townsfolk. Other streets are marked out, and most
likely named; for these towns in the New World begin with a firm
resolve to grow larger, Washington and Broadway, and then First and
Second, and so forth, being boldly plotted out as soon as the
community indulges in a plan. But, in the meanwhile, all the life
and most of the houses of Calistoga are concentrated upon that
street between the railway station and the road. I never heard it
called by any name, but I will hazard a guess that it is either
Washington or Broadway. Here are the blacksmith's, the chemist's,
the general merchant's, and Kong Sam Kee, the Chinese laundryman's;
here, probably, is the office of the local paper (for the place has
a paper--they all have papers); and here certainly is one of the
hotels, Cheeseborough's, whence the daring Foss, a man dear to
legend, starts his horses for the Geysers.
It must be remembered that we are here in a land of stage-drivers
and highwaymen: a land, in that sense, like England a hundred
years ago. The highway robber--road-agent, he is quaintly called--
is still busy in these parts. The fame of Vasquez is still young.
Only a few years go, the Lakeport stage was robbed a mile or two
from Calistoga. In 1879, the dentist of Mendocino City, fifty
miles away upon the coast, suddenly threw off the garments of his
trade, like Grindoff, in The Miller and his Men, and flamed forth
in his second dress as a captain of banditti. A great robbery was
followed by a long chase, a chase of days if not of weeks, among
the intricate hill-country; and the chase was followed by much
desultory fighting, in which several--and the dentist, I believe,
amongst the number--bit the dust. The grass was springing for the
first time, nourished upon their blood, when I arrived in
Calistoga. I am reminded of another highwayman of that same year.
"He had been unwell," so ran his humorous defence, "and the doctor
told him to take something, so he took the express-box."
The cultus of the stage-coachman always flourishes highest where
there are thieves on the road, and where the guard travels armed,
and the stage is not only a link between country and city, and the
vehicle of news, but has a faint warfaring aroma, like a man who
should be brother to a soldier. California boasts her famous
stage-drivers, and among the famous Foss is not forgotten. Along
the unfenced, abominable mountain roads, he launches his team with
small regard to human life or the doctrine of probabilities.
Flinching travellers, who behold themselves coasting eternity at
every corner, look with natural admiration at their driver's huge,
impassive, fleshy countenance. He has the very face for the driver
in Sam Weller's anecdote, who upset the election party at the
required point. Wonderful tales are current of his readiness and
skill. One in particular, of how one of his horses fell at a
ticklish passage of the road, and how Foss let slip the reins, and,
driving over the fallen animal, arrived at the next stage with only
three. This I relate as I heard it, without guarantee.
I only saw Foss once, though, strange as it may sound, I have twice
talked with him. He lives out of Calistoga, at a ranche called
Fossville. One evening, after he was long gone home, I dropped
into Cheeseborough's, and was asked if I should like to speak with
Mr. Foss. Supposing that the interview was impossible, and that I
was merely called upon to subscribe the general sentiment, I boldly
answered "Yes." Next moment, I had one instrument at my ear,
another at my mouth and found myself, with nothing in the world to
say, conversing with a man several miles off among desolate hills.
Foss rapidly and somewhat plaintively brought the conversation to
an end; and he returned to his night's grog at Fossville, while I
strolled forth again on Calistoga high street. But it was an odd
thing that here, on what we are accustomed to consider the very
skirts of civilization, I should have used the telephone for the
first time in my civilized career. So it goes in these young
countries; telephones, and telegraphs, and newspapers, and
advertisements running far ahead among the Indians and the grizzly
bears.
Alone, on the other side of the railway, stands the Springs Hotel,
with its attendant cottages. The floor of the valley is extremely
level to the very roots of the hills; only here and there a
hillock, crowned with pines, rises like the barrow of some
chieftain famed in war; and right against one of these hillocks is
the Springs Hotel--is or was; for since I was there the place has
been destroyed by fire, and has risen again from its ashes. A lawn
runs about the house, and the lawn is in its turn surrounded by a
system of little five-roomed cottages, each with a verandah and a
weedy palm before the door. Some of the cottages are let to
residents, and these are wreathed in flowers. The rest are
occupied by ordinary visitors to the Hotel; and a very pleasant way
this is, by which you have a little country cottage of your own,
without domestic burthens, and by the day or week.
The whole neighbourhood of Mount Saint Helena is full of sulphur
and of boiling springs. The Geysers are famous; they were the
great health resort of the Indians before the coming of the whites.
Lake County is dotted with spas; Hot Springs and White Sulphur
Springs are the names of two stations on the Napa Valley railroad;
and Calistoga itself seems to repose on a mere film above a
boiling, subterranean lake. At one end of the hotel enclosure are
the springs from which it takes its name, hot enough to scald a
child seriously while I was there. At the other end, the tenant of
a cottage sank a well, and there also the water came up boiling.
It keeps this end of the valley as warm as a toast. I have gone
across to the hotel a little after five in the morning, when a sea
fog from the Pacific was hanging thick and gray, and dark and dirty
overhead, and found the thermometer had been up before me, and had
already climbed among the nineties; and in the stress of the day it
was sometimes too hot to move about.
But in spite of this heat from above and below, doing one on both
sides, Calistoga was a pleasant place to dwell in; beautifully
green, for it was then that favoured moment in the Californian
year, when the rains are over and the dusty summer has not yet set
in; often visited by fresh airs, now from the mountain, now across
Sonoma from the sea; very quiet, very idle, very silent but for the
breezes and the cattle bells afield. And there was something
satisfactory in the sight of that great mountain that enclosed us
to the north: whether it stood, robed in sunshine, quaking to its
topmost pinnacle with the heat and brightness of the day; or
whether it set itself to weaving vapours, wisp after wisp growing,
trembling, fleeting, and fading in the blue.
The tangled, woody, and almost trackless foot-hills that enclose
the valley, shutting it off from Sonoma on the west, and from Yolo
on the east--rough as they were in outline, dug out by winter
streams, crowned by cliffy bluffs and nodding pine trees--wore
dwarfed into satellites by the bulk and bearing of Mount Saint
Helena. She over-towered them by two-thirds of her own stature.
She excelled them by the boldness of her profile. Her great bald
summit, clear of trees and pasture, a cairn of quartz and cinnabar,
rejected kinship with the dark and shaggy wilderness of lesser
hill-tops.
CHAPTER II--THE PETRIFIED FOREST
We drove off from the Springs Hotel about three in the afternoon.
The sun warmed me to the heart. A broad, cool wind streamed
pauselessly down the valley, laden with perfume. Up at the top
stood Mount Saint Helena, a bulk of mountain, bare atop, with tree-
fringed spurs, and radiating warmth. Once we saw it framed in a
grove of tall and exquisitely graceful white oaks, in line and
colour a finished composition. We passed a cow stretched by the
roadside, her bell slowly beating time to the movement of her
ruminating jaws, her big red face crawled over by half a dozen
flies, a monument of content.
A little farther, and we struck to the left up a mountain road, and
for two hours threaded one valley after another, green, tangled,
full of noble timber, giving us every now and again a sight of
Mount Saint Helena and the blue hilly distance, and crossed by many
streams, through which we splashed to the carriage-step. To the
right or the left, there was scarce any trace of man but the road
we followed; I think we passed but one ranchero's house in the
whole distance, and that was closed and smokeless. But we had the
society of these bright streams--dazzlingly clear, as is their
wont, splashing from the wheels in diamonds, and striking a lively
coolness through the sunshine. And what with the innumerable
variety of greens, the masses of foliage tossing in the breeze, the
glimpses of distance, the descents into seemingly impenetrable
thickets, the continual dodging of the road which made haste to
plunge again into the covert, we had a fine sense of woods, and
spring-time, and the open air.
Our driver gave me a lecture by the way on Californian trees--a
thing I was much in need of, having fallen among painters who know
the name of nothing, and Mexicans who know the name of nothing in
English. He taught me the madrona, the manzanita, the buck-eye,
the maple; he showed me the crested mountain quail; he showed me
where some young redwoods were already spiring heavenwards from the
ruins of the old; for in this district all had already perished:
redwoods and redskins, the two noblest indigenous living things,
alike condemned.
At length, in a lonely dell, we came on a huge wooden gate with a
sign upon it like an inn. "The Petrified Forest. Proprietor: C.
Evans," ran the legend. Within, on a knoll of sward, was the house
of the proprietor, and another smaller house hard by to serve as a
museum, where photographs and petrifactions were retailed. It was
a pure little isle of touristry among these solitary hills.
The proprietor was a brave old white-faced Swede. He had wandered
this way, Heaven knows how, and taken up his acres--I forget how
many years ago--all alone, bent double with sciatica, and with six
bits in his pocket and an axe upon his shoulder. Long, useless
years of seafaring had thus discharged him at the end, penniless
and sick. Without doubt he had tried his luck at the diggings, and
got no good from that; without doubt he had loved the bottle, and
lived the life of Jack ashore. But at the end of these adventures,
here he came; and, the place hitting his fancy, down he sat to make
a new life of it, far from crimps and the salt sea. And the very
sight of his ranche had done him good. It was "the handsomest spot
in the Californy mountains." "Isn't it handsome, now?" he said.
Every penny he makes goes into that ranche to make it handsomer.
Then the climate, with the sea-breeze every afternoon in the
hottest summer weather, had gradually cured the sciatica; and his
sister and niece were now domesticated with him for company--or,
rather, the niece came only once in the two days, teaching music
the meanwhile in the valley. And then, for a last piece of luck,
"the handsomest spot in the Californy mountains" had produced a
petrified forest, which Mr. Evans now shows at the modest figure of
half a dollar a head, or two-thirds of his capital when he first
came there with an axe and a sciatica.
This tardy favourite of fortune--hobbling a little, I think, as if
in memory of the sciatica, but with not a trace that I can remember
of the sea--thoroughly ruralized from head to foot, proceeded to
escort us up the hill behind his house.
"Who first found the forest?" asked my wife.
"The first? I was that man," said he. "I was cleaning up the
pasture for my beasts, when I found THIS"--kicking a great redwood
seven feet in diameter, that lay there on its side, hollow heart,
clinging lumps of bark, all changed into gray stone, with veins of
quartz between what had been the layers of the wood.
"Were you surprised?"
"Surprised? No! What would I be surprised about? What did I know
about petrifactions--following the sea? Petrifaction! There was
no such word in my language! I knew about putrifaction, though! I
thought it was a stone; so would you, if you was cleaning up
pasture."
And now he had a theory of his own, which I did not quite grasp,
except that the trees had not "grewed" there. But he mentioned,
with evident pride, that he differed from all the scientific people
who had visited the spot; and he flung about such words as "tufa"
and "scilica" with careless freedom.
When I mentioned I was from Scotland, "My old country," he said;
"my old country"--with a smiling look and a tone of real affection
in his voice. I was mightily surprised, for he was obviously
Scandinavian, and begged him to explain. It seemed he had learned
his English and done nearly all his sailing in Scotch ships. "Out
of Glasgow," said he, "or Greenock; but that's all the same--they
all hail from Glasgow." And he was so pleased with me for being a
Scotsman, and his adopted compatriot, that he made me a present of
a very beautiful piece of petrifaction--I believe the most
beautiful and portable he had.
Here was a man, at least, who was a Swede, a Scot, and an American,
acknowledging some kind allegiance to three lands. Mr. Wallace's
Scoto-Circassian will not fail to come before the reader. I have
myself met and spoken with a Fifeshire German, whose combination of
abominable accents struck me dumb. But, indeed, I think we all
belong to many countries. And perhaps this habit of much travel,
and the engendering of scattered friendships, may prepare the
euthanasia of ancient nations.
And the forest itself? Well, on a tangled, briery hillside--for
the pasture would bear a little further cleaning up, to my eyes--
there lie scattered thickly various lengths of petrified trunk,
such as the one already mentioned. It is very curious, of course,
and ancient enough, if that were all. Doubtless, the heart of the
geologist beats quicker at the sight; but, for my part, I was
mightily unmoved. Sight-seeing is the art of disappointment.
"There's nothing under heaven so blue,
That's fairly worth the travelling to."
But, fortunately, Heaven rewards us with many agreeable prospects
and adventures by the way; and sometimes, when we go out to see a
petrified forest, prepares a far more delightful curiosity, in the
form of Mr. Evans, whom may all prosperity attend throughout a long
and green old age.
CHAPTER III--NAPA WINE
I was interested in Californian wine. Indeed, I am interested in
all wines, and have been all my life, from the raisin wine that a
schoolfellow kept secreted in his play-box up to my last discovery,
those notable Valtellines, that once shone upon the board of
Caesar.
Some of us, kind old Pagans, watch with dread the shadows falling
on the age: how the unconquerable worm invades the sunny terraces
of France, and Bordeaux is no more, and the Rhone a mere Arabia
Petraea. Chateau Neuf is dead, and I have never tasted it;
Hermitage--a hermitage indeed from all life's sorrows--lies
expiring by the river. And in the place of these imperial elixirs,
beautiful to every sense, gem-hued, flower-scented, dream-
compellers:- behold upon the quays at Cette the chemicals arrayed;
behold the analyst at Marseilles, raising hands in obsecration,
attesting god Lyoeus, and the vats staved in, and the dishonest
wines poured forth among the sea. It is not Pan only; Bacchus,
too, is dead.
If wine is to withdraw its most poetic countenance, the sun of the
white dinner-cloth, a deity to be invoked by two or three, all
fervent, hushing their talk, degusting tenderly, and storing
reminiscences--for a bottle of good wine, like a good act, shines
ever in the retrospect--if wine is to desert us, go thy ways, old
Jack! Now we begin to have compunctions, and look back at the
brave bottles squandered upon dinner-parties, where the guests
drank grossly, discussing politics the while, and even the
schoolboy "took his whack," like liquorice water. And at the same
time, we look timidly forward, with a spark of hope, to where the
new lands, already weary of producing gold, begin to green with
vineyards. A nice point in human history falls to be decided by
Californian and Australian wines.
Wine in California is still in the experimental stage; and when you
taste a vintage, grave economical questions are involved. The
beginning of vine-planting is like the beginning of mining for the
precious metals: the wine-grower also "Prospects." One corner of
land after another is tried with one kind of grape after another.
This is a failure; that is better; a third best. So, bit by bit,
they grope about for their Clos Vougeot and Lafite. Those lodes
and pockets of earth, more precious than the precious ores, that
yield inimitable fragrance and soft fire; those virtuous Bonanzas,
where the soil has sublimated under sun and stars to something
finer, and the wine is bottled poetry: these still lie
undiscovered; chaparral conceals, thicket embowers them; the miner
chips the rock and wanders farther, and the grizzly muses
undisturbed. But there they bide their hour, awaiting their
Columbus; and nature nurses and prepares them. The smack of
Californian earth shall linger on the palate of your grandson.
Meanwhile the wine is merely a good wine; the best that I have
tasted better than a Beaujolais, and not unlike. But the trade is
poor; it lives from hand to mouth, putting its all into
experiments, and forced to sell its vintages. To find one properly
matured, and bearing its own name, is to be fortune's favourite.
Bearing its own name, I say, and dwell upon the innuendo.
"You want to know why California wine is not drunk in the States?"
a San Francisco wine merchant said to me, after he had shown me
through his premises. "Well, here's the reason."
And opening a large cupboard, fitted with many little drawers, he
proceeded to shower me all over with a great variety of gorgeously
tinted labels, blue, red, or yellow, stamped with crown or coronet,
and hailing from such a profusion of clos and chateaux, that a
single department could scarce have furnished forth the names. But
it was strange that all looked unfamiliar.
"Chateau X-?" said I. "I never heard of that."
"I dare say not," said he. "I had been reading one of X-'s
novels."
They were all castles in Spain! But that sure enough is the reason
why California wine is not drunk in the States.
Napa valley has been long a seat of the wine-growing industry. It
did not here begin, as it does too often, in the low valley lands
along the river, but took at once to the rough foot-hills, where
alone it can expect to prosper. A basking inclination, and stones,
to be a reservoir of the day's heat, seem necessary to the soil for
wine; the grossness of the earth must be evaporated, its marrow
daily melted and refined for ages; until at length these clods that
break below our footing, and to the eye appear but common earth,
are truly and to the perceiving mind, a masterpiece of nature. The
dust of Richebourg, which the wind carries away, what an apotheosis
of the dust! Not man himself can seem a stranger child of that
brown, friable powder, than the blood and sun in that old flask
behind the faggots.
A Californian vineyard, one of man's outposts in the wilderness,
has features of its own. There is nothing here to remind you of
the Rhine or Rhone, of the low cote d'or, or the infamous and
scabby deserts of Champagne; but all is green, solitary, covert.
We visited two of them, Mr. Schram's and Mr. M'Eckron's, sharing
the same glen.
Some way down the valley below Calistoga, we turned sharply to the
south and plunged into the thick of the wood. A rude trail rapidly
mounting; a little stream tinkling by on the one hand, big enough
perhaps after the rains, but already yielding up its life; overhead
and on all sides a bower of green and tangled thicket, still
fragrant and still flower-bespangled by the early season, where
thimble-berry played the part of our English hawthorn, and the
buck-eyes were putting forth their twisted horns of blossom:
through all this, we struggled toughly upwards, canted to and fro
by the roughness of the trail, and continually switched across the
face by sprays of leaf or blossom. The last is no great
inconvenience at home; but here in California it is a matter of
some moment. For in all woods and by every wayside there prospers
an abominable shrub or weed, called poison-oak, whose very
neighbourhood is venomous to some, and whose actual touch is
avoided by the most impervious.
The two houses, with their vineyards, stood each in a green niche
of its own in this steep and narrow forest dell. Though they were
so near, there was already a good difference in level; and Mr.
M'Eckron's head must be a long way under the feet of Mr. Schram.
No more had been cleared than was necessary for cultivation; close
around each oasis ran the tangled wood; the glen enfolds them;
there they lie basking in sun and silence, concealed from all but
the clouds and the mountain birds.
Mr. M'Eckron's is a bachelor establishment; a little bit of a
wooden house, a small cellar hard by in the hillside, and a patch
of vines planted and tended single-handed by himself. He had but
recently began; his vines were young, his business young also; but
I thought he had the look of the man who succeeds. He hailed from
Greenock: he remembered his father putting him inside Mons Meg,
and that touched me home; and we exchanged a word or two of Scotch,
which pleased me more than you would fancy.
Mr. Schram's, on the other hand, is the oldest vineyard in the
valley, eighteen years old, I think; yet he began a penniless
barber, and even after he had broken ground up here with his black
malvoisies, continued for long to tramp the valley with his razor.
Now, his place is the picture of prosperity: stuffed birds in the
verandah, cellars far dug into the hillside, and resting on pillars
like a bandit's cave:- all trimness, varnish, flowers, and
sunshine, among the tangled wildwood. Stout, smiling Mrs. Schram,
who has been to Europe and apparently all about the States for
pleasure, entertained Fanny in the verandah, while I was tasting
wines in the cellar. To Mr. Schram this was a solemn office; his
serious gusto warmed my heart; prosperity had not yet wholly
banished a certain neophite and girlish trepidation, and he
followed every sip and read my face with proud anxiety. I tasted
all. I tasted every variety and shade of Schramberger, red and
white Schramberger, Burgundy Schramberger, Schramberger Hock,
Schramberger Golden Chasselas, the latter with a notable bouquet,
and I fear to think how many more. Much of it goes to London--
most, I think; and Mr. Schram has a great notion of the English
taste.
In this wild spot, I did not feel the sacredness of ancient
cultivation. It was still raw, it was no Marathon, and no
Johannisberg; yet the stirring sunlight, and the growing vines, and
the vats and bottles in the cavern, made a pleasant music for the
mind. Here, also, earth's cream was being skimmed and garnered;
and the London customers can taste, such as it is, the tang of the
earth in this green valley. So local, so quintessential is a wine,
that it seems the very birds in the verandah might communicate a
flavour, and that romantic cellar influence the bottle next to be
uncorked in Pimlico, and the smile of jolly Mr. Schram might mantle
in the glass.
But these are but experiments. All things in this new land are
moving farther on: the wine-vats and the miner's blasting tools
but picket for a night, like Bedouin pavillions; and to-morrow, to
fresh woods! This stir of change and these perpetual echoes of the
moving footfall, haunt the land. Men move eternally, still chasing
Fortune; and, fortune found, still wander. As we drove back to
Calistoga, the road lay empty of mere passengers, but its green
side was dotted with the camps of travelling families: one
cumbered with a great waggonful of household stuff, settlers going
to occupy a ranche they had taken up in Mendocino, or perhaps
Tehama County; another, a party in dust coats, men and women, whom
we found camped in a grove on the roadside, all on pleasure bent,
with a Chinaman to cook for them, and who waved their hands to us
as we drove by.
CHAPTER IV--THE SCOT ABROAD
A few pages back, I wrote that a man belonged, in these days, to a
variety of countries; but the old land is still the true love, the
others are but pleasant infidelities. Scotland is indefinable; it
has no unity except upon the map. Two languages, many dialects,
innumerable forms of piety, and countless local patriotisms and
prejudices, part us among ourselves more widely than the extreme
east and west of that great continent of America. When I am at
home, I feel a man from Glasgow to be something like a rival, a man
from Barra to be more than half a foreigner. Yet let us meet in
some far country, and, whether we hail from the braes of Manor or
the braes of Mar, some ready-made affection joins us on the
instant. It is not race. Look at us. One is Norse, one Celtic,
and another Saxon. It is not community of tongue. We have it not
among ourselves; and we have it almost to perfection, with English,
or Irish, or American. It is no tie of faith, for we detest each
other's errors. And yet somewhere, deep down in the heart of each
one of us, something yearns for the old land, and the old kindly
people.
Of all mysteries of the human heart, this is perhaps the most
inscrutable. There is no special loveliness in that gray country,
with its rainy, sea-beat archipelago; its fields of dark mountains;
its unsightly places, black with coal; its treeless, sour,
unfriendly looking corn-lands; its quaint, gray, castled city,
where the bells clash of a Sunday, and the wind squalls, and the
salt showers fly and beat. I do not even know if I desire to live
there; but let me hear, in some far land, a kindred voice sing out,
"Oh, why left I my hame?" and it seems at once as if no beauty
under the kind heavens, and no society of the wise and good, can
repay me for my absence from my country. And though I think I
would rather die elsewhere, yet in my heart of hearts I long to be
buried among good Scots clods. I will say it fairly, it grows on
me with every year: there are no stars so lovely as Edinburgh
street-lamps. When I forget thee, auld Reekie, may my right hand
forget its cunning!
The happiest lot on earth is to be born a Scotchman. You must pay
for it in many ways, as for all other advantages on earth. You
have to learn the paraphrases and the shorter catechism; you
generally take to drink; your youth, as far as I can find out, is a
time of louder war against society, of more outcry and tears and
turmoil, than if you had been born, for instance, in England. But
somehow life is warmer and closer; the hearth burns more redly; the
lights of home shine softer on the rainy street; the very names,
endeared in verse and music, cling nearer round our hearts. An
Englishman may meet an Englishman to-morrow, upon Chimborazo, and
neither of them care; but when the Scotch wine-grower told me of
Mons Meg, it was like magic.
"From the dim shieling on the misty island
Mountains divide us, and a world of seas;
Yet still our hearts are true, our hearts are Highland,
And we, in dreams, behold the Hebrides."
And, Highland and Lowland, all our hearts are Scotch.
Only a few days after I had seen M'Eckron, a message reached me in
my cottage. It was a Scotchman who had come down a long way from
the hills to market. He had heard there was a countryman in
Calistoga, and came round to the hotel to see him. We said a few
words to each other; we had not much to say--should never have seen
each other had we stayed at home, separated alike in space and in
society; and then we shook hands, and he went his way again to his
ranche among the hills, and that was all.
Another Scotchman there was, a resident, who for the more love of
the common country, douce, serious, religious man, drove me all
about the valley, and took as much interest in me as if I had been
his son: more, perhaps; for the son has faults too keenly felt,
while the abstract countryman is perfect--like a whiff of peats.
And there was yet another. Upon him I came suddenly, as he was
calmly entering my cottage, his mind quite evidently bent on
plunder: a man of about fifty, filthy, ragged, roguish, with a
chimney-pot hat and a tail coat, and a pursing of his mouth that
might have been envied by an elder of the kirk. He had just such a
face as I have seen a dozen times behind the plate.
"Hullo, sir!" I cried. "Where are you going?"
He turned round without a quiver.
"You're a Scotchman, sir?" he said gravely. "So am I; I come from
Aberdeen. This is my card," presenting me with a piece of
pasteboard which he had raked out of some gutter in the period of
the rains. "I was just examining this palm," he continued,
indicating the misbegotten plant before our door, "which is the
largest spAcimen I have yet observed in Califoarnia."
There were four or five larger within sight. But where was the use
of argument? He produced a tape-line, made me help him to measure
the tree at the level of the ground, and entered the figures in a
large and filthy pocket-book, all with the gravity of Solomon. He
then thanked me profusely, remarking that such little services were
due between countrymen; shook hands with me, "for add lang syne,"
as he said; and took himself solemnly away, radiating dirt and
humbug as he went.
A month or two after this encounter of mine, there came a Scot to
Sacramento--perhaps from Aberdeen. Anyway, there never was any one
more Scotch in this wide world. He could sing and dance, and
drink, I presume; and he played the pipes with vigour and success.
All the Scotch in Sacramento became infatuated with him, and spent
their spare time and money, driving him about in an open cab,
between drinks, while he blew himself scarlet at the pipes. This
is a very sad story. After he had borrowed money from every one,
he and his pipes suddenly disappeared from Sacramento, and when I
last heard, the police were looking for him.
I cannot say how this story amused me, when I felt myself so
thoroughly ripe on both sides to be duped in the same way.
It is at least a curious thing, to conclude, that the races which
wander widest, Jews and Scotch, should be the most clannish in the
world. But perhaps these two are cause and effect: "For ye were
strangers in the land of Egypt."
PART II--WITH THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL
CHAPTER I.--TO INTRODUCE MR. KELMAR
One thing in this new country very particularly strikes a stranger,
and that is the number of antiquities. Already there have been
many cycles of population succeeding each other, and passing away
and leaving behind them relics. These, standing on into changed
times, strike the imagination as forcibly as any pyramid or feudal
tower. The towns, like the vineyards, are experimentally founded:
they grow great and prosper by passing occasions; and when the lode
comes to an end, and the miners move elsewhere, the town remains
behind them, like Palmyra in the desert. I suppose there are, in
no country in the world, so many deserted towns as here in
California.
The whole neighbourhood of Mount Saint Helena, now so quiet and
sylvan, was once alive with mining camps and villages. Here there
would be two thousand souls under canvas; there one thousand or
fifteen hundred ensconced, as if for ever, in a town of comfortable
houses. But the luck had failed, the mines petered out; and the
army of miners had departed, and left this quarter of the world to
the rattlesnakes and deer and grizzlies, and to the slower but
steadier advance of husbandry.
It was with an eye on one of these deserted places, Pine Flat, on
the Geysers road, that we had come first to Calistoga. There is
something singularly enticing in the idea of going, rent-free, into
a ready-made house. And to the British merchant, sitting at home
at ease, it may appear that, with such a roof over your head and a
spring of clear water hard by, the whole problem of the squatter's
existence would be solved. Food, however, has yet to be
considered, I will go as far as most people on tinned meats; some
of the brightest moments of my life were passed over tinned mulli-
gatawney in the cabin of a sixteen-ton schooner, storm-stayed in
Portree Bay; but after suitable experiments, I pronounce
authoritatively that man cannot live by tins alone. Fresh meat
must be had on an occasion. It is true that the great Foss,
driving by along the Geysers road, wooden-faced, but glorified with
legend, might have been induced to bring us meat, but the great
Foss could hardly bring us milk. To take a cow would have involved
taking a field of grass and a milkmaid; after which it would have
been hardly worth while to pause, and we might have added to our
colony a flock of sheep and an experienced butcher.
It is really very disheartening how we depend on other people in
this life. "Mihi est propositum," as you may see by the motto, "id
quod regibus;" and behold it cannot be carried out, unless I find a
neighbour rolling in cattle.
Now, my principal adviser in this matter was one whom I will call
Kelmar. That was not what he called himself, but as soon as I set
eyes on him, I knew it was or ought to be his name; I am sure it
will be his name among the angels. Kelmar was the store-keeper, a
Russian Jew, good-natured, in a very thriving way of business, and,
on equal terms, one of the most serviceable of men. He also had
something of the expression of a Scotch country elder, who, by some
peculiarity, should chance to be a Hebrew. He had a projecting
under lip, with which he continually smiled, or rather smirked.
Mrs. Kelmar was a singularly kind woman; and the oldest son had
quite a dark and romantic bearing, and might be heard on summer
evenings playing sentimental airs on the violin.
I had no idea, at the time I made his acquaintance, what an
important person Kelmar was. But the Jew store-keepers of
California, profiting at once by the needs and habits of the
people, have made themselves in too many cases the tyrants of the
rural population. Credit is offered, is pressed on the new
customer, and when once he is beyond his depth, the tune changes,
and he is from thenceforth a white slave. I believe, even from the
little I saw, that Kelmar, if he choose to put on the screw, could
send half the settlers packing in a radius of seven or eight miles
round Calistoga. These are continually paying him, but are never
suffered to get out of debt. He palms dull goods upon them, for
they dare not refuse to buy; he goes and dines with them when he is
on an outing, and no man is loudlier welcomed; he is their family
friend, the director of their business, and, to a degree elsewhere
unknown in modern days, their king.
For some reason, Kelmar always shook his head at the mention of
Pine Flat, and for some days I thought he disapproved of the whole
scheme and was proportionately sad. One fine morning, however, he
met me, wreathed in smiles. He had found the very place for me--
Silverado, another old mining town, right up the mountain. Rufe
Hanson, the hunter, could take care of us--fine people the Hansons;
we should be close to the Toll House, where the Lakeport stage
called daily; it was the best place for my health, besides. Rufe
had been consumptive, and was now quite a strong man, ain't it? In
short, the place and all its accompaniments seemed made for us on
purpose.
He took me to his back door, whence, as from every point of
Calistoga, Mount Saint Helena could be seen towering in the air.
There, in the nick, just where the eastern foothills joined the
mountain, and she herself began to rise above the zone of forest--
there was Silverado. The name had already pleased me; the high
station pleased me still more. I began to inquire with some
eagerness. It was but a little while ago that Silverado was a
great place. The mine--a silver mine, of course--had promised
great things. There was quite a lively population, with several
hotels and boarding-houses; and Kelmar himself had opened a branch
store, and done extremely well--"Ain't it?" he said, appealing to
his wife. And she said, "Yes; extremely well." Now there was no
one living in the town but Rufe the hunter; and once more I heard
Rufe's praises by the yard, and this time sung in chorus.
I could not help perceiving at the time that there was something
underneath; that no unmixed desire to have us comfortably settled
had inspired the Kelmars with this flow of words. But I was
impatient to be gone, to be about my kingly project; and when we
were offered seats in Kelmar's waggon, I accepted on the spot. The
plan of their next Sunday's outing took them, by good fortune, over
the border into Lake County. They would carry us so far, drop us
at the Toll House, present us to the Hansons, and call for us again
on Monday morning early.
CHAPTER II--FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF SILVERADO
We were to leave by six precisely; that was solemnly pledged on
both sides; and a messenger came to us the last thing at night, to
remind us of the hour. But it was eight before we got clear of
Calistoga: Kelmar, Mrs. Kelmar, a friend of theirs whom we named
Abramina, her little daughter, my wife, myself, and, stowed away
behind us, a cluster of ship's coffee-kettles. These last were
highly ornamental in the sheen of their bright tin, but I could
invent no reason for their presence. Our carriageful reckoned up,
as near as we could get at it, some three hundred years to the six
of us. Four of the six, besides, were Hebrews. But I never, in
all my life, was conscious of so strong an atmosphere of holiday.
No word was spoken but of pleasure; and even when we drove in
silence, nods and smiles went round the party like refreshments.
The sun shone out of a cloudless sky. Close at the zenith rode the
belated moon, still clearly visible, and, along one margin, even
bright. The wind blew a gale from the north; the trees roared; the
corn and the deep grass in the valley fled in whitening surges; the
dust towered into the air along the road and dispersed like the
smoke of battle. It was clear in our teeth from the first, and for
all the windings of the road it managed to keep clear in our teeth
until the end.
For some two miles we rattled through the valley, skirting the
eastern foothills; then we struck off to the right, through haugh-
land, and presently, crossing a dry water-course, entered the Toll
road, or, to be more local, entered on "the grade." The road
mounts the near shoulder of Mount Saint Helena, bound northward
into Lake County. In one place it skirts along the edge of a
narrow and deep canyon, filled with trees, and I was glad, indeed,
not to be driven at this point by the dashing Foss. Kelmar, with
his unvarying smile, jogging to the motion of the trap, drove for
all the world like a good, plain, country clergyman at home; and I
profess I blessed him unawares for his timidity.
Vineyards and deep meadows, islanded and framed with thicket, gave
place more and more as we ascended to woods of oak and madrona,
dotted with enormous pines. It was these pines, as they shot above
the lower wood, that produced that pencilling of single trees I had
so often remarked from the valley. Thence, looking up and from
however far, each fir stands separate against the sky no bigger
than an eyelash; and all together lend a quaint, fringed aspect to
the hills. The oak is no baby; even the madrona, upon these spurs
of Mount Saint Helena, comes to a fine bulk and ranks with forest
trees--but the pines look down upon the rest for underwood. As
Mount Saint Helena among her foothills, so these dark giants out-
top their fellow-vegetables. Alas! if they had left the redwoods,
the pines, in turn, would have been dwarfed. But the redwoods,
fallen from their high estate, are serving as family bedsteads, or
yet more humbly as field fences, along all Napa Valley.
A rough smack of resin was in the air, and a crystal mountain
purity. It came pouring over these green slopes by the oceanful.
The woods sang aloud, and gave largely of their healthful breath.
Gladness seemed to inhabit these upper zones, and we had left
indifference behind us in the valley. "I to the hills lift mine
eyes!" There are days in a life when thus to climb out of the
lowlands, seems like scaling heaven.
As we continued to ascend, the wind fell upon us with increasing
strength. It was a wonder how the two stout horses managed to pull
us up that steep incline and still face the athletic opposition of
the wind, or how their great eyes were able to endure the dust.
Ten minutes after we went by, a tree fell, blocking the road; and
even before us leaves were thickly strewn, and boughs had fallen,
large enough to make the passage difficult. But now we were hard
by the summit. The road crosses the ridge, just in the nick that
Kelmar showed me from below, and then, without pause, plunges down
a deep, thickly wooded glen on the farther side. At the highest
point a trail strikes up the main hill to the leftward; and that
leads to Silverado. A hundred yards beyond, and in a kind of elbow
of the glen, stands the Toll House Hotel. We came up the one side,
were caught upon the summit by the whole weight of the wind as it
poured over into Napa Valley, and a minute after had drawn up in
shelter, but all buffetted and breathless, at the Toll House door.
A water-tank, and stables, and a gray house of two stories, with
gable ends and a verandah, are jammed hard against the hillside,
just where a stream has cut for itself a narrow canyon, filled with
pines. The pines go right up overhead; a little more and the
stream might have played, like a fire-hose, on the Toll House roof.
In front the ground drops as sharply as it rises behind. There is
just room for the road and a sort of promontory of croquet ground,
and then you can lean over the edge and look deep below you through
the wood. I said croquet GROUND, not GREEN; for the surface was of
brown, beaten earth. The toll-bar itself was the only other note
of originality: a long beam, turning on a post, and kept slightly
horizontal by a counterweight of stones. Regularly about sundown
this rude barrier was swung, like a derrick, across the road and
made fast, I think, to a tree upon the farther side.
On our arrival there followed a gay scene in the bar. I was
presented to Mr. Corwin, the landlord; to Mr. Jennings, the
engineer, who lives there for his health; to Mr. Hoddy, a most
pleasant little gentleman, once a member of the Ohio legislature,
again the editor of a local paper, and now, with undiminished
dignity, keeping the Toll House bar. I had a number of drinks and
cigars bestowed on me, and enjoyed a famous opportunity of seeing
Kelmar in his glory, friendly, radiant, smiling, steadily edging
one of the ship's kettles on the reluctant Corwin.
Corwin, plainly aghast, resisted gallantly, and for that bout
victory crowned his arms.
At last we set forth for Silverado on foot. Kelmar and his jolly
Jew girls were full of the sentiment of Sunday outings, breathed
geniality and vagueness, and suffered a little vile boy from the
hotel to lead them here and there about the woods. For three
people all so old, so bulky in body, and belonging to a race so
venerable, they could not but surprise us by their extreme and
almost imbecile youthfulness of spirit. They were only going to
stay ten minutes at the Toll House; had they not twenty long miles
of road before them on the other side? Stay to dinner? Not they!
Put up the horses? Never. Let us attach them to the verandah by a
wisp of straw rope, such as would not have held a person's hat on
that blustering day. And with all these protestations of hurry,
they proved irresponsible like children. Kelmar himself, shrewd
old Russian Jew, with a smirk that seemed just to have concluded a
bargain to its satisfaction, intrusted himself and us devoutly to
that boy. Yet the boy was patently fallacious; and for that matter
a most unsympathetic urchin, raised apparently on gingerbread. He
was bent on his own pleasure, nothing else; and Kelmar followed him
to his ruin, with the same shrewd smirk. If the boy said there was
"a hole there in the hill"--a hole, pure and simple, neither more
nor less--Kelmar and his Jew girls would follow him a hundred yards
to look complacently down that hole. For two hours we looked for
houses; and for two hours they followed us, smelling trees, picking
flowers, foisting false botany on the unwary. Had we taken five,
with that vile lad to head them off on idle divagations, for five
they would have smiled and stumbled through the woods.
However, we came forth at length, and as by accident, upon a lawn,
sparse planted like an orchard, but with forest instead of fruit
trees. That was the site of Silverado mining town. A piece of
ground was levelled up, where Kelmar's store had been; and facing
that we saw Rufe Hanson's house, still bearing on its front the
legend Silverado Hotel. Not another sign of habitation. Silverado
town had all been carted from the scene; one of the houses was now
the school-house far down the road; one was gone here, one there,
but all were gone away.
It was now a sylvan solitude, and the silence was unbroken but by
the great, vague voice of the wind. Some days before our visit, a
grizzly bear had been sporting round the Hansons' chicken-house.
Mrs. Hanson was at home alone, we found. Rufe had been out after a
"bar," had risen late, and was now gone, it did not clearly appear
whither. Perhaps he had had wind of Kelmar's coming, and was now
ensconced among the underwood, or watching us from the shoulder of
the mountain. We, hearing there were no houses to be had, were for
immediately giving up all hopes of Silverado. But this, somehow,
was not to Kelmar's fancy. He first proposed that we should "camp
someveres around, ain't it?" waving his hand cheerily as though to
weave a spell; and when that was firmly rejected, he decided that
we must take up house with the Hansons. Mrs. Hanson had been, from
the first, flustered, subdued, and a little pale; but from this
proposition she recoiled with haggard indignation. So did we, who
would have preferred, in a manner of speaking, death. But Kelmar
was not to be put by. He edged Mrs. Hanson into a corner, where
for a long time he threatened her with his forefinger, like a
character in Dickens; and the poor woman, driven to her
entrenchments, at last remembered with a shriek that there were
still some houses at the tunnel.
Thither we went; the Jews, who should already have been miles into
Lake County, still cheerily accompanying us. For about a furlong
we followed a good road alone, the hillside through the forest,
until suddenly that road widened out and came abruptly to an end.
A canyon, woody below, red, rocky, and naked overhead, was here
walled across by a dump of rolling stones, dangerously steep, and
from twenty to thirty feet in height. A rusty iron chute on wooden
legs came flying, like a monstrous gargoyle, across the parapet.
It was down this that they poured the precious ore; and below here
the carts stood to wait their lading, and carry it mill-ward down
the mountain.
The whole canyon was so entirely blocked, as if by some rude
guerilla fortification, that we could only mount by lengths of
wooden ladder, fixed in the hillside. These led us round the
farther corner of the dump; and when they were at an end, we still
persevered over loose rubble and wading deep in poison oak, till we
struck a triangular platform, filling up the whole glen, and shut
in on either hand by bold projections of the mountain. Only in
front the place was open like the proscenium of a theatre, and we
looked forth into a great realm of air, and down upon treetops and
hilltops, and far and near on wild and varied country. The place
still stood as on the day it was deserted: a line of iron rails
with a bifurcation; a truck in working order; a world of lumber,
old wood, old iron; a blacksmith's forge on one side, half buried
in the leaves of dwarf madronas; and on the other, an old brown
wooden house.
Fanny and I dashed at the house. It consisted of three rooms, and
was so plastered against the hill, that one room was right atop of
another, that the upper floor was more than twice as large as the
lower, and that all three apartments must be entered from a
different side and level. Not a window-sash remained.
The door of the lower room was smashed, and one panel hung in
splinters. We entered that, and found a fair amount of rubbish:
sand and gravel that had been sifted in there by the mountain
winds; straw, sticks, and stones; a table, a barrel; a plate-rack
on the wall; two home-made bootjacks, signs of miners and their
boots; and a pair of papers pinned on the boarding, headed
respectively "Funnel No. 1," and "Funnel No. 2," but with the tails
torn away. The window, sashless of course, was choked with the
green and sweetly smelling foliage of a bay; and through a chink in
the floor, a spray of poison oak had shot up and was handsomely
prospering in the interior. It was my first care to cut away that
poison oak, Fanny standing by at a respectful distance. That was
our first improvement by which we took possession.
The room immediately above could only be entered by a plank propped
against the threshold, along which the intruder must foot it
gingerly, clutching for support to sprays of poison oak, the proper
product of the country. Herein was, on either hand, a triple tier
of beds, where miners had once lain; and the other gable was
pierced by a sashless window and a doorless doorway opening on the
air of heaven, five feet above the ground. As for the third room,
which entered squarely from the ground level, but higher up the
hill and farther up the canyon, it contained only rubbish and the
uprights for another triple tier of beds.
The whole building was overhung by a bold, lion-like, red rock.
Poison oak, sweet bay trees, calcanthus, brush, and chaparral, grew
freely but sparsely all about it. In front, in the strong sunshine,
the platform lay overstrewn with busy litter, as though the labours
of the mine might begin again to-morrow in the morning.
Following back into the canyon, among the mass of rotting plant and
through the flowering bushes, we came to a great crazy staging,
with a wry windless on the top; and clambering up, we could look
into an open shaft, leading edgeways down into the bowels of the
mountain, trickling with water, and lit by some stray sun-gleams,
whence I know not. In that quiet place the still, far-away tinkle
of the water-drops was loudly audible. Close by, another shaft led
edgeways up into the superincumbent shoulder of the hill. It lay
partly open; and sixty or a hundred feet above our head, we could
see the strata propped apart by solid wooden wedges, and a pine,
half undermined, precariously nodding on the verge. Here also a
rugged, horizontal tunnel ran straight into the unsunned bowels of
the rock. This secure angle in the mountain's flank was, even on
this wild day, as still as my lady's chamber. But in the tunnel a
cold, wet draught tempestuously blew. Nor have I ever known that
place otherwise than cold and windy.
Such was our fist prospect of Juan Silverado. I own I had looked
for something different: a clique of neighbourly houses on a
village green, we shall say, all empty to be sure, but swept and
varnished; a trout stream brawling by; great elms or chestnuts,
humming with bees and nested in by song-birds; and the mountains
standing round about, as at Jerusalem. Here, mountain and house
and the old tools of industry were all alike rusty and downfalling.
The hill was here wedged up, and there poured forth its bowels in a
spout of broken mineral; man with his picks and powder, and nature
with her own great blasting tools of sun and rain, labouring
together at the ruin of that proud mountain. The view up the
canyon was a glimpse of devastation; dry red minerals sliding
together, here and there a crag, here and there dwarf thicket
clinging in the general glissade, and over all a broken outline
trenching on the blue of heaven. Downwards indeed, from our rock
eyrie, we behold the greener side of nature; and the bearing of the
pines and the sweet smell of bays and nutmegs commanded themselves
gratefully to our senses. One way and another, now the die was
cast. Silverado be it!
After we had got back to the Toll House, the Jews were not long of
striking forward. But I observed that one of the Hanson lads came
down, before their departure, and returned with a ship's kettle.
Happy Hansons! Nor was it until after Kelmar was gone, if I
remember rightly, that Rufe put in an appearance to arrange the
details of our installation.
The latter part of the day, Fanny and I sat in the verandah of the
Toll House, utterly stunned by the uproar of the wind among the
trees on the other side of the valley. Sometimes, we would have it
it was like a sea, but it was not various enough for that; and
again, we thought it like the roar of a cataract, but it was too
changeful for the cataract; and then we would decide, speaking in
sleepy voices, that it could be compared with nothing but itself.
My mind was entirely preoccupied by the noise. I hearkened to it
by the hour, gapingly hearkened, and let my cigarette go out.
Sometimes the wind would make a sally nearer hand, and send a
shrill, whistling crash among the foliage on our side of the glen;
and sometimes a back-draught would strike into the elbow where we
sat, and cast the gravel and torn leaves into our faces. But for
the most part, this great, streaming gale passed unweariedly by us
into Napa Valley, not two hundred yards away, visible by the
tossing boughs, stunningly audible, and yet not moving a hair upon
our heads. So it blew all night long while I was writing up my
journal, and after we were in bed, under a cloudless, starset
heaven; and so it was blowing still next morning when we rose.
It was a laughable thought to us, what had become of our cheerful,
wandering Hebrews. We could not suppose they had reached a
destination. The meanest boy could lead them miles out of their
way to see a gopher-hole. Boys, we felt to be their special
danger; none others were of that exact pitch of cheerful
irrelevancy to exercise a kindred sway upon their minds: but
before the attractions of a boy their most settled resolutions
would be war. We thought we could follow in fancy these three aged
Hebrew truants wandering in and out on hilltop and in thicket, a
demon boy trotting far ahead, their will-o'-the-wisp conductor; and
at last about midnight, the wind still roaring in the darkness, we
had a vision of all three on their knees upon a mountain-top around
a glow-worm.
CHAPTER III. THE RETURN
Next morning we were up by half-past five, according to agreement,
and it was ten by the clock before our Jew boys returned to pick us
up. Kelmar, Mrs. Kelmar, and Abramina, all smiling from ear to
ear, and full of tales of the hospitality they had found on the
other side. It had not gone unrewarded; for I observed with
interest that the ship's kettles, all but one, had been "placed."
Three Lake County families, at least, endowed for life with a
ship's kettle. Come, this was no misspent Sunday. The absence of
the kettles told its own story: our Jews said nothing about them;
but, on the other hand, they said many kind and comely things about
the people they had met. The two women, in particular, had been
charmed out of themselves by the sight of a young girl surrounded
by her admirers; all evening, it appeared, they had been triumphing
together in the girl's innocent successes, and to this natural and
unselfish joy they gave expression in language that was beautiful
by its simplicity and truth.
Take them for all in all, few people have done my heart more good;
they seemed so thoroughly entitled to happiness, and to enjoy it in
so large a measure and so free from after-thought; almost they
persuaded me to be a Jew. There was, indeed, a chink of money in
their talk. They particularly commanded people who were well to
do. "HE don't care--ain't it?" was their highest word of
commendation to an individual fate; and here I seem to grasp the
root of their philosophy--it was to be free from care, to be free
to make these Sunday wanderings, that they so eagerly pursued after
wealth; and all this carefulness was to be careless. The fine,
good humour of all three seemed to declare they had attained their
end. Yet there was the other side to it; and the recipients of
kettles perhaps cared greatly.
No sooner had they returned, than the scene of yesterday began
again. The horses were not even tied with a straw rope this time--
it was not worth while; and Kelmar disappeared into the bar,
leaving them under a tree on the other side of the road. I had to
devote myself. I stood under the shadow of that tree for, I
suppose, hard upon an hour, and had not the heart to be angry.
Once some one remembered me, and brought me out half a tumblerful
of the playful, innocuous American cocktail. I drank it, and lo!
veins of living fire ran down my leg; and then a focus of
conflagration remained seated in my stomach, not unpleasantly, for
quarter of an hour. I love these sweet, fiery pangs, but I will
not court them. The bulk of the time I spent in repeating as much
French poetry as I could remember to the horses, who seemed to
enjoy it hugely. And now it went -
"O ma vieille Font-georges
Ou volent les rouges-gorges:"
and again, to a more trampling measure -
"Et tout tremble, Irun, Coimbre,
Sautander, Almodovar,
Sitot qu'on entend le timbre
Des cymbales do Bivar."
The redbreasts and the brooks of Europe, in that dry and songless
land; brave old names and wars, strong cities, cymbals, and bright
armour, in that nook of the mountain, sacred only to the Indian and
the bear! This is still the strangest thing in all man's
travelling, that he should carry about with him incongruous
memories. There is no foreign land; it is the traveller only that
is foreign, and now and again, by a flash of recollection, lights
up the contrasts of the earth.
But while I was thus wandering in my fancy, great feats had been
transacted in the bar. Corwin the bold had fallen, Kelmar was
again crowned with laurels, and the last of the ship's kettles had
changed hands. If I had ever doubted the purity of Kelmar's
motives, if I had ever suspected him of a single eye to business in
his eternal dallyings, now at least, when the last kettle was
disposed of, my suspicions must have been allayed. I dare not
guess how much more time was wasted; nor how often we drove off,
merely to drive back again and renew interrupted conversations
about nothing, before the Toll House was fairly left behind. Alas!
and not a mile down the grade there stands a ranche in a sunny
vineyard, and here we must all dismount again and enter.
Only the old lady was at home, Mrs. Guele, a brown old Swiss dame,
the picture of honesty; and with her we drank a bottle of wine and
had an age-long conversation, which would have been highly
delightful if Fanny and I had not been faint with hunger. The
ladies each narrated the story of her marriage, our two Hebrews
with the prettiest combination of sentiment and financial bathos.
Abramina, specially, endeared herself with every word. She was as
simple, natural, and engaging as a kid that should have been
brought up to the business of a money-changer. One touch was so
resplendently Hebraic that I cannot pass it over. When her "old
man" wrote home for her from America, her old man's family would
not intrust her with the money for the passage, till she had bound
herself by an oath--on her knees, I think she said--not to employ
it otherwise.
This had tickled Abramina hugely, but I think it tickled me fully
more.
Mrs. Guele told of her home-sickness up here in the long winters;
of her honest, country-woman troubles and alarms upon the journey;
how in the bank at Frankfort she had feared lest the banker, after
having taken her cheque, should deny all knowledge of it--a fear I
have myself every time I go to a bank; and how crossing the
Luneburger Heath, an old lady, witnessing her trouble and finding
whither she was bound, had given her "the blessing of a person
eighty years old, which would be sure to bring her safely to the
States. And the first thing I did," added Mrs. Guele, "was to fall
downstairs."
At length we got out of the house, and some of us into the trap,
when--judgment of Heaven!--here came Mr. Guele from his vineyard.
So another quarter of an hour went by; till at length, at our
earnest pleading, we set forth again in earnest, Fanny and I white-
faced and silent, but the Jews still smiling. The heart fails me.
There was yet another stoppage! And we drove at last into
Calistoga past two in the afternoon, Fanny and I having breakfasted
at six in the morning, eight mortal hours before. We were a pallid
couple; but still the Jews were smiling.
So ended our excursion with the village usurers; and, now that it
was done, we had no more idea of the nature of the business, nor of
the part we had been playing in it, than the child unborn. That
all the people we had met were the slaves of Kelmar, though in
various degrees of servitude; that we ourselves had been sent up
the mountain in the interests of none but Kelmar; that the money we
laid out, dollar by dollar, cent by cent, and through the hands of
various intermediaries, should all hop ultimately into Kelmar's
till;--these were facts that we only grew to recognize in the
course of time and by the accumulation of evidence. At length all
doubt was quieted, when one of the kettle-holders confessed.
Stopping his trap in the moonlight, a little way out of Calistoga,
he told me, in so many words, that he dare not show face therewith
an empty pocket. "You see, I don't mind if it was only five
dollars, Mr. Stevens," he said, "but I must give Mr. Kelmar
SOMETHING."
Even now, when the whole tyranny is plain to me, I cannot find it
in my heart to be as angry as perhaps I should be with the Hebrew
tyrant. The whole game of business is beggar my neighbour; and
though perhaps that game looks uglier when played at such close
quarters and on so small a scale, it is none the more intrinsically
inhumane for that. The village usurer is not so sad a feature of
humanity and human progress as the millionaire manufacturer,
fattening on the toil and loss of thousands, and yet declaiming
from the platform against the greed and dishonesty of landlords.
If it were fair for Cobden to buy up land from owners whom he
thought unconscious of its proper value, it was fair enough for my
Russian Jew to give credit to his farmers. Kelmar, if he was
unconscious of the beam in his own eye, was at least silent in the
matter of his brother's mote.
THE ACT OF SQUATTING
There were four of us squatters--myself and my wife, the King and
Queen of Silverado; Sam, the Crown Prince; and Chuchu, the Grand
Duke. Chuchu, a setter crossed with spaniel, was the most unsuited
for a rough life. He had been nurtured tenderly in the society of
ladies; his heart was large and soft; he regarded the sofa-cushion
as a bed-rook necessary of existence. Though about the size of a
sheep, he loved to sit in ladies' laps; he never said a bad word in
all his blameless days; and if he had seen a flute, I am sure he
could have played upon it by nature. It may seem hard to say it of
a dog, but Chuchu was a tame cat.
The king and queen, the grand duke, and a basket of cold provender
for immediate use, set forth from Calistoga in a double buggy; the
crown prince, on horseback, led the way like an outrider. Bags and
boxes and a second-hand stove were to follow close upon our heels
by Hanson's team.
It was a beautiful still day; the sky was one field of azure. Not
a leaf moved, not a speck appeared in heaven. Only from the summit
of the mountain one little snowy wisp of cloud after another kept
detaching itself, like smoke from a volcano, and blowing southward
in some high stream of air: Mount Saint Helena still at her
interminable task, making the weather, like a Lapland witch.
By noon we had come in sight of the mill: a great brown building,
half-way up the hill, big as a factory, two stories high, and with
tanks and ladders along the roof; which, as a pendicle of Silverado
mine, we held to be an outlying province of our own. Thither,
then, we went, crossing the valley by a grassy trail; and there
lunched out of the basket, sitting in a kind of portico, and
wondering, while we ate, at this great bulk of useless building.
Through a chink we could look far down into the interior, and see
sunbeams floating in the dust and striking on tier after tier of
silent, rusty machinery. It cost six thousand dollars, twelve
hundred English sovereigns; and now, here it stands deserted, like
the temple of a forgotten religion, the busy millers toiling
somewhere else. All the time we were there, mill and mill town
showed no sign of life; that part of the mountain-side, which is
very open and green, was tenanted by no living creature but
ourselves and the insects; and nothing stirred but the cloud
manufactory upon the mountain summit. It was odd to compare this
with the former days, when the engine was in fall blast, the mill
palpitating to its strokes, and the carts came rattling down from
Silverado, charged with ore.
By two we had been landed at the mine, the buggy was gone again,
and we were left to our own reflections and the basket of cold
provender, until Hanson should arrive. Hot as it was by the sun,
there was something chill in such a home-coming, in that world of
wreck and rust, splinter and rolling gravel, where for so many
years no fire had smoked.
Silverado platform filled the whole width of the canyon. Above, as
I have said, this was a wild, red, stony gully in the mountains;
but below it was a wooded dingle. And through this, I was told,
there had gone a path between the mine and the Toll House--our
natural north-west passage to civilization. I found and followed
it, clearing my way as I went through fallen branches and dead
trees. It went straight down that steep canyon, till it brought
you out abruptly over the roofs of the hotel. There was nowhere
any break in the descent. It almost seemed as if, were you to drop
a stone down the old iron chute at our platform, it would never
rest until it hopped upon the Toll House shingles. Signs were not
wanting of the ancient greatness of Silverado. The footpath was
well marked, and had been well trodden in the old clays by thirsty
miners. And far down, buried in foliage, deep out of sight of
Silverado, I came on a last outpost of the mine--a mound of gravel,
some wreck of wooden aqueduct, and the mouth of a tunnel, like a
treasure grotto in a fairy story. A stream of water, fed by the
invisible leakage from our shaft, and dyed red with cinnabar or
iron, ran trippingly forth out of the bowels of the cave; and,
looking far under the arch, I could see something like an iron
lantern fastened on the rocky wall. It was a promising spot for
the imagination. No boy could have left it unexplored.
The stream thenceforward stole along the bottom of the dingle, and
made, for that dry land, a pleasant warbling in the leaves. Once,
I suppose, it ran splashing down the whole length of the canyon,
but now its head waters had been tapped by the shaft at Silverado,
and for a great part of its course it wandered sunless among the
joints of the mountain. No wonder that it should better its pace
when it sees, far before it, daylight whitening in the arch, or
that it should come trotting forth into the sunlight with a song.
The two stages had gone by when I got down, and the Toll House
stood, dozing in sun and dust and silence, like a place enchanted.
My mission was after hay for bedding, and that I was readily
promised. But when I mentioned that we were waiting for Rufe, the
people shook their heads. Rufe was not a regular man any way, it
seemed; and if he got playing poker--Well, poker was too many for
Rufe. I had not yet heard them bracketted together; but it seemed
a natural conjunction, and commended itself swiftly to my fears;
and as soon as I returned to Silverado and had told my story, we
practically gave Hanson up, and set ourselves to do what we could
find do-able in our desert-island state.
The lower room had been the assayer's office. The floor was thick
with debris--part human, from the former occupants; part natural,
sifted in by mountain winds. In a sea of red dust there swam or
floated sticks, boards, hay, straw, stones, and paper; ancient
newspapers, above all--for the newspaper, especially when torn,
soon becomes an antiquity--and bills of the Silverado boarding-
house, some dated Silverado, some Calistoga Mine. Here is one,
verbatim; and if any one can calculate the scale of charges, he has
my envious admiration.
Calistoga Mine, May 3rd, 1875.
John Stanley
To S. Chapman, Cr.
To board from April 1st, to April 30 $25 75
" " " May lst, to 3rd ... 2 00
27 75
Where is John Stanley mining now? Where is S. Chapman, within
whose hospitable walls we were to lodge? The date was but five
years old, but in that time the world had changed for Silverado;
like Palmyra in the desert, it had outlived its people and its
purpose; we camped, like Layard, amid ruins, and these names spoke
to us of prehistoric time. A boot-jack, a pair of boots, a dog-
hutch, and these bills of Mr. Chapman's were the only speaking
relics that we disinterred from all that vast Silverado rubbish-
heap; but what would I not have given to unearth a letter, a
pocket-book, a diary, only a ledger, or a roll of names, to take me
back, in a more personal manner, to the past? It pleases me,
besides, to fancy that Stanley or Chapman, or one of their
companions, may light upon this chronicle, and be struck by the
name, and read some news of their anterior home, coming, as it
were, out of a subsequent epoch of history in that quarter of the
world.
As we were tumbling the mingled rubbish on the floor, kicking it
with our feet, and groping for these written evidences of the past,
Sam, with a somewhat whitened face, produced a paper bag. "What's
this?" said he. It contained a granulated powder, something the
colour of Gregory's Mixture, but rosier; and as there were several
of the bags, and each more or less broken, the powder was spread
widely on the floor. Had any of us ever seen giant powder? No,
nobody had; and instantly there grew up in my mind a shadowy
belief, verging with every moment nearer to certitude, that I had
somewhere heard somebody describe it as just such a powder as the
one around us. I have learnt since that it is a substance not
unlike tallow, and is made up in rolls for all the world like
tallow candles.
Fanny, to add to our happiness, told us a story of a gentleman who
had camped one night, like ourselves, by a deserted mine. He was a
handy, thrifty fellow, and looked right and left for plunder, but
all he could lay his hands on was a can of oil. After dark he had
to see to the horses with a lantern; and not to miss an
opportunity, filled up his lamp from the oil can. Thus equipped,
he set forth into the forest. A little while after, his friends
heard a loud explosion; the mountain echoes bellowed, and then all
was still. On examination, the can proved to contain oil, with the
trifling addition of nitro-glycerine; but no research disclosed a
trace of either man or lantern.
It was a pretty sight, after this anecdote, to see us sweeping out
the giant powder. It seemed never to be far enough away. And,
after all, it was only some rock pounded for assay.
So much for the lower room. We scraped some of the rougher dirt
off the floor, and left it. That was our sitting-room and kitchen,
though there was nothing to sit upon but the table, and no
provision for a fire except a hole in the roof of the room above,
which had once contained the chimney of a stove.
To that upper room we now proceeded. There were the eighteen bunks
in a double tier, nine on either hand, where from eighteen to
thirty-six miners had once snored together all night long, John
Stanley, perhaps, snoring loudest. There was the roof, with a hole
in it through which the sun now shot an arrow. There was the
floor, in much the same state as the one below, though, perhaps,
there was more hay, and certainly there was the added ingredient of
broken glass, the man who stole the window-frames having apparently
made a miscarriage with this one. Without a broom, without hay or
bedding, we could but look about us with a beginning of despair.
The one bright arrow of day, in that gaunt and shattered barrack,
made the rest look dirtier and darker, and the sight drove us at
last into the open.
Here, also, the handiwork of man lay ruined: but the plants were
all alive and thriving; the view below was fresh with the colours
of nature; and we had exchanged a dim, human garret for a corner,
even although it were untidy, of the blue hall of heaven. Not a
bird, not a beast, not a reptile. There was no noise in that part
of the world, save when we passed beside the staging, and heard the
water musically falling in the shaft.
We wandered to and fro. We searched among that drift of lumber-
wood and iron, nails and rails, and sleepers and the wheels of
tracks. We gazed up the cleft into the bosom of the mountain. We
sat by the margin of the dump and saw, far below us, the green
treetops standing still in the clear air. Beautiful perfumes,
breaths of bay, resin, and nutmeg, came to us more often and grew
sweeter and sharper as the afternoon declined. But still there was
no word of Hanson.
I set to with pick and shovel, and deepened the pool behind the
shaft, till we were sure of sufficient water for the morning; and
by the time I had finished, the sun had begun to go down behind the
mountain shoulder, the platform was plunged in quiet shadow, and a
chill descended from the sky. Night began early in our cleft.
Before us, over the margin of the dump, we could see the sun still
striking aslant into the wooded nick below, and on the
battlemented, pine-bescattered ridges on the farther side.
There was no stove, of course, and no hearth in our lodging, so we
betook ourselves to the blacksmith's forge across the platform. If
the platform be taken as a stage, and the out-curving margin of the
dump to represent the line of the foot-lights, then our house would
be the first wing on the actor's left, and this blacksmith's forge,
although no match for it in size, the foremost on the right. It
was a low, brown cottage, planted close against the hill, and
overhung by the foliage and peeling boughs of a madrona thicket.
Within it was full of dead leaves and mountain dust, and rubbish
from the mine. But we soon had a good fire brightly blazing, and
sat close about it on impromptu seats. Chuchu, the slave of sofa-
cushions, whimpered for a softer bed; but the rest of us were
greatly revived and comforted by that good creature-fire, which
gives us warmth and light and companionable sounds, and colours up
the emptiest building with better than frescoes. For a while it
was even pleasant in the forge, with the blaze in the midst, and a
look over our shoulders on the woods and mountains where the day
was dying like a dolphin.
It was between seven and eight before Hanson arrived, with a
waggonful of our effects and two of his wife's relatives to lend
him a hand. The elder showed surprising strength. He would pick
up a huge packing-case, full of books of all things, swing it on
his shoulder, and away up the two crazy ladders and the breakneck
spout of rolling mineral, familiarly termed a path, that led from
the cart-track to our house. Even for a man unburthened, the
ascent was toilsome and precarious; but Irvine sealed it with a
light foot, carrying box after box, as the hero whisks the stage
child up the practicable footway beside the waterfall of the fifth
act. With so strong a helper, the business was speedily
transacted. Soon the assayer's office was thronged with our
belongings, piled higgledy-piggledy, and upside down, about the
floor. There were our boxes, indeed, but my wife had left her keys
in Calistoga. There was the stove, but, alas! our carriers had
forgot the chimney, and lost one of the plates along the road. The
Silverado problem was scarce solved.
Rufe himself was grave and good-natured over his share of blame; he
even, if I remember right, expressed regret. But his crew, to my
astonishment and anger, grinned from ear to ear, and laughed aloud
at our distress. They thought it "real funny" about the stove-pipe
they had forgotten; "real funny" that they should have lost a
plate. As for hay, the whole party refused to bring us any till
they should have supped. See how late they were! Never had there
been such a job as coming up that grade! Nor often, I suspect,
such a game of poker as that before they started. But about nine,
as a particular favour, we should have some hay.
So they took their departure, leaving me still staring, and we
resigned ourselves to wait for their return. The fire in the forge
had been suffered to go out, and we were one and all too weary to
kindle another. We dined, or, not to take that word in vain, we
ate after a fashion, in the nightmare disorder of the assayer's
office, perched among boxes. A single candle lighted us. It could
scarce be called a housewarming; for there was, of course, no fire,
and with the two open doors and the open window gaping on the
night, like breaches in a fortress, it began to grow rapidly chill.
Talk ceased; nobody moved but the unhappy Chuchu, still in quest of
sofa-cushions, who tumbled complainingly among the trunks. It
required a certain happiness of disposition to look forward
hopefully, from so dismal a beginning, across the brief hours of
night, to the warm shining of to-morrow's sun.
But the hay arrived at last, and we turned, with our last spark of
courage, to the bedroom. We had improved the entrance, but it was
still a kind of rope-walking; and it would have been droll to see
us mounting, one after another, by candle-light, under the open
stars.
The western door--that which looked up the canyon, and through
which we entered by our bridge of flying plank--was still entire, a
handsome, panelled door, the most finished piece of carpentry in
Silverado. And the two lowest bunks next to this we roughly filled
with hay for that night's use. Through the opposite, or eastern-
looking gable, with its open door and window, a faint, disused
starshine came into the room like mist; and when we were once in
bed, we lay, awaiting sleep, in a haunted, incomplete obscurity.
At first the silence of the night was utter. Then a high wind
began in the distance among the tree-tops, and for hours continued
to grow higher. It seemed to me much such a wind as we had found
on our visit; yet here in our open chamber we were fanned only by
gentle and refreshing draughts, so deep was the canyon, so close
our house was planted under the overhanging rock.
THE HUNTER'S FAMILY
There is quite a large race or class of people in America, for whom
we scarcely seem to have a parallel in England. Of pure white
blood, they are unknown or unrecognizable in towns; inhabit the
fringe of settlements and the deep, quiet places of the country;
rebellious to all labour, and pettily thievish, like the English
gipsies; rustically ignorant, but with a touch of wood-lore and the
dexterity of the savage. Whence they came is a moot point. At the
time of the war, they poured north in crowds to escape the
conscription; lived during summer on fruits, wild animals, and
petty theft; and at the approach of winter, when these supplies
failed, built great fires in the forest, and there died stoically
by starvation. They are widely scattered, however, and easily
recognized. Loutish, but not ill-looking, they will sit all day,
swinging their legs on a field fence, the mind seemingly as devoid
of all reflection as a Suffolk peasant's, careless of politics, for
the most part incapable of reading, but with a rebellious vanity
and a strong sense of independence. Hunting is their most
congenial business, or, if the occasion offers, a little amateur
detection. In tracking a criminal, following a particular horse
along a beaten highway, and drawing inductions from a hair or a
footprint, one of those somnolent, grinning Hodges will suddenly
display activity of body and finesse of mind. By their names ye
may know them, the women figuring as Loveina, Larsenia, Serena,
Leanna, Orreana; the men answering to Alvin, Alva, or Orion,
pronounced Orrion, with the accent on the first. Whether they are
indeed a race, or whether this is the form of degeneracy common to
all back-woodsmen, they are at least known by a generic byword, as
Poor Whites or Low-downers.
I will not say that the Hanson family was Poor White, because the
name savours of offence; but I may go as far as this--they were, in
many points, not unsimilar to the people usually so-cared. Rufe
himself combined two of the qualifications, for he was both a
hunter and an amateur detective. It was he who pursued Russel and
Dollar, the robbers of the Lake Port stage, and captured them the
very morning after the exploit, while they were still sleeping in a
hayfield. Russel, a drunken Scotch carpenter, was even an
acquaintance of his own, and he expressed much grave commiseration
for his fate. In all that he said and did, Rufe was grave. I
never saw him hurried. When he spoke, he took out his pipe with
ceremonial deliberation, looked east and west, and then, in quiet
tones and few words, stated his business or told his story. His
gait was to match; it would never have surprised you if, at any
step, he had turned round and walked away again, so warily and
slowly, and with so much seeming hesitation did he go about. He
lay long in bed in the morning--rarely indeed, rose before noon; he
loved all games, from poker to clerical croquet; and in the Toll
House croquet ground I have seen him toiling at the latter with the
devotion of a curate. He took an interest in education, was an
active member of the local school-board, and when I was there, he
had recently lost the schoolhouse key. His waggon was broken, but
it never seemed to occur to him to mend it. Like all truly idle
people, he had an artistic eye. He chose the print stuff for his
wife's dresses, and counselled her in the making of a patchwork
quilt, always, as she thought, wrongly, but to the more educated
eye, always with bizarre and admirable taste--the taste of an
Indian. With all this, he was a perfect, unoffending gentleman in
word and act. Take his clay pipe from him, and he was fit for any
society but that of fools. Quiet as he was, there burned a deep,
permanent excitement in his dark blue eyes; and when this grave man
smiled, it was like sunshine in a shady place.
Mrs. Hanson (nee, if you please, Lovelands) was more commonplace
than her lord. She was a comely woman, too, plump, fair-coloured,
with wonderful white teeth; and in her print dresses (chosen by
Rufe) and with a large sun-bonnet shading her valued complexion,
made, I assure you, a very agreeable figure. But she was on the
surface, what there was of her, out-spoken and loud-spoken. Her
noisy laughter had none of the charm of one of Hanson's rare, slow-
spreading smiles; there was no reticence, no mystery, no manner
about the woman: she was a first-class dairymaid, but her husband
was an unknown quantity between the savage and the nobleman. She
was often in and out with us, merry, and healthy, and fair; he came
far seldomer--only, indeed, when there was business, or now and
again, to pay a visit of ceremony, brushed up for the occasion,
with his wife on his arm, and a clean clay pipe in his teeth.
These visits, in our forest state, had quite the air of an event,
and turned our red canyon into a salon.
Such was the pair who ruled in the old Silverado Hotel, among the
windy trees, on the mountain shoulder overlooking the whole length
of Napa Valley, as the man aloft looks down on the ship's deck.
There they kept house, with sundry horses and fowls, and a family
of sons, Daniel Webster, and I think George Washington, among the
number. Nor did they want visitors. An old gentleman, of singular
stolidity, and called Breedlove--I think he had crossed the plains
in the same caravan with Rufe--housed with them for awhile during
our stay; and they had besides a permanent lodger, in the form of
Mrs. Hanson's brother, Irvine Lovelands. I spell Irvine by guess;
for I could get no information on the subject, just as I could
never find out, in spite of many inquiries, whether or not Rufe was
a contraction for Rufus. They were all cheerfully at sea about
their names in that generation. And this is surely the more
notable where the names are all so strange, and even the family
names appear to have been coined. At one time, at least, the
ancestors of all these Alvins and Alvas, Loveinas, Lovelands, and
Breedloves, must have taken serious council and found a certain
poetry in these denominations; that must have been, then, their
form of literature. But still times change; and their next
descendants, the George Washingtons and Daniel Websters, will at
least be clear upon the point. And anyway, and however his name
should be spelt, this Irvine Lovelands was the most unmitigated
Caliban I ever knew.
Our very first morning at Silverado, when we were full of business,
patching up doors and windows, making beds and seats, and getting
our rough lodging into shape, Irvine and his sister made their
appearance together, she for neighbourliness and general curiosity;
he, because he was working for me, to my sorrow, cutting firewood
at I forget how much a day. The way that he set about cutting wood
was characteristic. We were at that moment patching up and
unpacking in the kitchen. Down he sat on one side, and down sat
his sister on the other. Both were chewing pine-tree gum, and he,
to my annoyance, accompanied that simple pleasure with profuse
expectoration. She rattled away, talking up hill and down dale,
laughing, tossing her head, showing her brilliant teeth. He looked
on in silence, now spitting heavily on the floor, now putting his
head back and uttering a loud, discordant, joyless laugh. He had a
tangle of shock hair, the colour of wool; his mouth was a grin;
although as strong as a horse, he looked neither heavy nor yet
adroit, only leggy, coltish, and in the road. But it was plain he
was in high spirits, thoroughly enjoying his visit; and he laughed
frankly whenever we failed to accomplish what we were about. This
was scarcely helpful: it was even, to amateur carpenters,
embarrassing; but it lasted until we knocked off work and began to
get dinner. Then Mrs. Hanson remembered she should have been gone
an hour ago; and the pair retired, and the lady's laughter died
away among the nutmegs down the path. That was Irvine's first
day's work in my employment--the devil take him!
The next morning he returned and, as he was this time alone, he
bestowed his conversation upon us with great liberality. He prided
himself on his intelligence; asked us if we knew the school ma'am.
HE didn't think much of her, anyway. He had tried her, he had. He
had put a question to her. If a tree a hundred feet high were to
fall a foot a day, how long would it take to fall right down? She
had not been able to solve the problem. "She don't know nothing,"
he opined. He told us how a friend of his kept a school with a
revolver, and chuckled mightily over that; his friend could teach
school, he could. All the time he kept chewing gum and spitting.
He would stand a while looking down; and then he would toss back
his shock of hair, and laugh hoarsely, and spit, and bring forward
a new subject. A man, he told us, who bore a grudge against him,
had poisoned his dog. "That was a low thing for a man to do now,
wasn't it? It wasn't like a man, that, nohow. But I got even with
him: I pisoned HIS dog." His clumsy utterance, his rude
embarrassed manner, set a fresh value on the stupidity of his
remarks. I do not think I ever appreciated the meaning of two
words until I knew Irvine--the verb, loaf, and the noun, oaf;
between them, they complete his portrait. He could lounge, and
wriggle, and rub himself against the wall, and grin, and be more in
everybody's way than any other two people that I ever set my eyes
on. Nothing that he did became him; and yet you were conscious
that he was one of your own race, that his mind was cumbrously at
work, revolving the problem of existence like a quid of gum, and in
his own cloudy manner enjoying life, and passing judgment on his
fellows. Above all things, he was delighted with himself. You
would not have thought it, from his uneasy manners and troubled,
struggling utterance; but he loved himself to the marrow, and was
happy and proud like a peacock on a rail.
His self-esteem was, indeed, the one joint in his harness. He
could be got to work, and even kept at work, by flattery. As long
as my wife stood over him, crying out how strong he was, so long
exactly he would stick to the matter in hand; and the moment she
turned her back, or ceased to praise him, he would stop. His
physical strength was wonderful; and to have a woman stand by and
admire his achievements, warmed his heart like sunshine. Yet he
was as cowardly as he was powerful, and felt no shame in owning to
the weakness. Something was once wanted from the crazy platform
over the shaft, and he at once refused to venture there--"did not
like," as he said, "foolen' round them kind o' places," and let my
wife go instead of him, looking on with a grin. Vanity, where it
rules, is usually more heroic: but Irvine steadily approved
himself, and expected others to approve him; rather looked down
upon my wife, and decidedly expected her to look up to him, on the
strength of his superior prudence.
Yet the strangest part of the whole matter was perhaps this, that
Irvine was as beautiful as a statue. His features were, in
themselves, perfect; it was only his cloudy, uncouth, and coarse
expression that disfigured them. So much strength residing in so
spare a frame was proof sufficient of the accuracy of his shape.
He must have been built somewhat after the pattern of Jack
Sheppard; but the famous housebreaker, we may be certain, was no
lout. It was by the extraordinary powers of his mind no less than
by the vigour of his body, that he broke his strong prison with
such imperfect implements, turning the very obstacles to service.
Irvine, in the same case, would have sat down and spat, and
grumbled curses. He had the soul of a fat sheep, but, regarded as
an artist's model, the exterior of a Greek God. It was a cruel
thought to persons less favoured in their birth, that this
creature, endowed--to use the language of theatres--with
extraordinary "means," should so manage to misemploy them that he
looked ugly and almost deformed. It was only by an effort of
abstraction, and after many days, that you discovered what he was.
By playing on the oaf's conceit, and standing closely over him, we
got a path made round the corner of the dump to our door, so that
we could come and go with decent ease; and he even enjoyed the
work, for in that there were boulders to be plucked up bodily,
bushes to be uprooted, and other occasions for athletic display:
but cutting wood was a different matter. Anybody could cut wood;
and, besides, my wife was tired of supervising him, and had other
things to attend to. And, in short, days went by, and Irvine came
daily, and talked and lounged and spat; but the firewood remained
intact as sleepers on the platform or growing trees upon the
mountainside. Irvine, as a woodcutter, we could tolerate; but
Irvine as a friend of the family, at so much a day, was too bald an
imposition, and at length, on the afternoon of the fourth or fifth
day of our connection, I explained to him, as clearly as I could,
the light in which I had grown to regard his presence. I pointed
out to him that I could not continue to give him a salary for
spitting on the floor; and this expression, which came after a good
many others, at last penetrated his obdurate wits. He rose at
once, and said if that was the way he was going to be spoke to, he
reckoned he would quit. And, no one interposing, he departed.
So far, so good. But we had no firewood. The next afternoon, I
strolled down to Rufe's and consulted him on the subject. It was a
very droll interview, in the large, bare north room of the
Silverado Hotel, Mrs. Hanson's patchwork on a frame, and Rufe, and
his wife, and I, and the oaf himself, all more or less embarrassed.
Rufe announced there was nobody in the neighbourhood but Irvine who
could do a day's work for anybody. Irvine, thereupon, refused to
have any more to do with my service; he "wouldn't work no more for
a man as had spoke to him's I had done." I found myself on the
point of the last humiliation--driven to beseech the creature whom
I had just dismissed with insult: but I took the high hand in
despair, said there must be no talk of Irvine coming back unless
matters were to be differently managed; that I would rather chop
firewood for myself than be fooled; and, in short, the Hansons
being eager for the lad's hire, I so imposed upon them with merely
affected resolution, that they ended by begging me to re-employ him
again, on a solemn promise that he should be more industrious. The
promise, I am bound to say, was kept. We soon had a fine pile of
firewood at our door; and if Caliban gave me the cold shoulder and
spared me his conversation, I thought none the worse of him for
that, nor did I find my days much longer for the deprivation.
The leading spirit of the family was, I am inclined to fancy, Mrs.
Hanson. Her social brilliancy somewhat dazzled the others, and she
had more of the small change of sense. It was she who faced
Kelmar, for instance; and perhaps, if she had been alone, Kelmar
would have had no rule within her doors. Rufe, to be sure, had a
fine, sober, open-air attitude of mind, seeing the world without
exaggeration--perhaps, we may even say, without enough; for he
lacked, along with the others, that commercial idealism which puts
so high a value on time and money. Sanity itself is a kind of
convention. Perhaps Rufe was wrong; but, looking on life plainly,
he was unable to perceive that croquet or poker were in any way
less important than, for instance, mending his waggon. Even his
own profession, hunting, was dear to him mainly as a sort of play;
even that he would have neglected, had it not appealed to his
imagination. His hunting-suit, for instance, had cost I should be
afraid to say how many bucks--the currency in which he paid his
way: it was all befringed, after the Indian fashion, and it was
dear to his heart. The pictorial side of his daily business was
never forgotten. He was even anxious to stand for his picture in
those buckskin hunting clothes; and I remember how he once warmed
almost into enthusiasm, his dark blue eyes growing perceptibly
larger, as he planned the composition in which he should appear,
"with the horns of some real big bucks, and dogs, and a camp on a
crick" (creek, stream).
There was no trace in Irvine of this woodland poetry. He did not
care for hunting, nor yet for buckskin suits. He had never
observed scenery. The world, as it appeared to him, was almost
obliterated by his own great grinning figure in the foreground:
Caliban Malvolio. And it seems to me as if, in the persons of
these brothers-in-law, we had the two sides of rusticity fairly
well represented: the hunter living really in nature; the
clodhopper living merely out of society: the one bent up in every
corporal agent to capacity in one pursuit, doing at least one thing
keenly and thoughtfully, and thoroughly alive to all that touches
it; the other in the inert and bestial state, walking in a faint
dream, and taking so dim an impression of the myriad sides of life
that he is truly conscious of nothing but himself. It is only in
the fastnesses of nature, forests, mountains, and the back of man's
beyond, that a creature endowed with five senses can grow up into
the perfection of this crass and earthy vanity. In towns or the
busier country sides, he is roughly reminded of other men's
existence; and if he learns no more, he learns at least to fear
contempt. But Irvine had come scatheless through life, conscious
only of himself, of his great strength and intelligence; and in the
silence of the universe, to which he did not listen, dwelling with
delight on the sound of his own thoughts.
THE SEA FOGS
A change in the colour of the light usually called me in the
morning. By a certain hour, the long, vertical chinks in our
western gable, where the boards had shrunk and separated, flashed
suddenly into my eyes as stripes of dazzling blue, at once so dark
and splendid that I used to marvel how the qualities could be
combined. At an earlier hour, the heavens in that quarter were
still quietly coloured, but the shoulder of the mountain which
shuts in the canyon already glowed with sunlight in a wonderful
compound of gold and rose and green; and this too would kindle,
although more mildly and with rainbow tints, the fissures of our
crazy gable. If I were sleeping heavily, it was the bold blue that
struck me awake; if more lightly, then I would come to myself in
that earlier and fairier fight.
One Sunday morning, about five, the first brightness called me. I
rose and turned to the east, not for my devotions, but for air.
The night had been very still. The little private gale that blew
every evening in our canyon, for ten minutes or perhaps a quarter
of an hour, had swiftly blown itself out; in the hours that
followed not a sigh of wind had shaken the treetops; and our
barrack, for all its breaches, was less fresh that morning than of
wont. But I had no sooner reached the window than I forgot all
else in the sight that met my eyes, and I made but two bounds into
my clothes, and down the crazy plank to the platform.
The sun was still concealed below the opposite hilltops, though it
was shining already, not twenty feet above my head, on our own
mountain slope. But the scene, beyond a few near features, was
entirely changed. Napa valley was gone; gone were all the lower
slopes and woody foothills of the range; and in their place, not a
thousand feet below me, rolled a great level ocean. It was as
though I had gone to bed the night before, safe in a nook of inland
mountains, and had awakened in a bay upon the coast. I had seen
these inundations from below; at Calistoga I had risen and gone
abroad in the early morning, coughing and sneezing, under fathoms
on fathoms of gray sea vapour, like a cloudy sky--a dull sight for
the artist, and a painful experience for the invalid. But to sit
aloft one's self in the pure air and under the unclouded dome of
heaven, and thus look down on the submergence of the valley, was
strangely different and even delightful to the eyes. Far away were
hilltops like little islands. Nearer, a smoky surf beat about the
foot of precipices and poured into all the coves of these rough
mountains. The colour of that fog ocean was a thing never to be
forgotten. For an instant, among the Hebrides and just about
sundown, I have seen something like it on the sea itself. But the
white was not so opaline; nor was there, what surprisingly
increased the effect, that breathless, crystal stillness over all.
Even in its gentlest moods the salt sea travails, moaning among the
weeds or lisping on the sand; but that vast fog ocean lay in a
trance of silence, nor did the sweet air of the morning tremble
with a sound.
As I continued to sit upon the dump, I began to observe that this
sea was not so level as at first sight it appeared to be. Away in
the extreme south, a little hill of fog arose against the sky above
the general surface, and as it had already caught the sun, it shone
on the horizon like the topsails of some giant ship. There were
huge waves, stationary, as it seemed, like waves in a frozen sea;
and yet, as I looked again, I was not sure but they were moving
after all, with a slow and august advance. And while I was yet
doubting, a promontory of the some four or five miles away,
conspicuous by a bouquet of tall pines, was in a single instant
overtaken and swallowed up. It reappeared in a little, with its
pines, but this time as an islet, and only to be swallowed up once
more and then for good. This set me looking nearer, and I saw that
in every cove along the line of mountains the fog was being piled
in higher and higher, as though by some wind that was inaudible to
me. I could trace its progress, one pine tree first growing hazy
and then disappearing after another; although sometimes there was
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