Roughing It
Recorder’s. In the morning, having renewed his provisional supplies, he
is off again on his wild and unbeaten route. Why, the fellow numbers
already his feet by the thousands. He is the horse-leech. He has the
craving stomach of the shark or anaconda. He would conquer metallic
worlds.
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This was enough. The instant we had finished reading the above article,
four of us decided to go to Humboldt. We commenced getting ready at
once. And we also commenced upbraiding ourselves for not deciding
sooner—for we were in terror lest all the rich mines would be found and
secured before we got there, and we might have to put up with ledges
that would not yield more than two or three hundred dollars a ton,
maybe. An hour before, I would have felt opulent if I had owned ten feet
in a Gold Hill mine whose ore produced twenty-five dollars to the ton;
now I was already annoyed at the prospect of having to put up with mines
the poorest of which would be a marvel in Gold Hill.
CHAPTER XXVII.
Hurry, was the word! We wasted no time. Our party consisted of four
persons—a blacksmith sixty years of age, two young lawyers, and myself.
We bought a wagon and two miserable old horses. We put eighteen hundred
pounds of provisions and mining tools in the wagon and drove out of
Carson on a chilly December afternoon. The horses were so weak and old
that we soon found that it would be better if one or two of us got out
and walked. It was an improvement. Next, we found that it would be
better if a third man got out. That was an improvement also. It was at
this time that I volunteered to drive, although I had never driven a
harnessed horse before and many a man in such a position would have felt
fairly excused from such a responsibility. But in a little while it was
found that it would be a fine thing if the driver got out and walked
also. It was at this time that I resigned the position of driver, and
never resumed it again. Within the hour, we found that it would not only
be better, but was absolutely necessary, that we four, taking turns, two
at a time, should put our hands against the end of the wagon and push it
through the sand, leaving the feeble horses little to do but keep out of
the way and hold up the tongue. Perhaps it is well for one to know his
fate at first, and get reconciled to it. We had learned ours in one
afternoon. It was plain that we had to walk through the sand and shove
that wagon and those horses two hundred miles. So we accepted the
situation, and from that time forth we never rode. More than that, we
stood regular and nearly constant watches pushing up behind.
We made seven miles, and camped in the desert. Young Clagett (now member
of Congress from Montana) unharnessed and fed and watered the horses;
Oliphant and I cut sagebrush, built the fire and brought water to cook
with; and old Mr. Ballou the blacksmith did the cooking. This division
of labor, and this appointment, was adhered to throughout the journey.
We had no tent, and so we slept under our blankets in the open plain. We
were so tired that we slept soundly.
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We were fifteen days making the trip—two hundred miles; thirteen,
rather, for we lay by a couple of days, in one place, to let the horses
rest.
We could really have accomplished the journey in ten days if we had
towed the horses behind the wagon, but we did not think of that until it
was too late, and so went on shoving the horses and the wagon too when
we might have saved half the labor. Parties who met us, occasionally,
advised us to put the _horses_ in the wagon, but Mr. Ballou, through
whose iron-clad earnestness no sarcasm could pierce, said that that
would not do, because the provisions were exposed and would suffer, the
horses being “bituminous from long deprivation.” The reader will excuse
me from translating. What Mr. Ballou customarily meant, when he used a
long word, was a secret between himself and his Maker. He was one of the
best and kindest hearted men that ever graced a humble sphere of life.
He was gentleness and simplicity itself—and unselfishness, too. Although
he was more than twice as old as the eldest of us, he never gave himself
any airs, privileges, or exemptions on that account. He did a _young_
man’s share of the work; and did his share of conversing and
entertaining from the general stand-point of any age—not from the
arrogant, overawing summit-height of sixty years. His one striking
peculiarity was his Partingtonian fashion of loving and using big words
_for their own sakes_, and independent of any bearing they might have
upon the thought he was purposing to convey. He always let his ponderous
syllables fall with an easy unconsciousness that left them wholly
without offensiveness. In truth his air was so natural and so simple
that one was always catching himself accepting his stately sentences as
meaning something, when they really meant nothing in the world. If a
word was long and grand and resonant, that was sufficient to win the old
man’s love, and he would drop that word into the most out-of-the-way
place in a sentence or a subject, and be as pleased with it as if it
were perfectly luminous with meaning.
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We four always spread our common stock of blankets together on the
frozen ground, and slept side by side; and finding that our foolish,
long-legged hound pup had a deal of animal heat in him, Oliphant got to
admitting him to the bed, between himself and Mr. Ballou, hugging the
dog’s warm back to his breast and finding great comfort in it. But in
the night the pup would get stretchy and brace his feet against the old
man’s back and shove, grunting complacently the while; and now and then,
being warm and snug, grateful and happy, he would paw the old man’s back
simply in excess of comfort; and at yet other times he would dream of
the chase and in his sleep tug at the old man’s back hair and bark in
his ear. The old gentleman complained mildly about these familiarities,
at last, and when he got through with his statement he said that such a
dog as that was not a proper animal to admit to bed with tired men,
because he was “so meretricious in his movements and so organic in his
emotions.” We turned the dog out.
It was a hard, wearing, toilsome journey, but it had its bright side;
for after each day was done and our wolfish hunger appeased with a hot
supper of fried bacon, bread, molasses and black coffee, the pipe-
smoking, song-singing and yarn-spinning around the evening camp-fire in
the still solitudes of the desert was a happy, care-free sort of
recreation that seemed the very summit and culmination of earthly
luxury.
It is a kind of life that has a potent charm for all men, whether city
or country-bred. We are descended from desert-lounging Arabs, and
countless ages of growth toward perfect civilization have failed to root
out of us the nomadic instinct. We all confess to a gratified thrill at
the thought of “camping out.”
Once we made twenty-five miles in a day, and once we made forty miles
(through the Great American Desert), and ten miles beyond—fifty in
all—in twenty-three hours, without halting to eat, drink or rest. To
stretch out and go to sleep, even on stony and frozen ground, after
pushing a wagon and two horses fifty miles, is a delight so supreme that
for the moment it almost seems cheap at the price.
We camped two days in the neighborhood of the “Sink of the Humboldt.” We
tried to use the strong alkaline water of the Sink, but it would not
answer. It was like drinking lye, and not weak lye, either. It left a
taste in the mouth, bitter and every way execrable, and a burning in the
stomach that was very uncomfortable. We put molasses in it, but that
helped it very little; we added a pickle, yet the alkali was the
prominent taste and so it was unfit for drinking.
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The coffee we made of this water was the meanest compound man has yet
invented. It was really viler to the taste than the unameliorated water
itself. Mr. Ballou, being the architect and builder of the beverage felt
constrained to endorse and uphold it, and so drank half a cup, by little
sips, making shift to praise it faintly the while, but finally threw out
the remainder, and said frankly it was “too technical for _him_.”
But presently we found a spring of fresh water, convenient, and then,
with nothing to mar our enjoyment, and no stragglers to interrupt it, we
entered into our rest.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
After leaving the Sink, we traveled along the Humboldt river a little
way. People accustomed to the monster mile-wide Mississippi, grow
accustomed to associating the term “river” with a high degree of watery
grandeur. Consequently, such people feel rather disappointed when they
stand on the shores of the Humboldt or the Carson and find that a
“river” in Nevada is a sickly rivulet which is just the counterpart of
the Erie canal in all respects save that the canal is twice as long and
four times as deep. One of the pleasantest and most invigorating
exercises one can contrive is to run and jump across the Humboldt river
till he is overheated, and then drink it dry.
On the fifteenth day we completed our march of two hundred miles and
entered Unionville, Humboldt county, in the midst of a driving snow-
storm. Unionville consisted of eleven cabins and a liberty-pole. Six of
the cabins were strung along one side of a deep canyon, and the other
five faced them. The rest of the landscape was made up of bleak mountain
walls that rose so high into the sky from both sides of the canyon that
the village was left, as it were, far down in the bottom of a crevice.
It was always daylight on the mountain tops a long time before the
darkness lifted and revealed Unionville.
We built a small, rude cabin in the side of the crevice and roofed it
with canvas, leaving a corner open to serve as a chimney, through which
the cattle used to tumble occasionally, at night, and mash our furniture
and interrupt our sleep. It was very cold weather and fuel was scarce.
Indians brought brush and bushes several miles on their backs; and when
we could catch a laden Indian it was well—and when we could not (which
was the rule, not the exception), we shivered and bore it.
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I confess, without shame, that I expected to find masses of silver lying
all about the ground. I expected to see it glittering in the sun on the
mountain summits. I said nothing about this, for some instinct told me
that I might possibly have an exaggerated idea about it, and so if I
betrayed my thought I might bring derision upon myself. Yet I was as
perfectly satisfied in my own mind as I could be of anything, that I was
going to gather up, in a day or two, or at furthest a week or two,
silver enough to make me satisfactorily wealthy—and so my fancy was
already busy with plans for spending this money. The first opportunity
that offered, I sauntered carelessly away from the cabin, keeping an eye
on the other boys, and stopping and contemplating the sky when they
seemed to be observing me; but as soon as the coast was manifestly
clear, I fled away as guiltily as a thief might have done and never
halted till I was far beyond sight and call. Then I began my search with
a feverish excitement that was brimful of expectation—almost of
certainty. I crawled about the ground, seizing and examining bits of
stone, blowing the dust from them or rubbing them on my clothes, and
then peering at them with anxious hope. Presently I found a bright
fragment and my heart bounded! I hid behind a boulder and polished it
and scrutinized it with a nervous eagerness and a delight that was more
pronounced than absolute certainty itself could have afforded. The more
I examined the fragment the more I was convinced that I had found the