Roughing It
same. It is no colder, and no warmer, in the one month than the other.
You do not use overcoats and you do not use fans. It is as pleasant a
climate as could well be contrived, take it all around, and is doubtless
the most unvarying in the whole world. The wind blows there a good deal
in the summer months, but then you can go over to Oakland, if you
choose—three or four miles away—it does not blow there. It has only
snowed twice in San Francisco in nineteen years, and then it only
remained on the ground long enough to astonish the children, and set
them to wondering what the feathery stuff was.
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During eight months of the year, straight along, the skies are bright
and cloudless, and never a drop of rain falls. But when the other four
months come along, you will need to go and steal an umbrella. Because
you will require it. Not just one day, but one hundred and twenty days
in hardly varying succession. When you want to go visiting, or attend
church, or the theatre, you never look up at the clouds to see whether
it is likely to rain or not—you look at the almanac. If it is Winter, it
_will_ rain—and if it is Summer, it _won’t_ rain, and you cannot help
it. You never need a lightning-rod, because it never thunders and it
never lightens. And after you have listened for six or eight weeks,
every night, to the dismal monotony of those quiet rains, you will wish
in your heart the thunder _would_ leap and crash and roar along those
drowsy skies once, and make everything alive—you will wish the prisoned
lightnings _would_ cleave the dull firmament asunder and light it with a
blinding glare for _one_ little instant. You would give _anything_ to
hear the old familiar thunder again and see the lightning strike
somebody. And along in the Summer, when you have suffered about four
months of lustrous, pitiless sunshine, you are ready to go down on your
knees and plead for rain—hail—snow—thunder and lightning—anything to
break the monotony—you will take an earthquake, if you cannot do any
better. And the chances are that you’ll get it, too.
San Francisco is built on sand hills, but they are prolific sand hills.
They yield a generous vegetation. All the rare flowers which people in
“the States” rear with such patient care in parlor flower-pots and
green-houses, flourish luxuriantly in the open air there all the year
round. Calla lilies, all sorts of geraniums, passion flowers, moss
roses—I do not know the names of a tenth part of them. I only know that
while New Yorkers are burdened with banks and drifts of snow,
Californians are burdened with banks and drifts of flowers, if they only
keep their hands off and let them grow. And I have heard that they have
also that rarest and most curious of all the flowers, the beautiful
Espiritu Santo, as the Spaniards call it—or flower of the Holy
Spirit—though I thought it grew only in Central America—down on the
Isthmus. In its cup is the daintiest little facsimile of a dove, as pure
as snow. The Spaniards have a superstitious reverence for it. The
blossom has been conveyed to the States, submerged in ether; and the
bulb has been taken thither also, but every attempt to make it bloom
after it arrived, has failed.
I have elsewhere spoken of the endless Winter of Mono, California, and
but this moment of the eternal Spring of San Francisco. Now if we travel
a hundred miles in a straight line, we come to the eternal Summer of
Sacramento. One never sees Summer-clothing or mosquitoes in San
Francisco—but they can be found in Sacramento. Not always and
unvaryingly, but about one hundred and forty-three months out of twelve
years, perhaps. Flowers bloom there, always, the reader can easily
believe—people suffer and sweat, and swear, morning, noon and night, and
wear out their stanchest energies fanning themselves. It gets hot there,
but if you go down to Fort Yuma you will find it hotter. Fort Yuma is
probably the hottest place on earth. The thermometer stays at one
hundred and twenty in the shade there all the time—except when it varies
and goes higher. It is a U.S. military post, and its occupants get so
used to the terrific heat that they suffer without it. There is a
tradition (attributed to John Phenix [It has been purloined by fifty
different scribblers who were too poor to invent a fancy but not ashamed
to steal one.—M. T.]) that a very, very wicked soldier died there, once,
and of course, went straight to the hottest corner of perdition,—and the
next day he _telegraphed back for his blankets._ There is no doubt about
the truth of this statement—there can be no doubt about it. I have seen
the place where that soldier used to board. In Sacramento it is fiery
Summer always, and you can gather roses, and eat strawberries and ice-
cream, and wear white linen clothes, and pant and perspire, at eight or
nine o’clock in the morning, and then take the cars, and at noon put on
your furs and your skates, and go skimming over frozen Donner Lake,
seven thousand feet above the valley, among snow banks fifteen feet
deep, and in the shadow of grand mountain peaks that lift their frosty
crags ten thousand feet above the level of the sea.
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There is a transition for you! Where will you find another like it in
the Western hemisphere? And some of us have swept around snow-walled
curves of the Pacific Railroad in that vicinity, six thousand feet above
the sea, and looked down as the birds do, upon the deathless Summer of
the Sacramento Valley, with its fruitful fields, its feathery foliage,
its silver streams, all slumbering in the mellow haze of its enchanted
atmosphere, and all infinitely softened and spiritualized by distance—a
dreamy, exquisite glimpse of fairyland, made all the more charming and
striking that it was caught through a forbidden gateway of ice and snow,
and savage crags and precipices.
CHAPTER LVII.
It was in this Sacramento Valley, just referred to, that a deal of the
most lucrative of the early gold mining was done, and you may still see,
in places, its grassy slopes and levels torn and guttered and disfigured
by the avaricious spoilers of fifteen and twenty years ago. You may see
such disfigurements far and wide over California—and in some such
places, where only meadows and forests are visible—not a living
creature, not a house, no stick or stone or remnant of a ruin, and not a
sound, not even a whisper to disturb the Sabbath stillness—you will find
it hard to believe that there stood at one time a fiercely-flourishing
little city, of two thousand or three thousand souls, with its
newspaper, fire company, brass band, volunteer militia, bank, hotels,
noisy Fourth of July processions and speeches, gambling hells crammed
with tobacco smoke, profanity, and rough-bearded men of all nations and
colors, with tables heaped with gold dust sufficient for the revenues of
a German principality—streets crowded and rife with business—town lots
worth four hundred dollars a front foot—labor, laughter, music, dancing,
swearing, fighting, shooting, stabbing—a bloody inquest and a man for
breakfast every morning—_everything_ that delights and adorns
existence—all the appointments and appurtenances of a thriving and
prosperous and promising young city,—and _now_ nothing is left of it all
but a lifeless, homeless solitude. The men are gone, the houses have
vanished, even the _name_ of the place is forgotten. In no other land,
in modern times, have towns so absolutely died and disappeared, as in
the old mining regions of California.
It was a driving, vigorous, restless population in those days. It was a
_curious_ population. It was the _only_ population of the kind that the
world has ever seen gathered together, and it is not likely that the
world will ever see its like again. For observe, it was an assemblage of
two hundred thousand _young_ men—not simpering, dainty, kid-gloved
weaklings, but stalwart, muscular, dauntless young braves, brimful of
push and energy, and royally endowed with every attribute that goes to
make up a peerless and magnificent manhood—the very pick and choice of
the world’s glorious ones. No women, no children, no gray and stooping
veterans,—none but erect, bright-eyed, quick-moving, strong-handed young
giants—the strangest population, the finest population, the most gallant
host that ever trooped down the startled solitudes of an unpeopled land.
And where are they now? Scattered to the ends of the earth—or
prematurely aged and decrepit—or shot or stabbed in street affrays—or
dead of disappointed hopes and broken hearts—all gone, or nearly
all—victims devoted upon the altar of the golden calf—the noblest
holocaust that ever wafted its sacrificial incense heavenward. It is
pitiful to think upon.
It was a splendid population—for all the slow, sleepy, sluggish-brained
sloths staid at home—you never find that sort of people among
pioneers—you cannot build pioneers out of that sort of material. It was
that population that gave to California a name for getting up astounding
enterprises and rushing them through with a magnificent dash and daring
and a recklessness of cost or consequences, which she bears unto this
day—and when she projects a new surprise, the grave world smiles as
usual, and says “Well, that is California all over.”
But they were rough in those times! They fairly reveled in gold, whisky,
fights, and fandangoes, and were unspeakably happy. The honest miner
raked from a hundred to a thousand dollars out of his claim a day, and
what with the gambling dens and the other entertainments, he hadn’t a
cent the next morning, if he had any sort of luck. They cooked their own
bacon and beans, sewed on their own buttons, washed their own
shirts—blue woollen ones; and if a man wanted a fight on his hands
without any annoying delay, all he had to do was to appear in public in
a white shirt or a stove-pipe hat, and he would be accommodated. For
those people hated aristocrats. They had a particular and malignant
animosity toward what they called a “biled shirt.”
It was a wild, free, disorderly, grotesque society! _Men_—only swarming
hosts of stalwart _men_—nothing juvenile, nothing feminine, visible
anywhere!
In those days miners would flock in crowds to catch a glimpse of that
rare and blessed spectacle, a woman! Old inhabitants tell how, in a
certain camp, the news went abroad early in the morning that a woman was
come! They had seen a calico dress hanging out of a wagon down at the
camping-ground—sign of emigrants from over the great plains. Everybody
went down there, and a shout went up when an actual, bona fide dress was
discovered fluttering in the wind! The male emigrant was visible. The
miners said:
“Fetch her out!”
He said: “It is my wife, gentlemen—she is sick—we have been robbed of
money, provisions, everything, by the Indians—we want to rest.”
“Fetch her out! We’ve got to see her!”
“But, gentlemen, the poor thing, she—”
“FETCH HER OUT!”
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He “fetched her out,” and they swung their hats and sent up three
rousing cheers and a tiger; and they crowded around and gazed at her,
and touched her dress, and listened to her voice with the look of men
who listened to a _memory_ rather than a present reality—and then they
collected twenty-five hundred dollars in gold and gave it to the man,
and swung their hats again and gave three more cheers, and went home
satisfied.
Once I dined in San Francisco with the family of a pioneer, and talked
with his daughter, a young lady whose first experience in San Francisco
was an adventure, though she herself did not remember it, as she was
only two or three years old at the time. Her father said that, after
landing from the ship, they were walking up the street, a servant