Roughing It
aristocratic in the city, and stopped. It was a place where he had often
dined, in better days, and Martin knew him well. Standing aside, just
out of the range of the light, he worshiped the quails and steaks in the
show window, and imagined that may be the fairy times were not gone yet
and some prince in disguise would come along presently and tell him to
go in there and take whatever he wanted. He chewed his stick with a
hungry interest as he warmed to his subject. Just at this juncture he
was conscious of some one at his side, sure enough; and then a finger
touched his arm. He looked up, over his shoulder, and saw an
apparition—a very allegory of Hunger! It was a man six feet high, gaunt,
unshaven, hung with rags; with a haggard face and sunken cheeks, and
eyes that pleaded piteously. This phantom said:
“Come with me—please.”
He locked his arm in Blucher’s and walked up the street to where the
passengers were few and the light not strong, and then facing about, put
out his hands in a beseeching way, and said:
“Friend—stranger—look at me! Life is easy to you—you go about, placid
and content, as I did once, in my day—you have been in there, and eaten
your sumptuous supper, and picked your teeth, and hummed your tune, and
thought your pleasant thoughts, and said to yourself it is a good
world—but you’ve never _suffered_! You don’t know what trouble is—you
don’t know what misery is—nor hunger! Look at me! Stranger have pity on
a poor friendless, homeless dog! As God is my judge, I have not tasted
food for eight and forty hours!—look in my eyes and see if I lie! Give
me the least trifle in the world to keep me from
starving—anything—twenty-five cents! Do it, stranger—do it, _please_. It
will be nothing to you, but life to me. Do it, and I will go down on my
knees and lick the dust before you! I will kiss your footprints—I will
worship the very ground you walk on! Only twenty-five cents! I am
famishing—perishing—starving by inches! For God’s sake don’t desert me!”
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Blucher was bewildered—and touched, too—stirred to the depths. He
reflected. Thought again. Then an idea struck him, and he said:
“Come with me.”
He took the outcast’s arm, walked him down to Martin’s restaurant,
seated him at a marble table, placed the bill of fare before him, and
said:
“Order what you want, friend. Charge it to me, Mr. Martin.”
“All right, Mr. Blucher,” said Martin.
Then Blucher stepped back and leaned against the counter and watched the
man stow away cargo after cargo of buckwheat cakes at seventy-five cents
a plate; cup after cup of coffee, and porter house steaks worth two
dollars apiece; and when six dollars and a half’s worth of destruction
had been accomplished, and the stranger’s hunger appeased, Blucher went
down to French Pete’s, bought a veal cutlet plain, a slice of bread, and
three radishes, with his dime, and set to and feasted like a king!
Take the episode all around, it was as odd as any that can be culled
from the myriad curiosities of Californian life, perhaps.
CHAPTER LX.
By and by, an old friend of mine, a miner, came down from one of the
decayed mining camps of Tuolumne, California, and I went back with him.
We lived in a small cabin on a verdant hillside, and there were not five
other cabins in view over the wide expanse of hill and forest. Yet a
flourishing city of two or three thousand population had occupied this
grassy dead solitude during the flush times of twelve or fifteen years
before, and where our cabin stood had once been the heart of the teeming
hive, the centre of the city. When the mines gave out the town fell into
decay, and in a few years wholly disappeared—streets, dwellings, shops,
everything—and left no sign. The grassy slopes were as green and smooth
and desolate of life as if they had never been disturbed. The mere
handful of miners still remaining, had seen the town spring up spread,
grow and flourish in its pride; and they had seen it sicken and die, and
pass away like a dream. With it their hopes had died, and their zest of
life. They had long ago resigned themselves to their exile, and ceased
to correspond with their distant friends or turn longing eyes toward
their early homes. They had accepted banishment, forgotten the world and
been forgotten of the world. They were far from telegraphs and
railroads, and they stood, as it were, in a living grave, dead to the
events that stirred the globe’s great populations, dead to the common
interests of men, isolated and outcast from brotherhood with their kind.
It was the most singular, and almost the most touching and melancholy
exile that fancy can imagine.—One of my associates in this locality, for
two or three months, was a man who had had a university education; but
now for eighteen years he had decayed there by inches, a bearded, rough-
clad, clay-stained miner, and at times, among his sighings and
soliloquizings, he unconsciously interjected vaguely remembered Latin
and Greek sentences—dead and musty tongues, meet vehicles for the
thoughts of one whose dreams were all of the past, whose life was a
failure; a tired man, burdened with the present, and indifferent to the
future; a man without ties, hopes, interests, waiting for rest and the
end.
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In that one little corner of California is found a species of mining
which is seldom or never mentioned in print. It is called “pocket
mining” and I am not aware that any of it is done outside of that little
corner. The gold is not evenly distributed through the surface dirt, as
in ordinary placer mines, but is collected in little spots, and they are
very wide apart and exceedingly hard to find, but when you do find one
you reap a rich and sudden harvest. There are not now more than twenty
pocket miners in that entire little region. I think I know every one of
them personally. I have known one of them to hunt patiently about the
hill-sides every day for eight months without finding gold enough to
make a snuff-box—his grocery bill running up relentlessly all the
time—and then find a pocket and take out of it two thousand dollars in
two dips of his shovel. I have known him to take out three thousand
dollars in two hours, and go and pay up every cent of his indebtedness,
then enter on a dazzling spree that finished the last of his treasure
before the night was gone. And the next day he bought his groceries on
credit as usual, and shouldered his pan and shovel and went off to the
hills hunting pockets again happy and content. This is the most
fascinating of all the different kinds of mining, and furnishes a very
handsome percentage of victims to the lunatic asylum.
Pocket hunting is an ingenious process. You take a spadeful of earth
from the hill-side and put it in a large tin pan and dissolve and wash
it gradually away till nothing is left but a teaspoonful of fine
sediment. Whatever gold was in that earth has remained, because, being
the heaviest, it has sought the bottom. Among the sediment you will find
half a dozen yellow particles no larger than pin-heads. You are
delighted. You move off to one side and wash another pan. If you find
gold again, you move to one side further, and wash a third pan. If you
find _no_ gold this time, you are delighted again, because you know you
are on the right scent.
You lay an imaginary plan, shaped like a fan, with its handle up the
hill—for just where the end of the handle is, you argue that the rich
deposit lies hidden, whose vagrant grains of gold have escaped and been
washed down the hill, spreading farther and farther apart as they
wandered. And so you proceed up the hill, washing the earth and
narrowing your lines every time the absence of gold in the pan shows
that you are outside the spread of the fan; and at last, twenty yards up
the hill your lines have converged to a point—a single foot from that
point you cannot find any gold. Your breath comes short and quick, you
are feverish with excitement; the dinner-bell may ring its clapper off,
you pay no attention; friends may die, weddings transpire, houses burn
down, they are nothing to you; you sweat and dig and delve with a
frantic interest—and all at once you strike it! Up comes a spadeful of
earth and quartz that is all lovely with soiled lumps and leaves and
sprays of gold. Sometimes that one spadeful is all—$500. Sometimes the
nest contains $10,000, and it takes you three or four days to get it all
out. The pocket-miners tell of one nest that yielded $60,000 and two men
exhausted it in two weeks, and then sold the ground for $10,000 to a
party who never got $300 out of it afterward.
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The hogs are good pocket hunters. All the summer they root around the
bushes, and turn up a thousand little piles of dirt, and then the miners
long for the rains; for the rains beat upon these little piles and wash
them down and expose the gold, possibly right over a pocket. Two pockets
were found in this way by the same man in one day. One had $5,000 in it
and the other $8,000. That man could appreciate it, for he hadn’t had a
cent for about a year.
In Tuolumne lived two miners who used to go to the neighboring village
in the afternoon and return every night with household supplies. Part of
the distance they traversed a trail, and nearly always sat down to rest
on a great boulder that lay beside the path. In the course of thirteen
years they had worn that boulder tolerably smooth, sitting on it. By and
by two vagrant Mexicans came along and occupied the seat. They began to
amuse themselves by chipping off flakes from the boulder with a sledge-
hammer. They examined one of these flakes and found it rich with gold.
That boulder paid them $800 afterward. But the aggravating circumstance
was that these “Greasers” knew that there must be more gold where that
boulder came from, and so they went panning up the hill and found what
was probably the richest pocket that region has yet produced. It took
three months to exhaust it, and it yielded $120,000. The two American
miners who used to sit on the boulder are poor yet, and they take turn
about in getting up early in the morning to curse those Mexicans—and
when it comes down to pure ornamental cursing, the native American is
gifted above the sons of men.
I have dwelt at some length upon this matter of pocket mining because it
is a subject that is seldom referred to in print, and therefore I judged
that it would have for the reader that interest which naturally attaches
to novelty.
CHAPTER LXI.
One of my comrades there—another of those victims of eighteen years of
unrequited toil and blighted hopes—was one of the gentlest spirits that
ever bore its patient cross in a weary exile: grave and simple Dick
Baker, pocket-miner of Dead-House Gulch.—He was forty-six, gray as a
rat, earnest, thoughtful, slenderly educated, slouchily dressed and
clay-soiled, but his heart was finer metal than any gold his shovel ever
brought to light—than any, indeed, that ever was mined or minted.
Whenever he was out of luck and a little down-hearted, he would fall to
mourning over the loss of a wonderful cat he used to own (for where
women and children are not, men of kindly impulses take up with pets,
for they must love something). And he always spoke of the strange
sagacity of that cat with the air of a man who believed in his secret
heart that there was something human about it—may be even supernatural.
I heard him talking about this animal once. He said:
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“Gentlemen, I used to have a cat here, by the name of Tom Quartz, which
you’d a took an interest in I reckon—most any body would. I had him here
eight year—and he was the remarkablest cat _I_ ever see. He was a large
gray one of the Tom specie, an’ he had more hard, natchral sense than