Roughing It
all to myself, for public lectures were almost an unknown commodity in
the Pacific market. They are not so rare, now, I suppose. I took an old
personal friend along to play agent for me, and for two or three weeks
we roamed through Nevada and California and had a very cheerful time of
it. Two days before I lectured in Virginia City, two stagecoaches were
robbed within two miles of the town. The daring act was committed just
at dawn, by six masked men, who sprang up alongside the coaches,
presented revolvers at the heads of the drivers and passengers, and
commanded a general dismount. Everybody climbed down, and the robbers
took their watches and every cent they had. Then they took gunpowder and
blew up the express specie boxes and got their contents. The leader of
the robbers was a small, quick-spoken man, and the fame of his vigorous
manner and his intrepidity was in everybody’s mouth when we arrived.
The night after instructing Virginia, I walked over the desolate
“divide” and down to Gold Hill, and lectured there. The lecture done, I
stopped to talk with a friend, and did not start back till eleven. The
“divide” was high, unoccupied ground, between the towns, the scene of
twenty midnight murders and a hundred robberies. As we climbed up and
stepped out on this eminence, the Gold Hill lights dropped out of sight
at our backs, and the night closed down gloomy and dismal. A sharp wind
swept the place, too, and chilled our perspiring bodies through.
“I tell you I don’t like this place at night,” said Mike the agent.
“Well, don’t speak so loud,” I said. “You needn’t remind anybody that we
are here.”
Just then a dim figure approached me from the direction of Virginia—a
man, evidently. He came straight at me, and I stepped aside to let him
pass; he stepped in the way and confronted me again. Then I saw that he
had a mask on and was holding something in my face—I heard a click-click
and recognized a revolver in dim outline. I pushed the barrel aside with
my hand and said:
“Don’t!”
He ejaculated sharply:
“Your watch! Your money!”
I said:
“You can have them with pleasure—but take the pistol away from my face,
please. It makes me shiver.”
“No remarks! Hand out your money!”
“Certainly—I—”
“Put up your _hands_! Don’t you go for a weapon! Put ’em up! Higher!”
I held them above my head.
A pause. Then:
“_Are_ you going to hand out your money or _not_?”
I dropped my hands to my pockets and said:
Certainly! I—”
“Put up your hands! Do you want your head blown off? Higher!”
I put them above my head again.
Another pause.
Are you going to hand out your money or not? Ah-ah—again? Put up your
hands! By George, you want the head shot off you awful bad!”
“Well, friend, I’m trying my best to please you. You tell me to give up
my money, and when I reach for it you tell me to put up my hands. If you
would only—. Oh, now—don’t! All six of you at me! That other man will
get away while.—Now please take some of those revolvers out of my
face—_do_, if you _please_! Every time one of them clicks, my liver
comes up into my throat! If you have a mother—any of you—or if any of
you have ever _had_ a mother—or a—grandmother—or a—”
“Cheese it! _Will_ you give up your money, or have we got to—.
There—there—none of that! Put up your _hands_!”
“Gentlemen—I know you are gentlemen by your—”
“Silence! If you want to be facetious, young man, there are times and
places more fitting. _This_ is a serious business.”
“You prick the marrow of my opinion. The funerals I have attended in my
time were comedies compared to it. Now _I_ think—”
“Curse your palaver! Your money!—your money!—your money! Hold!—put up
your hands!”
“Gentlemen, listen to reason. You _see_ how I am situated—now _don’t_
put those pistols so close—I smell the powder.
“You see how I am situated. If I had four hands—so that I could hold up
two and—”
“Throttle him! Gag him! Kill him!”
“Gentlemen, _don’t_! Nobody’s watching the other fellow. Why don’t some
of you—. Ouch! Take it away, please!
“Gentlemen, you see that I’ve got to hold up my hands; and so I can’t
take out my money—but if you’ll be so kind as to take it out for me, I
will do as much for you some—”
“Search him Beauregard—and stop his jaw with a bullet, quick, if he wags
it again. Help Beauregard, Stonewall.”
Then three of them, with the small, spry leader, adjourned to Mike and
fell to searching him. I was so excited that my lawless fancy tortured
me to ask my two men all manner of facetious questions about their rebel
brother-generals of the South, but, considering the order they had
received, it was but common prudence to keep still. When everything had
been taken from me,—watch, money, and a multitude of trifles of small
value,—I supposed I was free, and forthwith put my cold hands into my
empty pockets and began an inoffensive jig to warm my feet and stir up
some latent courage—but instantly all pistols were at my head, and the
order came again:
“Be still! Put up your hands! And keep them up!”.
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They stood Mike up alongside of me, with strict orders to keep his hands
above his head, too, and then the chief highwayman said:
“Beauregard, hide behind that boulder; Phil Sheridan, you hide behind
that other one; Stonewall Jackson, put yourself behind that sage-bush
there. Keep your pistols bearing on these fellows, and if they take down
their hands within ten minutes, or move a single peg, let them have it!”
Then three disappeared in the gloom toward the several ambushes, and the
other three disappeared down the road toward Virginia.
It was depressingly still, and miserably cold. Now this whole thing was
a practical joke, and the robbers were personal friends of ours in
disguise, and twenty more lay hidden within ten feet of us during the
whole operation, listening. Mike knew all this, and was in the joke, but
I suspected nothing of it. To me it was most uncomfortably genuine. When
we had stood there in the middle of the road five minutes, like a couple
of idiots, with our hands aloft, freezing to death by inches, Mike’s
interest in the joke began to wane. He said:
“The time’s up, now, aint it?”
“No, you keep still. Do you want to take any chances with these bloody
savages?”
Presently Mike said:
“_Now_ the time’s up, anyway. I’m freezing.”
“Well freeze. Better freeze than carry your brains home in a basket.
Maybe the time _is_ up, but how do _we_ know?—got no watch to tell by. I
mean to give them good measure. I calculate to stand here fifteen
minutes or die. Don’t you move.”
So, without knowing it, I was making one joker very sick of his
contract. When we took our arms down at last, they were aching with cold
and fatigue, and when we went sneaking off, the dread I was in that the
time might not yet be up and that we would feel bullets in a moment, was
not sufficient to draw all my attention from the misery that racked my
stiffened body.
The joke of these highwayman friends of ours was mainly a joke upon
themselves; for they had waited for me on the cold hill-top two full
hours before I came, and there was very little fun in that; they were so
chilled that it took them a couple of weeks to get warm again. Moreover,
I never had a thought that they would kill me to get money which it was
so perfectly easy to get without any such folly, and so they did not
really frighten me bad enough to make their enjoyment worth the trouble
they had taken. I was only afraid that their weapons would go off
accidentally. Their very numbers inspired me with confidence that no
blood would be intentionally spilled. They were not smart; they ought to
have sent only _one_ highwayman, with a double-barrelled shot gun, if
they desired to see the author of this volume climb a tree.
However, I suppose that in the long run I got the largest share of the
joke at last; and in a shape not foreseen by the highwaymen; for the
chilly exposure on the “divide” while I was in a perspiration gave me a
cold which developed itself into a troublesome disease and kept my hands
idle some three months, besides costing me quite a sum in doctor’s
bills. Since then I play no practical jokes on people and generally lose
my temper when one is played upon me.
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When I returned to San Francisco I projected a pleasure journey to Japan
and thence westward around the world; but a desire to see home again
changed my mind, and I took a berth in the steamship, bade good-bye to
the friendliest land and livest, heartiest community on our continent,
and came by the way of the Isthmus to New York—a trip that was not much
of a pic-nic excursion, for the cholera broke out among us on the
passage and we buried two or three bodies at sea every day. I found home
a dreary place after my long absence; for half the children I had known
were now wearing whiskers or waterfalls, and few of the grown people I
had been acquainted with remained at their hearthstones prosperous and
happy—some of them had wandered to other scenes, some were in jail, and
the rest had been hanged. These changes touched me deeply, and I went
away and joined the famous Quaker City European Excursion and carried my
tears to foreign lands.
Thus, after seven years of vicissitudes, ended a “pleasure trip” to the
silver mines of Nevada which had originally been intended to occupy only
three months. However, I usually miss my calculations further than that.
MORAL.
If the reader thinks he is done, now, and that this book has no moral to
it, he is in error. The moral of it is this: If you are of any account,
stay at home and make your way by faithful diligence; but if you are “no
account,” go away from home, and then you will _have_ to work, whether
you want to or not. Thus you become a blessing to your friends by
ceasing to be a nuisance to them—if the people you go among suffer by
the operation.
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APPENDIX.
APPENDIX. A.
BRIEF SKETCH OF MORMON HISTORY.
Mormonism is only about forty years old, but its career has been full of
stir and adventure from the beginning, and is likely to remain so to the
end. Its adherents have been hunted and hounded from one end of the
country to the other, and the result is that for years they have hated
all “Gentiles” indiscriminately and with all their might. Joseph Smith,
the finder of the Book of Mormon and founder of the religion, was driven
from State to State with his mysterious copperplates and the miraculous
stones he read their inscriptions with. Finally he instituted his
“church” in Ohio and Brigham Young joined it. The neighbors began to
persecute, and apostasy commenced. Brigham held to the faith and worked
hard. He arrested desertion. He did more—he added converts in the midst
of the trouble. He rose in favor and importance with the brethren. He
was made one of the Twelve Apostles of the Church. He shortly fought his
way to a higher post and a more powerful—President of the Twelve. The
neighbors rose up and drove the Mormons out of Ohio, and they settled in
Missouri. Brigham went with them. The Missourians drove them out and
they retreated to Nauvoo, Illinois. They prospered there, and built a
temple which made some pretensions to architectural grace and achieved
some celebrity in a section of country where a brick court-house with a
tin dome and a cupola on it was contemplated with reverential awe. But
the Mormons were badgered and harried again by their neighbors. All the
proclamations Joseph Smith could issue denouncing polygamy and
repudiating it as utterly anti-Mormon were of no avail; the people of
the neighborhood, on both sides of the Mississippi, claimed that
polygamy was practised by the Mormons, and not only polygamy but a