University of Virginia Library

THE "EARLY DAYS"

But they were rough in those times! They fairly reveled in gold, whisky, fights and fandangoes, and were unspeakably happy. The honest miner raked a hundred to a thousand dollars out of his claim a day, and what with the gambling dues 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 woolen 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."

In his sketch entitled "The Luck of Roaring Camp," Mr. Bret Harte has deftly pictured the roughness and lawlessness of a California mining camp of the early days, and also its large-hearted charity and compassion — for these traits are found in all true pioneers. Roaring Camp becomes blessed by the presence of a wandering, sickly woman and her little child — rare and coveted treasures among rude men who still yearned in secret for the mothers and sisters and children they loved and cherished in other days. This wanderer — the only woman in Roaring Camp — died, and the honest miners took charge of the orphan little one in a body. They washed it and dressed it and fed it — getting its garments on wrong end first as often as any other way, and pinning the garments to the child occasionally and wondering why the baby wasn't comfortable — and the food these inexperienced nurses lovingly concocted for it was often rather beyond its capabilities, since it was neither an alligator nor an ostrich.

But they meant well, and the baby thrived in spite of the perilous kindnesses of the miners. But it was manifest that all could not nurse the baby at once, and so they passed a law that the best behaved man should have it for one day, and the man with the cleanest shirt the next day, and the man whose cabin was in the neatest order the next, and so on. And the result was, that a handsome cradle was bought, and carted from cabin to cabin, according to who won the privilege of nursing that day — and the handsome cradle made such a contrast to the unhandsome furniture, that gradually the unhandsome furniture disappeared and gave way for a neater sort — and then ambitious male nurses got to washing up and putting on clean garments every day, and some of them twice a day — and rough, boisterous characters became gentle and soft-spoken, since only the well-behaved could nurse the baby. And, in fine, the lawless Roaring Camp became insensibly transformed into a neat well-dressed, orderly and law-abiding community, the wonder and admiration of all the mining world. All this, through the dumb teaching, the humanizing influence, the uninspired ministering of a little child.