University of Virginia Library

1. CHAPTER I.
AURI SACRA FAMES.

I write in the first person; but I shall not
maunder about myself. I am in no sense the
hero of this drama. Call me Chorus, if you
please, — not Chorus merely observant and impassive;
rather Chorus a sympathizing monitor
and helper. Perhaps I gave a certain crude
momentum to the movement of the play, when
finer forces were ready to flag; but others bore
the keen pangs, others took the great prizes,
while I stood by to lift the maimed and cheer
the victor.

It is a healthy, simple, broad-daylight story.
No mystery in it. There is action enough, primeval
action of the Homeric kind. Deeds of
the heroic and chivalric times do not utterly disdain
our day. There are men as ready to gallop
for love and strike for love now, as in the age of
Amadis.

Roughs and brutes, as well as gentlemen, take
their places in this drama. None of the characters
have scruples or qualms. They act according
to their laws, and are scourged or crowned,
as their laws suit Nature's or not.

To me these adventures were episode; to my
friend, the hero, the very substance of life.

But enough backing and filling. Enter Richard
Wade — myself — as Chorus.

A few years ago I was working a gold-quartz
mine in California.

It was a worthless mine, under the conditions
of that time. I had been dragged into it by the
shifts and needs of California life. Destiny probably
meant to teach me patience and self-possession
in difficulty. So Destiny thrust me into a
bitter bad business of QUARTZ MINING.

If I had had countless dollars of capital to
work my mine, or quicksilver for amalgamation
as near and plenty as the snow on the Sierra
Nevada, I might have done well enough.

As it was, I got but certain pennyworths of
gold to a most intolerable quantity of quartz.
The precious metal was to the brute mineral in
the proportion of perhaps a hundred pin-heads to
the ton. My partners, down in San Francisco,
wrote to me: “Only find twice as many pin-heads,
and our fortune is made.” So thought

those ardent fellows, fancying that gold would go
up and labor go down, — that presently I would
strike a vein where the mineral would show yellow
threads and yellow dots, perhaps even yellow
knobs, in the crevices, instead of empty crannies
which Nature had prepared for monetary deposits
and forgotten to fill.

So thought the fellows in San Francisco. They
had been speculating in beef, bread-stuffs, city
lots, Rincon Point, wharf property, mission lands,
Mexican titles, Sacramento boats, politics, Oregon
lumber. They had been burnt out, they had
been cleaned out, they had been drowned out.
They depended upon me and the quartz mine to
set them up again. So there was a small, steady
stream of money flowing up from San Francisco
from the depleted coffers of those sanguine partners,
flowing into our mine, and sinking there,
together with my labor and my life.

Our ore — the San Francisco partners liked to
keep up the complimentary fiction of calling it
ore — was pretty stuff for an amateur mineralogical
cabinet. A professor would have exhibited
specimens to a lecture-room with delight. There
never was any quartz where the matrix was better
defined, better shaped to hold the gold that was
not in it. For Macadam, what royal material it
would have been! Park roads made of it would
have glittered gayer than marble. How brilliantly

paths covered with its creamy-white fragments
would have meandered through green grass!

If I had had no fond expectations of these
shining white and yellow stones, I should have
deemed their mass useful and ornamental enough,
— useful skeleton material to help hold the world
together, ornamental when it lay in the sun and
sparkled. But this laughing sparkle had something
of a sneer in it. The stuff knew that it
had humbugged me. Let a man or a woman be
victor over man or woman, and the chances are
that generosity will suppress the pæan. But matter
is so often insulted and disdained, that when
it triumphs over mind it is merciless.

Yes; my quartz had humbugged me. Or
rather — let me not be unjust even to undefended
stone, not rich enough to pay an advocate —
I had humbugged myself with false hopes. I
have since ascertained that my experience is
not singular. Other men have had false hopes
of other things than quartz mines. Perhaps it
was to teach me this that the experience came.
Having had my lesson, I am properly cool and
patient now when I see other people suffering
in the same way, — whether they dig for gold,
fame, or bliss; digging for the bread of their
life, and getting only a stone. The quartz was
honest enough as quartz. It was my own fault
that I looked for gold-bearing quartz, and so

found it bogus and a delusion. What right
have we to demand the noble from the ignoble!

I used sometimes fairly to shake my fist at
my handsome pile of mineral, my bullionless
pockets of ore. There was gold in the quartz;
there are pearls in the Jersey muds; there are
plums in boarding-house puddings; there are
sixpences in the straw of Broadway omnibuses.

Steady disappointment, by and by, informs a
man that he is in the wrong place. All work,
no play, no pay, is a hint to work elsewhere.
But men must dig in the wrong spots to learn
where these are, and so narrow into the right
spot at last. Every man, it seems, must waste
so much life. Every man must have so much
imprisonment to teach him limits and fit him
for freedom.

Nearly enough, however of Miei Prigioni. A
word or two of my companions in jail. A
hard lot they were, my neighbors within twenty
miles! Jail-birds, some of them, of the worst
kind. It was as well, perhaps, that my digging
did not make money, and theirs did. They
would not have scrupled to bag my gold and
butcher me. But they were not all ruffians;
some were only barbarians.

Pikes, most of these latter. America is manufacturing
several new types of men. The
Pike is one of the newest. He is a bastard

pioneer. With one hand he clutches the pioneer
vices; with the other he beckons forward
the vices of civilization. It is hard to understand
how a man can have so little virtue in
so long a body, unless the shakes are foes to
virtue in the soul, as they are to beauty in the
face.

He is a terrible shock, this unlucky Pike, to
the hope that the new race on the new continent
is to be a handsome race. I lose that faith, which
the people about me now have nourished, when I
recall the Pike. He is hung together, not put
together. He inserts his lank fathom of a man
into a suit of molasses-colored homespun. Frowzy
and husky is the hair Nature crowns him with;
frowzy and stubby the beard. He shambles in
his walk. He drawls in his talk. He drinks
whiskey by the tank. His oaths are to his words
as Falstaff's sack to his bread. I have seen Maltese
beggars, Arab camel-drivers, Dominican friars,
New York Aldermen, Digger Indians; the
foulest, frowziest creatures I have ever seen are
thorough-bred Pikes. The most vigorous of
them leave their native landscape of cotton-wood
and sand-bars along the yellow ditches of the
West, and emigrate with a wagon-load of pork
and pork-fed progeny across the plains to California.
There the miasms are roasted out of
them; the shakes warmed away; they will grow

rich, and possibly mellow, in the third or fourth
generation. They had not done so in my time.
I lived among them ad nauseam, month after
month, and I take this opportunity to pay them
parting compliments.

I went on toiling, day after day, week after
week, two good years of my life, over that miserable
mine. Nothing came of it. I was growing
poorer with every ton we dug, poorer with every
pound we crushed. In a few months more, I
should have spent my last dollar and have gone
to day labor, perhaps among the Pikes. The
turnpike stuff refused to change into gold. I
saw, of course, that something must be done.
What, I did not know. I was in that state
when one needs an influence without himself to
take him by the hand gently, by the shoulder
forcibly, by the hair roughly, or even by the nose
insultingly, and drag him off into a new region.

The influence came. Bad news reached me.
My only sister, a widow, my only near relative,
died, leaving two young children to my care. It
was strange how this sorrow made the annoyance
and weariness of my life naught! How this responsibility
cheered me! My life seemed no
longer lonely and purposeless. Point was given
to all my intentions at once. I must return
home to New York. Further plans when I am
there! But now for home! If any one wanted

my quartz mine, he might have it. I could not
pack it in my saddle-bags to present to a college
cabinet of mineralogy.

I determined, as time did not absolutely press,
to ride home across the plains. It is a grand
journey. Two thousand miles, or so, on horseback.
Mountains, deserts, prairies, rivers, Mormons,
Indians, buffalo, — adventures without
number in prospect. A hearty campaign, and
no carpet knighthood about it.

It was late August. I began my preparations
at once.