University of Virginia Library

6. CHAPTER VI.
DOWN AMONG THE LIVE MEN.

A CHANGE had certainly come over the
actions and, I may say, the mind of the
Prince, in the long weeks of my illness.
I had fallen into his hands so helplessly and so
wholly that I was in a way absolutely his. He
did not shift the responsibility, nor attempt to escape
it.

I could not, of course, then understand why my
presence, or the responsibility of a young person
thrown on him in this way, could have influenced him
for good or evil, or have altered his plans or course
of life in any way at all. I think I can now. I did
not stop to inquire then. It so happens that when
very young we are not particular about reasons for
anything.

It is often a fortunate thing for a man that the
fates have laid some responsibility to his charge.
From what I could learn the Prince was utterly
alone;—had no one depending on him; had formed

no very ardent attachments; expected, of course, to
leave the mountains sometime, and settle down as all
others were doing, but did not just then care to fix
the time, or assume any concern about it.

Naturally noble and generous in all his instincts,
he fell to planning first for me, and then for himself
and me together. He saw no prospect better than
that of an honest miner. He shrunk from initiating
any one into the art of his own temporary calling, and
resolved to possess a mining claim, build a cabin, and
enter upon a real life. This made him a new man—a
more thoughtful, earnest man, perhaps—no better.
Besides, a recollection of his reverses at the Klamat
possibly had a little to do in this making up the
decision to turn over a new leaf in his life. Not the
losses, either—he could not care for that; but,
rather, that he felt ashamed to have to do with a
calling where men would stoop so low and go to
such lengths to procure money.

After casting about for many days in the various
neighbouring localities, the Prince finally decided to
pitch his tent on the Humbug, a tributary of the
Klamat, and the most flourishing, newly-discovered
camp of the north. It lay west of the city, a day's
ride down in a deep, densely-timbered canon, out of
sight of Mount Shasta, out of sight of everything—
even the sun; save here and there where a land-slide
had ploughed up the forest, or the miners had

mown down the great evergreens about their cabins,
or town sites in the camp.

Do not doubt or be surprised at this name of
Humbug. Get your map and you will see it there—
fifty miles or more north-west of Mount Shasta, twenty
miles from Greenhorn, thirty miles from Deadwood,
and about the same distance from Rogue's Gulch.
Hogem, Hardscrabble, and Hell-bent were adjoining,
and intervening mining camps of lesser note.

I asked the Prince to go down and see about my
pony when we were about to set out, but the negro
had confiscated him long since—claimed to have disposed
of him for his keeping. “He's eat his cussed
head off,” said he, and I saw my swift patient little
companion no more.

On a crisp clear morning, we set out from the city,
and when we had reached the foot-hills to the west,
we struck a fall of snow, with enormous hare, ears as
large almost as those of Mexican mules, crossing
here and there, and coyotes sitting on the ground,
tame as dogs, looking down on the cabins and camp
below.

We had, strapped to our saddles behind us, blankets,
picks, shovels, frying-pans, beans, bacon, and
coffee,—all, of course, in limited quantities.

The two mules snuffed at the snow, lifted their
little feet gingerly, spun around many times like tops,
and brayed a solemn prayer or two to be allowed to
turn back.

Snow is a mule's aversion. Give him sand, even the
heat of a furnace, and only sage-brush to subsist
upon, and he will go on patient and uncomplaining;
but snow goes against his nature. We began to leave
the world below—the camps, the clouds of smoke, and
the rich smell of the burning juniper and manzanita.

The pines were open on this side of the mountain,
so that sometimes we could see through the trees to
the world without and below. Over against us stood
Shasta. Grander, nearer, now he seemed than ever,
covered with snow from base to crown.

If you would see any mountain in its glory, you
must go up a neighbouring mountain, and see it
above the forests and lesser heights. You must see
a mountain with the clouds below you, and between
you and the object of contemplation.

Until you have seen a mountain over the tops and
crests of a sea of clouds, you have not seen, and cannot
understand, the sublime and majestic scenery of
the Pacific.

Never, until on some day of storms in the lower
world you have ascended one mountain, looked out
above the clouds, and seen the white snowy pyramids
piercing here and there the rolling nebulus sea, can
you hope to learn the freemasonry of mountain
scenery in its grandest, highest, and most supreme
degree. Lightning and storms and thunder underneath
you; calm and peace and perfect beauty about
you. Typical and suggestive.

Sugar-pines, tall as pyramids, on either hand as we
rode up the trail, through the dry bright snow, with
great burrs or cones, long as your arm, swaying from
the tips of their lofty branches; and little pine squirrels,
black and brown, ran up and down, busy with
their winter hoard.

Once on the summit we dismounted, drew the
sinches till the mules grunted and put in a protest
with their teeth and heels, and then began the descent.

The Prince had been silent all day, but as we were
mounting the mules again, he said—

“We may have a rocky time down there, my boy.
The grass is mighty short with me, I tell you. But
I have thought it all out, clean down to the bed-rock,
and this is the best that can be done. If we can
manage to scratch through this winter, we will be all
right for a big clean up by the time the snows fly
over again; and then, if you like, you shall see another
land. There! look down there,” he said, as
we came to the rim of a bench in the mountain, and
had a look-out below, “that is the place where we
shall winter. Three thousand people there! not a
woman, not a child! Two miles below, and ten
miles a-head!”

Not a woman? Not much of a chance for a love
affair. He who consents to descend with me into
that deep dark gorge in the mountains, and live the

weary winter through, will see neither the light of
the sun, nor the smiles of woman. A sort of Hades.
A savage Eden, with many Adams walking up and
down, and plucking of every tree, nothing forbidden
here; for here, so far as it would seem, are neither
laws of God or man.

When shall we lie down and sleep, and awake and
find an Eve and the Eden in the forest? An Eve
untouched and unstained, fresh from the hand of
God, gazing at her reflection in the mossy mountain
stream, amazed at her beauty, and in love with
herself; even in this first act setting an example
for man that he has followed too well for his own
peace.

This canon was as black as Erebus down there—a
sea of sombre firs; and down, down as if the earth
was cracked and cleft almost in two. Here and there
lay little nests of clouds below us, tangled in the tree-tops,
no wind to drive them, nothing to fret and disturb.
They lay above the dusks of the forest as if
asleep. Over across the canon stood another mountain,
not so fierce as this, but black with forest, and
cut and broken into many gorges—scars of earthquake
shocks, and sabre-cuts of time. Gorge on
gorge, canon intersecting canon, pitching down towards
the rapid Klamat—a black and boundless
forest till it touches the very tide of the sea a hundred
miles to the west.

Our cabin was on the mountain side. Where else
could it have been but on the mountain top? Nothing
but mountains. A little stream went creeping
down below,—a little wanderer among the boulders
—for it was now sorely fretted and roiled by the
thousands of miners up and down.

There was a town, a sort of common centre, called
The Forks; for here three little streams joined hands,
and went down from there to the Klamat together.
Our cabin stood down on the main stream, not far
from the river.

The Forks had two butcher's shops; and each of
the rival houses sent up and down the streams two
mules each day, laden with their meats; left so much
at each claim as directed, weighed it out themselves,
kept the accounts themselves; and yet, never to my
knowledge, in any of the mining camps, did the butcher
betray his trust. A small matter this, you say.
No doubt it is. Yet it is true and new. Any new
truth is always worthy of attention. I mention this
particularly as an item of evidence confirmative of my
belief, that we have only to trust man to make him
honest, and, on the other hand, to watch and suspect
him to make him a knave.

The principal saloon of The Forks was the
“Howlin' Wilderness;” an immense pine-log cabin,
with higher walls than most cabins, earth floor, and
an immense fire-place, where crackled and roared, day

and night, a pine-log fire, that refreshes me even to
this day to remember.

It is true the Howlin' Wilderness was not high-toned,
was not even first-class in this fierce little mining
camp of The Forks; but it was a spacious place
—always had more people in it and a bigger fire than
other places, and so was a power and a centre in the
town. Besides, all the important fights took place at
the Howlin' Wilderness, and if you wanted to be well
up in the news, or to see the Saturday evening
entertainment, you had to have some regard for the
Howlin' Wilderness.

The proprietors, who stood behind the bar, had
bags of sand laid up in a bullet-proof wall inside the
counter, between them and the crowd, so that when
the shooting set in, and men threw themselves on
the floor, fled through the door, or barricaded their
breasts with monte-tables and wooden benches, they
had only to drop down behind the bags of sand, and
lie there, pistols in hand, till the ball was over.

These men were wisely silent and impartial in all
misunderstandings that arose. They always seemed
to try to quell a trouble, and prevent a fight; perhaps
they did. At all events, when the battles were
over, they were always the first to take up the
wounded, and do what they could for the dying and
the dead. There was a great puncheon, hewn from
sugar-pine, that had once been a monte-table, back

on the outside by the chimney. This was stained
with the blood of many. Many bodies had been laid
out, in the course of a year, to stiffen on this board.

“We will have a man for breakfast to-morrow,”
some one would say, when shots were heard in the
direction of the Howlin' Wilderness; and the prophecy
was nearly always fulfilled.

There was a tall man, a sort of half sport and half
miner, who had a cabin close to town, who seemed
to take a special interest in these battles. He was
known as “Long Dan,” always carried two pistols, and
took a pride in getting into trouble.

“Look here,” said Prince to him one evening,
after he had been telling his six-shooter adventures,
with great delight, by the cabin fire, “Look here,
Dan, some of these days you will die with your
boots on. Now see if you don't, if you keep on
slinging your six-shooter around loose in this sort of
a way, you will go up the flume as slick as a salmon
—die with your boots on before you know it.”

Dan smiled blandly as he tapped an ivory pistol-butt,
and said, “Bet you the cigars, I don't! Whenever
my man comes to the centre, I will call him,
see if I don't, and get away with it, too.”

Now to understand the pith of the grim joke
which Dan played in the last act, you must know
that “dying with the boots on” means a great deal
in the mines. It is the poetical way of expressing
the result of a bar-room or street-battle.

Let me here state that while the wild, semi-savage
life of the mines and mountains has brought forth no
dialect to speak of, it has produced many forms of
expression that are to be found nowhere else.

These sharp sword-cuts are sometimes coarse,
sometimes wicked, but always forcible and driven to
the hilt. They are even sometimes strangely poetical,
and when you know their origin, they carry with them
a touch of tenderness beyond the reach of song.

Take, for example, the last words of the old Sierra
Nevada stage-driver, who, for a dozen years, had sat
up on his box in storm or sun, and dashed down the
rocky roads, with his hat on his nose, his foot on the
brake, and the four lines threaded through his
fingers.

The old hero of many encounters with robbers and
floods and avalanches in the Sierras, was dying now.
His friends gathered around him to say farewell.
He half raised his head, lifted his hands as if still at
his post, and said:—

“Boys, I am on the down grade, and can't reach
the brake!” and sank down and died.

And so it is that “the down grade,” an expression
born of the death of the old stage-driver, has a
meaning with us now.

A Saturday or so after the conversation alluded to
between Long Dan and the Prince, there were heard
pistol shots in the direction of the Howlin' Wilderness

saloon, and most of the men rushed forth to see
what Jonah, fate had pitched upon to be thrown into
the sea of eternity, and be the “man for breakfast”
this time.

Nothing “draws” like a bar-room fight of California.
It is a sudden thing. Sharp and quick come
the keen reports, and the affair has the advantage of
being quite over by the time you reach the spot, and
all danger of serving the place of barricades for a
stray bullet is past.

I have known miners standing on their good behaviour,
who resisted the temptations of hurdy-gurdy
houses, bull-fights, and bull and bear encounters,
who always wrote home on Sundays, read old letters,
and said the Lord's Prayer; but I never yet
knew one who could help going to see the dead man
or the scene of the six-shooter war-dance, whenever
the shots were heard.

The Prince rushed up. The house was full; surging
and excited men with their hats knocked off, their
faces red with passion, and their open red shirts
showing their strong, hairy bosoms.

“It is Long Dan,” some one called out; and this
made the Prince, who was his neighbour, push his
way more eagerly through the men. He reached the
wounded man at last, and the crowd, who knew the
Prince as an acquaintance of the sufferer, fell back
and gave him a place at his side.

The proprietors of the Howlin' Wilderness had set
up the monte-table, which had been overthrown in
the struggle, and laid the dying Dan gently there
with an old soldier overcoat under his head.

When the Prince took up the helpless hand of the
poor fellow, so overthrown in his pride and strength,
and spoke to him, he slowly opened his eyes, looked
straight at the Prince with a smile, only perceptible,
hardly as distinct as the tear in his eye, and said in a
whisper, as he drew the Prince down to his face:

“Old fellow, Prince, old boy, take off my boots.”

The Prince hastened to obey, and again took his
place at his side.

Again Long Dan drew him down, and said, huskily,

“Prince, Prince, old boy, I've won the cigars! I've
won 'em, by the holy poker!”

And so he died.