Part 12 (1/2)

These California pets had their little day, perished, and are forgotten,--all save one. Who can forget the bear cub that Bret Harte immortalized under the name of Baby Sylvester! ”He was as free from angles as one of Leda's offspring. Your caressing hand sank away in his fur with dreamy languor. To look at him long was an intoxication of the senses; to pat him was a wild delirium; to embrace him an utter demoralization of the intellectual faculties.... He takes the only milk that comes to the settlement--brought up by Adams' Express at seven o'clock every morning.”

CHAPTER IX

FRIENDs.h.i.+P AMONG THE PIONEERS

In Bret Harte's stories woman is subordinated to man, and love is subordinated to friends.h.i.+p. This is a strange reversal of modern notions, but it was the reflection of his California experience,--reinforced, possibly, by some predilection of his own. There is a significant remark in a letter written by him from a town in Kansas where he once delivered a lecture: ”Of course, as in all such places, the women contrast poorly with the men--even in feminine qualities. Somehow, a man here may wear fustian and glaring colors, and paper collars, and yet keep his gentleness and delicacy, but a woman in glaring 'Dolly-Vardens,' and artificial flowers, changes natures with him at once.”

Friends.h.i.+p between one man and another would seem to be the most unselfish feeling of which a human being is capable. The only sentiment that can be compared with it in this respect is that of patriotism, and even in patriotism there is an instinct of self-preservation, or at least of race-preservation. In modern times the place which the friend held in cla.s.sic times is taken by the wife; but in California, owing to the absence of women and the exigencies of mining, friends.h.i.+p for a brief and brilliant period, never probably to recur, became once more an heroic pa.s.sion.

That there was no exaggeration in Bret Harte's pictures of Pioneer friends.h.i.+p might be shown by many extracts from contemporary observers, but one such will suffice:--”Two men who lived together, slept in the same cabin, ate together, took turns cooking and was.h.i.+ng, tended on each other in sickness, and toiled day in and day out side by side, and made an equal division of their losses and gains, were regarded and generally regarded themselves as having entered into a very intimate tie, a sort of band of brotherhood, almost as sacred as that of marriage. The word 'partner,' or 'pard' as it was usually contracted, became the most intimate and confidential term that could be used.”[68]

Even in the cities friends.h.i.+p between men a.s.sumed a character which it had nowhere except in California. Partners in business were partners in all social and often in all domestic matters. They took their meals and their pleasures together, and showed that interest in each other's welfare which, at home, they would have expended upon wives and children. The withdrawal of one member from a firm seemed like the breaking up of a family. The citizens of San Francisco and Sacramento were all newcomers, they were mostly strangers to one another; and every partners.h.i.+p, though established primarily for business purposes, became a union of persons bound together by a sense of almost feudal loyalty, confident of one another's sympathy and support under all circ.u.mstances, and forming a coherent group in a chaotic community.

In the mines the partners.h.i.+p relation was even more idyllic. Gold was sought at first by the primitive method of pan-mining. The miners travelled singly sometimes, but much more often in pairs, with knapsacks, guns and frying-pans; and they used a wooden bowl, or a metal pan, and sometimes an Indian wicker basket for was.h.i.+ng the gravel or sand which was supposed to contain gold. Even a family bread-pan might be made to serve this purpose, and that was the article which the youthful miner, Jack Fleming, borrowed from beautiful Tinka Gallinger, and so became possessed in the end, not indeed of gold, but of something infinitely more valuable,--Tinka herself, the Treasure of the Redwoods.

The operation of was.h.i.+ng was thus described by a Pioneer: ”The bowl is held in both hands, whirled violently back and forth through a half circle, and pitched this way and that sufficiently to throw off the earth and water, while the gold mixed with black sand settles to the bottom. The process is extremely tiresome, and involves all the muscles of the frame.

In its effect it is more like swinging a scythe than any other labor I ever attempted.”

This work was much less laborious when the miner had access to a current of water, and in later times it was a.s.sisted by the use of a magnet to draw away the iron of which the black sand was largely composed.

The bowl or pan stage was the first stage, and its tendency was to arrange the miners in couples like that of Tennessee and his Partner. Next came the use of the rocker or cradle,--the ”golden canoe,” as the Indians called it. The rocker was an oblong box, open at the lower end, the upper end being protected by a screen or grating. The screen intercepted all pebbles and gravel, and the finer material, earth and sand, was swept through the screen by the action of water thrown or directed against it.

The same water carried the earth through the box, and out at the lower end; but the heavy sand, containing the gold, sank and was intercepted by cleats nailed across the inside of the box. A rough cradle, formed from a hollow log, would sell at one time for two hundred dollars.

This process required the services of four or five men, and in pursuing it the miner ceased to be a vagrant. He acquired a habitation, more or less permanent, and entered into various relations.h.i.+ps with his fellows, which finally included the lynching of a small portion of them. This is the life described by Bret Harte in _The Luck of Roaring Camp_, _Left Out on Lone Star Mountain_, and many other stories.

The rocker period lasted only about a year, and was succeeded by that of the sluice, a sort of magnified rocker, fifty or even a hundred feet long.

The necessary stream of water was diverted from some river, or was supplied by an artificial reservoir. It was the bursting of such a reservoir, as the Reader may remember, that precipitated the romance in the life of the Youngest Miss Piper.

But the evolution of the industry was not yet complete. The next step was to explore the bed of a river by laboriously turning the stream aside.

This was accomplished by constructing a dam across the river, and directing the water into a ca.n.a.l or flume prepared for it, thus leaving the bed of the river bare, perhaps for miles. These operations required the labor of many hands, and were extremely arduous and difficult. The dam could be built, of course, only in the dry season, and the first autumnal rains would be sure to send the stream back to its old channel. The coming of the rainy season in California is extremely uncertain, and river-bed mining was correspondingly precarious. Sometimes, great perseverance in these attempts was rewarded by great success. In November, 1849, the Swett's Bar Company, composed of seventy miners, succeeded in damming and diverting the Sonora River after fifteen days of extreme exertion. Five hours later the dam was swept away by a flood. The following summer the same company, reduced to sixty members, constructed a second and larger dam, which required sixty-nine days' labor. This also was swept away on the very day of its completion. But the miners did not give up. The next morning they began anew, the directors leading the way into the now ice-cold water, and the rest of the company following, some fairly shrieking with the contact. The dam was rebuilt as quickly as possible,--and, again, the river brushed it aside. The third year, a remnant of the company, some twenty-seven stubborn souls, for the fourth time completed a dam. This time it stood fast, and before the rains set in the persevering miners had obtained gold enough to make them all rich.

Men who had struggled, side by side, through such difficulties and disappointments were bound by no common tie,--and the tie was a still closer one when, as in the first idyllic days, the partners.h.i.+p consisted of two members only.

Bret Harte has devoted to friends.h.i.+p four of his best stories, namely, _Tennessee's Partner_, _Captain Jim's Friend_, _In the Tules_, _Uncle Jim and Uncle Billy_. The subject is touched upon also in the story called _Under the Eaves_.

Unquestionably the best of these stories is the first one, and if we should also set this down as the best of all Bret Harte's stories, we could not go far wrong. The author himself is said to have preferred it.

It is a complete tale and a dramatic one, and yet it has the simplicity of an incident. There is not, one makes bold to say, a superfluous word in it, and perhaps only one word which an exacting reader could wish to change. The background of scenery that the story requires is touched in with that deep but restrained feeling for nature, with that realization of its awful beauty, when contrasted with the life of man, which is a peculiar trait of modern literature. The Reader will remember that rough, mean, kerosene-lighted, upper room in which the trial took place. ”And above all this, etched on the dark firmament, rose the Sierra, remote and pa.s.sionless, crowned with remoter, pa.s.sionless stars.”

The pathos of _Tennessee's Partner_ consists chiefly in the fact that Tennessee, so far as we can judge him, was unworthy of his partner's devotion. He was courageous and good-humored, to be sure, but he was a robber, something of a drunkard, and inconsiderate enough to have run off with his partner's wife. Had Tennessee been a model of all the virtues, his partner's affection for him would have been a bestowal only of what was due. It would not have been, as it was in fact, the spontaneous outpouring of a generous and affectionate character. Whether we consider that the partner saw in Tennessee something which was really there, some divine spark or quality, known only to the G.o.d who created and to the friend who loved him, or that in Tennessee he beheld an ideal of his own creation, something different from the real man,--in either case his affection is equally disinterested and n.o.ble.

Those who do not give the first place to _Tennessee's Partner_ would probably a.s.sign it either to _The Luck of Roaring Camp_ or _The Outcasts of Poker Flat_; but in both of those stories the element of accident is utilized, though not improbably. It was more or less an accident that the Luck was swept away by a flood; it was an accident that the Outcasts were banished on the eve of a storm. But in _Tennessee's Partner_, there is no accident. Given the characters, all the rest followed inevitably.

An acute, if somewhat degenerate critic, Mr. James Douglas, writing in the ”Bookman,”[69] presents the case against the _Luck_ and the _Outcasts_ in its most extreme form: ”There is no doubt that we have outgrown the art which relies on picturesque lay figures grouped against a romantic background.... In Bret Harte's best stories the presence of the scene painter, the stage carpenter and the stage manager jars on our consciousness.... Bret Harte takes Cherokee Sal, an Indian prost.i.tute, puts her in a degraded mining settlement, and sanctifies her by motherhood. That is good art. He lets her die, while her child survives.