A Drift from Redwood Camp

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A DRIFT FROM REDWOOD CAMP


by Bret Harte


They had all known him as a shiftless, worthless creature. From the
time he first entered Redwood Camp, carrying his entire effects in a
red handkerchief on the end of a long-handled shovel, until he lazily
drifted out of it on a plank in the terrible inundation of '56, they
never expected anything better of him. In a community of strong men with
sullen virtues and charmingly fascinating vices, he was tolerated as
possessing neither--not even rising by any dominant human weakness or
ludicrous quality to the importance of a butt. In the dramatis
personae of Redwood Camp he was a simple "super"--who had only passive,
speechless roles in those fierce dramas that were sometimes unrolled
beneath its green-curtained pines. Nameless and penniless, he was
overlooked by the census and ignored by the tax collector, while in a
hotly-contested election for sheriff, when even the head-boards of the
scant cemetery were consulted to fill the poll-lists, it was discovered
that neither candidate had thought fit to avail himself of his actual
vote. He was debarred the rude heraldry of a nickname of achievement,
and in a camp made up of "Euchre Bills," "Poker Dicks," "Profane Pete,"
and "Snap-shot Harry," was known vaguely as "him," "Skeesicks," or "that
coot." It was remembered long after, with a feeling of superstition,
that he had never even met with the dignity of an accident, nor received
the fleeting honor of a chance shot meant for somebody else in any of
the liberal and broadly comprehensive encounters which distinguished the
camp. And the inundation that finally carried him out of it was
partly anticipated by his passive incompetency, for while the others
escaped--or were drowned in escaping--he calmly floated off on his plank
without an opposing effort.

For all that, Elijah Martin--which was his real name--was far from being
unamiable or repellent. That he was cowardly, untruthful, selfish, and
lazy, was undoubtedly the fact; perhaps it was his peculiar misfortune
that, just then, courage, frankness, generosity, and activity were the
dominant factors in the life of Redwood Camp. His submissive gentleness,
his unquestioned modesty, his half refinement, and his amiable exterior
consequently availed him nothing against the fact that he was missed
during a raid of the Digger Indians, and lied to account for it; or that
he lost his right to a gold discovery by failing to make it good against
a bully, and selfishly kept this discovery from the knowledge of the
camp. Yet this weakness awakened no animosity in his companions, and it
is probable that the indifference of the camp to his fate in this final
catastrophe came purely from a simple forgetfulness of one who at that
supreme moment was weakly incapable.

Such was the reputation and such the antecedents of the man who, on the
15th of March, 1856, found himself adrift in a swollen tributary of the
Minyo. A spring freshet of unusual volume had flooded the adjacent river
until, bursting its bounds, it escaped through the narrow, wedge-shaped
valley that held Redwood Camp. For a day and night the surcharged river
poured half its waters through the straggling camp. At the end of that
time every vestige of the little settlement was swept away; all that was
left was scattered far and wide in the country, caught in the hanging
branches of water-side willows and alders, embayed in sluggish pools,
dragged over submerged meadows, and one fragment--bearing up Elijah
Martin--pursuing the devious courses of an unknown tributary fifty miles
away. Had he been a rash, impatient man, he would have been speedily
drowned in some earlier desperate attempt to reach the shore; had he
been an ordinary bold man, he would have succeeded in transferring
himself to the branches of some obstructing tree; but he was neither,
and he clung to his broken raft-like berth with an endurance that
was half the paralysis of terror and half the patience of habitual
misfortune. Eventually he was caught in a side current, swept to the
bank, and cast ashore on an unexplored wilderness.

His first consciousness was one of hunger that usurped any sentiment
of gratitude for his escape from drowning. As soon as his cramped limbs
permitted, he crawled out of the bushes in search of food. He did
not know where he was; there was no sign of habitation--or even
occupation--anywhere. He had been too terrified to notice the direction
in which he had drifted--even if he had possessed the ordinary knowledge
of a backwoodsman, which he did not. He was helpless. In his bewildered
state, seeing a squirrel cracking a nut on the branch of a hollow tree
near him, he made a half-frenzied dart at the frightened animal, which
ran away. But the same association of ideas in his torpid and confused
brain impelled him to search for the squirrel's hoard in the hollow
of the tree. He ate the few hazel-nuts he found there, ravenously. The
purely animal instinct satisfied, he seemed to have borrowed from it a
certain strength and intuition. He limped through the thicket not
unlike some awkward, shy quadrumane, stopping here and there to peer
out through the openings over the marshes that lay beyond. His sight,
hearing, and even the sense of smell had become preternaturally acute.
It was the latter which suddenly arrested his steps with the odor
of dried fish. It had a significance beyond the mere instincts of
hunger--it indicated the contiguity of some Indian encampment. And as
such--it meant danger, torture, and death.

He stopped, trembled violently, and tried to collect his scattered
senses. Redwood Camp had embroiled itself needlessly and brutally with
the surrounding Indians, and only held its own against them by reckless
courage and unerring marksmanship. The frequent use of a casual
wandering Indian as a target for the practising rifles of its members
had kept up an undying hatred in the heart of the aborigines and
stimulated them to terrible and isolated reprisals. The scalped and
skinned dead body of Jack Trainer, tied on his horse and held hideously
upright by a cross of wood behind his saddle, had passed, one night,
a slow and ghastly apparition, into camp; the corpse of Dick Ryner had
been found anchored on the river-bed, disembowelled and filled with
stone and gravel. The solitary and unprotected member of Redwood Camp
who fell into the enemy's hands was doomed.

Elijah Martin remembered this, but his fears gradually began to subside
in a certain apathy of the imagination, which, perhaps, dulled his
apprehensions and allowed the instinct of hunger to become again
uppermost. He knew that the low bark tents, or wigwams, of the Indians
were hung with strips of dried salmon, and his whole being was new
centered upon an attempt to stealthily procure a delicious morsel. As
yet he had distinguished no other sign of life or habitation; a
few moments later, however, and grown bolder with an animal-like
trustfulness in his momentary security, he crept out of the thicket and
found himself near a long, low mound or burrow-like structure of mud and
bark on the river-bank. A single narrow opening, not unlike the entrance
of an Esquimau hut, gave upon the river. Martin had no difficulty in
recognizing the character of the building. It was a "sweathouse," an
institution common to nearly all the aboriginal tribes of California.
Half a religious temple, it was also half a sanitary asylum, was used as
a Russian bath or superheated vault, from which the braves, sweltering
and stifling all night, by smothered fires, at early dawn plunged,
perspiring, into the ice-cold river. The heat and smoke were further
utilized to dry and cure the long strips of fish hanging from the roof,
and it was through the narrow aperture that served as a chimney that the
odor escaped which Martin had detected. He knew that as the bathers
only occupied the house from midnight to early morn, it was now probably
empty. He advanced confidently toward it.

He was a little surprised to find that the small open space between it
and the river was occupied by a rude scaffolding, like that on which
certain tribes exposed their dead, but in this instance it only
contained the feathered leggings, fringed blanket, and eagle-plumed
head-dress of some brave. He did not, however, linger in this plainly
visible area, but quickly dropped on all fours and crept into the
interior of the house. Here he completed his feast with the fish, and
warmed his chilled limbs on the embers of the still smouldering fires.
It was while drying his tattered clothes and shoeless feet that he
thought of the dead brave's useless leggings and moccasins, and it
occurred to him that he would be less likely to attract the Indians'
attention from a distance and provoke a ready arrow, if he were
disguised as one of them. Crawling out again, he quickly secured, not
only the leggings, but the blanket and head-dress, and putting them on,
cast his own clothes into the stream. A bolder, more energetic, or more
provident man would have followed the act by quickly making his way
back to the thicket to reconnoitre, taking with him a supply of fish for
future needs. But Elijah Martin succumbed again to the recklessness
of inertia; he yielded once more to the animal instinct of momentary
security. He returned to the interior of the hut, curled himself again
on the ashes, and weakly resolving to sleep until moonrise, and as
weakly hesitating, ended by falling into uneasy but helpless stupor.

When he awoke, the rising sun, almost level with the low entrance to
the sweat-house, was darting its direct rays into the interior, as
if searching it with fiery spears. He had slept ten hours. He rose
tremblingly to his knees. Everything was quiet without; he might yet
escape. He crawled to the opening. The open space before it was empty,
but the scaffolding was gone. The clear, keen air revived him. As he
sprang out, erect, a shout that nearly stunned him seemed to rise from
the earth on all sides. He glanced around him in a helpless agony of
fear. A dozen concentric circles of squatting Indians, whose heads were
visible above the reeds, encompassed the banks around the sunken base
of the sweat-house with successive dusky rings. Every avenue of escape
seemed closed. Perhaps for that reason the attitude of his surrounding
captors was passive rather than aggressive, and the shrewd, half-Hebraic
profiles nearest him expressed only stoical waiting. There was a strange
similarity of expression in his own immovable apathy of despair. His
only sense of averting his fate was a confused idea of explaining his
intrusion. His desperate memory yielded a few common Indian words. He
pointed automatically to himself and the stream. His white lips moved.

"I come--from--the river!"

A guttural cry, as if the whole assembly were clearing their throats,
went round the different circles. The nearest rocked themselves to
and fro and bent their feathered heads toward him. A hollow-cheeked,
decrepit old man arose and said, simply:--

"It is he! The great chief has come!"

*****

He was saved. More than that, he was re-created. For, by signs and
intimations he was quickly made aware that since the death of their
late chief, their medicine-men had prophesied that his perfect successor
should appear miraculously before them, borne noiselessly on the river
FROM THE SEA, in the plumes and insignia of his predecessor. This mere
coincidence of appearance and costume might not have been convincing to
the braves had not Elijah Martin's actual deficiencies contributed to
their unquestioned faith in him. Not only his inert possession of the
sweat-house and his apathetic attitude in their presence, but his utter
and complete unlikeness to the white frontiersmen of their knowledge and
tradition--creatures of fire and sword and malevolent activity--as well
as his manifest dissimilarity to themselves, settled their conviction
of his supernatural origin. His gentle, submissive voice, his yielding
will, his lazy helplessness, the absence of strange weapons and fierce
explosives in his possession, his unwonted sobriety--all proved him an
exception to his apparent race that was in itself miraculous. For it
must be confessed that, in spite of the cherished theories of most
romances and all statesmen and commanders, that FEAR is the great
civilizer of the savage barbarian, and that he is supposed to regard
the prowess of the white man and his mysterious death-dealing weapons
as evidence of his supernatural origin and superior creation, the facts
have generally pointed to the reverse. Elijah Martin was not long in
discovering that when the Minyo hunter, with his obsolete bow, dropped
dead by a bullet from a viewless and apparently noiseless space, it
was NOT considered the lightnings of an avenging Deity, but was traced
directly to the ambushed rifle of Kansas Joe, swayed by a viciousness
quite as human as their own; the spectacle of Blizzard Dick, verging
on delirium tremens, and riding "amuck" into an Indian village with a
revolver in each hand, did NOT impress them as a supernatural act, nor
excite their respectful awe as much as the less harmful frenzy of one
of their own medicine-men; they were NOT influenced by implacable white
gods, who relaxed only to drive hard bargains and exchange mildewed
flour and shoddy blankets for their fish and furs. I am afraid they
regarded these raids of Christian civilization as they looked upon
grasshopper plagues, famines, inundations, and epidemics; while an
utterly impassive God washed his hands of the means he had employed, and
even encouraged the faithful to resist and overcome his emissaries--the
white devils! Had Elijah Martin been a student of theology, he
would have been struck with the singular resemblance of these
theories--although the application thereof was reversed--to the
Christian faith. But Elijah Martin had neither the imagination of
a theologian nor the insight of a politician. He only saw that he,
hitherto ignored and despised in a community of half-barbaric men,
now translated to a community of men wholly savage, was respected and
worshipped!

It might have turned a stronger head than Elijah's. He was at first
frightened, fearful lest his reception concealed some hidden irony,
or that, like the flower-crowned victim of ancient sacrifice, he was
exalted and sustained to give importance and majesty to some impending
martyrdom. Then he began to dread that his innocent deceit--if deceit it
was--should be discovered; at last, partly from meekness and partly from
the animal contentment of present security, he accepted the situation.
Fortunately for him it was purely passive. The Great Chief of the Minyo
tribe was simply an expressionless idol of flesh and blood. The previous
incumbent of that office had been an old man, impotent and senseless
of late years through age and disease. The chieftains and braves had
consulted in council before him, and perfunctorily submitted their
decisions, like offerings, to his unresponsive shrine. In the same way,
all material events--expeditions, trophies, industries--were supposed
to pass before the dull, impassive eyes of the great chief, for direct
acceptance. On the second day of Elijah's accession, two of the braves
brought a bleeding human scalp before him. Elijah turned pale, trembled,
and averted his head, and then, remembering the danger of giving way
to his weakness, grew still more ghastly. The warriors watched him with
impassioned faces. A grunt--but whether of astonishment, dissent, or
approval, he would not tell--went round the circle. But the scalp was
taken away and never again appeared in his presence.

An incident still more alarming quickly followed. Two captives, white
men, securely bound, were one day brought before him on their way to
the stake, followed by a crowd of old and young squaws and children. The
unhappy Elijah recognized in the prisoners two packers from a distant
settlement who sometimes passed through Redwood Camp. An agony of
terror, shame, and remorse shook the pseudo chief to his crest of high
feathers, and blanched his face beneath its paint and yellow ochre. To
interfere to save them from the torture they were evidently to receive
at the hands of those squaws and children, according to custom, would be
exposure and death to him as well as themselves; while to assist by his
passive presence at the horrible sacrifice of his countrymen was too
much for even his weak selfishness. Scarcely knowing what he did as the
lugubrious procession passed before him, he hurriedly hid his face
in his blanket and turned his back upon the scene. There was a dead
silence. The warriors were evidently unprepared for this extraordinary
conduct of their chief. What might have been their action it was
impossible to conjecture, for at that moment a little squaw, perhaps
impatient for the sport and partly emboldened by the fact that she
had been selected, only a few days before, as the betrothed of the new
chief, approached him slyly from the other side. The horrified eyes of
Elijah, momentarily raised from his blanket, saw and recognized her. The
feebleness of a weak nature, that dared not measure itself directly with
the real cause, vented its rage on a secondary object. He darted a quick
glance of indignation and hatred at the young girl. She ran back in
startled terror to her companions, a hurried consultation followed, and
in another moment the whole bevy of girls, old women, and children were
on the wing, shrieking and crying, to their wigwams.

"You see," said one of the prisoners coolly to the other, in English,
"I was right. They never intended to do anything to us. It was only a
bluff. These Minyos are a different sort from the other tribes. They
never kill anybody if they can help it."

"You're wrong," said the other, excitedly. "It was that big chief there,
with his head in a blanket, that sent those dogs to the right about.
Hell! did you see them run at just a look from him? He's a high and
mighty feller, you bet. Look at his dignity!"

"That's so--he ain't no slouch," said the other, gazing at Elijah's
muffled head, critically. "D----d if he ain't a born king."

The sudden conflict and utter revulsion of emotion that those simple
words caused in Elijah's breast was almost incredible. He had been at
first astounded by the revelation of the peaceful reputation of
the unknown tribe he had been called upon to govern; but even this
comforting assurance was as nothing compared to the greater revelations
implied in the speaker's praise of himself. He, Elijah Martin!
the despised, the rejected, the worthless outcast of Redwood Camp,
recognized as a "born king," a leader; his power felt by the very men
who had scorned him! And he had done nothing--stop! had he actually done
NOTHING? Was it not possible that he was REALLY what they thought him?
His brain reeled under the strong, unaccustomed wine of praise; acting
upon his weak selfishness, it exalted him for a moment to their measure
of his strength, even as their former belief in his inefficiency had
kept him down. Courage is too often only the memory of past success.
This was his first effort; he forgot he had not earned it, even as
he now ignored the danger of earning it. The few words of unconscious
praise had fallen like the blade of knighthood on his cowering
shoulders; he had risen ennobled from the contact. Though his face was
still muffled in his blanket, he stood erect and seemed to have gained
in stature.

The braves had remained standing irresolute, and yet watchful, a few
paces from their captives. Suddenly, Elijah, still keeping his back
to the prisoners, turned upon the braves, with blazing eyes, violently
throwing out his hands with the gesture of breaking bonds. Like all
sudden demonstrations of undemonstrative men, it was extravagant, weird,
and theatrical. But it was more potent than speech--the speech that,
even if effective, would still have betrayed him to his countrymen.
The braves hurriedly cut the thongs of the prisoners; another impulsive
gesture from Elijah, and they, too, fled. When he lifted his eyes
cautiously from his blanket, captors and captives had dispersed in
opposite directions, and he was alone--and triumphant!

From that moment Elijah Martin was another man. He went to bed that
night in an intoxicating dream of power; he arose a man of will, of
strength. He read it in the eyes of the braves, albeit at times averted
in wonder. He understood, now, that although peace had been their
habit and custom, they had nevertheless sought to test his theories of
administration with the offering of the scalps and the captives, and in
this detection of their common weakness he forgot his own. Most heroes
require the contrast of the unheroic to set them off; and Elijah
actually found himself devising means for strengthening the defensive
and offensive character of the tribe, and was himself strengthened
by it. Meanwhile the escaped packers did not fail to heighten
the importance of their adventure by elevating the character and
achievements of their deliverer; and it was presently announced
throughout the frontier settlements that the hitherto insignificant and
peaceful tribe of Minyos, who inhabited a large territory bordering on
the Pacific Ocean, had developed into a powerful nation, only kept from
the war-path by a more powerful but mysterious chief. The Government
sent an Indian agent to treat with them, in its usual half-paternal,
half-aggressive, and wholly inconsistent policy. Elijah, who still
retained the imitative sense and adaptability to surroundings which
belong to most lazy, impressible natures, and in striped yellow and
vermilion features looked the chief he personated, met the agent with
silent and becoming gravity. The council was carried on by signs.
Never before had an Indian treaty been entered into with such perfect
knowledge of the intentions and designs of the whites by the Indians,
and such profound ignorance of the qualities of the Indians by the
whites. It need scarcely be said that the treaty was an unquestionable
Indian success. They did not give up their arable lands; what they did
sell to the agent they refused to exchange for extravagant-priced shoddy
blankets, worthless guns, damp powder, and mouldy meal. They took pay in
dollars, and were thus enabled to open more profitable commerce with the
traders at the settlements for better goods and better bargains; they
simply declined beads, whiskey, and Bibles at any price. The result
was that the traders found it profitable to protect them from their
countrymen, and the chances of wantonly shooting down a possible
valuable customer stopped the old indiscriminate rifle-practice.
The Indians were allowed to cultivate their fields in peace. Elijah
purchased for them a few agricultural implements. The catching, curing,
and smoking of salmon became an important branch of trade. They waxed
prosperous and rich; they lost their nomadic habits--a centralized
settlement bearing the external signs of an Indian village took the
place of their old temporary encampments, but the huts were internally
an improvement on the old wigwams. The dried fish were banished from the
tent-poles to long sheds especially constructed for that purpose. The
sweat-house was no longer utilized for worldly purposes. The wise and
mighty Elijah did not attempt to reform their religion, but to preserve
it in its integrity.

That these improvements and changes were due to the influence of one man
was undoubtedly true, but that he was necessarily a superior man did
not follow. Elijah's success was due partly to the fact that he had been
enabled to impress certain negative virtues, which were part of his own
nature, upon a community equally constituted to receive them. Each was
strengthened by the recognition in each other of the unexpected value of
those qualities; each acquired a confidence begotten of their success.
"He-hides-his-face," as Elijah Martin was known to the tribe after the
episode of the released captives, was really not so much of an autocrat
as many constitutional rulers.

*****

Two years of tranquil prosperity passed. Elijah Martin, foundling,
outcast, without civilized ties or relationship of any kind, forgotten
by his countrymen, and lifted into alien power, wealth, security, and
respect, became--homesick!

It was near the close of a summer afternoon. He was sitting at the door
of his lodge, which overlooked, on one side, the far-shining levels
of the Pacific and, on the other, the slow descent to the cultivated
meadows and banks of the Minyo River, that debouched through a waste of
salt-marsh, beach-grass, sand-dunes, and foamy estuary into the
ocean. The headland, or promontory--the only eminence of the Minyo
territory--had been reserved by him for his lodge, partly on account of
its isolation from the village at its base, and partly for the view it
commanded of his territory. Yet his wearying and discontented eyes were
more often found on the ocean, as a possible highway of escape from his
irksome position, than on the plain and the distant range of mountains,
so closely connected with the nearer past and his former detractors. In
his vague longing he had no desire to return to them, even in triumph in
his present security there still lingered a doubt of his ability to
cope with the old conditions. It was more like his easy, indolent
nature--which revived in his prosperity--to trust to this least
practical and remote solution of his trouble. His homesickness was as
vague as his plan for escape from it; he did not know exactly what
he regretted, but it was probably some life he had not enjoyed, some
pleasure that had escaped his former incompetency and poverty.