Roughing It

M >> Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) >> Roughing It


We found the small skiff belonging to the Brigade boys, and without loss
of time set out across a deep bend of the lake toward the landmarks that
signified the locality of the camp. I got Johnny to row--not because I
mind exertion myself, but because it makes me sick to ride backwards when
I am at work. But I steered. A three-mile pull brought us to the camp
just as the night fell, and we stepped ashore very tired and wolfishly
hungry. In a "cache" among the rocks we found the provisions and the
cooking utensils, and then, all fatigued as I was, I sat down on a
boulder and superintended while Johnny gathered wood and cooked supper.
Many a man who had gone through what I had, would have wanted to rest.

It was a delicious supper--hot bread, fried bacon, and black coffee.
It was a delicious solitude we were in, too. Three miles away was a
saw-mill and some workmen, but there were not fifteen other human beings
throughout the wide circumference of the lake. As the darkness closed
down and the stars came out and spangled the great mirror with jewels, we
smoked meditatively in the solemn hush and forgot our troubles and our
pains. In due time we spread our blankets in the warm sand between two
large boulders and soon feel asleep, careless of the procession of ants
that passed in through rents in our clothing and explored our persons.
Nothing could disturb the sleep that fettered us, for it had been fairly
earned, and if our consciences had any sins on them they had to adjourn
court for that night, any way. The wind rose just as we were losing
consciousness, and we were lulled to sleep by the beating of the surf
upon the shore.

It is always very cold on that lake shore in the night, but we had plenty
of blankets and were warm enough. We never moved a muscle all night, but
waked at early dawn in the original positions, and got up at once,
thoroughly refreshed, free from soreness, and brim full of friskiness.
There is no end of wholesome medicine in such an experience. That
morning we could have whipped ten such people as we were the day before
--sick ones at any rate. But the world is slow, and people will go to
"water cures" and "movement cures" and to foreign lands for health.
Three months of camp life on Lake Tahoe would restore an Egyptian mummy
to his pristine vigor, and give him an appetite like an alligator. I do
not mean the oldest and driest mummies, of course, but the fresher ones.
The air up there in the clouds is very pure and fine, bracing and
delicious. And why shouldn't it be?--it is the same the angels breathe.
I think that hardly any amount of fatigue can be gathered together that a
man cannot sleep off in one night on the sand by its side. Not under a
roof, but under the sky; it seldom or never rains there in the summer
time. I know a man who went there to die. But he made a failure of it.
He was a skeleton when he came, and could barely stand. He had no
appetite, and did nothing but read tracts and reflect on the future.
Three months later he was sleeping out of doors regularly, eating all he
could hold, three times a day, and chasing game over mountains three
thousand feet high for recreation. And he was a skeleton no longer, but
weighed part of a ton. This is no fancy sketch, but the truth. His
disease was consumption. I confidently commend his experience to other
skeletons.

I superintended again, and as soon as we had eaten breakfast we got in
the boat and skirted along the lake shore about three miles and
disembarked. We liked the appearance of the place, and so we claimed
some three hundred acres of it and stuck our "notices" on a tree. It was
yellow pine timber land--a dense forest of trees a hundred feet high and
from one to five feet through at the butt. It was necessary to fence our
property or we could not hold it. That is to say, it was necessary to
cut down trees here and there and make them fall in such a way as to form
a sort of enclosure (with pretty wide gaps in it). We cut down three
trees apiece, and found it such heart-breaking work that we decided to
"rest our case" on those; if they held the property, well and good; if
they didn't, let the property spill out through the gaps and go; it was
no use to work ourselves to death merely to save a few acres of land.
Next day we came back to build a house--for a house was also necessary,
in order to hold the property. We decided to build a substantial
log-house and excite the envy of the Brigade boys; but by the time we had
cut and trimmed the first log it seemed unnecessary to be so elaborate,
and so we concluded to build it of saplings. However, two saplings, duly
cut and trimmed, compelled recognition of the fact that a still modester
architecture would satisfy the law, and so we concluded to build a
"brush" house. We devoted the next day to this work, but we did so much
"sitting around" and discussing, that by the middle of the afternoon we
had achieved only a half-way sort of affair which one of us had to watch
while the other cut brush, lest if both turned our backs we might not be
able to find it again, it had such a strong family resemblance to the
surrounding vegetation. But we were satisfied with it.

We were land owners now, duly seized and possessed, and within the
protection of the law. Therefore we decided to take up our residence on
our own domain and enjoy that large sense of independence which only such
an experience can bring. Late the next afternoon, after a good long
rest, we sailed away from the Brigade camp with all the provisions and
cooking utensils we could carry off--borrow is the more accurate word
--and just as the night was falling we beached the boat at our own landing.




CHAPTER XXIII.

If there is any life that is happier than the life we led on our timber
ranch for the next two or three weeks, it must be a sort of life which I
have not read of in books or experienced in person. We did not see a
human being but ourselves during the time, or hear any sounds but those
that were made by the wind and the waves, the sighing of the pines, and
now and then the far-off thunder of an avalanche. The forest about us
was dense and cool, the sky above us was cloudless and brilliant with
sunshine, the broad lake before us was glassy and clear, or rippled and
breezy, or black and storm-tossed, according to Nature's mood; and its
circling border of mountain domes, clothed with forests, scarred with
land-slides, cloven by canons and valleys, and helmeted with glittering
snow, fitly framed and finished the noble picture. The view was always
fascinating, bewitching, entrancing. The eye was never tired of gazing,
night or day, in calm or storm; it suffered but one grief, and that was
that it could not look always, but must close sometimes in sleep.

We slept in the sand close to the water's edge, between two protecting
boulders, which took care of the stormy night-winds for us. We never
took any paregoric to make us sleep. At the first break of dawn we were
always up and running foot-races to tone down excess of physical vigor
and exuberance of spirits. That is, Johnny was--but I held his hat.
While smoking the pipe of peace after breakfast we watched the sentinel
peaks put on the glory of the sun, and followed the conquering light as
it swept down among the shadows, and set the captive crags and forests
free. We watched the tinted pictures grow and brighten upon the water
till every little detail of forest, precipice and pinnacle was wrought in
and finished, and the miracle of the enchanter complete. Then to
"business."

That is, drifting around in the boat. We were on the north shore.
There, the rocks on the bottom are sometimes gray, sometimes white.
This gives the marvelous transparency of the water a fuller advantage
than it has elsewhere on the lake. We usually pushed out a hundred yards
or so from shore, and then lay down on the thwarts, in the sun, and let
the boat drift by the hour whither it would. We seldom talked.
It interrupted the Sabbath stillness, and marred the dreams the luxurious
rest and indolence brought. The shore all along was indented with deep,
curved bays and coves, bordered by narrow sand-beaches; and where the
sand ended, the steep mountain-sides rose right up aloft into space--rose
up like a vast wall a little out of the perpendicular, and thickly wooded
with tall pines.

So singularly clear was the water, that where it was only twenty or
thirty feet deep the bottom was so perfectly distinct that the boat
seemed floating in the air! Yes, where it was even eighty feet deep.
Every little pebble was distinct, every speckled trout, every
hand's-breadth of sand. Often, as we lay on our faces, a granite
boulder, as large as a village church, would start out of the bottom
apparently, and seem climbing up rapidly to the surface, till presently
it threatened to touch our faces, and we could not resist the impulse to
seize an oar and avert the danger. But the boat would float on, and the
boulder descend again, and then we could see that when we had been
exactly above it, it must still have been twenty or thirty feet below the
surface. Down through the transparency of these great depths, the water
was not merely transparent, but dazzlingly, brilliantly so. All objects
seen through it had a bright, strong vividness, not only of outline, but
of every minute detail, which they would not have had when seen simply
through the same depth of atmosphere. So empty and airy did all spaces
seem below us, and so strong was the sense of floating high aloft in
mid-nothingness, that we called these boat-excursions "balloon-voyages."

We fished a good deal, but we did not average one fish a week. We could
see trout by the thousand winging about in the emptiness under us, or
sleeping in shoals on the bottom, but they would not bite--they could see
the line too plainly, perhaps. We frequently selected the trout we
wanted, and rested the bait patiently and persistently on the end of his
nose at a depth of eighty feet, but he would only shake it off with an
annoyed manner, and shift his position.

We bathed occasionally, but the water was rather chilly, for all it
looked so sunny. Sometimes we rowed out to the "blue water," a mile or
two from shore. It was as dead blue as indigo there, because of the
immense depth. By official measurement the lake in its centre is one
thousand five hundred and twenty-five feet deep!

Sometimes, on lazy afternoons, we lolled on the sand in camp, and smoked
pipes and read some old well-worn novels. At night, by the camp-fire, we
played euchre and seven-up to strengthen the mind--and played them with
cards so greasy and defaced that only a whole summer's acquaintance with
them could enable the student to tell the ace of clubs from the jack of
diamonds.

We never slept in our "house." It never recurred to us, for one thing;
and besides, it was built to hold the ground, and that was enough. We
did not wish to strain it.

By and by our provisions began to run short, and we went back to the old
camp and laid in a new supply. We were gone all day, and reached home
again about night-fall, pretty tired and hungry. While Johnny was
carrying the main bulk of the provisions up to our "house" for future
use, I took the loaf of bread, some slices of bacon, and the coffee-pot,
ashore, set them down by a tree, lit a fire, and went back to the boat to
get the frying-pan. While I was at this, I heard a shout from Johnny,
and looking up I saw that my fire was galloping all over the premises!
Johnny was on the other side of it. He had to run through the flames to
get to the lake shore, and then we stood helpless and watched the
devastation.

The ground was deeply carpeted with dry pine-needles, and the fire
touched them off as if they were gunpowder. It was wonderful to see with
what fierce speed the tall sheet of flame traveled! My coffee-pot was
gone, and everything with it. In a minute and a half the fire seized
upon a dense growth of dry manzanita chapparal six or eight feet high,
and then the roaring and popping and crackling was something terrific.
We were driven to the boat by the intense heat, and there we remained,
spell-bound.

Within half an hour all before us was a tossing, blinding tempest of
flame! It went surging up adjacent ridges--surmounted them and
disappeared in the canons beyond--burst into view upon higher and farther
ridges, presently--shed a grander illumination abroad, and dove again
--flamed out again, directly, higher and still higher up the
mountain-side--threw out skirmishing parties of fire here and there, and
sent them trailing their crimson spirals away among remote ramparts and
ribs and gorges, till as far as the eye could reach the lofty
mountain-fronts were webbed as it were with a tangled network of red lava
streams. Away across the water the crags and domes were lit with a ruddy
glare, and the firmament above was a reflected hell!

Every feature of the spectacle was repeated in the glowing mirror of the
lake! Both pictures were sublime, both were beautiful; but that in the
lake had a bewildering richness about it that enchanted the eye and held
it with the stronger fascination.

We sat absorbed and motionless through four long hours. We never thought
of supper, and never felt fatigue. But at eleven o'clock the
conflagration had traveled beyond our range of vision, and then darkness
stole down upon the landscape again.

Hunger asserted itself now, but there was nothing to eat. The provisions
were all cooked, no doubt, but we did not go to see. We were homeless
wanderers again, without any property. Our fence was gone, our house
burned down; no insurance. Our pine forest was well scorched, the dead
trees all burned up, and our broad acres of manzanita swept away. Our
blankets were on our usual sand-bed, however, and so we lay down and went
to sleep. The next morning we started back to the old camp, but while
out a long way from shore, so great a storm came up that we dared not try
to land. So I baled out the seas we shipped, and Johnny pulled heavily
through the billows till we had reached a point three or four miles
beyond the camp. The storm was increasing, and it became evident that it
was better to take the hazard of beaching the boat than go down in a
hundred fathoms of water; so we ran in, with tall white-caps following,
and I sat down in the stern-sheets and pointed her head-on to the shore.
The instant the bow struck, a wave came over the stern that washed crew
and cargo ashore, and saved a deal of trouble. We shivered in the lee of
a boulder all the rest of the day, and froze all the night through. In
the morning the tempest had gone down, and we paddled down to the camp
without any unnecessary delay. We were so starved that we ate up the
rest of the Brigade's provisions, and then set out to Carson to tell them
about it and ask their forgiveness. It was accorded, upon payment of
damages.

We made many trips to the lake after that, and had many a hair-breadth
escape and blood-curdling adventure which will never be recorded in any
history.




CHAPTER XXIV.

I resolved to have a horse to ride. I had never seen such wild, free,
magnificent horsemanship outside of a circus as these picturesquely-clad
Mexicans, Californians and Mexicanized Americans displayed in Carson
streets every day. How they rode! Leaning just gently forward out of
the perpendicular, easy and nonchalant, with broad slouch-hat brim blown
square up in front, and long riata swinging above the head, they swept
through the town like the wind! The next minute they were only a sailing
puff of dust on the far desert. If they trotted, they sat up gallantly
and gracefully, and seemed part of the horse; did not go jiggering up and
down after the silly Miss-Nancy fashion of the riding-schools. I had
quickly learned to tell a horse from a cow, and was full of anxiety to
learn more. I was resolved to buy a horse.

While the thought was rankling in my mind, the auctioneer came skurrying
through the plaza on a black beast that had as many humps and corners on
him as a dromedary, and was necessarily uncomely; but he was "going,
going, at twenty-two!--horse, saddle and bridle at twenty-two dollars,
gentlemen!" and I could hardly resist.

A man whom I did not know (he turned out to be the auctioneer's brother)
noticed the wistful look in my eye, and observed that that was a very
remarkable horse to be going at such a price; and added that the saddle
alone was worth the money. It was a Spanish saddle, with ponderous
'tapidaros', and furnished with the ungainly sole-leather covering with
the unspellable name. I said I had half a notion to bid. Then this
keen-eyed person appeared to me to be "taking my measure"; but I
dismissed the suspicion when he spoke, for his manner was full of
guileless candor and truthfulness. Said he:

"I know that horse--know him well. You are a stranger, I take it, and so
you might think he was an American horse, maybe, but I assure you he is
not. He is nothing of the kind; but--excuse my speaking in a low voice,
other people being near--he is, without the shadow of a doubt, a Genuine
Mexican Plug!"

I did not know what a Genuine Mexican Plug was, but there was something
about this man's way of saying it, that made me swear inwardly that I
would own a Genuine Mexican Plug, or die.

"Has he any other--er--advantages?" I inquired, suppressing what
eagerness I could.

He hooked his forefinger in the pocket of my army-shirt, led me to one
side, and breathed in my ear impressively these words:

"He can out-buck anything in America!"

"Going, going, going--at twent--ty--four dollars and a half, gen--"

"Twenty-seven!" I shouted, in a frenzy.

"And sold!" said the auctioneer, and passed over the Genuine Mexican Plug
to me.

I could scarcely contain my exultation. I paid the money, and put the
animal in a neighboring livery-stable to dine and rest himself.

In the afternoon I brought the creature into the plaza, and certain
citizens held him by the head, and others by the tail, while I mounted
him. As soon as they let go, he placed all his feet in a bunch together,
lowered his back, and then suddenly arched it upward, and shot me
straight into the air a matter of three or four feet! I came as straight
down again, lit in the saddle, went instantly up again, came down almost
on the high pommel, shot up again, and came down on the horse's neck--all
in the space of three or four seconds. Then he rose and stood almost
straight up on his hind feet, and I, clasping his lean neck desperately,
slid back into the saddle and held on. He came down, and immediately
hoisted his heels into the air, delivering a vicious kick at the sky, and
stood on his forefeet. And then down he came once more, and began the
original exercise of shooting me straight up again. The third time I
went up I heard a stranger say:

"Oh, don't he buck, though!"

While I was up, somebody struck the horse a sounding thwack with a
leathern strap, and when I arrived again the Genuine Mexican Plug was not
there. A California youth chased him up and caught him, and asked if he
might have a ride. I granted him that luxury. He mounted the Genuine,
got lifted into the air once, but sent his spurs home as he descended,
and the horse darted away like a telegram. He soared over three fences
like a bird, and disappeared down the road toward the Washoe Valley.

I sat down on a stone, with a sigh, and by a natural impulse one of my
hands sought my forehead, and the other the base of my stomach. I
believe I never appreciated, till then, the poverty of the human
machinery--for I still needed a hand or two to place elsewhere. Pen
cannot describe how I was jolted up. Imagination cannot conceive how
disjointed I was--how internally, externally and universally I was
unsettled, mixed up and ruptured. There was a sympathetic crowd around
me, though.

One elderly-looking comforter said:

"Stranger, you've been taken in. Everybody in this camp knows that
horse. Any child, any Injun, could have told you that he'd buck; he is
the very worst devil to buck on the continent of America. You hear me.
I'm Curry. Old Curry. Old Abe Curry. And moreover, he is a simon-pure,
out-and-out, genuine d--d Mexican plug, and an uncommon mean one at that,
too. Why, you turnip, if you had laid low and kept dark, there's chances
to buy an American horse for mighty little more than you paid for that
bloody old foreign relic."

I gave no sign; but I made up my mind that if the auctioneer's brother's
funeral took place while I was in the Territory I would postpone all
other recreations and attend it.

After a gallop of sixteen miles the Californian youth and the Genuine
Mexican Plug came tearing into town again, shedding foam-flakes like the
spume-spray that drives before a typhoon, and, with one final skip over a
wheelbarrow and a Chinaman, cast anchor in front of the "ranch."

Such panting and blowing! Such spreading and contracting of the red
equine nostrils, and glaring of the wild equine eye! But was the
imperial beast subjugated? Indeed he was not.

His lordship the Speaker of the House thought he was, and mounted him to
go down to the Capitol; but the first dash the creature made was over a
pile of telegraph poles half as high as a church; and his time to the
Capitol--one mile and three quarters--remains unbeaten to this day. But
then he took an advantage--he left out the mile, and only did the three
quarters. That is to say, he made a straight cut across lots, preferring
fences and ditches to a crooked road; and when the Speaker got to the
Capitol he said he had been in the air so much he felt as if he had made
the trip on a comet.

In the evening the Speaker came home afoot for exercise, and got the
Genuine towed back behind a quartz wagon. The next day I loaned the
animal to the Clerk of the House to go down to the Dana silver mine, six
miles, and he walked back for exercise, and got the horse towed.
Everybody I loaned him to always walked back; they never could get enough
exercise any other way.

Still, I continued to loan him to anybody who was willing to borrow him,
my idea being to get him crippled, and throw him on the borrower's hands,
or killed, and make the borrower pay for him. But somehow nothing ever
happened to him. He took chances that no other horse ever took and
survived, but he always came out safe. It was his daily habit to try
experiments that had always before been considered impossible, but he
always got through. Sometimes he miscalculated a little, and did not get
his rider through intact, but he always got through himself. Of course I
had tried to sell him; but that was a stretch of simplicity which met
with little sympathy. The auctioneer stormed up and down the streets on
him for four days, dispersing the populace, interrupting business, and
destroying children, and never got a bid--at least never any but the
eighteen-dollar one he hired a notoriously substanceless bummer to make.
The people only smiled pleasantly, and restrained their desire to buy, if
they had any. Then the auctioneer brought in his bill, and I withdrew
the horse from the market. We tried to trade him off at private vendue
next, offering him at a sacrifice for second-hand tombstones, old iron,
temperance tracts--any kind of property. But holders were stiff, and we
retired from the market again. I never tried to ride the horse any more.
Walking was good enough exercise for a man like me, that had nothing the
matter with him except ruptures, internal injuries, and such things.
Finally I tried to give him away. But it was a failure. Parties said
earthquakes were handy enough on the Pacific coast--they did not wish to
own one. As a last resort I offered him to the Governor for the use of
the "Brigade." His face lit up eagerly at first, but toned down again,
and he said the thing would be too palpable.

Just then the livery stable man brought in his bill for six weeks'
keeping--stall-room for the horse, fifteen dollars; hay for the horse,
two hundred and fifty! The Genuine Mexican Plug had eaten a ton of the
article, and the man said he would have eaten a hundred if he had let
him.

I will remark here, in all seriousness, that the regular price of hay
during that year and a part of the next was really two hundred and fifty
dollars a ton. During a part of the previous year it had sold at five
hundred a ton, in gold, and during the winter before that there was such
scarcity of the article that in several instances small quantities had
brought eight hundred dollars a ton in coin! The consequence might be
guessed without my telling it: peopled turned their stock loose to
starve, and before the spring arrived Carson and Eagle valleys were
almost literally carpeted with their carcases! Any old settler there
will verify these statements.

I managed to pay the livery bill, and that same day I gave the Genuine
Mexican Plug to a passing Arkansas emigrant whom fortune delivered into
my hand. If this ever meets his eye, he will doubtless remember the
donation.