Roughing It

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


Mr. Goodman's return relieved me of employment, unless I chose to become
a reporter again. I could not do that; I could not serve in the ranks
after being General of the army. So I thought I would depart and go
abroad into the world somewhere. Just at this juncture, Dan, my
associate in the reportorial department, told me, casually, that two
citizens had been trying to persuade him to go with them to New York and
aid in selling a rich silver mine which they had discovered and secured
in a new mining district in our neighborhood. He said they offered to
pay his expenses and give him one third of the proceeds of the sale.
He had refused to go. It was the very opportunity I wanted. I abused
him for keeping so quiet about it, and not mentioning it sooner. He said
it had not occurred to him that I would like to go, and so he had
recommended them to apply to Marshall, the reporter of the other paper.
I asked Dan if it was a good, honest mine, and no swindle. He said the
men had shown him nine tons of the rock, which they had got out to take
to New York, and he could cheerfully say that he had seen but little rock
in Nevada that was richer; and moreover, he said that they had secured a
tract of valuable timber and a mill-site, near the mine. My first idea
was to kill Dan. But I changed my mind, notwithstanding I was so angry,
for I thought maybe the chance was not yet lost. Dan said it was by no
means lost; that the men were absent at the mine again, and would not be
in Virginia to leave for the East for some ten days; that they had
requested him to do the talking to Marshall, and he had promised that he
would either secure Marshall or somebody else for them by the time they
got back; he would now say nothing to anybody till they returned, and
then fulfil his promise by furnishing me to them.

It was splendid. I went to bed all on fire with excitement; for nobody
had yet gone East to sell a Nevada silver mine, and the field was white
for the sickle. I felt that such a mine as the one described by Dan
would bring a princely sum in New York, and sell without delay or
difficulty. I could not sleep, my fancy so rioted through its castles in
the air. It was the "blind lead" come again.

Next day I got away, on the coach, with the usual eclat attending
departures of old citizens,--for if you have only half a dozen friends
out there they will make noise for a hundred rather than let you seem to
go away neglected and unregretted--and Dan promised to keep strict watch
for the men that had the mine to sell.

The trip was signalized but by one little incident, and that occurred
just as we were about to start. A very seedy looking vagabond passenger
got out of the stage a moment to wait till the usual ballast of silver
bricks was thrown in. He was standing on the pavement, when an awkward
express employee, carrying a brick weighing a hundred pounds, stumbled
and let it fall on the bummer's foot. He instantly dropped on the ground
and began to howl in the most heart-breaking way. A sympathizing crowd
gathered around and were going to pull his boot off; but he screamed
louder than ever and they desisted; then he fell to gasping, and between
the gasps ejaculated "Brandy! for Heaven's sake, brandy!" They poured
half a pint down him, and it wonderfully restored and comforted him.
Then he begged the people to assist him to the stage, which was done.
The express people urged him to have a doctor at their expense, but he
declined, and said that if he only had a little brandy to take along with
him, to soothe his paroxyms of pain when they came on, he would be
grateful and content. He was quickly supplied with two bottles, and we
drove off. He was so smiling and happy after that, that I could not
refrain from asking him how he could possibly be so comfortable with a
crushed foot.

"Well," said he, "I hadn't had a drink for twelve hours, and hadn't a
cent to my name. I was most perishing--and so, when that duffer dropped
that hundred-pounder on my foot, I see my chance. Got a cork leg, you
know!" and he pulled up his pantaloons and proved it.

He was as drunk as a lord all day long, and full of chucklings over his
timely ingenuity.

One drunken man necessarily reminds one of another. I once heard a
gentleman tell about an incident which he witnessed in a Californian
bar-room. He entitled it "Ye Modest Man Taketh a Drink." It was nothing
but a bit of acting, but it seemed to me a perfect rendering, and worthy
of Toodles himself. The modest man, tolerably far gone with beer and
other matters, enters a saloon (twenty-five cents is the price for
anything and everything, and specie the only money used) and lays down a
half dollar; calls for whiskey and drinks it; the bar-keeper makes change
and lays the quarter in a wet place on the counter; the modest man
fumbles at it with nerveless fingers, but it slips and the water holds
it; he contemplates it, and tries again; same result; observes that
people are interested in what he is at, blushes; fumbles at the quarter
again--blushes--puts his forefinger carefully, slowly down, to make sure
of his aim--pushes the coin toward the bar-keeper, and says with a sigh:

"Gimme a cigar!"

Naturally, another gentleman present told about another drunken man. He
said he reeled toward home late at night; made a mistake and entered the
wrong gate; thought he saw a dog on the stoop; and it was--an iron one.

He stopped and considered; wondered if it was a dangerous dog; ventured
to say "Be (hic) begone!" No effect. Then he approached warily, and
adopted conciliation; pursed up his lips and tried to whistle, but
failed; still approached, saying, "Poor dog!--doggy, doggy, doggy!--poor
doggy-dog!" Got up on the stoop, still petting with fond names; till
master of the advantages; then exclaimed, "Leave, you thief!"--planted a
vindictive kick in his ribs, and went head-over-heels overboard, of
course. A pause; a sigh or two of pain, and then a remark in a
reflective voice:

"Awful solid dog. What could he ben eating? ('ic!) Rocks, p'raps.
Such animals is dangerous.--' At's what I say--they're dangerous. If a
man--('ic!)--if a man wants to feed a dog on rocks, let him feed him on
rocks; 'at's all right; but let him keep him at home--not have him layin'
round promiscuous, where ('ic!) where people's liable to stumble over him
when they ain't noticin'!"

It was not without regret that I took a last look at the tiny flag (it
was thirty-five feet long and ten feet wide) fluttering like a lady's
handkerchief from the topmost peak of Mount Davidson, two thousand feet
above Virginia's roofs, and felt that doubtless I was bidding a permanent
farewell to a city which had afforded me the most vigorous enjoyment of
life I had ever experienced. And this reminds me of an incident which
the dullest memory Virginia could boast at the time it happened must
vividly recall, at times, till its possessor dies. Late one summer
afternoon we had a rain shower.

That was astonishing enough, in itself, to set the whole town buzzing,
for it only rains (during a week or two weeks) in the winter in Nevada,
and even then not enough at a time to make it worth while for any
merchant to keep umbrellas for sale. But the rain was not the chief
wonder. It only lasted five or ten minutes; while the people were still
talking about it all the heavens gathered to themselves a dense blackness
as of midnight. All the vast eastern front of Mount Davidson,
over-looking the city, put on such a funereal gloom that only the
nearness and solidity of the mountain made its outlines even faintly
distinguishable from the dead blackness of the heavens they rested
against. This unaccustomed sight turned all eyes toward the mountain;
and as they looked, a little tongue of rich golden flame was seen waving
and quivering in the heart of the midnight, away up on the extreme
summit! In a few minutes the streets were packed with people, gazing with
hardly an uttered word, at the one brilliant mote in the brooding world
of darkness. It flicked like a candle-flame, and looked no larger; but
with such a background it was wonderfully bright, small as it was. It
was the flag!--though no one suspected it at first, it seemed so like a
supernatural visitor of some kind--a mysterious messenger of good
tidings, some were fain to believe. It was the nation's emblem
transfigured by the departing rays of a sun that was entirely palled from
view; and on no other object did the glory fall, in all the broad
panorama of mountain ranges and deserts. Not even upon the staff of the
flag--for that, a needle in the distance at any time, was now untouched
by the light and undistinguishable in the gloom. For a whole hour the
weird visitor winked and burned in its lofty solitude, and still the
thousands of uplifted eyes watched it with fascinated interest. How the
people were wrought up! The superstition grew apace that this was a
mystic courier come with great news from the war--the poetry of the idea
excusing and commending it--and on it spread, from heart to heart, from
lip to lip and from street to street, till there was a general impulse to
have out the military and welcome the bright waif with a salvo of
artillery!

And all that time one sorely tried man, the telegraph operator sworn to
official secrecy, had to lock his lips and chain his tongue with a
silence that was like to rend them; for he, and he only, of all the
speculating multitude, knew the great things this sinking sun had seen
that day in the east--Vicksburg fallen, and the Union arms victorious at
Gettysburg!

But for the journalistic monopoly that forbade the slightest revealment
of eastern news till a day after its publication in the California
papers, the glorified flag on Mount Davidson would have been saluted and
re-saluted, that memorable evening, as long as there was a charge of
powder to thunder with; the city would have been illuminated, and every
man that had any respect for himself would have got drunk,--as was the
custom of the country on all occasions of public moment. Even at this
distant day I cannot think of this needlessly marred supreme opportunity
without regret. What a time we might have had!




CHAPTER LVI.

We rumbled over the plains and valleys, climbed the Sierras to the
clouds, and looked down upon summer-clad California. And I will remark
here, in passing, that all scenery in California requires distance to
give it its highest charm. The mountains are imposing in their sublimity
and their majesty of form and altitude, from any point of view--but one
must have distance to soften their ruggedness and enrich their tintings;
a Californian forest is best at a little distance, for there is a sad
poverty of variety in species, the trees being chiefly of one monotonous
family--redwood, pine, spruce, fir--and so, at a near view there is a
wearisome sameness of attitude in their rigid arms, stretched down ward
and outward in one continued and reiterated appeal to all men to "Sh!
--don't say a word!--you might disturb somebody!" Close at hand, too,
there is a reliefless and relentless smell of pitch and turpentine; there
is a ceaseless melancholy in their sighing and complaining foliage; one
walks over a soundless carpet of beaten yellow bark and dead spines of
the foliage till he feels like a wandering spirit bereft of a footfall;
he tires of the endless tufts of needles and yearns for substantial,
shapely leaves; he looks for moss and grass to loll upon, and finds none,
for where there is no bark there is naked clay and dirt, enemies to
pensive musing and clean apparel. Often a grassy plain in California, is
what it should be, but often, too, it is best contemplated at a distance,
because although its grass blades are tall, they stand up vindictively
straight and self-sufficient, and are unsociably wide apart, with
uncomely spots of barren sand between.

One of the queerest things I know of, is to hear tourists from "the
States" go into ecstasies over the loveliness of "ever-blooming
California." And they always do go into that sort of ecstasies. But
perhaps they would modify them if they knew how old Californians, with
the memory full upon them of the dust-covered and questionable summer
greens of Californian "verdure," stand astonished, and filled with
worshipping admiration, in the presence of the lavish richness, the
brilliant green, the infinite freshness, the spend-thrift variety of form
and species and foliage that make an Eastern landscape a vision of
Paradise itself. The idea of a man falling into raptures over grave and
sombre California, when that man has seen New England's meadow-expanses
and her maples, oaks and cathedral-windowed elms decked in summer attire,
or the opaline splendors of autumn descending upon her forests, comes
very near being funny--would be, in fact, but that it is so pathetic.
No land with an unvarying climate can be very beautiful. The tropics are
not, for all the sentiment that is wasted on them. They seem beautiful
at first, but sameness impairs the charm by and by. Change is the
handmaiden Nature requires to do her miracles with. The land that has
four well-defined seasons, cannot lack beauty, or pall with monotony.
Each season brings a world of enjoyment and interest in the watching of
its unfolding, its gradual, harmonious development, its culminating
graces--and just as one begins to tire of it, it passes away and a
radical change comes, with new witcheries and new glories in its train.
And I think that to one in sympathy with nature, each season, in its
turn, seems the loveliest.

San Francisco, a truly fascinating city to live in, is stately and
handsome at a fair distance, but close at hand one notes that the
architecture is mostly old-fashioned, many streets are made up of
decaying, smoke-grimed, wooden houses, and the barren sand-hills toward
the outskirts obtrude themselves too prominently. Even the kindly
climate is sometimes pleasanter when read about than personally
experienced, for a lovely, cloudless sky wears out its welcome by and by,
and then when the longed for rain does come it stays. Even the playful
earthquake is better contemplated at a dis----

However there are varying opinions about that.

The climate of San Francisco is mild and singularly equable. The
thermometer stands at about seventy degrees the year round. It hardly
changes at all. You sleep under one or two light blankets Summer and
Winter, and never use a mosquito bar. Nobody ever wears Summer clothing.
You wear black broadcloth--if you have it--in August and January, just
the same. It is no colder, and no warmer, in the one month than the
other. You do not use overcoats and you do not use fans. It is as
pleasant a climate as could well be contrived, take it all around, and is
doubtless the most unvarying in the whole world. The wind blows there a
good deal in the summer months, but then you can go over to Oakland, if
you choose--three or four miles away--it does not blow there. It has
only snowed twice in San Francisco in nineteen years, and then it only
remained on the ground long enough to astonish the children, and set them
to wondering what the feathery stuff was.

During eight months of the year, straight along, the skies are bright and
cloudless, and never a drop of rain falls. But when the other four
months come along, you will need to go and steal an umbrella. Because
you will require it. Not just one day, but one hundred and twenty days
in hardly varying succession. When you want to go visiting, or attend
church, or the theatre, you never look up at the clouds to see whether it
is likely to rain or not--you look at the almanac. If it is Winter, it
will rain--and if it is Summer, it won't rain, and you cannot help it.
You never need a lightning-rod, because it never thunders and it never
lightens. And after you have listened for six or eight weeks, every
night, to the dismal monotony of those quiet rains, you will wish in your
heart the thunder would leap and crash and roar along those drowsy skies
once, and make everything alive--you will wish the prisoned lightnings
would cleave the dull firmament asunder and light it with a blinding
glare for one little instant. You would give anything to hear the old
familiar thunder again and see the lightning strike somebody. And along
in the Summer, when you have suffered about four months of lustrous,
pitiless sunshine, you are ready to go down on your knees and plead for
rain--hail--snow--thunder and lightning--anything to break the monotony
--you will take an earthquake, if you cannot do any better. And the
chances are that you'll get it, too.

San Francisco is built on sand hills, but they are prolific sand hills.
They yield a generous vegetation. All the rare flowers which people in
"the States" rear with such patient care in parlor flower-pots and
green-houses, flourish luxuriantly in the open air there all the year
round. Calla lilies, all sorts of geraniums, passion flowers, moss
roses--I do not know the names of a tenth part of them. I only know that
while New Yorkers are burdened with banks and drifts of snow,
Californians are burdened with banks and drifts of flowers, if they only
keep their hands off and let them grow. And I have heard that they have
also that rarest and most curious of all the flowers, the beautiful
Espiritu Santo, as the Spaniards call it--or flower of the Holy Spirit
--though I thought it grew only in Central America--down on the Isthmus.
In its cup is the daintiest little facsimile of a dove, as pure as snow.
The Spaniards have a superstitious reverence for it. The blossom has
been conveyed to the States, submerged in ether; and the bulb has been
taken thither also, but every attempt to make it bloom after it arrived,
has failed.

I have elsewhere spoken of the endless Winter of Mono, California, and
but this moment of the eternal Spring of San Francisco. Now if we travel
a hundred miles in a straight line, we come to the eternal Summer of
Sacramento. One never sees Summer-clothing or mosquitoes in San
Francisco--but they can be found in Sacramento. Not always and
unvaryingly, but about one hundred and forty-three months out of twelve
years, perhaps. Flowers bloom there, always, the reader can easily
believe--people suffer and sweat, and swear, morning, noon and night, and
wear out their stanchest energies fanning themselves. It gets hot there,
but if you go down to Fort Yuma you will find it hotter. Fort Yuma is
probably the hottest place on earth. The thermometer stays at one
hundred and twenty in the shade there all the time--except when it varies
and goes higher. It is a U.S. military post, and its occupants get so
used to the terrific heat that they suffer without it. There is a
tradition (attributed to John Phenix [It has been purloined by fifty
different scribblers who were too poor to invent a fancy but not ashamed
to steal one.--M. T.]) that a very, very wicked soldier died there,
once, and of course, went straight to the hottest corner of perdition,
--and the next day he telegraphed back for his blankets. There is no doubt
about the truth of this statement--there can be no doubt about it. I
have seen the place where that soldier used to board. In Sacramento it
is fiery Summer always, and you can gather roses, and eat strawberries
and ice-cream, and wear white linen clothes, and pant and perspire, at
eight or nine o'clock in the morning, and then take the cars, and at noon
put on your furs and your skates, and go skimming over frozen Donner
Lake, seven thousand feet above the valley, among snow banks fifteen feet
deep, and in the shadow of grand mountain peaks that lift their frosty
crags ten thousand feet above the level of the sea.

There is a transition for you! Where will you find another like it in
the Western hemisphere? And some of us have swept around snow-walled
curves of the Pacific Railroad in that vicinity, six thousand feet above
the sea, and looked down as the birds do, upon the deathless Summer of
the Sacramento Valley, with its fruitful fields, its feathery foliage,
its silver streams, all slumbering in the mellow haze of its enchanted
atmosphere, and all infinitely softened and spiritualized by distance--a
dreamy, exquisite glimpse of fairyland, made all the more charming and
striking that it was caught through a forbidden gateway of ice and snow,
and savage crags and precipices.




CHAPTER LVII.

It was in this Sacramento Valley, just referred to, that a deal of the
most lucrative of the early gold mining was done, and you may still see,
in places, its grassy slopes and levels torn and guttered and disfigured
by the avaricious spoilers of fifteen and twenty years ago. You may see
such disfigurements far and wide over California--and in some such
places, where only meadows and forests are visible--not a living
creature, not a house, no stick or stone or remnant of a ruin, and not a
sound, not even a whisper to disturb the Sabbath stillness--you will find
it hard to believe that there stood at one time a fiercely-flourishing
little city, of two thousand or three thousand souls, with its newspaper,
fire company, brass band, volunteer militia, bank, hotels, noisy Fourth
of July processions and speeches, gambling hells crammed with tobacco
smoke, profanity, and rough-bearded men of all nations and colors, with
tables heaped with gold dust sufficient for the revenues of a German
principality--streets crowded and rife with business--town lots worth
four hundred dollars a front foot--labor, laughter, music, dancing,
swearing, fighting, shooting, stabbing--a bloody inquest and a man for
breakfast every morning--everything that delights and adorns existence
--all the appointments and appurtenances of a thriving and prosperous and
promising young city,--and now nothing is left of it all but a lifeless,
homeless solitude. The men are gone, the houses have vanished, even the
name of the place is forgotten. In no other land, in modern times, have
towns so absolutely died and disappeared, as in the old mining regions of
California.

It was a driving, vigorous, restless population in those days. It was a
curious population. It was the only population of the kind that the
world has ever seen gathered together, and it is not likely that the
world will ever see its like again. For observe, it was an assemblage of
two hundred thousand young men--not simpering, dainty, kid-gloved
weaklings, but stalwart, muscular, dauntless young braves, brimful of
push and energy, and royally endowed with every attribute that goes to
make up a peerless and magnificent manhood--the very pick and choice of
the world's glorious ones. No women, no children, no gray and stooping
veterans,--none but erect, bright-eyed, quick-moving, strong-handed young
giants--the strangest population, the finest population, the most gallant
host that ever trooped down the startled solitudes of an unpeopled land.
And where are they now? Scattered to the ends of the earth--or
prematurely aged and decrepit--or shot or stabbed in street affrays--or
dead of disappointed hopes and broken hearts--all gone, or nearly all
--victims devoted upon the altar of the golden calf--the noblest holocaust
that ever wafted its sacrificial incense heavenward. It is pitiful to
think upon.

It was a splendid population--for all the slow, sleepy, sluggish-brained
sloths staid at home--you never find that sort of people among pioneers
--you cannot build pioneers out of that sort of material. It was that
population that gave to California a name for getting up astounding
enterprises and rushing them through with a magnificent dash and daring
and a recklessness of cost or consequences, which she bears unto this
day--and when she projects a new surprise, the grave world smiles as
usual, and says "Well, that is California all over."

But they were rough in those times! They fairly reveled in gold, whisky,
fights, and fandangoes, and were unspeakably happy. The honest miner
raked from a hundred to a thousand dollars out of his claim a day, and
what with the gambling dens and the other entertainments, he hadn't a
cent the next morning, if he had any sort of luck. They cooked their own
bacon and beans, sewed on their own buttons, washed their own shirts
--blue woollen ones; and if a man wanted a fight on his hands without any
annoying delay, all he had to do was to appear in public in a white shirt
or a stove-pipe hat, and he would be accommodated. For those people
hated aristocrats. They had a particular and malignant animosity toward
what they called a "biled shirt."

It was a wild, free, disorderly, grotesque society! Men--only swarming
hosts of stalwart men--nothing juvenile, nothing feminine, visible
anywhere!

In those days miners would flock in crowds to catch a glimpse of that
rare and blessed spectacle, a woman! Old inhabitants tell how, in a
certain camp, the news went abroad early in the morning that a woman was
come! They had seen a calico dress hanging out of a wagon down at the
camping-ground--sign of emigrants from over the great plains. Everybody
went down there, and a shout went up when an actual, bona fide dress was
discovered fluttering in the wind! The male emigrant was visible. The
miners said: