Around the Horn on a clipper ship in 1856, cooking and whaling off Baja California, mining in the Sierras in 1858, finally teaching school in Tuolumne County.
   
Prentice Mulford wasn't a Rogue Valley pioneer, but his memoir is an introspective view into the life, mind and work of a miner.
   
Transcribed by the indefatigable Rene Forncrook.


    In 1856 I shipped "before the mast" on the A-1 first-class clipper Wizard bound from New York to San Francisco.
    When I made up my mind to become a sailor, I had tried several of this world's callings and seemed to find none suitable. I had asked counsel of several elderly gentlemen in my native village as to the best way of securing all things needful during my sojourn in this world. They said many wise and good things. They looked wise and good. But really the wordy help they offered was unsatisfactory. So, I cut the knot myself and said I would be a sailor. I explained to my male and female friends that I felt myself destined for a maritime career. I needed more excitement than could be got out of a shore humdrum life. The sea was the place for enterprising youthful Americans. The American merchant marine needed American officers and sailors. All heard me and agreed. No doubt it was the best thing. And I talked on and they agreed with all my arguments. How people will agree with you when it's all one to them what you do! I was eighteen and in most respects a fool, including this--that I did not know it.
    The Wizard, on which I shipped with five other boys from my native town, was a first-class clipper. She was a fine thing to look at from a distance, either as she lay at anchor, the tracery of her spars and rigging in relief against the sky, or speeding along under studding sails rigged out on both sides. But once on board and inside her symmetrical lines, things were not so beautiful. Those white, cloud-like sails tore men's fingers as, hard and heavy with ice or snow, the sailors tried to furl them. Those graceful, tapering yards, supporting the studding sails, strained and half crushed men's backs when lowered and toted about the deck. There were wooden belaying pins, iron marlinspikes and other miscellaneous things to fling at men's heads by those in authority. Those cobweb-like ropes had hard, thick ends lying coiled on deck to lash men's bodies.
    We, the six boys, were obliged to leave our native heaths because there wasn't room for us on them to earn our bread and clothes. We were not clearly aware of this at the time, though an unspoken sentiment prevailed there, as it does in most of the older settled states, that the young man must move away to "seek his fortune."
    The captain of the Wizard was from our native town. Therefore myself and the five other boys had shipped under him, expecting special favors. A mistake. Never sail under a captain who knows your folks at home. You have no business to expect favoritism, he has no business to grant it.
    I was the last of the six young lubbers to leave the town for New York. On the morning of my departure the mothers, sisters and other female relatives of the five who had gone before discovered many other things which they deemed necessary for the urchins to carry on the voyage. So they bore down on me with them, and I bade most of these good people an earthly farewell, loaded down, in addition to my own traps, with an assorted cargo of cakes, sweetmeats, bed quilts, Bibles, tracts and one copy of Young's Night Thoughts for the boys.
    I ate my last dinner as a free man at a Broadway restaurant, and then I went to the wharf where the ship lay. Already the tug was alongside, preparatory to hauling her out in the stream. I went up the plank and over the side. A gentleman in authority asked me, as I stepped on deck, if I belonged to the ship. I said I did. "Take off those togs, then, put on your working duds and turn to, then," he remarked. The togs went off. I put on my canvas pants and flannel shirt, the garb of sea servitude. Henceforth I was a slave. The ship just then was not a Sunday school, nor a society for ethical culture. It was a howling pandemonium of oaths and orders. Fully one-third of the able seamen had not recovered from their closing-out shore spree and had tumbled into their berths or were sprawled on deck drunk. Cargo in cases, bales, boxes and barrels was still rattled over the bulwarks and into the hold. Everybody seemed to be swearing--first, each one on his own private account, and secondly, all in one general chorus for mutual purposes. Many people seemed in command. I couldn't distinguish the officers of the ship from the stevedores. Still officers continued to turn up everywhere, and each officer ordered me to some particular and separate duty.
    The world looked pretty black to me then. I wished there was some way out of it. On shore the period between the foremast hand and the position of captain was only the duration of a thought. Here it was an eternity. Daydreams are short, real experience is long. But all this is often in youth a difficult matter to realize.
    There came along a short, stout man with a deeper voice and more sonorous oath than anybody else. This was the fourth and last mate. It was a relief to find at last the end of the mates and to know the exact number of men legitimately entitled to swear at me. This gentleman for a season concentrated himself entirely on me. He ordered me with a broom and scraper into the ship's pig pen, which he argued needed cleaning. This was my first well-defined maritime duty. It was a lower round of the ladder than I had anticipated. It seemed in its nature an occupation more bucolic than nautical. I would have preferred, also, that compliance with the order had not been exacted until the ship had left the wharf, because there were several shore visitors on board, and among them two of my intimate friends, who had come to see me off. There they stood, in all the bravery of silk hats and fashionable-cut attire, conversing on terms of equality with the first mate. They could talk with him on the weather or any subject. I, by virtue of my inferior position, was not at liberty to speak to this potentate at all.
    I jumped into the pig pen. Thus destiny, despite our inclinations, forces down our throats these bitter pills. The fourth mate was not more than a year my senior. He stood over me during the entire process and scolded, cursed and commanded. My shore friends looked on from afar and grinned. Already they saw the great social chasm which yawned between me and them and governed their actions accordingly. Already did they involuntarily patronize me. It requires a wise man to detect the wickedness and deceit in his own nature. Probably I should have similarly acted had our positions been reversed. The mate was very particular. He made me sweep and scrape every corner with an elaborate and painful accuracy. He sent me into the pig's house to further perfect the work. I was obliged to enter it in an almost recumbent position. The pig ran out disgusted. I scraped his floor in a similar mood. Thus commenced life on the ocean wave.
    But I got even with the mate. Destiny made me my own involuntary avenger of the indignity put upon me. By indignity I don't mean the cleaning of the pig pen. That was an honorable though menial occupation--at least, in theory. Cincinnatus on his farm may have done the same thing. But I do mean the scurrility and abuse the young officer bestowed on me, while I did my best to execute his bidding.
    I hauled the young man overboard about three minutes afterward, but he never knew I did it, and I never allowed myself to think of the occurrence while on shipboard, for fear the powers of the air might ventilate the matter. It came about in this way: A line was passed through a hawsehole forward to the tug, which was puffing, fretting, fuming, and churning with her screw the mud ooze and garbage floating in the slip into a closer fusion. My friend the mate stood on the forechains with the end of the heavy rope in both hands, trying to pass it to those on the tug. This line running through the hawsehole aft was lying near where I stood. Someone called out: "Haul in on that line!" I supposed that the order referred to me and the hawser lying at my side. So, I hauled with all my might. I felt at first some resistance--something like a tugging at the other end. I hauled all the harder. Then something seemed to give way. It hauled easier. I heard, coincident with these sensations, a splash, loud cries, much swearing and the yell of "Man overboard!" I raised my head over the bulwarks and there was my mate, floundering amid dock ooze, rotten oranges and salt water. It was he who held the other end of the line, and my hauling had caused the center of gravity in his short body to shift beyond the base, and in accordance with a natural law he had gone overboard. He was the general cynosure of all eyes. They fished him out, wet and swearing. There was a vigorous demand for the miscreant who had been hauling on the line. I was as far as possible from the pot and kept myself very busy. Bluster went below and changed his clothes. I was avenged.
    We were towed into the stream and anchored for the night. To look at New York City, with its many lights and its thousands amusing themselves in various ways from the ship's deck, without the possibility of joining them, was to feel for the first time the slavery of marine life. Emerging very early next morning from the "boys' house," I found everything in the bustle and confusion of getting underway. A long file of men were tramping aft with a very wet hawser. As I stood looking at them my ear was seized by our Dutch third mate, who accompanied the action with the remark, "Cooms, I put you to work." He conducted me in this manner to the rope and bade me lay hold of it. I did so. I could have done so with a better heart and will had it not been for the needless and degrading manner in which he enforced his command. Most men do their work just as well for being treated with a certain courtesy of command due from the superior to the inferior.
Crawfordsville Journal, Crawfordsville, Indiana, January 25, 1890, page 5

    The first night out was fine. The Wizard slightly bowed to the ocean, and the sails seemed great black patches, waving to and fro against the sky. The six boys, so soon to be miserable, gathered in a cluster on deck. Jed Coles proposed that we "spin yarns." It was the nautically correct way of passing the time. So we "spun yarns," or at least Jed did. He had a batch ready for the occasion. He sat on a tub, put an enormous chew of tobacco in his mouth, hitched up his trousers and felt every inch a sailor. I noticed the second mate, that incarnation of evil and brutality, hovering about us, dark as it was. I saw his fiendish grin and the glare of his greenish eye. A precious lot of young fools we must have seemed to him. A little after our yarn spinning was interrupted by shrieks and cries of distress proceeding from the forward part of the ship. We had then our first exhibition of the manner of enforcing American merchant service discipline.
    The second mate was beating Cummings, a simple being, who, having sailed only in "fore and aft" coasting vessels, had made the mistake of shipping as an ordinary seaman on a square-rigged craft, and was almost as much at sea in his knowledge of the ropes as the "boys." This officer had singled out Cummings for his awkwardness as the proper man to "haze." He was showering upon him blows, thick and fast, with the end of one of the forebraces. It was the first time I had ever seen a man beaten by one in authority. The cringing attitude, the cries, sobs and supplications of a full-grown man, and the oaths and terrible ferocity of his castigator, were inexpressibly shocking to me. The incident, which was often repeated during the voyage, broke up our amateur yarning and made us very thoughtful.
    Jedediah Coles was not at all nautically loquacious the next night. Then the Gulf Stream gave us a touch of its tantrums. All during the afternoon the sky grew more and more threatening. By dark it was blowing hard. The lighter sails one by one were stowed. Then it blew harder. The mate swore the harder. The captain came on deck and swore at everybody. One of the "boys" asked him if he thought it would be stormy. He considered himself privileged to ask the captain that question. He was a native of the same village. His father and the captain were friends, and his mother and the captain's wife visited each other. So, he deemed it advisable to establish himself on a sociable footing with the captain at the commencement of the voyage. Poor boy! Never again during the trip did he consult the captain meteorologically. He learned speedily the great gulf which yawns between the cabin and the forecastle.
    It grew dark, the waves became bigger and bigger, and the ship seemed taxed to her utmost trying to clamber [over] them one after another as they presented themselves. The mates came out in their oilskins.
    When the order came to reef, and I saw the men clambering up the fore and main rigging, I added myself to their number, though I felt I should never come down again--at least, in one piece. It was my debut aloft off soundings. Many a time had I clambered about the rigging of the old whalers as they lay at the village wharf, but they were not roaring, kicking and plunging like this vessel. Heavy seamen's boots kicked me in the face as I followed their wearers up this awful ascent; other heavy boots trod on my fingers; they shook the ratlines, too, in a most uncomfortable manner. The mast strained and groaned fearfully. Somehow, after climbing over some awful chasms, I got on the yard with the men. I dared not go out far. The foot rope wobbled, jerked and gave way under me at times with the weight and motion of the men upon it. The great sail seemed in no humor to be furled. It hauled away from us, bellied, puffed and kept up a gigantic series of thundering flaps. Laying over on the yard the men would gather in as much of the hard, wet, wirelike canvas as possible and then together haul back on it.
    This I objected to. It was risky enough to lay out on an enormous stick sixty feet in the air, while the wind tore our voices from us and seemed to hurl the words far away ere they had well got out of our mouths, and the white-topped waves, dimly seen below, seemed leaping up and snatching at us. But at that height, and amid all that motion, to balance one's body on the stomach, grasp with outstretched arms a hard roll of struggling, wet canvas, while the legs were as far extended the other way and the feet resting only against a rope working and wobbling and giving way here and there from the weight of fifteen hundred pounds of men unequally distributed over it, was a task and seeming risk too great for my courage. I dared do nothing but hold on. The conduct of the main topsail was desperate and outrageous. It seemed straining every nerve--supposing, for the sake of forcible expression, that it had nerves--to pull us off the yard and "into the great deep."
    I found myself between two old sailors, who lost no time in convincing me of my complete and utter worthlessness aloft. I concurred. They bade me clear out and get down on deck. I was glad to do so. Reefing topsails in reality was very different from reefing them in books or in imagination. On reaching the deck I concluded to lie down. All through the evening I had experienced an uneasy sensation in the stomach. I argued with myself it was not seasickness--something did not agree with me. But when I lay down in the scuppers I admitted being seasick. Then I only cared to lie there. Life was too miserable even to hope in. The tumult went on as ever. The sailors trampled over me. Being in the way, they dragged me aside. I cared not. Finally, someone bawled in my ear, "Sick! Go below." I went. The five other boys, all similarly affected, all caring naught for life or living, lay in their bunks.
    The boys' house was about the size of a respectable pigpen--a single pigpen. There was room in it for two boys to turn at once, providing they turned slowly and carefully. On going on board, we had bestowed such of our outfit as could be brought into this pen in the manner in which boys of 16 bestow things generally on first commencing to "keep house." Everything was arranged on a terra firma basis. We made no calculation for the ship's deviating from an even keel. When she did commence to pitch everything fell down. Clothing fell on the floor; plates, knives, forks, cups and bottles rolled from shelf and bunk; plum and sponge cake, pie and sweetmeats fell; for each boy had a space in his sea chest filled with these articles, placed there by kind, dear relatives at home. It was intended that we should not refer to them until the ship was far advanced on her voyage.
    But we never had such large supplies of cake and sweetmeats at hand before, so we went for these things immediately. The house abounded with them the first night out. The roof leaked. We left our sliding door carelessly open, and a few barrels of the ocean slopped over the bulwarks into the apartment. At midnight our combined clothing, plates, mugs, knives, forks, bottles, water kegs, combs, hair brushes, hats, pants, coats, meat, bread, pie, cake, sweetmeats, molasses, salt water, and an occasional seasick and despairing boy united to form a wet, sodden mass on the floor two feet in depth. Above, the storm howled and swept through the rigging, with little sail to interrupt it. Six sick and wretched boys in their berths lay "heads and pints," as they pack herring--that is, the toe of one rested on the pillow of the other, for it was not possible to lie otherwise in those narrow receptacles for the living. But the horrors of that second night are not to be related.
    No solicitous stewards with basins and tenders of broth and champagne attended us. We were not cabin passengers on an ocean steamer. Barely had the next morning's dawn appeared when our door was flung open. In it stood that dreadful second mate of the greenish eyes, hard, brick-red complexion, horny fists and raspy voice--a hard, rough, rude, unfeeling man, who cried: "Come out of there! Oh, you're young bears--your troubles ain't commenced yet!" Then his long, bony arm gripped us, one after another, and tore us from our bunks. Out this dreadful morning we tumbled, in the wet clothes wherein we had lain all night, weak, sick, staggering, giddy.
    A long iron hook was put in my hand and I was desired to go forward and assist in hauling a long length after length of the cable, preparatory to stowing it away. Sky and sea were all of dull, monotonous gray; the ship was still clambering one great wave after another with tiresome and laborious monotony. All the canvas of the preceding day had disappeared, save a much-diminished foretopsail and storm staysail. The mates on duty were alert and swearing. The men, not all fully recovered from their last shore debauch, were grumbling and swearing also. The cook, a dark-hued tropical mongrel, with glittering eyes, was swearing at something amiss in his department. It was a miserable time. But a cure was quickly effected. In thirty-six hours, all seasickness had departed. With the delicate petting process in vogue with wealthy cabin passengers it would have required a week. But we had no time in which to be seasick.
    Life for us on board this ship was commenced on a new basis. We were obliged to learn "manners." Manners among modern youth have become almost obsolete. The etiquette and formality required from the young to the elder, and common to the time of perukes and knee breeches, has now little place save on shipboard, where such traditions and customs linger. We were surprised to find it our duty to say "sir" to an officer, and also to find it imperative to recognize every order addressed us by the remark "Aye, aye, sir!" The sullen, shambling fashion of receiving words addressed to us in silence, so that the speaker was left in doubt as to whether he was heard or not, had no place off soundings. In short, we were obliged to practice what is not common now to many boys on shore--that is, an outward show of respect for superiors. If business called us to the "west end" of a ship, the quarterdeck, our place was to walk on the lee side of that deck and leave the weather side the moment the duty was done. If sent for any article by an officer, it was our business to find it without further recourse to him.
Crawfordsville Journal, Crawfordsville, Indiana, January 25, 1890, page 5

    Petted boys have little patience for hunting for things. At home two minutes is about the limit of time spent in looking for a mislaid poker, and the "ma!" "pa!" or "aunt!" is called on to turn to and do this disagreeable work. The second mate once ordered me to find a certain iron hook, wherewith to draw the pump boxes, and when, after a short search, I returned and asked him where it might be, I was horrified by the expression of astonished indignation spreading over his face, as he yelled: "Great Scott, he expects me to help him find it!" I saw the point and all it involved, and never so wounded an officer's dignity again. It is a sailor's, and especially a boy's, business on shipboard to find whatever he is ordered to.
    We soon learned on the Wizard how well we had lived at home. Our sea fare of hardtack and salt junk taught us how to appreciate at their true value the broiled steaks, hotcakes and buttered toast of home tables. The quart of very common molasses served out to us weekly soon became a luxury, and when the steward occasionally brought us "benavlins" (the nautical term for the broken fragments from the cabin table), we regarded it as very luxurious living, though a month previous we should have deemed such food fit only for the swill tub.
    In about two weeks we had settled down into the routine of life at sea. Sailors are apt to term theirs a "dog's life." I never did. It was a peculiar life, and in some respects an unpleasant one--like many others on land. But it was not a "dog's life." There was plenty to eat, and we relished our "lobscouse," har tack, salt junk, beans, codfish, potatoes and--Sundays and Thursdays--duff.
    The hours of labor were not exhausting. It was "watch and watch, four hours off and four hours on." Many a New York retail grocer's clerk, who turns to at 5 in the morning and never leaves off until 11 at night, would revel on such regulation of time and labor. So would many a sewing girl. We had plenty of time for sleep. If called up at 4 every alternate morning, and obliged to stand watch until 8 a.m., we could "turn in" at that hour after breakfast and sleep till noon. Apart from the alternate watches the work of "jobs" occupied about six hours per day. True, there was at times some heavy work, but it was only occasional. Sailor work is not heavy as compared with the incessant fagging, wearing, never-ending character of some occupations on shore. Skill, agility and quickness are in greater demand than mere brute strength.
    Lobscouse is a preparation of hard bread, first soaked and then stewed with shredded salt beef. It looks somewhat like rations for a delicate bear when served out by the panful. But it is very good. Salt beef is wonderfully improved by streaks of fat through it. These serve the foremast hands in place of butter. I know of no better relish than good pilot bread and sliced salt junk, with plenty of clean, white fat. On shore that quart of boiling hot liquid, sweetened with molasses and called tea, would have been pitched into the gutter. At sea, after an afternoon's work, it was good. With similar content and resignation, not to say happiness, we drank in the morning the hot quart of black fluid similarly sweetened and called coffee. It was not real coffee. I don't know what it was. I cared not to know. Of course, we grumbled at it. But we drank it. It was "filling," and was far better than the cold, brackish water, impregnated thickly with iron rust, a gallon of which was served out daily. For the fresh water was kept below in an iron tank, and, as the deck leaked, a small portion of the Atlantic had somehow gained admission to it and slightly salted it. It resembled chocolate to the eye, but not to the palate.
    On the fourth day out the Wizard was found to have four feet of water in her hold. The ship was pumped dry in about four hours, when she proceeded to fill up again. The captain seemed a man of many minds for the next two or three days. First, the ship was put back for New York. This course was altered, and her bows pointed for Africa. Then the foremast hands became worried, and, going aft one morning in a body, asked Capt. S----- what he meant to do and where he meant to go, because they had shipped for San Francisco and they did not intend going anywhere else. The captain answered that his own safety and that of the vessel were as dear to him as their lives were to them, and that he intended doing the best for the general good. This answer was not very satisfactory to the crew, who went grumbling back to their quarters. Ultimately it turned out that we were to take the leak with us to San Francisco.
    At the rate the water was running in it was judged that the bone, muscle and sinews of the crew could manage to keep it down. So, we pumped all the way round Cape Horn. We pumped during our respective watches every two hours. In good weather and on an even keel it took half an hour to "suck the pumps." If the vessel was heeled to larboard or starboard it took much longer. In very rough weather we pumped all the time that could be spared from other duties. There were two pumps at the foot of the mainmast worked by levers, and these were furnished with "bell ropes" to pull on. Half the watch worked at each lever, and these were located exactly where on stormy nights the wild waves were in the habit of flinging over the bulwarks a hogshead or two of water to drench us and wash us off our feet.
    The Wizard was a very "wet ship." She loved giving us moist surprises. Sometimes on a fine day she would gracefully, but suddenly, poke her nose under, and come up and out of the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean with fifteen or twenty tons of pea green sea water foaming over the t'gallant forecastle, cascading thence on the spar deck and washing everything movable slam bang up and sometimes into the cabin. This took place once on a washday. Sailors' washday is often regulated by the supply of water caught from the clouds. On this particular occasion the foredeck was full of old salts up to their bared elbows in suds, vigorously discoursing washtub and washboard. Then the flood came, and in a moment the deck was filled with a great surge bearing on its crest all these old salts struggling among their tubs, their washboards, their soap and partly washed garments. The cabin bulkhead partly stopped some, but the door being open others were borne partly inside, and their woolen shirts were afterward found stranded on the carpeted cabin floor. One "duff day" we had gathered about our extra repast in the boys' house. The duff and New Orleans molasses had just commenced to disappear.
    Then a shining, greenish, translucent cataract filled the doorway from top to bottom. It struck boys, beef, bread duff and dishes. It scattered them. It tumbled them in various heaps. It was a brief season of terror, spitting and sputtering salt water, and a scrambling for life, as we thought. It washed under bunks and in remote corners duff, bread, beef, plates, knives, forks, cups, spoons and molasses bottles. The dinner was lost. Going on deck we found a couple of feet of water swashing from bulwark to bulwark with every roll, bearing with it heavy blocks and everything movable which had been loosened by the shock, to the great risk of legs and bodies. But these were trifles. At least we call them trifles when they are over. I have noticed, however, that a man may swear as hard at a jammed finger as a broken leg, and the most efficacious means in the world to quickly develop a furious temper is to lose one's dinner when hungry, get wet through, then abused by a Dutch mate for not stirring around quicker, and finally work all the afternoon setting things to rights on a empty stomach, robbed and disappointed of its duff. This is no trifle.
    Learning the ropes isn't all a boy's first lessons at sea. He must learn also to wash and mend his own clothes. At least he must try to learn and go through the forms. I never could wash a flannel shirt, and how the extraneous matter called dirt, which the washing process is intended to disperse, is gotten rid of by soap and muscle at an equal average over the entire surface of the garment is for me today one of earth's mysteries. I could wash a shirt in spots; when I tried to convince myself that I had finished it, I could still see where I had washed clean and where I had not. There is a certain system in the proper manipulation of a garment in a washtub which to me is incomprehensible. An old sailor is usually a good washer. It's part of his trade. Those on the Wizard would reprove the boys for their slipshod work. "Such a slovenly washed shirt as that," said Conner, an old man-of-war's man, "hung in the rigging is a disgrace to the ship." He alluded to one of mine. The failure was not from any lack of labor put on it. The trouble lay in that I didn't know where to put the labor on.
    It was particularly disagreeable at midnight as we assembled at the bell ropes to give her the last "shake up," and, more asleep than awake, pulled wearily, with monotonous clank. Sometimes at that hour, when our labors were half through, the valves would get out of order. It was then necessary to call the carpenter and have them repaired. This would keep us on deck half an hour or more, for by mutual compact each watch was obliged to "suck its own pumps." Such delays made the men very angry. They stopped singing at their work--always a bad sign--and became silent, morose and sullen. For the first six weeks all the "shanty-songs" known on the sea had been sung. Regularly at each pumping exercise we had "Shanty Ann," "Bully in the Alley," "Miranda Lee," "Storm Along, John," and other operatic maritime gems, some of which might have a place in our modern operas of "The Pinafore" school.
    There's a good deal of rough melody when these airs are rolled out by twenty or thirty strong lungs to the accompaniment of a windlass' clank and the wild, shrill sweep of the winds in the rigging above. But the men would no longer sing. The fact was reported to the captain. He put on his spectacles, walked out on the quarterdeck and gazed at them mournfully and reprovingly. The mates tried to incite them to renewed melody. But the shipping articles did not compel them to sing unless they felt like it. The pumps clanked gloomily without any enlivening chorus. The captain went sadly back to his cabin and renewed his novel.
Crawfordsville Journal, Crawfordsville, Indiana, February 1, 1890, page 7

    One night the pumps broke down five minutes before 12 o'clock. Our watch was at work on them. The carpenter was called as usual, and after the usual bungling and fishing in the well for the broken valves, they were put in order again. It was then nearly 1 a.m. Meanwhile all the able seamen in our watch had at eight bells walked below. The watch newly come on deck refused to pump the ship clear, alleging it was the business of the others. The watch below were bidden to come on deck and perform their neglected duty. They refused. This was mutiny. The four mates got their pistols, entered the forecastle and stormed, ordered and threatened. It was of no avail. The fifteen able seamen who refused constituted the main strength and effectiveness of that watch. They were threatened with being put in irons. They preferred irons to pumping out of their turn. They were put in irons, fifteen stout men, by four mates, who then returned and reported proceedings to the captain. The men remained shackled until the next morning. It was then discovered that it was impossible to work the ship without their aid. Of course, they couldn't handle the vessel in irons.
    The Wizard rated over 3,000 tons, and many a frigate of her size would have been deemed poorly off with less than one hundred men for handling the ship alone. We rarely secured the lower sails properly in heavy weather, from the mere lack of physical strength to handle them. So, Capt. S--- pored sadly at his breakfast through his gold-bowed spectacles, and when the meal was over issued orders for the release of the fifteen men in irons. In this little affair the boys and ordinary seamen belonging to the mutinous watch took no part. They were strictly neutral and waited to see which side would win. I felt rather unpleasant and alarmed. Though not a full-fledged mutiny and a conversion of a peaceful merchantman into a pirate, it did look at one time as if the initiatory steps to such end were being taken.
    One of the great aims of existence at sea is that of keeping the decks clean. The scrubbing, swishing and swashing is performed by each watch on alternate mornings and commences at daylight. It was the one ordeal which I regarded with horror and contempt. You are called up at 4 in the morning, when the sleep of a growing youth is soundest. The maniacal wretch of the other watch, who does the calling, does it with the glee and screech of a fiend. He will not stop his "All h-a-a-nds!" until he hears some responsive echo from the sleepers. He is noisy and joyous because it is so near the time he can turn in. And these four hours of sleep at sea are such luxuries as may rarely be realized on shore. But the mate's watch is calling us, screeching, howling, thumping on the forecastle door, and making himself extremely pleasant.
    We are called and on deck, and stumbling about, maybe with one boot half on, and more asleep than awake and more dead than alive. We are in the warm, enervating latitude of the tropics, with every sinew relaxed from the steaming heat. Perhaps there is a light wind aft. We are carrying studding sails. Studding sails are beautiful to look at from a distance. But when once you have sailed in a ship carrying them from the royals down and know something of the labor of rigging them out all on one side, fore, main and mizzen masts, and then, if the breeze alters a couple of points, taking the starboard sails all down and rigging out the larboard, or perhaps on both sides--and this on a Sunday afternoon, when there are no jobs and you've been expecting plenty of leisure to eat your duff and molasses; or if you have ever helped carry those heavy yards about the deck when the ship was rolling violently in a heavy ground swell, and every time she brought up, sails, blocks and everything movable was bringing up also with a series of pistol like reports; or if you have ever laid out on a royal yard trying to pass a heavy rope through the "jewel block," at the extreme end thereof, while the mast and yard were oscillating to and fro with you through the air in a rapidly recurring series of gigantic arcs caused by the lazy swell, in the trough of which your ship is rolling--and at the end of each roll you find yourself holding on for dear life, lest at the termination of each oscillation you be shot like an arrow into the sea from your insecure perch--why in all these cases the beauty and picturesqueness of a ship under studding sails will be tempered by some sober realities.
    It is 5:30 or 6 o'clock. The morning light has come. The cry of "Turn to!" is heard. That is, "turn to" to wash down decks, an operation which will tax the already exhausted resources of an empty stomach until breakfast time at 8 o'clock. The mates have their fragrant "cabin coffee" and biscuit served them on the brass capstan aft; we can smell its aroma, but nothing warm can get into our stomachs for over two long hours of work. The basic idea in this regular washing down decks at sea seems to be that of keeping men busy for the sake of keeping them busy. The top of every deck plank must be scrubbed with a care and scrutiny befitting the labors of a diamond polisher on his gems, while the underside may be dripping with foulness, as it sometimes is. I had the post of honor in scrubbing the quarterdeck. That was the drawing of water in a canvas bucket from the mizzen chains to wash over that deck. The remaining five boys would push wearily about with their brooms, hand brushes, squabs and squeegees, superintended by our extraordinary fourth mate (always to me an object of interest, from the fact of the secret carefully hoarded in my breast that I had pulled him into the New York dock), who, with a microscopic eye, inspected each crack and seam after the boys' labors, in search of atomic particles of dirt, and called them back with all the dignity of command, and a small amount of commanding personality behind it, whenever he deemed he had discovered any. When this labor was finished I was generally so exhausted as to have no appetite for breakfast. But a sailor's stomach is not presumed to be at all sensitive under any conditions. And above all a "boy"--a boy belonging to a squad of boys who about once a day were encouraged and enthused to exertion and maritime ambition by the assurance conveyed them by one of the mates that they weren't "worth their salt"--what business had a boy's stomach to put on airs at sea? Most landsmen, if called up at 4 o'clock on a muggy morning and worked like mules for a couple of hours on a digestive vacuum, would probably at the breakfast hour feel more the need of food than the appetite to partake of it.
    Though I followed the sea nearly two years, I am no sailor. The net result of my maritime experience is a capacity for tying a bow line or a square knot and a positive knowledge and conviction concerning which end of the ship goes first. I also know enough not to throw hot ashes to windward.
    But on a yard I could never do much else but hold on. The foolhardy men about me would lie out flat on their stomachs amid the darkness and storm and expose themselves to the risk of pitching headlong into the sea in the most reckless manner while trying to "spill the wind" out of a t'gallant sail. But I never emulated them. I never lived up to the maritime maxim of "one hand for yourself and the other for the owners." I kept both hands for myself, and that kept me from going overboard. What would the owners have cared had I gone overboard? Nothing. Such an occurrence twenty-five odd years ago would, weeks afterward, have been reported in the marine news this way: "Common sailor, very common sailor, fell from t'gallant yard off Cape Horn and lost."
    The owner would have secretly rejoiced, as he bought his Christmas toys for his children, that the t'gallant yard had not gone with the sailor. No; on a yard in a storm I believed and lived up to the maxim: "Hold fast to that which is good." The yard was good. Yet I was ambitious when a boy before the mast on the clipper which brought me to California. I was quick to get into the rigging when there was anything to do aloft. But once in the rigging I was of little utility.
    The first time I went up at night to loosen one of the royals, I thought I should never stop climbing. The deck soon vanished in the darkness of a very black tropical night, the mastheads were likewise lost in a Cimmerian obscurity--whatever that is. At last I found the yard. I wasn't quite sure whether it was the right one or not. I didn't know exactly what to do. I knew I had to untie something somewhere. But where? Meantime the savage Scotch second mate was bellowing, as it then seemed, a mile below me. I knew the bellow was for me. I had to do something, and I commenced doing. I did know, or rather guessed, enough to cast off the lee and weather gaskets, or lines which bind the sail when furled to the yard, and then I made them up into a most slovenly knot. But the bunt gasket (the line binding the middle and most bulky portion of the sail) bothered me. I couldn't untie it. I picked away at it desperately, tore my nails and skinning my knuckles.
    The bellowing from below continued as fiercely as ever, which, though not intelligible as to words, was certainly exhorting me, and me only, to vigilance. Then the watch got tired waiting for me. Thinking the sail loosed, they began hoisting. They hoisted the yard to its proper place and me with it. I clung on and went up higher. That, by the way, always comes of holding fast to that which is good. Then a man's head came bobbing up out of the darkness. It was that of a good-natured Nantucket boy, whose name of course was Coffin. He asked me the trouble. I went into a lengthy explanation about the unmanageable knot. "Oh, the knot!" said he. "Cut it!" and he cut it. I would never have cut it. In my then and ever-present nautical ignorance I should have expected the mast or yard to have fallen from cutting anything aloft. Only a few days previous I had seen the captain on the quarterdeck jumping up and down in his tracks with rage because a common seaman had, by mistake, cut a mizzen brace, and the second mate, as usual, had jumped up and down on the seaman when he reached the deck. I feared to set a similar jumping process in operation. Coming on deck after my lengthy and blundering sojourn loosing a royal, I expected to be mauled to a pulp for my stupidity. But both watch and bellowing mate had gone below and I heard no more of it.
    A few days after my unsuccessful ascension, the Wizard one morning shot through a bank of fog and San Francisco lay before us.
Crawfordsville Journal, Crawfordsville, Indiana, February 1, 1890, page 7

    I shipped as cook and steward of the schooner Henry, bound from San Francisco for a whaling, sealing, abalone curing and general "pick up" voyage along the Lower Californian coast. My acceptance as cook was based on the production of an Irish stew which I cooked for the captain and mate while the Henry was "hove down" on the beach at North Point and undergoing the process of cleaning her bottom of barnacles. I can't recollect at this lapse of time where I learned to cook an Irish stew. I will add that it was all I could cook--positively all--and with this astounding capital of culinary ignorance I ventured down upon the great deep to do the maritime housework for twenty great men.
    When we were fairly afloat and the Farallones were out of sight, my fearful incapacity for the duties of the position became apparent. Besides, I was dreadfully seasick, and so remained for two weeks. Yet I cooked. It was purgatory, not only for myself, but all hands. There was a general howl of execration forward and aft at my bread, my lobscouse, my tea, my coffee, my beef, my beans, my cake, my pies. Why the captain continued me in the position, why they didn't throw me overboard, why I was not beaten to a jelly for my continued culinary failures, is for me to this day one of the great mysteries of my existence. We were away nearly ten months. I was three months learning my trade. The sufferings of the crew during those three months were fearful. They had to eat my failures or starve. Several times it was intimated to me by the under officers that I had better resign and go "for'ard" as one of the crew. I would not. I persevered at the expense of many a pound of good flour. I conquered and returned a second-class sea cook.
    The Henry was a small vessel--the deck was a clutter of whaling gear. Where my galley or sea kitchen should have been stood the try works for boiling blubber. They shoved me around anywhere. Sometimes I was moved to the starboard side, sometimes to the larboard, sometimes when cutting in a whale, way astern. I expected eventually to be hoisted into one of the tops and cook aloft. Any well-regulated galley is placed amidships, where there is the least motion. This is an important consideration for a sea cook. At best he is often obliged to make his soup like an acrobat, half on his head and half on his heels, and with the roof of his unsteady kitchen trying to become the floor. My stove was not a marine stove. It had no rail around the edges to guard the pots and kettles from falling off during extra lurches.
    The Henry was a most uneasy craft, and always getting up extra lurches or else trying to stand on her head or stern. Therefore, as she flew up high astern when I was located in that quarter, she has in more than one instance flung me bodily, in an unguarded moment, out of that galley door and over that quarterdeck, while a host of kettles, covers and other culinary utensils rushed with clang and clatter out after me and with me as their commander at their head. We all eventually terminated in the scuppers. I will not, as usual, say "lee scuppers." Any scupper was a lee scupper on that infernal vessel. I endeavored to remedy the lack of a rail about this stove by a system of wires attaching both pots and lids to the galley ceiling. I "guyed" my chief culinary utensils. Still during furious oscillations of the boat, the pots would roll off their holes, and, though prevented from falling, some of them as suspended by these wires would swing like so many pendulums, around and to and fro over the area of that stove.
    That was the busiest year of my life. I was the first one up in the morning, and the last, save the watch, to turn in at night. In this dry goods box of a kitchen I had daily to prepare a breakfast for seven men in the cabin, and another for eleven in the forecastle; a dinner for the cabin and another for the forecastle; likewise, supper for the same. It was my business to set the aristocratic cabin table, clear it off and wash the dishes three times daily. I had to serve out the tea and coffee to the eleven men forward. The cabin expected hot biscuit for breakfast, and frequently pie and pudding for dinner. Above all men must the sea cook not only have a place for everything and everything in its place, but he must have everything choked and wedged in its place. You must wash up your tea things, sometimes holding on to the deck with your toes, and the washtub with one hand, and wedging each plate, so soon as wiped, into a corner, so that it slide not away and smash. And even then the entire dish-washing apparatus, yourself included, slides gently across the deck to leeward. You can't leave a fork, or a stove cover, or lid lifter lying about indifferently but what it slides and sneaks away with the roll of the vessel to some secret crevice and is long lost. When your best dinner is cooked in rough weather, it is a time of trial, terror and tribulation to bestow it safely on the cabin table. You must harbor your kindling and matches as sacredly as the ancients kept their household goods, for if not, on stormy mornings, with the drift flying over the deck and everything wet and clammy with the water-surcharged air of the sea, your breakfast will be hours late through inability to kindle a fire, whereas the cook catches it from that potentate of the sea, "the old man," and all the mates raise their voices and cry with empty stomachs, "Let him be accursed."
    One great trial with me lay in the difficulty of distinguishing fresh water from salt--I mean by the eye. We sea cooks use salt water to boil beef and potatoes in; or rather to boil beef and pork and steam the potatoes. So, I usually had a pail of salt water and one of fresh standing by the galley door. Sometimes these got mixed up. I always found this out after making salt water coffee, but then it was too late. They were particular, especially in the cabin, and did not like salt water coffee. On any strictly disciplined vessel the cook, for such an offense, would have been compelled to drink a quart or so of his own coffee, but some merciful cherub aloft always interfered and got me out of bad scrapes. Another annoyance was the loss of spoons and forks thrown accidentally overboard as I flung away my soup and grease-clouded dishwater. It was indeed bitter when, as occupied in these daily washings, I allowed my mind to drift to other and brighter scenes, to see the glitter of a spoon or fork in the air or sinking in the deep blue sea, and then to realize that already there were not enough spoons to go around, or forks either. Our storeroom was the cabin. Among other articles there was a keg of molasses. One evening after draining a quantity I neglected to close the faucet tightly. Molasses, therefore, oozed over the cabin floor all night. The cabin was a freshet of molasses. Very early in the morning the captain, getting out of his bunk, jumped both stockinged feet into the saccharine deluge. Some men will swear as vigorously in a foot bath of molasses as they would in one of coal-tar. He did. It was a very black day for me, and life generally seemed joyless and uninviting; but I cooked on.
    The Henry was full of mice. These little creatures would obtrude themselves in my dough wet up for fresh bread overnight, become bemired and die therein. Once a mouse thus dead was unconsciously rolled up in a biscuit, baked with it, and served smoking hot for the morning's meal aft. It was, as it were, an involuntary meat pie. Of course, the cabin grumbled; but they would grumble at anything. They were as particular about their food as a habitué of Delmonico's. I wish now at times I had saved that biscuit to add to my collection of odds and endibles. Still even the biscuit proved but an episode in my career. I cooked on, and those I served stood aghast, not knowing what would come next.
    After five months of self-training I graduated on pies. I studied and wrought out the making of pies unassisted and untaught. Mine were sea mince pies; material, salt beef soaked to freshness and boiled tender, dried apples and molasses. The cabin pronounced them good. This was one of the few feathers in my culinary cap. Of course, their goodness was relative. On shore such a pie would be scorned. But on a long sea voyage almost any combination of flour, dried fruit and sugar will pass. Indeed, the appetite, rendered more vigorous and perhaps appreciative by long deprivation from luxuries, will take not kindly to dried apples alone. The changes in the weekly bill of fare at sea run something thus: Sundays and Thursdays are "duff days"; Tuesday, bean day; Friday, codfish and potato day; some vessels have one or two special days for pork; salt beef, hardtack, tea and coffee are fluids and solids to fall back on every day. I dreaded the making of duffs, or flour puddings, to the end of the voyage. Rarely did I attain success with them.
    A duff is a quantity of flour and yeast, or yeast powder, mixed, tied up in a bag and boiled until it is light. Plum duff argues the insertion of a quantity of raisins. Plain duff is duff without raisins. But the proper cooking of a duff is rather a delicate matter. If it boils too long the flour settles into a hard, putty-like mass, whereunto there is neither sponginess, lightness, nor that porousness which delights the heart of a cook when he takes his duff from the seething cauldron. If the duff does not boil long enough, the interior is still a paste. If a duff stops boiling for ever so few minutes, great damage results. And sometimes duff won't do properly, anyway. Mine were generally of the hardened species, and the plums evinced a tendency to hold mass meetings at the bottom. Twice the hands forward rebelled at my duffs, and their committee on culinary grievances bore them aft to the door of the cabin and deposited them there unbroken and uneaten for the "Old Man's" inspection. Which public demonstration I witnessed from my galley door, and when the duff deputation had retired, I emerged, and swiftly and silently bore that duff away before the Old Man had finished his dinner below. It is a hard ordeal thus to feel one's self the subject of such an outbreak of popular indignation. But my sympathies now are all with the sailors. A spoiled duff is a great misfortune in the forecastle of a whaler, where neither pie nor cake nor any other delicacy, save boiled flour and molasses sauce, come from month's end to month's end.
Crawfordsville Journal, Crawfordsville, Indiana, February 8, 1890, page 5

    I was an experimental cook, and once or twice, while cutting in whale, tried them with whale meat. The flesh lying under the blubber somewhat resembles beef in color and is so tender as easily to be torn apart by the hands. But whale meat is not docile under culinary treatment. Gastronomically, it has an individuality of its own, which will keep on asserting itself, no matter how much spice and pepper is put upon it. It is a wild, untamed steed. I propounded it to my guests in the guise of sausages, but when the meal was over the sausages were there still. It can't be done. Shark can. Shark's is a sweet meat, much resembling that of the swordfish, but no man will ever eat a whale, at least an old one. The calves might conduct themselves better in the frying pan. We had many about us whose mothers we had killed, but we never thought of frying them. When a whaler is trying out oil, she is blackened with the greasy soot arising from the burning blubber scraps from stem to stern. It falls like a storm of black snowflakes. They sift into the tiniest crevice. Of all this my cookery got its full share. It tinged my bread and even my pies with a funeral tinge of blackness. The deck at such times was covered with "horse pieces" up to the top of the bulwarks. "Horse pieces" are chunks of blubber a foot or so in length, that being one stage of their reduction to the size necessary for the try pots. I have introduced them here for the purpose of remarking that on my passage to and fro, from galley to cabin, while engaged in laying the cloth and arranging our services of gold plate and Sevres wear, I had to clamber, wade, climb and sometimes, in my white necktie and swallow-tail coat, actually crawl over the greasy mass with the silver tureen full of "consommé" or "soup Julien," while I held the gilt-edged and enameled menu between my teeth. Those were trying-out times for a maritime head butler.
    The cook socially does not rank high at sea. He stands very near the bottom round of the ladder. He is the subject of many jests and low comparisons. This should not be. The cook should rank next or near to the captain. It is the cook who prepares the material which shall put mental and physical strength into human bodies. He is, in fact, a chemist, who carries on the last external processes with meat, flour and vegetables necessary to prepare them for their invisible and still more wonderful treatment in the laboratory which every man and woman possesses--the stomach--whereby these raw materials are converted not only into blood, bone, nerve, sinew and muscle, but into thoughts. A good cook may help materially to make good poetry. An indigestible beefsteak, fried in grease to leather, may, in the stomach of a general, lose a battle on which shall depend the fate of nations. A good cook might have won the battle. Of course, he would receive no credit therefor, save the conviction in his own culinary soul, that his beefsteak properly and quickly broiled was thus enabled to digest itself properly in the stomach of the general, and thereby transmit to and through the general's organism that amount of nerve force and vigor, which, acting upon the brain, caused all his intelligence and talent to attain its maximum, and thereby conquer his adversary. That's what a cook may do. This would be a far better and happier world were there more really good cooks on land and sea. And when all cooks are Blots or Soyers, then will we have a society to be proud of.
    While whaling in Margarita Bay, we "kedged" the Henry about one hundred miles inland, where the whales abounded. In so kedging it was necessary to stake out at low water portions of the channel daily, when it ran a mere creek through an expanse of hard sand, sometimes a mile from either shore. At high water, all this would be covered to a depth of six or seven feet. The Henry grounded at each ebb, and often keeled over at an angle of forty-five. From our bulwarks it was often possible to jump on dry ground. This keeling over process, twice repeated every twenty-four hours, was particularly hard on the cook, for the inconvenience resulting from such a forty-five degree angle of inclination extended to all things within his province. My stove worked badly at the angle of forty-five. The kettle could be but half filled, and only boiled where the water was shallowest inside. The cabin table could only be set at an angle of forty-five. So that while the guests on the upper side had great difficulty in preventing themselves from slipping off their seats on and over that table, those on the lower side had equal difficulty in keeping themselves up to a convenient feeding distance.
    Capt. Reynolds, at the head of the board, had a hard lot in the endeavor to maintain his dignity and sitting perpendicularly at the same time on the then permanent and not popular angle of forty-five. But I, steward, butler, cook and cabin boy, bore the hardest tribulation of all in carrying my dishes across the deck, down the cabin stairs, and arranging them on a table at an angle of forty-five. Of course, at this time the rack used in rough weather to prevent plates and platters from slipping off was brought into permanent use.
    Transit from galley to cabin was accomplished by crawling on two legs and one arm, thus making of myself a peripatetic human triangle, while the unoccupied hand with difficulty bore aloft the soup tureen. It was then I appreciated the great advantages afforded in certain circumstances by the prehensile caudal termination of our possible remote ancestors. With such a properly equipped appendage, the steward might have taken a close hitch around an eyebolt and let all the rest of himself and his dishes safely down into the little cabin. It is questionable whether man's condition has been physically improved by the process of evolution. He may have lost more than he has gained. A monkey can well afford to scorn the relatively clumsy evolutions of the most skillful human brother acrobat.
    In former days while narrating the events of this voyage, which I have done some thousands of times, I used to say, "we whaled." But I never whaled, never went in the boats, never pulled an oar. I had other fish to fry in the galley, and now that I commence to realize what a conscience is, I mention this for truth's sake as well as to give variety to the story. We were boarded occasionally by a few Mexicans. There was one melancholy-looking Don Somebody who seemed always in a chronic state of corn husk cigarette. When not smoking he was rolling them, when not rolling or smoking he was lighting them. He and his companions were persons of some importance, for which reason Capt. Reynolds tendered them the hospitalities of the Henry and would ask them to whatever meal was nearest ready.
    These two Mexicans had enormous stowage for grub. They resembled the gulls. They also seemed unfathomable. There was no filling them. What they did at table they did with all their might, and when they finished, especially when eating by themselves, as they frequently did, there was literally nothing left. "Nothing" in this case meant something. It meant in addition to bread, meat and potatoes, every scrap of butter on the butter plate and every grain of sugar in the sugar bowl. I didn't take the hint the first time they ate with us, deeming the entire absence of butter and sugar at the end of the repast to be owing to my placing a small amount on the table.
    The second time they came on board I remedied this. But on inspection after they had finished I found left only an empty butter plate and sugar bowl. It was so at the third trial. Butter and sugar seem to be regarded as delicacies by the natives of Lower California. Nor do they seem to comprehend the real mission and import of butter and sugar on the table. They regarded both these articles as regular dishes, and scooped them in. On discovering this, after a consultation with the captain, I put them on allowance. These two men would have eaten up all our butter and sugar in four weeks.
    However, it was comparatively a slight toll they levied on us for carrying off their whale oil, seal and abalone. We were miles within their legal boundaries, taking away the wealth of their waters. Twelve other American whalers lay in Margarita Bay that season. It was practically an invasion, only the Mexicans didn't seem to know they were invaded or didn't care if they did know. So long as they had plenty of butter and sugar on coming on board and the blubber-stripped carcasses which came on shore they seemed satisfied. These carcasses they cut open when stranded and extracted the fat about the heart, which, on being fried out, would yield from one to four barrels of oil and about three miles of solid stench. They borrowed from us the vessels wherewith to boil this fat. I was ordered to loan them all the pots, pans and kettles which could be spared from my culinary laboratory. They never returned them, and I was very glad they did not. No amount of scouring would ever have rid them of the odor of decomposed leviathan. We left them a dozen or so iron vessels the richer. A Mexican, at least on that coast, with a kettle is looked up to as a man of wealth. Beyond serapes, cigarette lighters, saddles and bridles, the gang of natives on shore had few other possessions. They seemed brilliant examples of contented poverty. The individual Mexican is a more independent being than the citizen of our own boasted "independent" nation. His wants are ten times less.
    Some mercantile hopes may hang on the senoras and senoritas. The few we saw wanted calicoes of gay and diverse patterns. The men will eat butter and sugar, but whether they will buy these articles remains to be proved. Perhaps furniture sets of polished and painted horses' skulls might tempt some of the more aesthetic in the matter of household adornment to purchase, if put at a reasonable rate. Such are the conclusions drawn regarding the probabilities of trade with Mexico, at least the fragment of Mexico I saw from my galley. If we wanted any service of them they talked dollars at a very high figure. But they never abated. They showed no anxiety to tempt a bargain or an engagement. They went on just as ever, full to the brim of genuine sangfroid, eternally rolling, lighting, and smoking their cigarettes, and looking as if they felt themselves a superior race, and knew it all, and didn't want to know any more, until we asked them to eat. Then they seemed in no hurry but clambered lazily down the cabin stairs and lazily set to work to find the bottom of every dish on the table, including the sugar dish and butter plate. I learned on that voyage the true signification of the term "greaser."
Crawfordsville Journal, Crawfordsville, Indiana, February 15, 1890, page 7

    Having finished my own tribulations and those I fed as a sea cook, I resolved to go to the mines. I went. By boat and stage, I got over the 200 miles intervening 'twixt San Francisco and the "diggings." I had friends on Hawkins' Bar, on the Tuolumne River, in Tuolumne County. Thither I went. When I "struck" Hawkins' in 1858 it was on its last legs. Still it boasted a store and a dozen houses. Golden hopes were still anchored in the bed of the river. Expensive river claims were then being worked from Red Mountain down to French Bar. But a premature rain and consequent freshet swept the river that season from end to end with the bosom of destruction and sent for the winter the miners back to their two-dollar-per-day bank diggings.
    It was at Hawkins' that I had first "buckled to the mines." My first "buckling," however, was in the capacity of a meat peddler. I became the agent of a firm of butchers up on the mountain for distributing their tough steaks to the Hawkins' Bar miners. Through the instrumentality of a horse, over whose back was slung a couple of huge panniers, I continued the agency for a week. Then one morning the horse kicked up his heels and ran away. As he ran, at every kick a raw and bloody steak would fly out of the boxes, flash in the brilliant morning sunshine, and then fall in the fine red dust of the mountain trail. I followed hard after, gathering up these steaks as they fell, and when the burden became too heavy I piled them up by the roadside in little heaps of dusty, very dusty, meat. At last, dusty, perspiring and distressed beyond measure, I managed to catch that villainous horse. For he, after having ejected nearly the whole load of meat, concluded to stop and be caught. I loaded the panniers again with the dusty, carnivorous deposits, led the horse down the steep trail to the river, then muddy and of a rich coffee color from up-country mining sediment. Herein I washed my steaks, rinsed them as well as I could of dust, and, as was then the custom, hung up piece after piece in the gauze-curtained meat safes at the miners' cabins. I think Hawkins' got its share of grit that day in its beef. Shortly afterward I went out of the beefsteak distributing bureau.
    Then I went into the service of the man who kept the Bar store, saloon and boarding house. I was errand boy, barkeeper, bookkeeper, woodchopper, assistant cook and general maid of all work, and possibly worthlessness. One day the storekeeper's horse, packed with miners' supplies, was given into my charge to lead three miles up the river to the camp of the Split Rock River claim. The load was strapped to a "cross-jack" saddle. It consisted mostly of flour, potatoes, bacon and a demijohn of whiskey. I was advised by the merchant, on setting out, not to let that horse get ahead of me. If he did it was prophesied that he would run away, "sure pop." But I had not gone forty rods from the store when the beast made a rush, got ahead of me, tore the leading halter out of my grasp and set off along the narrow mountain trail at the rate of twenty knots per hour. Hence the distance between us soon increased.
    As he ran, the motion burst the bag of flour, ditto the potatoes, and then the whiskey demijohn broke. It was a fine sight. The flour rose in the air like a white cloud above the horse, out of and above which flew potatoes, and the whole was interspersed with jets of whiskey. It looked like a snow squall traveling on horseback. When the animal had spilt all the flour, all the potatoes and all the whiskey, he slowed up and allowed himself to be caught. His mission was accomplished. I found remaining the saddle and the empty potato sack. The trail was white with flour for a mile, and so it remained for months afterward. I led the animal back to the store. My heart was heavy, and his load was light. The storekeeper gave me his blessing. I did not thereafter remain long in the service of that transportation bureau.
    After this I borrowed a rocker and started to washing some river bank gravel. It took me several days to become in any degree skilled in the use of the rocker. I had no teacher and was obliged to become acquainted with all its peculiarities by myself. First I set it on a dead level. As it had no "fall" the sand would not run out. But the hardest work of all was to dip and pour water from the dipper on the gravel in the sieve with one hand and rock the cradle with the other. There was a constant tendency on the part of the hand and arm employed in pouring to go through the motion of rocking, and vice versa. The hand and arm that rocked were more inclined to go through the motion of pouring. I seemed cut up in two individuals, between whom existed a troublesome and perplexing difference of opinion as to their respective duties and functions. Such a conflict, to all intents and purposes, of two different minds inside of and acting on one body, shook it up fearfully and tore it all to pieces. I was as a house divided against itself and could not stand. However, at last the physical and mental elements thus warring with each other inside of me made up their differences, and the left hand rocked the cradle peacefully while the right hand poured harmoniously, and the result was about $1.50 per day. Soon after I found my first mining partner. He wandered to the Bar, a melancholy-looking man, with three dogs accompanying, and was always in a chronic state of red bandanna and nose wiping. He and I joined forces and went up the river to "crevice" among the rocks near the Split Rock claim. He had all the skill, all the experience and all the dogs, and I all the general ignorance and incapacity. I deemed it a great advantage to have thus secured a real "old miner" for a partner and felt that such a man must turn up gold.
    We built ourselves a rude brush house on a shelf of the rocky ledge in a canyon whose sides sloped at an angle of forty-five degrees. Even this shelf was not level. It pitched toward the river, and there was so little of it that during the night's repose our legs stuck out of the house entrance. We were obliged to "chock" all our supply of provisions in their respective packages to prevent them from rolling out of our wigwam over the brink and into the Tuolumne. If a potato got loose it ran like a "thing possessed" over the rocks and down into the muddy, raging current. We were obliged to peg ourselves at night while sleeping to prevent a like catastrophe. It was a permanent and laborious existence at an angle of forty-five. To stand erect for any length of time was very tiresome. More frequently, like Nebuchadnezzar, we lived on all fours. "Crevicing" did not prove very profitable. By day the bare rocks become heated by the sun to a blistering capacity.
    With pick and sledge and crowbar and bent bits of hoop iron we pried and pounded and scraped, and scraped and pounded and pried all the hot day long, or else were doubled up in all sorts of back-aching, back-breaking, body-tiring positions, drawing up at arm's length from some deeper "pothole" or crevice spoonful after spoonful of yellow mold. It did hold considerable gold, and heavy gold too. But it took so long to get the mold. This was in the latter part of September. The termination of the dry season was reached. The first rain came. It came at night. It drizzled through our brush house. It sent tiny streams down the rocky mountains, and some of these streams found their way under us. We had lain and endured the rain from above dripping on our faces and wetting our clothes. In those times one's day suit served for a nightgown. But when the aqueous enemy undermined our position we had to turn out.
    It blew a gale. How the wind howled and tore up the canyon! We tried to kindle a fire. Match after match was blown out. Finally, a blaze was attained. Then the rains descended heavier than ever and put it out. The chief misery was, we could not at night find our way out of the canyon to any place of shelter. Nor could we walk at all to keep warm. There was "standing room only." All about us were the steeply inclined rocks, molded into every irregularity of shape. We were obliged all through the night to "stand and take it" as it came, shivering in our thin summer clothing. With daylight we made our way to the camp of the Split Rockers. They gave us some gin. It was common gin--very common gin--but the comfortable and soothing remembrance of that gin after such a night exists for me even unto this day. I wore a black cloth cap. The rain had washed out the dye, and this dye had coursed over my brow and cheeks in tiny rivulets of jet. I noticed that I seemed to be more than a usual object of interest to those about me, and wondered, until a friend advised me to consult a mirror. I did so, and found my face marked like a railroad route map. Such was my inauguration in mining at Hawkins' Bar. What glorious old times they were! What independence! What freedom from the trammels and conventionalities of fashion! Who cared or commented if we did turn up the bottoms of our pantaloons, or wear, for coolness' sake, our flannel shirts outside the trousers? Who then was so much better than anybody else, when any man might strike it rich tomorrow? Who would beg for work or truckle, and fawn and curry favor of an employer for the mere sake of retaining a situation and help that same man to make money, when he could shoulder pick, shovel and rocker, go down to the river's edge and make his $2 or $3 per day? Though even at that time this reputed $3 was oftener $1.50.
    Even then reports of the paying capacities of claims were as apt to be watered as are stocks nowadays.
Crawfordsville Journal, Crawfordsville, Indiana, February 15, 1890, page 5

    We got out of our blankets heavily. Legs and back were apt to be a little stiff in the morning. Or if not stiff, they lacked action. Working all the day previously, possibly in the water, or with it splashing all about, tugging at heavy boulders, shouldering wet sluices, to say nothing of the regular pick and shovel exercise, would make itself felt even when the limb and blood were younger than now. Dressing was a short job. A pair of damp overalls, a pair of socks, a pair of shoes, or possibly the heavy rubber mining boots. Flannel shirts we slept in. A face swabbing with cold water in the tin basin outside and a "lick and a promise" for the hair with the comb. That was about all for week days. Vanity of apparel there was little for the working miner. Who was there to dress for? Woman? The nearest was half a mile, 50 years of age, and married. Then breakfast. The fire kindled in the contrary little stove. Possibly it was necessary to attack with an ax that dried old stump near by and hack off a few chips to cook with. The miner's wood pile was generally small.
    He got in fuel on rainy days, or at the odd intervals to be spared from work. You put on the worn tin teapot, lowered the gauze-covered meat safe from the tree, cut a steak from the chunk of bull mahogany within called beef, slung a dab of lard in the frying pan, put therein the meat and let it sizzle. Two or three boiled potatoes might be sliced, fried more or less brown in the gravy, and this, with bread and tea, formed the breakfast. The bread was the bread of your own laborious baking, the loaf of an irregular shape, the crust very hard and thick, the color often "pied," being black where it had burned, brown where it had baked, and of a pallid whiteness where it had not baked at all. Within the loaf might be close, heavy, and in color either a creamy or a canary yellow, in proportion to the improper amount of yeast powder used.
    The table is a broad shelf against the wall. There is no tablecloth. You did not always wash up after breakfast, for the dishes, as they stood, were all in place for dinner. Some fastidious miners washed their dishes after each meal; most of us did not. It was too much to expect of hard-worked humanity. The cabin door is open while you eat and from it you look forth on the claim. There lies the bank of red earth as you left it yesterday after the "cave." There is the reservoir full of coffee-colored ditch water which had run in during the night after being used for washing in a dozen claims "up country." Then you draw on those damp, clammy rubber boots, either to the knee or hip high, the outside splashed with the dried reddish mud, and smelling disagreeably of rubber as you pulled them on and smelling worse as you became heated and perspiring. In these you waddle to the claim. I forgot. Breakfast over, one of the most important acts of the day was next on the program. That was the filling, lighting and smoking of your pipe. Nothing could hurry you through this performance. The filling was cut in slivers with a careful and solemn consideration; the weed was carefully bestowed in the bowl: the match was applied with a deliberation savoring of a religious act; the first puff rose in the air as incense to the early morn, and smoking thus you waddled in your big boots to the claim. There you met your three partners, all likewise smoking. There they stand on the bank, looking into the ground sluice. There is no "good morning" or other greeting; if anything, grunts. There lay the tools--shovels, picks, crowbar and sluice fork--helplessly about, as left last evening. A little muddy water trickles through the line of sluices. One of us goes to the reservoir, a few hundred yards off, and turns on the water. Another goes to the tail of the sluices with the sluice fork. Then is heard the clicking of the pick and the grating of the shovel against the red dirt; down comes the muddy water over the bank and the day's work has fairly commenced.
    We stand in a row, allowing sufficient room between each for swinging the pick. We are undermining the bank, the water running at our feet and between us and the bottom of the bank. Each chunk of red dirt dislodged by the pick falls into the running water, and if it be hard and will not readily dissolve it must be broken up by pick or shovel to keep the stream clear and unimpeded. The large boulders are picked out by hand and thrown behind us--not in disordered fashion, either. Room in the cut is scarce and must be economized, so the ever-accumulating boulder pile is "faced up" with a neat wall, laid without mortar, but with some care and skill. The bedrock is under our feet. We are undermining the bank and keeping the stream turned in as much as possible to the part undermined. The gravel for a foot or six inches is pretty hard, and the stones here are harder and closer packed than those nearer the surface. There the gravel is lighter. Many of the stones are light and rotten; a blow with the pick dashes them to pieces. This streak just above the ledge and for a few inches in the crevices of the ledge is our "pay streak," where ages on ages ago some stream ran, depositing, as all streams do, the heavier gravel on the bottom and the lighter above. Occasionally the pick strikes a firmly embedded boulder hard and square on its point, in such a way as to send the vibration like a shock along the iron, up the handle and into one's arm and "crazy bone." Our bank of dirt is about eight feet in height. A few inches of the top is a dark mold, below that are three or four feet of "hardpan," below the "hardpan" light sandy gravel and rotten boulders, and near the ledge is the pay streak. This order of formation has varied as we have worked up and into the bank. At first, near the river's edge, there was only mold on a very light alluvial sand. This was readily washed off and paid $4 or $5 per day. A little farther back we struck the edge of the red gravel streak. This for a time paid better. Farther still came the deposit of light sandy gravel, and lastly came in the accursed "hardpan."
    Our claim, on being first prospected, was reported to pay three cents to the pan from the top down. We believed it at first, not having learned that "three cents to the pan from the top down" means the biggest kind of luck. If you get an average of half a cent a pan from the top down, and the dirt would wash easily, we should make money. It was hard even for an "honest miner" to give as a result of a prospect anything less than "three cents to the pan." But "hardpan" is our foe. "Hardpan" is the essence of brickbats. Its consistency is about that of chalk. It seems the finest kind of sand cemented and pressed together. It can be carved into any form with a knife. It takes as much time to work off a square foot of hardpan as ten square feet of soft gravel. When, after half a day's labor, we succeed in getting down a cave, it goes into the ground sluice in a few great lumps, which must be battered to pieces with our picks before the water will slowly dissolve them into mud. And it doesn't hold a "color" of gold. The work in the ground sluice goes on hour after hour. Pick and shovel and scrape, scrape and shovel and pick, the water meantime tumbling and roaring over the bank and making it difficult for us to hear one another's voices. The sun climbs higher and gets hotter. The water pail is frequently visited. The backs of the gray shirts are wet with perspiration. In an easy, companionable claim, where the partners are all good fellows and on good terms and not too insane in the matter of getting an enormous quantity of dirt through the sluices each day, there may be more or less brief suspensions from the work, when all hands lean on their shovels and talk politics, or horses, or last night's poker game, or have a short service of tobacco smoke, with the usual solemn preliminaries of cutting the plug and filling pipes. But if the majority of the "company" are a mean, crabbed, close-fisted lot, the misery goes on without cessation.
    A queerly assorted group are we thus laboring together. Jack Gwin's impelling hope and life's idea is to earn enough to pay his passage home to Philadelphia and buy him a suit of clothes. A decent suit he has not earned these five years. He would be the terror and distress of his relatives if ever he got back, for with him $5 in his pocket over expenses and sobriety are an impossibility. McFadden dreams of a cabin, a cow, some geese and goats, a horse and a wife, and is in a fair way of realizing them all. He saves most of his earnings, gets drunk wisely only on holidays, pays his debts regularly, hates the English, lives in that little black, brownish cabin up yonder, does all his cooking in two tin pots, sleeps in one pair of ancient blankets and a most disreputable bed quilt, and $3 will cover the cost of all his domestic fittings and utensils. Bill Furnea, a French Canadian, has drifted here into this hole in the foothills very much as he drifted into the world--without aim or object in life save present enjoyment. He is a good worker and works because he was brought up to it and can't help it. He is a good boatman, a good logger, a skilled woodcutter, a devotee of poker and generally a successful one, an entertaining scamp, full of wit and originality, quick to take in the peculiarities and eccentricities of others, something of a dandy, as far as dandyism can be indulged in this out-of-the-way place, and a born scamp, glib of tongue, unreliable, and socially the best man of the crowd.
    It is near 11 o'clock. There stands in a cool corner of the claim, and carefully shielded from any stray flying pebble, a black bottle. It is nearly full of whiskey--very common corn whiskey. It is most welcome at this hour. Poison it may be, but a draught from the tin cup brightens up and makes all things new. The sunshine is more cheerful. All nature smiles. The picks descend with increased force and a host of new daydreams start into being. It revives hope. It quenches despair. It gilds the monotony of our lives. It was ever thus, and possibly ever shall be, world without end. It is high noon. The sun is over our heads and the shadows are at their shortest length. One of our number trudges wearily up to the reservoir to shut off the water. So soon as its flow lessens we trudge off in wet overalls or heavy rubbers to our respective cabins. We are now ground sluicing at or about the year 1860, when miners generally had abandoned "cabining" in squads and each man kept house by himself. Cause--general incompatibility of temper, temperament, disposition, and habit. The sober miner found it disagreeable to live permanently with the spreeing miner, and the miner nice in his domestic economy and particular about his food soon became tired of a companion who never aired his blankets and didn't care whether his bread was light or heavy, sweet or sour. Trudging to our cabins, we pick up the dried twigs in our path. These are to kindle the dinner fire. Dinner is very much like breakfast, beef or bacon, bread, tea, dried apple sauce. The boots are kicked off and thumped into a corner. The temperature is up to that notch that induces perspiration without any exertion at all, and the ugly little stove makes it hotter still.
    We sit down to the noon meal in a melting condition and rise from it in the same state. Dinner is eaten, the "nooning" is over, back again to the claim, turn on the water, pick, shovel, scrape, pry, toss back boulders and prop up sluices slipped from their supports. Between 2 and 3 o'clock a snowy white cloud rises over a distant peak to the eastward. It seems like a great bank of snow against the blue sky, and the longer we look at it the farther we seem to peer into its translucent, clear white depths. It rises over that peak at almost the same hour every afternoon and is almost of the same shape. It is the condensed vapor of the snow melting on the higher Sierra summits, eighty-six miles distant. It is imposing in its silent imperceptible rising, its wonderful whiteness, its majesty, its distance. It seems a fit bed of snowy splendor for fairies or some sort of ethereal beings to bask and revel in. It seems to be looking down, half in scorn, half in pity, at us four weary, miserable worms of the dust, feebly pecking at a bit of mother earth, muddy, wet and feebly squirming in and about this bank of dirt.
    At 4 o'clock there are longer pauses in our labors. There is more leaning on shovels and more frequent glances at our timepiece, the sun, as he sinks in the western heavens. The shadow of the hill opposite creeps slowly down its side. It is a cool, welcome shadow. The strongest worker secretly welcomes it. Though he be a "horse of a man," his muscles all feel the effects of the long day's labor. It is more his strong will than his body which keeps him swinging the pick. We are in duty bound to work till 6 o'clock. Everybody works till 6 o'clock. Everybody is more or less tired at 4 o'clock, but it is not the capacity of the body for labor that fixes the time. It is custom, stupid custom. The gauge is the limit of physical strength, not for the weakest, but the strongest. The great, brawny-armed, big-boned Hercules of our company doesn't feel it much. He may walk three miles after supper to the bar store, play cards and drink whiskey till 9 o'clock, and then walk back again and be up fresh for work next morning by 5:30 o'clock. This is 1860.
    In 1870 he showed it, however, and in the marks of age was ten years ahead of his time. You can't keep up this sort of thing--digging, tugging, lifting, wet to the skin day after day, summer and winter with no interval of rest, but a steady drag twelve months of the year--without paying for it. There's dissipation in the use of muscle as well as in the use of whiskey. Every old miner knows it now and feels it. Don't you? How does the muscle of 45 years in 1882 compare with that of 25 years in 1862? Of course, man must live by the sweat of his brow or the sweat of his brain, but many of you sweat too long in those days, and I hear you all saying, "That's so!" Start anew the fire in the little stove; thump the wet boots in the corner; drag yourself down to the spring a few hundred yards distant for a pail of fresh water; hack a few more chips from the dried stump; mix some flour, water and yeast powder for the day's baking; sit down a minute on your flour barrel chair and look on your earthly possessions. The worn and scarred trunk you brought years ago from the States; it holds your best suit of a forgotten fashion, two or three white shirts, a bundle of letters from home, a few photographs, a Bible not worn out with use, a quartz crystal, a few gold "specimens," a tarantula's nest, the tail of a rattlesnake and six vests. Do you remember how vests would accumulate in the mines? Pants, coat, everything else would wear out--vests never.
Crawfordsville Journal, Crawfordsville, Indiana,  February 8, 1890, page 2

    This is the Sunday sun that streams through the cabin window and through the chinks of the cabin wall.
    It is the same sunshine as that of the weekday. Yet as the miner wakes and realizes it is Sunday it has a different appearance and conveys a different impression from that of the weekday sun. Everything seems more quiet, more restful, and even more staid and serious. There belongs to it and to the landscape as he looks out a flavor of faraway eastern Sabbath bells and Sunday morning's hush and longer family prayer than usual and Sunday school. But there is not a church bell within ten miles, and there never will be one heard on this flat. There is not the least approach to church society or religious organization or observance. There is not, so far as known, so much as a man in the least religiously inclined. We are a hard lot. No work on the claim today. The pick and shovel will rest where thrown Saturday afternoon, and only a trickle of yellowish water from the reservoir will seep through the long line of sluices instead of yesterday's muddy surge rushing through--sand, gravel, and grating pebble and boulder.
    But there is work of another sort to be done and a great deal of it. After breakfast and shaving that small mirror of most imperfect glass, whose reflection distorts the features, screwing up one side of the face and enlarging the other in an unnatural fashion, is suitably adjusted. A smell of soap pervades the air. He lathers and shaves and re-lathers and re-shaves with a tedious and painful precision, the while making faces at himself in the glass as he brings one portion of his countenance after another more directly under the sweep of the razor. In some cases, he comes off with a few scratches or leaves a hirsute oasis here and there of uncut bristle. Black pantaloons, a white shirt, a felt or straw hat, a linen duster and the Sunday boots. This is his dandy outfit. In his pocket is a buckskin purse, once yellow, now faded to a dull gray, holding gold dust, a few ounces more or less, perhaps five, perhaps ten.
    It is the company dust and is to be sold and turned into bright, yellow gold pieces. And why all this preparation? "To go to camp." Camp is three miles away over the mountain yonder. A group of ramshackle cabins, alternating with saloons, three grocery stores, a hotel, an express office and a justice of the peace, all in a hot gulch, with hillsides long ago swept of trees, scarred with cuts and streaked with patches of dry yellowish ledge. "Camp" to him has all the importance and interest of a great metropolis. It is the center of news. The stage passes through it on the way to a larger camp. Two boss gamblers reside there. There is a faro game on occasion, a billiard table with a mountainous sort of bed, where the balls roll as they please and after an eccentric fashion of their own.
    The camp is for him the first nerve center of civilization and the only outlet to the great world which he has left. You, fresh from the great city, regard this dilapidated place as an out-of-the-way corner; but to him, living on his remote flat, with but two cabins in sight for as many miles, camp is a place of importance.
    He repairs first to the Magnolia. He has long in imagination seen it from afar. How cool is the big barroom. The landlord keeps the floor well wet down. That Magnolia floor is one of the few places where water, unmixed with other fluid, is useful and grateful. How comforting and soothing is the first drink. A long drink in a long tumbler, with plenty of ice, soda water and whiskey. If heaven be anywhere as a material locality it is in that first cool drink after a three-mile July tramp over the kiln-dried hills and herbage of the California foothills. The Magnolia is the social heart center of camp.
    There he finds the doctor. The doctor drinks with him. The doctor drinks with everybody. There, too, is the justice of the peace. The justice drinks with him. The justice holds his court at the Magnolia. The proprietor of the Magnolia is the camp constable, and between drinks during trial calls viva voce the witnesses in the case. The judge drinks with him. The judge generally drinks. The principal camp gambler is at the Magnolia. He takes a light drink. He is a wise man and knows the advantage and profit of keeping a cool head. The regular camp drunkard sits in the rear in one of the armchairs back of the billiard table.
    He looks so humble, so respectful--and so dry, that our miner's heart moves to pity and he "asks him up." He complies, but not with undue haste. This treats of the era between 1865 and 1870. The camp drunkard had not then so "lost his grip" as to be unmindful of a certain slowness, deliberation and dignity befitting a gentleman. But when he does arrive at the bar he takes a "four-fingered" drink.
    They stand in a row at the bar. The barkeeper is mixing the "long" and the short drinks. Each man waits, says nothing and eyes every motion of the bartender. The silence is impressive. All is ready. Each glass is grasped and raised, and then from each to each, and more than all, from all to the drink donor, there is a nod, that incantatory phrase is uttered, "Well, here's luck," and the poison is down. As it rasps, they call "Ahem!" with varied degrees of modulation. But this is a careful and prudent miner, and he now repairs to the store. There his dust is weighed, sold, and the week's provision ordered. His combined partners' "divvies" are put aside in a lump and safely stored. Now the weight is off his mind. He returns to the attractions of camp.
    These are not numerous. There is the Magnolia, the Bella Union, the Court Exchange, the post and express office. There are the "boys." He learns the news of the county or district. The Mount Vernon is paying $4 per day. Long Shortman has gone on another spree and hasn't done any work for the last ten days. Jimmy McNeil has sent for his wife's sister. She is unmarried. Sullivan has had another row with his wife, and she has complained to the authorities. Sam Gedney is going to run for county clerk on the Democratic ticket. Bob Delmame lost $200 at the game the other night. A San Francisco company have bought the Crazy Gulch quartz lead and will put a ten-stamp mill on it. The schoolmaster was drunk last Friday night. Ford shot at McGillis the other night but did not hit him. There is scandal and talk concerning the Frenchwoman who keeps the peanut stand, and the justice of the peace. The Wiley girls, two sisters, who have recently moved into camp, are making a sensation, and their small parlor at times won't hold the crowd of semi-bald and unconsciously middle-aged miners and others who are calling on them with possible matrimony in prospective.
    They may pass along the street about the middle of the afternoon, and such "ragging out" was never seen before in this camp. The curious have investigated the tracks made by their little gaiters in the red dust of the upper road and report them the smallest feet ever seen in this section. Billy Devins, of the Blue-jay claim, is thought to have the best show with the eldest, and Goldberry, of the livery stable, with the youngest. No. He won't let his best horse and buggy to anybody now and takes her out riding three times a week. But they're snappy and uncertain, and nobody can count on them for a certainty. So runs the week's news, which he picks up with sundry drinks.
    He enjoys the luxury of a hotel dinner--a dinner he is not obliged to prepare with his own hands--a decidedly plain dinner in metropolitan estimation, but to him, commencing with soup and ending with pie, a sumptuous repast. It is moonlight, and he takes his way back by the old trail home. Old not in years, but in association. It is but the track of twenty years or so, yet for him how old is it in thought. How many, many times he has traveled over it.
    That poker game is going on in one corner of the Magnolia. The "hard case" from over the hill is trying to beat it. He has been so trying every Sunday night in that same saloon and in that same corner for the last twenty years. He has grown old in trying. It has kept him poor, yet he thinks he can play poker. He is encouraged in this impression by a considerate few. He works for them. They "scoop him in" regularly. He will go home tomorrow morning, and during the week wash out a couple of ounces more for the benefit of "Scotty" and "Texas."
    It is 11 o'clock and time to go home. That three-mile walk is before him; he has taken as many drinks as is prudent, possibly one or two more. The camp saloon revelries are beginning to quiet down. Most of the prominent drunks have fallen in the cause. The chronic drunk of the camp is talking at the bar. But he will thus talk all night; he never stops talking--or drinking. He has been here more or less drunk ever since 1852. He is phenomenal and not a standard for ordinary intemperates. Almost every camp has known such a drunkard. Some are alive yet. They are of the immortal few not born to die. It would be madness to compete with such.
    So, he sets out on his lonely walk. Of how much has he thought while plodding over it. Here the same big buckeye brushes against his face as it did in the "spring of '50," when he was twenty years younger and had a sweetheart in the "States," whose memory was fresh and warm. It has all died out since. The letters became less and less, the years more and more, and then all came to a dead standstill, and he received the village paper, and there, appropriately below the column of deaths, he read of her marriage, whereat he went to camp and plunged wildly into all the concert saloon could give, and made things howl and boldly challenged the chronic poker game and won.
    The trail turns suddenly. It has run over the rocks by the river, its trail at times for many feet almost illegible, a vague, smoothly worn streak over ledge and loose boulders, polished and strewn with new white sand and pebbles by some unusually high freshet. But here the shelving bank suddenly ceases. It becomes a precipice. Up the hard worn path in the red earth he climbs forty, fifty, sixty feet. It is closely hedged with chamisal. Now he emerges near the brow of the high, rocky bluff. In all its moonlit glory surges, bubbles and roars the river below. Its yellow muddiness of the day is now changed to a dark shade of brown, with tremulous silver bars. Night and the moon are the artists.
Crawfordsville Journal, Crawfordsville, Indiana, February 15, 1890, page 2

    No work on the claim today. It rains too hard. It is the winter rain of California--a warm, steady, continuous drizzle. The red earth is soft and soppy. It mires to the ankles. The dark green of the chaparral on the hillsides seems today almost black. The hue of the river by my cabin door is yellower than ever. The water mark is three feet higher than last night, and it creeps upward every hour. Over the mountain crags yonder white sheets of foam are tumbling where none has been seen before for many months. This is an enforced day of rest. I have finished my breakfast and sit down for a few minutes in a keen enjoyment of idleness. There is a ceaseless patter of raindrops on the cabin roof. The river roars louder than ever over the riffle close by. That roar is the first sound I hear in the morning and the last at night. It has roared thus for me these three years. In one sense of time's duration they seem as three hundred years; in another, they seem not much over three months. It is three months when I think only of the date of my arrival on Fraser's Flat. It is three hundred years as I attempt to recall the daily round of experience and thought since I came here. Outwardly it has been what many would consider a monotonous experience. Weeks have been so much alike that they leave no distinguishing marks in my memory.
    I wonder how many years more I shall spend here. I wonder if I must live and die here. I am no nearer fortune than three years ago, not so near, by three years. I seem more and more chained down here by force of habit. I seem fit for little else but to dig. I long to see something of the great world beyond this lone foothill nook. Yet without money I feel less and less capable of going out and "getting on" in that world. And as for saving money--well, we call this a "three-dollar claim," which means an average daily profit when all expenses are paid, of two dollars, more or less. These thoughts are making it as gloomy within as the weather is without. I must get out of this. My gray flannel working shirt needs mending. The right sleeve is ripped from wrist to elbow. It has been so ripped for about six weeks. I have rolled that wet sleeve up to the elbow about a hundred times a day, and at every tenth stroke of the pick it has unrolled again and flapped in my face. I sew up the sleeve with a very large needle and a very coarse thread doubled. This is a good time to clean up a little. I will be domestic today. I will bake a fresh batch of bread and make a pie. It shall be a mince pie. We are ten miles from the nearest baker's mince pie. It shall be made of salt beef previously soaked to freshness, dried apples, molasses, and vinegar in lieu of cider. The crust I roll out with a junk bottle on a smooth, flat board. I bake it on a shallow tin plate. It will be, when done, a thin, wafery pie; but it will be a pie--the shadow of a pie at least--such as I used to eat at home; only a shadow.
    Rain, rain, rain. The wind is up and about too, tearing around among the trees and shaking the cloth roof of my cabin. Here and there little trickles of water are coming through and running down the logs. Mine is a log cabin of the roughest make. Four logs piled atop of each other form the sides. A mud chimney at one end; a door at the other. The logs are very dry and very rotten and abound in those insects that delight in rotten wood. I have found scorpions under the bark and occasionally an earwig promenades over the table. I open the door and look out on the river. It is rising. Wrecks are coming down--boards, logs, lumber and an occasional sluice and pieces of fluming. There is an eddy around the turn of the hill above, where much of this drift runs in. I repair thither and make a few hauls. I secure a half dozen good boards, some pieces of joist, some driftwood for fuel, and pile it up on the bank out of the swelling water's reach. "Halloa!" That cry is from a couple of men on the other side of the river, plodding down the trail in oilskins. I know them. Two of the "boys" from Poverty Bar. They are going to Price's store, two miles below--store, grog shop, boarding house, polling booth at election, ferry, etc. Being a rainy day, they are going there to get drunk. That is not their avowed purpose on setting out, but it's as near a certainty as anything can be in this world.
    I return to my cabin. The pie has baked. It is browner than I had intended it should be. On one side it is almost black. It is ornamented about the rim with a row of scallops made by pressure of the thumb. Now I put in the bread, previously mixed and kneaded. I am not a good bread maker. It is always bread too much baked or too little, or too sour or too yellow, or too heavy. But I don't care. I bake only for myself, and I am unfortunately too easily pleased, and probably too lazy to take that care and elaborate preparation necessary for good bread. I never measure accurately the proportions of flour, water and yeast powder necessary for good bread. I throw them together at random. It's a "hit or miss"--generally miss. It's too much trouble to bother about these small details. A particular friend of mine who stayed with me a few days reproved me for the poor quality of my bread and the general slovenliness apparent about my cooking utensils.
    "You have no pride," said he.
    I owned up. What was the use of pride about a tin kettle. This friend was my backer. He had set me up on this claim, and put me, after a fashion, on my feet. He had come to see how I was getting along.. While on this visit, a man of some standing from a camp up the river came along looking for a stray cow. My friend asked him to dinner--one of my dinners--graced by about the worst baking of bread I ever accomplished. My friend did not realize what he was about when he asked the future lieutenant governor of the state of California to that dinner. But when he sat down to my board, and when they tried to eat my bread, he sorrowed in secret and gave me some good and forcible advice afterward relative to culinary and domestic matters. In these matters he was a very particular man. During his stay he inaugurated a reign of neatness, and for me one of terror and discomfort. He put his whole mind on cooking and covered the stove with dishes. He was an animated bill of fare. He scoured all the tinware brightly.
    But the man didn't enjoy eating his elaborately prepared meals so much as I did. He worked too hard getting them up. He exhausted too much of his force in planning, worrying and cooking. He worked his mind in too many channels at once. He lacked repose. There's where I had the best of him. I was reposeful, and if you please so to term it, lazy. He is dead--I am alive. There's the result of different mental conditions. It is noon. I have no clock to tell the hours, but we acquire a faculty of feeling when noon arrives. The rain has ceased temporarily, but it will soon recommence, for which I am glad, as it will prevent work on the claim during the afternoon. Having eaten dinner, finishing with a piece of mince pie, it occurs to me that this is a good time to write home. It's hard work writing home. I put it off for weeks and months. It lays a load on my mind. I receive at times letters from people complaining of my neglect. I know I ought to write, but what is there to write? Nothing but the same old story, "Hope soon to do well." I have written in this strain for the last six years, until I am tired and sick of it. It is of no use telling any more about the country. All that has been told. If my people knew how much I suffered in this endeavor to be dutiful, perhaps they would not insist on my writing more than the line, "I am still alive; yours truly."
    The ink in my cabin is thick, the pen a bad one, and my mind seems in this epistolary effort thicker and rustier than ink or pen. "Dear___," and then a big blot, and then a long pause and the patter of the rain and the roar of the river. I write about a page and a half, feeling as if every stroke of the pen were encumbered with a ball and chain. I accomplish half a dozen more blots, and I finish in a wretched state of mind and in a prickly heat. It is a barren, pithless, sapless effort. I will go out and get a breath of fresh air and rain. It is 4 o'clock. Still it rains. The heavens are dark, and already the first shades of the winter's night are coming on. I revisit my haul of lumber from the river. It is gone. The river has not reached the spot where I placed it. It is the work of those thieving Chinamen on Chambers' Bar, half a mile above. There is no use in going after them. My lumber is deposited and hidden amid the piles they have today dragged out of the river.
    I spend about an hour getting in fuel. I have a woodyard on the hillside yonder. Nature has kindly felled and seasoned there a few scrub oaks for my use. I drag down a few branches. The land here is free--very free. No fences, no boundary lines, no gates, no proprietors. It's a pretty flat wen the sun shines. A dark background of mountain, in front a river, with its curving and varied outline of tule and bank up and down stream, and close about the oaks are so scattered as to give one the impression of a park and an old mansion hidden somewhere in the background. What a luxury would be this spot to thousands in crowded cities who haven't even the range of a back yard nor the shadow of a tree! Yet I am discontented and would get away to these crowded cities. The early darkness has come. I light my candle. My candelabra is of glass--dark olive green--a bottle. I did use a big potato with a hole therein scooped. But the esthetic nature requires constant change and I adopted a bottle. I spread the evening repast. I sit down alone. From the window I see lights glimmering in the few other neighboring cabins.
    I take refuge in the effort to repair my best and only pair of broadcloth pantaloons. I brought these with me from the States. They show decided signs of wear. I am putting in a patch. It is a job I take hold of at intervals. There is about it a mystery and a complication I can't fathom. I can't get the patch to fit, or rather to set. There is more in the tailor's art than I imagined. Every time I put them on I find a difference and a seeming division of action and sentiment between the new cloth I have sewed inside and the old cloth outside. They won't hold together. The stitches rip apart, and everything goes by the run. I seem to fail in making the new cloth accommodate itself to the varying proportions of this part of the garment. And so, the dreary night wears on. Rain, rain, rain; roar, roar, roar. Is this living?
Crawfordsville Journal, Crawfordsville, Indiana,  February 15, 1890, page 2

    I was not confident of my ability to teach even a "common school" when the situation was offered me in a little Tuolumne County mining camp. I said so to my old friend, Pete H., who had secured me the position. "Well," said he, after a reflective pause, "do you retain a clear recollection of the twenty-six letters of the alphabet? For, if you do, you are equal to any educational demand this camp will make on you."
    It was a reckless "camp." No phase of life was viewed or treated seriously. They did walk their horses to the grave slowly at a funeral, but how they did race back!
    It was legally necessary, however, that I should be examined as to my ability by the school trustees. These were Dr. D., Bill K., a saloon keeper, and Tom J., a miner. I met them in the justice's office. The doctor was an important-appearing man, proud, pompous, well dressed and spectacled. He glared at me with an expression betwixt sadness and severity. I saw he was to be the chief inquisitor. I expected from him a searching examination, and trembled; it was years since I had seen a school book. I knew that in geography I was rusty and in mathematics musty.
    Before the doctor lay one thin book. It turned out to be a spelling book. The doctor opened it, glared on me leisurely, and finally said: "Spell cat." I did so. "Spell hat." I spelled. "Rat," said the doctor, with a look of explosive fierceness and in a tone an octave higher. I spelled, and then remarked: "But, doctor, you surely must know that I can spell words of one syllable?" "I don't," he shouted, and propounded "mat" for me to spell, with an increase of energy in his voice, and so went on until I had so spelled long enough to amuse him and the other two trustee triflers. Then he shut the book, saying: "Young man, you'll do for our camp. I wouldn't teach that school for $5,000 a year; and there are two boys you'll have for scholars that I advise you to kill, if possible, the first week. Let's all go over and take a drink."
    My school house was the church, built and paid for partly by the gamblers and partly by the good people of Jimtown "for the use of all sects" on Sundays, for educational purposes on weekdays.
    I was shut up in that little church six hours a day with sixty children and youths, ranging from 4 to 18 years of age. In summer it was a fiercely hot little church. The mercury was always near 90 by noon, and sometimes over 100, and you could at times hear the shingles split and crack on the roof of the cathedral. A few years of interior California summers' suns will turn unpainted boards and shingles almost as black as charcoal.
    The majority of my pupils' parents being from New England and North America, they brought and carried into effect all their North American ideas of education. The California summer heat is, I think, unfit for educational purposes. It is too hot to herd sixty restless children together six hours a day. They proved this in several cases. Some fell sick suddenly. Some fainted. But this made no difference. The school went on in all its misery. I sent a fainting child home one day, and the father returned with it an hour afterward. He was fierce, and said he wanted his child kept in school when he sent it to school.
    This was in California's early days. My scholars were the children of the Argonauts, and in some cases had come out with them. There was then no regular system of textbooks. Publishers had not commenced making fortunes by getting out a new school book system every three years.
    My scholars came, bringing a great variety of school books. They brought "Pike's Arithmetic," which had come over the plains, and "Smith's Geography," which had sailed around Cape Horn. Seldom were two alike. But the greatest variety lay in grammars. There was a regular museum of English grammars, whose authors fought each other with different rules and called the various arts of speech by different names. I accounted for the great variety of grammars on the supposition that it is or was the ambition of a large proportion of schoolmasters to write a work on grammar before they died and say: "I have left another grammar to bless and confuse posterity."
    Besides bringing grammars, most of the boys brought dogs. Dogs of many breeds and sizes hovered around the school house. They wanted frequently to come in, and did often come in, to sneak under the seats and lay themselves at their masters' feet. I had frequently to kick or order them out, and I noticed that whenever a dog was chased out he would take the longest road to get out, and under as many seats as possible, in order to receive as many kicks as possible from the youthful owners of the other dogs.
    I could not so organize a battalion of ten different grammars as to act in concert on my grammar class of twenty pupils. So, I put them all on the retired list, and tried to teach this so called "science" orally. I chalked the rules on the blackboard as well as the names of the different parts of speech. I made my scholars commit these to memory, standing, although I will not argue that memory takes any stronger grip on a thing while the pupil stands. At last I taught a few with good memories to "parse." I worked hard with that grammar class and was very proud of their proficiency until I found that after months of this drilling they neither spoke nor wrote any better English than before.
    However, I lost nothing by this experience, for it helped me to the conviction that I have held to ever since, that the entire grammar system and method does very little to make one habitually use correct language, and that a taste for reading and constant association with correct English speaking people does a great deal. As for spending time in "parsing," I think it would be better to use that force in learning the boy to shoe horses and the girl to make bread, or let the girl shoe the horses if she wants to and the boy make the bread.
    The labor of teaching the alphabet to ten infants, calling them up once an hour "to say their letters," is, in my estimation, greater than that of swinging a pick in the surface gold "diggings." I have tried both, and infinitely prefer the pick. It is not so much work when you are employed with them as when you are occupied with the other pupils. Then these poor little alphabetical cherubs can do nothing but squirm on their low benches, catch flies, pinch each other, make and project spit balls and hold up their hands for another drink of water. I could not let them out of doors to play in the sand, where they should have been, because the North American parent would have considered himself as defrauded of a part of his infant's schooling were they not imprisoned the whole six hours.
    Neither can you set a child to studying A or M or any other letter. There is not an idea in A or B. During the two years of my administration I wrought with one child who never could get successfully beyond F. Her parents questioned my ability as a teacher. Some days she would repeat the whole alphabet correctly. I would go home with a load off my mind. The next day her mind would relapse into an alphabetical blank after F. She grew to be an eyesore to me. The sight of her at last made me sick.
    I held a public examination every six months and was careful to do all the examining myself. An interloper among the audience I invited did me great damage on one of these memorized performances by asking a simple arithmetical question of the showoff geographical boy. The urchin was brilliant in dealing with boundary lines, capes and islands, but his head was one that mathematics could not readily be injected into. On the other hand, my specimen grammarian was as likely to describe an island as a body of land surrounded by land as by water. I had no heart to find fault with this poor barefooted urchin who, when in class was always trying to stand on one leg, like a crane, and sending his right big toe on exploring scratching expeditions up his left trouser. He had been born and brought up in an inland country, where no body of water was to be seen save an occasional fleeting mud puddle; and what earthly conception could he form of the ocean and its islands?
    But the parents who attended these exhibitions of stuffed memories were struck at the proficiency of the progeny, and retired with the impression that their children knew a great deal because they had parroted off so much that was all Greek to them; and after I had been in this occupation a year I would sit in my empty theological school house when they had gone and try and convict myself as a profound humbug, and one, too, compelled, in order to get a living, to encourage and foster a system which had so much humbug in it.
    The California schools were not then "graded." They were conducted on the "go as you please" plan, sometimes going as the teachers pleased, sometimes as the parents pleased, sometimes as the pupils pleased. The parents of the youthful brains I was trying to develop into future statesmen and presidents wanted me to teach many things. One father wished his son taught Latin. It is bringing extremes pretty near each other to teach Latin and A B C's. But I "taught" the young man Latin as I was "taught" many things at school. I started him committing to memory the Latin declensions and conjugations, and then heard him "say his lesson." If he got anything out of it I don't know what it was, except tough work. He never reached any translations of the classics, for several reasons.
    Another father was annoyed because I exercised his son mathematically in what, in those days, were called "vulgar fractions." "I don't want," said he, "my son to have anything to do with fractions, anyway. They're no use in business. Anything over half a cent we call a cent on the books, and anything under it we don't call nothin'. But I want Thomas to be well grounded in "tare and tret."
    So, I grounded Thomas in "tare and tret." He grew up, took to evil ways, and was hung by a vigilance committee somewhere in Southern California. A boy who stammered very badly was sent me. I was expected to cure him. Five or six of my pupils were Mexicans and spoke very little English.
    One of my hardest trials was a great, stout boy, so full of vitality that he could not remain quiet at his desk. I could not blame him. He had force enough inside of him to run a steam engine. It would have vent in some direction. But it would not expend itself in "learning lessons." He would work his books into a mass of dog's ears. His writing book was ever in mourning with ink stains. His face was generally inky. His inkstand was generally upset. He would hold a pen as he would a pitchfork. He seemed also to give out his vitality when he came to school and infect all the others with it. He was not a regular scholar. He was sent only when it was an "off day" on his father's "ranch." In the scholastic sense he learned nothing.
    But that boy at the age of 15 would drive his father's two-horse wagon, loaded with fruit and vegetables, 150 miles from California to Nevada over the rough mountain roads of the Sierras, sell the produce to the silver miners of Aurora and adjacent camps, and return safely home. He was obliged in places to camp out at night, cook for himself, look out for his stock, repair harness or wagon and keep an eye out for skulking Indians, who, if not "hostile," were not saints. When it came to using the hand and the head together he had in him "go," "gumptions" and executive ability, and none of my "teaching" put it where it was in him either. He may have grown up "unpolished," but he is one of the kinds who are at this moment hiring polished and scholarly men to do work for them on very small wages.
    I do not despise "polish" and "culture," but is there not an education now necessary which shall give the child some clearer idea of the manner in which it must cope with the world in a few years? The land today is full of "culture" at ten dollars a week. Culture gives polish to the blade. But it is not the process which makes the hard, well-tempered steel.
    The "smartest" boy in my school gave me even more trouble than the son of the rancher. He could commit to memory as much in ten minutes as the others could in an hour, and the balance of the time he was working off the Satanism with which he was filled. His memory was an omnivorous maw. It would take in anything and everything with the smallest amount of application. It would have required two-thirds of my time to feed this voracious and mischievous little monster with books for his memory to devour.
    But he was not the boy to drive a team through a wild country and dispose of the load in Nevada, though he could on such a trip have committed to memory several hundred words per day on any subject, whether he understood it or not.
    My young lady pupils also gave me a great deal of trouble. They were very independent, and for this reason: Girls, even of 15, were very scarce then in the mines; so were women of any marriageable age. There were ten men to one woman. The result was that anything humanly feminine was very valuable, much sought after and made much of by men of all ages. My girls of 15, as to life and association, were grown-up women. Young miners and middle-aged, semi-baldheaded miners, who did not realize how many of their years had slipped away since they came out from the "States," took these girls to balls and whirled them by night over the dusty roads of Tuolumne County in dusty buggies.
    It was difficult for one lone man, and he only a schoolmaster, to enforce discipline with these prematurely matured children, who had an average of two chances a month to marry, and who felt like any other woman their power and influence with the other sex. Half of them did have a prospective husband in some brawny pick slinger, who never went abroad without a battery of portable small artillery slung at his waist, and who was half jealous, half envious of the schoolmaster for what he considered the privilege of being in the same room with his future wife six hours a day.
    One needs to live in a country where there is a dearth of women to realize these situations. When my school was dismissed at 4 o'clock p.m., all the unemployed chivalry of "Jimtown" massed on the street corner at the Bella Union Saloon to see this coveted bevy of California rosebuds pass on their way home. The Bella Union, by the way, was only a few yards from the church. Extremes got very close together in these mining camps. But the frequenters of the Bella Union, who gambled all night on the arid green baize of the monte table, had more than half paid for that church, and I infer, wanted it in sight so that no other persuasion should run off with it. I was glad when these girls got married and entered another school of life, where I knew within a year's time they were likely to have a master.
    I was once "barred out" at the close of a summer term. This was a fashion imported from the extreme southwestern part of what some call "our beloved Union." Returning from dinner I found the doors and windows of the university closed against me. I parleyed at one of the windows a few feet from the ground. I was met by a delegation of the two biggest boys. They informed me I could get in by coming out with a disbursement of $2.50, to treat the school to nuts, candies and cakes. I did not accede, smashed the window and went in. Most of the undergraduates went suddenly out. I clinched with the biggest boy. The other, like a coward, ran away. The two together could easily have mastered me. Order was restored. The mutiny did not hang well together. It was not a good "combine." The northern-bred scholars did not quite understand this move and did not really enter heartily into it. Their backing had been forced by the two big boys, and therefore had not good stuff in it.
    The big boy had a cut face. So had I. His still bigger brother met me a few days after and wanted to pick a quarrel with me about the affair. A quarrel with his class always lay within easy approach of knife or pistol. Besides, I was a Yankee. He was a Texan. And this was in 1862, when the two sections in California were neighbors, but not very warm friends, and about equal in numbers.
Crawfordsville Journal, Crawfordsville, Indiana, February 22, 1890, page 2


    One June morning, when I was a boy, Captain Eben Latham came to our house, and the first gossip he unloaded was that "them stories about finding gold in Californy was all true." It was "wash day" and our folks and some of the neighbors were gathered in the "wash house" while the colored help soused her fat black arms in the suds of the wash tub.
    That was the first report I heard from California. Old Eben had been a man of the sea; was once captured by a pirate, and when he told the story, which he did once a week, he concluded by rolling up his trousers and showing the bullet scars he had received.
    California then was but a blotch of yellow on the schoolboy's map of 1847. It was associated only with hides, tallow, and Dana's Two Years Before the Mast. It was thought of principally in connection with long-horned savage cattle, lassoes, and Mexicans. Very near this in general vacancy and mystery was the entire region west of the Rocky Mountains. What was known as the Indian Territory covered an area now occupied by half a dozen prosperous states. Texas was then the Mecca of adventurers and people who found it advisable to leave home suddenly. The phrase in those days, "Gone to Texas," had a meaning almost equivalent to "Gone to the ------." Then California took its place.
    The report slumbered during the summer in our village, but in the fall it commenced kindling and by winter it was ablaze. The companies commenced forming. It was not entirely a strange land to some of our people.
    Ours was a whaling village. Two-thirds of the male population were bred to the sea. Every boy knew the ropes of a ship as soon if not sooner than he did his multiplication table. Ours was a "traveled" community. They went nearer the North and South Poles than most people of their time and Bering Straits, the Kamchatkan coast, the Sea of Japan, Rio Janeiro, Valparaiso, the Sandwich Islands, the Azores and the names of many other remote localities were words in everyone's mouth, and words, too, which we were familiar with from childhood. Many of our whalers had touched at San Francisco and Monterey. There had recently been a great break down in the whale fishery. Whale ships for sale were plentiful. Most of them were bought to carry the "'49" rush of merchandise and men to California.
    By November, 1848, California was the talk of the village, as it was all that time of the whole country. The great gold fever raged all winter.
    All the old retired whaling captains wanted to go, and most of them did go. All the spruce young men of the place wanted to go. Companies were formed, and there was much serious drawing up of constitutions and bylaws for their regulation. In most cases the avowed object of the companies, as set forth in these documents, was "mining and trading with the Indians." Great profit was expected to be gotten out of the California Indian. He was expected to give stores of gold and furs in exchange for gilt watches, brass chains, beads, and glass marbles. The companies bought safes in which to keep their gold, and also strange and complex gold-washing machines, of which numerous patterns suddenly sprang up, invented by Yankees who never saw and never were to see a gold mine. Curious ideas were entertained relative to California. The Sacramento River was reported as abounding in alligators. Colored prints represented the adventurer pursued by these reptiles. The general opinion was that it was a fearfully hot country and full of snakes.
    Of the companies formed in our vicinity, some had more standing and weight than others, and membership in them was eagerly sought for. An idea prevailed that when this moral weight and respectability was launched on the shores of California it would entail fortune on all belonging to the organization. People with the lightning glance and divination of golden anticipation saw themselves already in the mines hauling over chunks of ore and returning home weighed down with them. Five years was the longest period anyone expected to stay. Five years at most was to be given to rifling California of her treasures, and then that country was to be thrown aside like a used-up newspaper and the rich adventurers would spend the remainder of their days in wealth, peace, and prosperity at their Eastern homes. l No one talked then of going out "to build up the glorious state of California." No one then ever took any pride in the thought that he might be called a "Californian." So they went.
    People who could not go invested in men who could go, and paid half the expense of their passage and outfit on condition that they should remit back half the gold they dug. This description of Argonaut seldom paid any dividends. I doubt if one ever sent back a dollar. Eastern shareholders really got their money's worth in gilded hopes, which with them lasted for years. But people never put such brilliant anticipations on the credit side of the account; and merely because that at the last they are not realized.
    As the winter of "'48" waned the companies, one after another, set sail for the land of gold. The Sunday preceding they listened to farewell sermons at church. I recollect seeing a score or two of the young Argonauts thus preached to. They were admonished from the pulpit to behave temperately, virtuously, wisely, and piously. How seriously they listened. How soberly were their narrow-brimmed, straight-up-and-down, little plug hats of that period piled one atop the other in front of them. How glistened their hair with the village barber's hair oil. How pronounced the creak of their tight boots as they marched up the aisle. How brilliant the hue of their neckties. How patiently and resignedly they listened to the sad discourse of the minister, knowing it would be the last they would hear for many months. How eager the glances they cast up to the church choir, where sat the girls they were to marry on their return. How few returned. How few married the girl of that period's choice. How little weighed the words of the minister a year afterward in the hurry-scurry of the San Francisco life of '49-'50.
    What an innocent, unsophisticated, inexperienced lot were those forty-odd young Argonauts who sat in those pews. Not one of them then could bake his own bread, turn a flapjack, reseat his trousers, or wash his shirt. Not one of them had dug even a post hole. All had a vague sort of impression that California was a nutshell of a country and that they would see each other there frequently and eventually all return home at or about the same time. How little they realized that one was to go to the northern and one to the southern mines and one to remain in San Francisco, and the three never to meet again! What glittering gold mines existed in their brains even during the preaching of that sermon! Holes where the gold was put out by the shovelful, from which an occasional boulder or pebble was picked out and flung away.
    The young Argonaut, church being dismissed, took his little stiff, shiny plug and went home to the last Sunday tea. And that Sunday night, on seeing her home from church for the last time, he was allowed to sit up with her almost as long as he pleased. The light glimmered long from the old homestead front parlor window. The cold north wind without roared among the leafless sycamores and crashed the branches together. It was a sad, sad pleasure. The old sofa they sat upon would be sat upon by them no more for years. For years? Forever in many cases. Today, old and gray, gaunt and bent, somewhere in the gulches, "up north" somewhere, hidden away in an obscure mining camp of the Tuolumne, Stanislaus, or Mokelumne, up in Cariboo or down in Arizona, still he recollects that night as a dream. And she? Oh, she dried her eyes and married the stay-at-home five years after. A girl can't wait forever. And besides, bad reports after a time reached home about him. He drank. He gambled. He found fair friends among the senoritas. And, worse than all, he made no fortune.
    By spring most of the Argonauts had departed. With them went the flower of the village. Their absence made a big social gap, and that for many a day. The girls they left behind tried for a time to live on hope, and afterward "took up" and made the most of the younger generation of boys.
    After many months came the first letters from San Francisco, and then specimens of gold dust and gold pieces. The gold dust came in quills or in vials, mixed with black sand
    In the course of two years a few of the "boys" came straggling back. The first of these arrivals, I remember, walked up our main street, wearing on his shoulders a brilliant-hued Mexican serape. It created a sensation. All the small boys of the village "tagged on behind him," a sort of impromptu guard of honor. The serape was about all he did bring home. He talked a great deal of gold and brought specimens, but not in sufficient quantity to pay all outstanding bills. The next of the returned was a long, gaunt, yellow case of Chagres fever. He brought only gloom. Along in 1853-54 came a few of the more fortunate who had made a "raise." Two returned and paid up their creditors in full who had been by creditors given over. But few came to remain. They "stayed around" home a few weeks, turned up their noses at the small prices asked for drinks, cigars, and stews, treated everybody, grew restless and were off again.
    Sometimes on visiting my native village I stand before one of those old-fashioned houses, from whose front door thirty-four years ago there went forth for the last time the young Argonaut on his way to the ship. There is more than one such house in the village. The door is double, the knocker is still upon it, the window panes are small, the front gate is the same and up to the door the same stones lie upon the walk. But within all are strangers.
    The father and mother are past anxious inquiry of their son. The sisters are married and live, or have died. elsewhere. A new generation is all about. They never heard of him. The great event of that period, the sailing of that ship for California, is sometimes recalled by a few--a few rapidly diminishing. His name is all but forgotten. Some have a dim remembrance of him. In his time he was an important young man in the village. He set the fashion in collars and the newest style of plugs. Oh, fame, how fleeting! What is a generation? A puff. A few old maids recollect him. What a pity, what a shame that we do all fade as a leaf!
    The recollections treated in this chapter are to me as a commencement and an ending of the shadows of a series of coming events.
Yorkville Enquirer, Yorkville, South Carolina, May 6, 1891, page 1

Yorkville Enquirer, Yorkville, South Carolina, May 13, 1891, page 1

Yorkville Enquirer, Yorkville, South Carolina, May 20, 1891, page 1

Yorkville Enquirer, Yorkville, South Carolina, May 27, 1891, page 1

Yorkville Enquirer, Yorkville, South Carolina, June 3, 1891, page 1

Yorkville Enquirer, Yorkville, South Carolina, June 10, 1891, page 1

Yorkville Enquirer, Yorkville, South Carolina, June 17, 1891, page 1

Yorkville Enquirer, Yorkville, South Carolina, June 24, 1891, page 1

Yorkville Enquirer, Yorkville, South Carolina, July 1, 1891, page 1

Yorkville Enquirer, Yorkville, South Carolina, July 8, 1891, page 1

Yorkville Enquirer, Yorkville, South Carolina, July 15, 1891, page 1

Yorkville Enquirer, Yorkville, South Carolina, July 22, 1891, page 1

Yorkville Enquirer, Yorkville, South Carolina, July 29, 1891, page 1

Yorkville Enquirer, Yorkville, South Carolina, August 19, 1891, page 1

Yorkville Enquirer, Yorkville, South Carolina, August 26, 1891, page 1

Yorkville Enquirer, Yorkville, South Carolina, September 9, 1891, page 1


        Prentice Mulford is a little old man with a small face, rapidly working eyes and a trifling sort of gray mustache. He used to be rather prominent here in early days as a writer for the newspapers and magazines. For twenty years past he has been knocking around the world, but has finally settled in New York, where he does business as a publisher of books. He came back to California by the Panama steamer a few days ago and is quartered at the Occidental. Mr. Mulford doesn't like to be interviewed. He is a timid little old gentleman, and is afraid that he may say something to offend the public--which is foolish, because the public really cares nothing about Mr. Mulford's opinions--at least does not care to the extent of getting mad about them if they don't happen to be complimentary.
    The time of Mr. Mulford's greatest literary activity was in the days of the old Overland, when Bret Harte was its editor, and the magazine had a worldwide fame. Mulford's best work consisted of descriptions of his adventures as a miner and whatnot. A sketch of his experience as a cook on a whaler was probably the most distinctive of his productions. Since those days he has appeared in type chiefly as a newspaper correspondent, his letters being mild disquisitions on social and religious topics, with a faint, very faint, flavor of Thackeray's good-natured benevolence in them.
    "I really have nothing to say," said Mr. Mulford last night. "Yes, of course there have been a good many changes in San Francisco since I saw it last. There used to be lots of sand here. Where is that sand now? That question, I suppose, embraces the story of the city's progress. But please don't quote me. The people might not like it, you know. I asked them to build a fire in my room this afternoon, and I asked them not to mention the circumstance. The people here are proud of the climate, you understand. Yet I was really cold. Don't say anything about that fire, I beg of you."
    "You were with Joaquin Miller in London in the days of his early fame, weren't you?"
    "Yes, indeed. Where is Miller, by the way? In Washington, living in a cabin, isn't he? Over at Fruitvale, eh? Yes, I remember lots of interesting things about Miller in London. When he was going upstairs one night to a reception at Lord Somebody or other's the butler--a fat, pompous, English butler, you know--stared at his long hair and his pants in his boots, and all that, and says to him: 'Hadn't you better arrange your dress before going up, sir!' And Miller says: 'Oh, no; that's all right.' Miller understood the English people perfectly. He said to me once: 'You must expect your landlady to cheat you three shillings a week. She doesn't regard three shillings as robbery, but if she cheated you four shillings a week she'd get down on her knees and ask God to forgive her for that extra shilling. Yes, indeed, life in London is very interesting to an American. It has a broadening effect upon the mind.'"
    A gentleman unknown to fame who sat beside Mr. Mulford said:
    "Miller's a queer chap. He reads scarcely anything. I was walking with him one Sunday in Oakland some years ago and found this out by trying to talk to him about books. I'd been reading Jef Davis' work on the Civil War. I said it was surprising that a man had cut so large a figure in the world's affairs who seemed to have the small, hard mind of a technical lawyer. 'Why,' said I, 'the man hasn't advanced an inch since 1861.' 'That's right,' said Miller. 'Jeff Davis has no right to advance. He ought to have died with his men fighting for the Confederacy. But as he didn't die with them it's his duty to be as dead as he can.'"
    "Yes," said Mr. Mulford, "Miller's a strange fellow. He was of a great deal of use to me showing me around London, and so on."
    "I presume, Mr. Mulford," said the interviewer, "that you have many interesting recollections of the men who made California famous in a literary way in the old days?"
    "Oh, yes; certainly; I knew them all. There was Bret Harte, you know, and Charles Warren Stoddard, and Mark Twain, and Jim Bowman. Bowman's dead, isn't he? I remember him very well. You know what a solemn sort of a man be was. His wife kept a high-toned boarding house, and one morning Bowman took me home to breakfast. He was as full as a tick, and he embarrassed me very much when we went into the breakfast room, for the first thing he did after introducing me was to fall on his hands and knees and begin to crawl under the table. You know what a dignified lady Mrs. Bowman was. Well, she protested, of course, and Bowman he got up with a hurt expression and says: 'I am sorry, madam, that you object to my crawling under the table from this side. Anything to oblige, and I will now proceed to crawl under it from the other,' which he did."
    "Is that all you can recall of the literary activity of the later sixties and early seventies?"
    "Oh no, indeed," said Mr. Mulford. "Calvin B. MacDonald, is he alive still? Well, Calvin was editor of the American Flag, you know, and the owner of the paper was a man named McCarthy, and MacDonald got full one day and told everybody in the office that there was going to be bloodshed. He said he was going to kill the proprietor. Most writers, you know, dislike proprietors. Well, Calvin hid behind the hall door with a big pistol, waiting for McCarthy to come along. Somebody must have told McCarthy, I guess, for when he arrived he just reached behind the door and caught MacDonald by the ear and put him out on the sidewalk, you know."
    Mr. Mulford does not think highly of current American literature. "What it lacks," he says, "is vigor. Take the Century and Harper's, for instance. There is an immense amount of literary skill, of course, but no vigor. It must be discouraging to young men who want to write. Parlor fiction is all the go. It lacks vigor. Yes, indeed, that's what's the matter with it. It hasn't any vigor. Out here in the old days that I have been telling you about we had lots of vigor."
    "Do you look for a change in this respect?"
    "Well, yes, I suppose so. Yes, I expect there will be a change."
    "What will bring it about?"
    "Oh, I suppose fellows will just keep on writing, and it'll come about naturally, you know."
    "You look for more vigor, then?"
    "Certainly. Of course there's bound to be more vigor. There's a demand for it, you see. At least I think so."
    Mr. Mulford does not know how long he will stay in California. He is here for pleasure, he says, and is quite interested in what he sees.
San Francisco Examiner, February 3, 1890, page 4


    New York, June 8.--Prentice Mulford is dead, and in that death the world has lost one of the strangest of men. He might have been called a crank or a seer, a foolish man or one who was wise beyond the measure of most men's wisdom. Few knew him at all well, for he was shy almost beyond belief, yet he had the keenest and most vivid interest in the affairs of men.
    In mental ability he was a chief among his fellows. He possessed vast knowledge, but of the most heterogeneous character. He was full of the most strange, out-of-the-way information, mingled with much that was practical to a degree. His humor was delightful, he saw the comic side of everything, yet was his humor most closely allied to pathos. His range of thought covered the wildest, and to many, the most absurd dreams, but he was full of hard common sense, which flashed out in his brief comment on the doings of a day with the shock of a douche of cold water. In literary work nothing is so difficult as the writing of epigrams, those short, pithy sentences which cover so much in so few words; yet to Mulford they seemed to be the easiest of all forms of composition.
    In his love of nature Prentice Mulford reminded one of Thoreau. He was exceedingly fond of the water, and he lived on it for many years, cruising about alone in his boat. In San Francisco, when he was working for The Golden Era, a weekly paper edited by Colonel Lawrence, his home was in an old whaleboat he had picked up somewhere and made over to suit his needs. For quite a long time he wore the strangest clothes one can imagine--a knitted suit all in one piece, like a bathing suit. This had, I believe, originally been blue in color, but the wind, and the rain, and the strong sunlight had turned it to a rusty brown. Mulford declared it to be the only garment a man should wear, and was fond of expatiating on its many excellent qualities.
    In his boat he had a place to sleep and an arrangement for cooking. It was his habit to land once in a day or two for the purpose of buying bread, papers, eggs, milk and butter, and to mail and receive his letters. At other times he cruised, sleeping at night with his boat anchored in the most lonely parts of the bay. But writing on a pad resting on his knee, with his arm over the tiller, he would pour out any quantity of the wittiest, most humorous, most common-sense matter that anyone ever read. Some of his articles literally laughed with the fun that bubbled through them; in others he struck deep notes of passion or of pain.
    Colonel Lawrence, himself one of the queerest originals I ever met, was full of stories about Mulford. The Golden Era was the first paper Mulford wrote for, and he remained faithful to it so long as Colonel Lawrence had it. Mulford was under salary, but as he was utterly careless about money and never drew more than ten dollars at a time--which he preferred should be paid in silver quarters, as he thereby had plenty of small change--his money accumulated to his credit in the Era office. Many times Colonel Lawrence urged him to draw it out, but Mulford always replied he had no need of it. Then the colonel mentioned the savings bank, but Mulford, who at that time was a rank socialist, declared he considered banks immoral institutions which he refused to patronize.
    Mulford was shy beyond the power of words to express. When for any cause he found it necessary to visit the Era office, then in Merchant Street, he used to stand on the sidewalk until someone he knew came along who would go up with him. Remember, the man was a favorite with everyone in the place, and was at that time one of the chief contributors to the paper. When alone with one person he knew well, or with two, or, perhaps, if he were in the mood, with three, he would talk at times most brilliantly, holding his audience spellbound by the beauty of his thoughts and words, or keeping them in paroxysms of laughter by his fun. Let someone he did not know join the circle, or let two more persons come up and Mulford became silent at once, nor was it long before he would break away to enjoy his beloved solitude once more. While he was able to face audiences at his lectures in after days, he never got over his shyness when brought into close companionship with men.
    Mulford was a man who cared absolutely nothing about money. During the period of his married life, when he had a wife to support, he made greater efforts to earn it than at any other time, but ordinarily he was indifferent. His wants were few and of the simplest; his food was the plainest he could get, and his friends cared far more about his dress than he ever did. At one time he believed that men should not eat meat, for he held the blood was the life. His diet then was fish, vegetables, fruit and bread. I have heard him argue eloquently in favor of this regimen, and it is needless to say I agreed with him. No one ever disagreed with Mulford when he spoke in earnest, however much one might rebel afterward when the spell of the talk was no longer on him. But Mulford had strange ideas about the blood, and sometimes I have thought he then looked on it as a sacrament. This, however, is a part of his mysticism which no one, so far as I know, ever thoroughly understood.
    Strange things became no longer strange to those who knew Prentice Mulford; he always did that which no one would expect. He had the most absolute disbelief in his own mental powers; he never realized the intense admiration felt for them by other men. He has in his time actually resigned a position on a paper because he was convinced he would be discharged; the fact being that no one in the office would have allowed him to go if it might be prevented. He hated flattery of all descriptions; "lionizing" drove him away at once. He liked people to admire his articles, but their admiration had to be expressed with extreme caution or he thought they were laughing at him. You could, however, praise his work if you sandwiched in a due proportion of criticism. Yet for all this he was quick to defend his beliefs. I remember an article be wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle, which was devoted wholly to the play of light and shade on the sea. The humor, fun, pathos, wit, color introduced made it a marvel of words. Yet Mulford never thought very much of it.
    Mulford lived the most lonely of lives, and he was an example of what contemplation may bring a man to. In many respects he was like those Hindoos who devote years to self-study. His mind became, under this training, mystical to a degree, yet was he able to evolve many ideas of striking force. He believed thought to be a tangible power. He wrote: "If you keep any idea, good or ill, in your mind from month to month and year to year, you make it a more enduring, unseen reality, and as it so becomes stronger and stronger, it must at last take shape and appear in the seen and physical." Again: "If you want to keep a secret from others, keep it as much as possible out of your own mind, save when it is absolutely necessary to recall it. For what you think you make or put out in the air, and as put out in the air, when you are much of the time thinking of it, it is all the more likely to fasten on some mind about you, in the form of a surmise, a passing thought, which at last, if you keep forcing it on them by thinking of it, ripens into a suspicion. All great successes depend on secrecy."
    A great mind, not well understood and never fairly exploited for others, passed away when Prentice Mulford died.
Los Angeles Herald, July 16, 1891, page 10



Last revised April 6, 2020