At last he drew an arrow, sighted along its straight shaft, bringing the obsidian head to bear on Mount Whitney, and in strange fragments of language told me that the peak was an old, old man, who watched this valley and cared for the Indians, but who shook the country with earthquakes to punish the whites for injustice toward his tribe.
I looked at his whitened hair and keen, black eye. I watched the spare, bronze face, upon which was written the burden of a hundred dark and gloomy superstitions; and as he trudged away across the sands I could but feel the liberating power of modern culture, which unfetters us from the more than iron bands of self-made myths. My mood vanished with the savage, and I saw the great peak only as it really is—a splendid mass of granite 14,887 feet high, ice-chiselled and storm-tinted; a great monolith left standing amid the ruins of a bygone geological empire.
XIV
THE PEOPLE
If mankind were offspring of isothermal lines and topography, we might arrive at a just criticism of Sierra Nevada people by that cheap and rapid method so much in vogue nowadays among physical geographers. Their practice of dragooning the free-agent with wet and dry bulb thermometers would help us to predict the future of Sierra society but little more securely than Madam Saint John, who also deals in coming events. I fear we have no better than the old way of developing what lies ahead logically from yesterday and to-day, adding large measure of sympathy with human aspiration and faith in divine help.
Why all sorts and conditions of men from every race upon the planet wanted gold, and twenty years ago came here to win it, I shall not concern myself to ask. Nor can I formulate very accurately the proportions of good, bad, and indifferent dramatis personæ upon whom the golden curtain of ’49 rolled up.
No venerated landmark or sacred restraint held those men in check. There were no precedents for the acting, no play-book, no prompter, no audience. “Anglo-Saxondom’s idee” reigned supreme, developing a plot of riotous situation, and inconceivably sudden change. Wit and intellect wrought a condition the most ambitious savages might regard with baffled envy. History would not, if she could, parallel the state of society here from ’49 to ’55, nor can we imagine to what height of horror it might have reached had the Sierra drainage held unlimited gold. Those were lively days. The penniless ’49er still looks back to them with bleared eyes as the one period of his life. “Dust” was plenty and to be had, if not for digging, at the modest price of a bullet.
To prove the soil’s fertility he tells you proudly how, in those years, wild oats on every hill grew tall enough to be tied across your saddle-bow. This irony of nature has passed away, but the cursed plant ripens its hundredfold in life and manner.
No one familiar with society as it then was feels the least surprise that Mr. Bret Harte should deal so largely in morbid anatomy, or appear to search painfully for a single noble trait to redeem the common bad. Yet not universal bad, for there were not wanting a few strong Christian men who, amid all, kept their eyes on the one model, leading lives blameless, if obscure.
Broadly, through all kinds and conditions, shone the virtue of generous, if not self-denying, hospitality. A sort of open-handed fraternity banded together the honest miners; they were shoulder to shoulder in common quest of gold, in united effort to make the “camp” lively. The “fraternity” too often emulated that of Cain, or wore a ghastly likeness to the Commune. That those desperadoes, who, through the long chain of mining towns, outnumbered respectable men, had so generally the fixed habit of killing one another should rather be written down to their credit; that they never married to hand down lawless traits seems their crowning virtue.
For a few years the solemn pines looked down on a mad carnival of godless license, a pandemonium in whose picturesque delirium human character crumbled and vanished like dead leaves.