Forty miles from Hell,
Girl Wanted—Inquire within.
Rudely printed and stuck at a rakish angle upon a tree, hundreds of miles from civilization, or indeed from any visible touch of human habitation, this sign greeted the astonished eyes of the passengers who traveled on the stage line from Redding to Shasta in the north of California in ’75. Leading from it, off into the woods, was a tiny newly trodden path—an invitation that any adventurous young woman could hardly fail to take—had any come that way. But there was the joke—few did.
These Westerners made jests of everything, their loneliness and misery in particular, and the characteristic is not dead yet. For just thirty years later, in the city of San Francisco, people forced to rush from their homes by a great conflagration, leaving all their worldly possessions behind them, put up outside their improvised tents and shacks such ridiculous signs as these:
Old clothes for sale.
Beer, five cents.
Fortunes told.
Dew Drop Inn.
Rooms To Let.
And while the fire still raged within the walls of that hostelry of which they were all so proud, there appeared over the poorest and most tumble-down shelter of all the words: