When, therefore, I arrived at San Francisco I determined on trying a newly invented machine which had not yet been proved in the mines, but which looked very promising for my experimental work; with this, and an eight horse power steam engine, I returned to Tuttle Town.
It was hard work to get the boiler of the engine over the mountains, for the rains had commenced to fall, and in many places the mud was very deep. Three or four days’ rain entirely change the character of the Sonora road; and wherever there is a hollow in which the water can accumulate, there, throughout the winter, you have a quagmire which becomes deeper as each fresh waggon or mule passes through it, until at last having become impassable, it is avoided by a circuit, which one traveller having made every other traveller from that day follows.
Although I had given the boiler two or three days’ start, I found it on arriving at Table Mountain, with the worst part of the journey still before it; however, we had sixteen yoke of oxen, and after a couple of days of great trouble, the machinery was at length safely planted in Tuttle Town. Its arrival created great sensation, and the town increased in size and importance on the strength of it. A French baker and a butcher established themselves in our main street; and at the first general election a justice of the peace and constable were legally elected; the former was a worthy carpenter of good education; the latter post was filled by Rowe. Whenever we saw Rowe buckling on his pistols in a decisive manner preparatory to a start, we knew that he was proceeding to collect a debt due to some Tuttletonian, and this active constable invariably brought back either the money or the man. And although our own small population was very peaceful, our justice of the peace had ample employment from the surrounding miners, and dispensed a great amount of justice in a very firm but off-hand manner; and so much respect was felt for the sagacity and impartiality of our carpenter, that his decisions in those disputes that came before his notice were invariably received with satisfaction on all sides. The following incident will illustrate the summary process by which one judge and one constable could force obedience to the law amongst an armed population in the mountains. One evening as our “judge� was putting the finishing touch to a shanty he had been engaged in repairing, a messenger informed him that a murder had just been committed at an adjacent digging; the judge thereupon threw down his hammer, and, after taking the depositions, issued a warrant for the arrest of the murderer, who was a well-known desperado. Constable Rowe was to serve this warrant and capture the delinquent; consequently, the whole population of Tuttle Town (about fifteen) armed themselves to protect constable Rowe, and accompanied him to the diggings in question. Arrived there, the accused was found to have entrenched himself in his house, with desperate intentions of firing his revolver at the law in whatever form it might summon him. I was not sorry to find on our arrival that he abandoned this design and surrendered himself at discretion, so we marched him off to Tuttle Town. The judge heard all that was to be said, and that was sufficient for the committal of the prisoner to the jail at Sonora to await a trial; so we mounted our horses, took him at once into the town, and had him locked up. Whatever became of him afterwards I don’t know, but he never returned to our vicinity, and this was the way that the law was put in force in every case that came under the authority of our carpenter judge.
A Sonorian was found one day in possession of a mule not his own. Whilst the culprit quakes in the grip of our constable, our judge exhorts the villain to be more honest in his dealings. I have this scene before me so vividly that I’ll place it on the wood at once before I write another line.
So! now if there is less benevolence beaming from the eyes of our carpenter than I would have you believe existed in his heart, the fault is in the spectacles.
We rid ourselves about this time of a bad character. There was a fierce brute of a man who often visited our camp, who was known to have committed a cold-blooded murder, although the law had acquitted him. He was called “Cut-throat Jack,� nor did he object to the appellation; he was more feared in the mines than I should have supposed any man to have been, but he was always in a reckless, half-drunken state, and those who preferred to avoid a deadly quarrel would leave any house he entered. He was invariably armed, and always boastful.
One night as Thomas was watching a stack-fire near the tents, in which a mass of quartz was being purposely brought to a white heat for experimental purposes, Cut-throat Jack swaggered up to him, and informed him that he intended to pass the night in our shanty (Rowe and I being at Sonora). To this Thomas objected, upon which Cut-throat made such a warlike demonstration that Thomas very properly knocked him down. “Jack� unfortunately fell on the red-hot quartz, and the sensation was so new to him that, as soon as he could withdraw himself, he drew neither pistol nor knife, but was instantly lost to sight in the surrounding gloom, and never swaggered into our camp again from that night forth.
In our immediate neighbourhood we had three classes of miners, Mexicans, French, and Chinese, and their peculiarities of race were so marked that I shall record them.