But the rainy season is usually neither long nor constant. The fall of rain on the Pacific Slope is only about one third of the rainfall in the Atlantic States; and, before water was supplied artificially, the miner was often obliged to suspend operations for want of it. Frequently a day’s rain would have been cheaply bought at the price of a million dollars; and even a good shower gave an impetus to business which was felt by the merchants and gamblers of San Francisco and Sacramento. It was observed that after a long drought dimes took the place of gold slugs upon the roulette and faro tables. Thus, even the weather was a speculation in Pioneer times.
And yet, notwithstanding the general mildness of the climate, extremes of cold, at high levels, are close at hand. Snow often falls to a depth of one or two feet within fifty miles of San Francisco. Near the head-waters of the Feather River the snow is sometimes twelve and even fifteen feet deep; and in December, 1850, eighteen men out of a party of nineteen, and sixty-eight of their seventy mules froze to death in one night. A snow-storm came up so suddenly, and fell with such fury, that their firewood became inaccessible, and they were obliged to burn their cabin; but even that did not save them.
Bret Harte has described a California snow-storm not only in The Outcasts of Poker Flat, but in several other stories, notably in Gabriel Conroy, Snow-Bound at Eagle’s, and A Night on the Divide. It is interesting to know, as Mr. Pemberton tells us, that the description of the snow-storm in Gabriel Conroy was written on a hot day in August.
Poker Flat was in Sierra County, and in March, 1860, the snow was so deep in that county that tunnels were dug through it as a picturesque and convenient means of access to local saloons. The storm which overwhelmed the Outcasts was no uncommon event. But when these storms clear off, the cold, though often intense, is not disagreeable, owing to the dryness of the air. “We are now working every fair day,” wrote a miner in January, 1860, “and have been all the Winter without inconvenience. The long, sled-runner Norwegian snow-shoes are used here by nearly everybody. I have seen the ladies floating about, wheeling and soaring, with as much grace and ease of motion as swans on the bosom of a placid lake or eagles in the sun-lit air.”
On the summit of the mountains the snow is perpetual, and on the easterly slopes it often attains the almost incredible depth, or height, of fifty feet. In A Tale of Three Truants, Bret Harte has described an avalanche of snow, carrying the Three Truants along with it, in the course of which they “seemed to be going through a thicket of underbrush, but Provy Smith knew that they were the tops of pine trees.”
On the whole, the climate of California justified the enthusiasm which it aroused in the Pioneers, and which sometimes found an amusing expression. The birth of twins to an immigrant and his wife, who had been childless for fifteen years, was triumphantly recorded by a San José paper as the natural result of even a short residence on the Pacific Slope. Large families and long life marked not only the Spaniards, but also the Mexicans and Indians. Families of fifteen, twenty, and even twenty-five children excited no surprise and procured no rewards of merit for the parents. In 1849 there was a woman living at Monterey whose children, all alive and in good health, numbered twenty-eight.
We read of an Indian, blind but still active at the age of one hundred and forty; and of a squaw “very active” at one hundred and twenty-six. Mr. Charles Dudley Warner[39] a speaks of “Don Antonio Serrano, a tall, spare man, who rides with grace and vigor at ninety-three,” and of an Indian servant “who was a grown man, breaking horses, when Don Antonio was an infant. This man is still strong enough to mount his horse and canter about the country. He is supposed to be about one hundred and eighteen.” This wonderful longevity was ascribed by Mr. Warner to the equable climate and a simple diet.
Ancient Mexicans and Indians figure occasionally in Bret Harte’s stories. There is, for example, Concepcion, “a wrinkled Indian woman, brown and veined like a tobacco leaf,” who acts as servant to the Convert of the Mission; and, at the Mission of San Carmel, Sanchicha, in the form of a bundle, is brought in and deposited in a corner of the room. “Father Pedro bent over the heap, and distinguished in its midst the glowing black eyes of Sanchicha, the Indian centenarian of the Mission. Only her eyes lived. Helpless, boneless, and jelly-like, old age had overtaken her with a mild form of deliquescence.”
But it was not length of days,—it was feverish energy that the climate produced in the new race which had come under its influence. The amount of labor performed by the Pioneers was prodigious. “There is as much difference,” wrote the Methodist preacher, Father Taylor, “between the muscular action of the California miner and a man hired to work on a farm, as between the aimless movements of a sloth and the pounce of the panther.”
“We have,” declared a San Francisco paper, “the most exhilarating atmosphere in the world. In it a man can do more work than anywhere else, and he feels under a constant pressure of excitement. With a sun like that of Italy, a coast wind as cool as an Atlantic breeze in Spring, an air as crisp and dry as that of the high Alps, people work on without let or relaxation, until the vital cord suddenly snaps. Few Americans die gradually here or of old age; they fall off without warning.”