III
A woman of moods, when Lola made a change, it was a complete one. She made one now. The artificiality of the towns, with their false standards and atmosphere of pretence, had begun to pall. She wanted to try a fresh milieu. Everybody was talking just then of Grass Valley, a newly opened-up district, set amid a background of the rugged Sierras, where gangs of miners were delving for gold in the bowels of Mother Earth, and, if half the accounts were true, amassing fortunes. Why not go there and see for herself? It would at least be a novel experience.
No sooner said than done. Hiring a mule team and wagon, and accompanied by Patrick Hull, she started off on a preliminary tour of inspection of the district.
Travelling was unhurried in those leisurely days. There were several stoppages; and the roads were rough, and long detours had to be made to avoid yawning canyons. "At the end of two weeks from the time they left Sacramento behind them, Pat Hull and his charming bride wheeled across the mountains into Grass Valley."
"There were about 1600 people in the township of Marysville at this period," says a chronicler, "and 1400 of them were of the masculine sex. The prospect of sudden riches was the attraction that drew them. England and the Continent were represented by some of the first families. A dozen were graduates of Oxford and Cambridge; there were two young relatives of Victor Hugo; there were a number of scions of the impoverished nobility of Bohemia; and several hundred Americans. Among the latter was William Morris Stewart, a Marysville lawyer, who was afterwards to become a senator and attorney-general."
Grass Valley at this period (the autumn of 1853) was little more than a wilderness. The nearest town of any size was Nevada City, fringed by the shadows of the lofty Sierras. Between the gulches had sprung up as if by magic a forest of tented camps and tin-roofed shanties, with gambling-booths and liquor saloons by the hundred, in which bearded men dug hard by day, and played faro and monte and drank deep by night. Fortunes were made—and spent—and nuggets were common currency. The cost of living was very high. But it cost still more to be ill, since a grain of gold was the accepted tariff for a grain of quinine.
The whole district was a melting-pot. Attracted by the prospect of the precious metal that was to be wrung from it, there had drifted into the Valley a flotsam and jetsam, representatives of all nations and of all callings. As was natural, Americans in the majority; but, with them, Englishmen and Frenchmen and Germans and Italians, plus an admixture of Chinamen and Kanakas; also an undesirable element of deserters from ships and convicts escaped from Australia. To keep them in some sort of order, rough justice was the rule. Mayors and sheriffs had arbitrary powers, and did not hesitate to employ them. Judge Lynch was supreme; and a length of hemp dangling from a branch was part of the equipment of every camp.
With a full knowledge of all these possible drawbacks, Lola Montez looked upon Grass Valley and saw that it was good. Perhaps the Bret Harte atmosphere appealed to her. At any rate, she decided to settle down there temporarily; and, with this end in view, she persuaded Hull to buy a six-roomed cottage just above Marysville.
When Lola Montez—for all that she had a wedding-ring on her finger, she still stuck to the name—arrived there with her new husband, the conditions of life in Grass Valley were a little primitive. A telegraph service did not exist; and letters were collected and delivered irregularly. Transport with the outer world was by stage coach and mule and pony express. Whisky had to come round by Cape Horn; sugar from China; and meat and vegetables from Australia. The fact was, the early settlers were much too busily employed extracting nuggets and gold dust to concern themselves with the production of any other commodity.
Mrs. Dora Knapp, a neighbour of Lola Montez in Grass Valley at this period, has contributed some reminiscences of her life there: