The gold hunters

by John David Borthwick

At last, after a great deal of scrambling and climbing, my shins barked, my clothes nearly torn off my back, and my eyes half scratched out by the bushes, completely blown, and suffocated with the heat, I arrived at a place where I considered that I had got over the worst of it, as the ascent seemed to become a little more practicable. I was dying of thirst, and would have given a very long price for a drink of water; but the nearest water I expected to find was at a spring about five miles off, which I had passed in the morning. I could not help thinking what a delightful thing a quart pot of Bass’s pale ale would be, with a lump of ice in it; then I thought I would prefer a sherry cobbler, but I could not drink that fast enough; and then it seemed that a quart pot of ale would not be enough, that I would like to drink it out of a bucket. I quaffed in imagination gigantic goblets, one after another, of all sorts of delicious fluids, but none of them did me any good; and so I concluded that I had better think of something else till I reached the spring.

The rest of the mountain was not very hard traveling, and when once on the top of the range, I struck off in a direction which I thought would hit my old trail. I very soon got on to it, and after half an hour’s walking, I found the spring, where, as the Missourians say, “you may just bet your life,” I did drink.

It was about three o’clock, and I thought my safest plan was to return to the house I had started from in the morning, about six miles off, where, on my arrival, I learned that I had been misled by an Indian trail, and had traveled far out of the right direction. It was too late to make a fresh start that day, so I was doomed to pass another night here, and in the evening amused myself by sketching a train of pack-mules which had camped near the house.

I was just setting off in the morning, when two or three men, who had seen me sketching the evening before, came and asked me to take their likenesses for them. As they were very anxious about it, I made them sit down, and very soon polished them all off, improving so much on their personal appearance, that they evidently had no idea before that they were such good-looking fellows, and expressed themselves highly satisfied. As I was finishing the last one, an old fellow came in, who, seeing what was up, was seized with a violent desire to have his sweet countenance “pictur’d off” likewise, to send to his wife. It struck me that his wife must be a woman of singular taste if she ever wished to see his face again. He was just about the ugliest man I ever saw in my life. He wanted to comb his hair, poor fellow, and make himself look as presentable as possible; but I had no mercy on him, and, making him sit down as he was, I did my best to represent him about fifty per cent. uglier than he really was. He was in great distress that he had not better clothes on for the occasion; so, to make up for caricaturing his features, I improved his costume, and gave him a very spicy black coat, black satin waistcoat, and very stiff stand-up collars. The fidelity of the likeness he never doubted, being so lost in admiration of his dress, that he seemed to think the face a matter of minor importance altogether.

I did not take many portraits in the mines; but from what little experience I had, I invariably found that men of a lower class wanted to be shown in the ordinary costume of the nineteenth century—that is to say, in a coat, waistcoat, white shirt and neckcloth; while gentlemen miners were anxious to appear in character, in the most ragged style of California dress.

I went to Foster’s Bar after dinner with a man who was on his way there from Downieville, a town about thirty miles up the river. He told me that he and his partner had gone there a few months before, and had worked together for some time, when they separated, his partner joining a company which had averaged a hundred dollars a day to each man ever since, while my friend had bought a share in another company, and, after working hard for six weeks, had not, as he expressed it, made enough to pay for his grub. Such is mining.

Foster’s Bar is a place about half a mile long, with the appearance of having slipped down off the face of the mountains, and thus formed a flat along the side of the river. The village or camp consisted of a few huts and cabins; and all around on the rocks, wherever it suited their convenience, were parties of miners camping out.

I could only see one place which purported to be a hotel, and to it I went. It was a large canvas house, the front part of which was the bar-room, and behind it the dining-room. Alongside of the former an addition had been made as a sleeping apartment, and here, when I felt inclined to turn in about ten o’clock, I was accommodated with a cot.

A gambling-room in San Francisco is a tolerably quiet place, where little else is heard but good music or the chinking of dollars, and where, if it were necessary, one could sleep comfortably enough. But a gambling-room in a small camp in the mines is a very different affair. There not so much ceremony is observed, and the company are rather more apt to devote themselves to the social enjoyment of drinking, quarrelling, and kicking up a row generally. In this instance the uproar beat all my previous experience, and sleeping was out of the question. The bar-room, I found, was also the gambling-room of the diggings. Four or five monte tables were in full blast, and the room was crowded with all the rowdies of the place. As the night wore on and the brandy began to tell, they seemed to be having a general fight, and I half expected to see some of them pitched through the canvas into the sleeping apartment; or perhaps pistols might be used, in which case I should have had as good a chance of being shot as any one else.

I managed to drop off asleep during a lull in the storm; but when I awoke at daylight, it was only then finally subsiding. I found that some man had broken a monte bank, and, on the strength of his good fortune, had been treating the company to an unlimited supply of brandy all night, which fully accounted for the row; but I did not fancy such sleeping quarters, and made up my mind to camp out while I remained in those diggings.