The gold hunters

by John David Borthwick

Young as California was, it was in one respect older than its parent country, for life was so fast that already it could show ruins and deserted villages. In out-of-the-way places one met with cabins fallen into disrepair, which the proprietors had abandoned to locate themselves elsewhere; and even villages of thirty or forty shanties were to be seen deserted and desolate, where the diggings had not proved so productive as the original founders had anticipated.

Labor, however, was not exclusively devoted to mining operations. Roads had in many parts been cut in the sides of the mountains, bridges had been built, and innumerable saw-mills, most of them driven by steam power, were in full operation, many of them having been erected in anticipation of a demand for lumber, and before any population existed around them. Every little valley in the mountains where the soil was at all fit for cultivation was already fenced in, and producing crops of barley or oats; and canals, in some cases forty or fifty miles long, were in course of construction, to bring the waters of the rivers to the mountain-tops, to diggings which were otherwise unavailable.

Life for the most part was hard enough certainly, but every village was a little city of itself, where one could live in comparative luxury. Even Downieville had its theater and concerts, its billiard-rooms and saloons of all sorts, a daily paper, warm baths, and restaurants where men in red flannel shirts, with bare arms, spread a napkin over their muddy knees, and studied the bill of fare for half an hour before they could make up their minds what to order for dinner.

I was sitting on a rock by the side of the river one day sketching, when I became aware that a most ragamuffinish individual was looking over my shoulder. He was certainly, without exception, the most tattered and torn man I ever saw in my life; even his hair and beard gave the idea of rags, which was fully realized by his costume. He was a complete caricature of an old miner, and quite a picture by himself, seen from any point of view.

The rim of his old brown hat seemed ready to drop down on his shoulders at a moment’s notice, and the sides, having dissolved all connection with the crown, presented at the top a jagged circumference, festooned here and there with locks of light brown hair, while, to keep the whole fabric from falling to pieces of its own weight, it was bound round with a piece of string in lieu of a hat-band. His hair hung all over his shoulders in large straight flat locks, just as if a handkerchief had been nailed to the top of his head and then torn into shreds, and a long beard of the same pattern fringed a face as brown as a mahogany table. His shirt had once been red flannel—of course it was flannel yet, what remained of it—but it was in a most dilapidated condition. Half-way down to his elbows hung some shreds, which led to the belief that at one time he had possessed a pair of sleeves; but they seemed to have been removed by the action of time and the elements, which had also been busy with other parts of the garment, and had, moreover, changed its original scarlet to different shades of crimson and purple. There was enough of his shirt left almost to meet a pair of—not trousers, but still less mentionable articles, of the same material as the shirt, and in the same stage of decomposition. He must have had trousers once on a time, but I suppose he had worn them out; and I could not help thinking what extraordinary things they must have been on the morning when he came to the conclusion that they were not good enough to wear. I daresay he would have put them on if he could, but perhaps they were so full of holes that he did not know which to get into. His boots at least had reached this point, and to acknowledge that they had been boots was as much as a conscientious man could say for them. They were more holes than leather, and had no longer any title to the name of boots.

He was a man between thirty and forty, and, notwithstanding his rags, there was nothing in his appearance at all dirty or repulsive; on the contrary, he had a very handsome, prepossessing face, with an air about him which at once gave the idea that he had been used to polite society. I was, consequently, not surprised at the style of his address. He talked with me for some time, and I found him a most amusing and gentlemanly fellow. He was a German doctor, but it was hard to detect any foreign accent in his pronunciation.

The claim he was working was a mile or two up the river, and his company, he told me, was one of the greatest curiosities in the country. It consisted of two Americans, two Frenchmen, two Italians, two Mexicans, and my ragged friend, who was the only man in the company who spoke any language but his mother tongue. He was captain of the company, and interpreter-general for the crowd. I quite believed him when he said it was hard work to keep them all in order, and that when he was away no work could be done at all, and for that reason he was now hurrying back to his claim. But before leaving me he said, “I saw you sketching from the trail, and I came down to ask a favor of you.”

There is as much vanity sometimes in rags as in gorgeous apparel; and what he wanted of me was to make a sketch of him, rags and all, just as he was. To study such a splendid figure was exactly what I wanted to do myself, so I made an appointment with him for the next day, and begged of him in the meantime not to think of combing his hair, which, indeed, to judge from its appearance, he had not done for some time.

I found afterwards that he was a well-known character, and went by the name of the Flying Dutchman.

I passed by his claim one day, and such a scene it was! The Tower of Babel was not a circumstance to it. The whole of the party were up to their waists in water, in the middle of the river, trying to build a wing-dam. The Americans, the Frenchmen, the Italians, and the Mexicans, were all pulling in different directions at an immense unwieldy log, and bestowing on each other most frightful oaths, though happily in unknown tongues; while the directing genius, the Flying Dutchman, was rushing about among them, and gesticulating wildly in his endeavors to pacify them, and to explain what was to be done. He spoke all the modern languages at once, occasionally talking Spanish to a Frenchman, and English to the Italians, then cursing his own stupidity in German, and blowing them all up collectively in a promiscuous jumble of national oaths, when they all came to a stand-still, the Flying Dutchman even seeming to give it up in despair. But after addressing a few explanatory remarks to each nation separately, in their respective languages, he persuaded them to try once more, when they got along well enough for a few minutes, till something went wrong, and then the Tower-of-Babel scene was enacted over again.