When the man riding the bull thought he had enough of it, he took an opportunity when the bull came near the outside of the arena, and hopped off his back on to the top of the barrier. A door was then opened, and the bull was allowed to depart in peace. Three or four more bulls in succession were fought in the same manner. The last of them was to have been killed with the sword; but he proved one of those sulky, treacherous animals who do not fight fair; he would not put down his head and charge blindly at anything or everything, but only made a rush now and then, when he thought he had a sure chance. With a bull of this sort there is great danger, while with a furiously savage one there is none at all—so say the bull-fighters; and after doing all they could, without success, to madden and irritate this sulky animal, he was removed, and another one was brought in, who had already shown a requisite amount of blind fury in his disposition.
A long straight sword was then handed to the matador, who, with his flag in his left hand, played with the bull for a little, evading several attacks till he got one to suit him, when, as he stepped aside from before the bull’s horns, he plunged the sword into the back of his neck. Without a moan or a struggle the bull fell dead on the instant, coming down all of a heap, in such a way that it was evident that even before he fell he was dead. I have seen cattle butchered in every sort of way, but in none was the transition from life to death so instantaneous.
This was the grand feat of the day, and was thought to have been most beautifully performed. The spectators testified their delight by the most vociferous applause; the Mexican women waved their handkerchiefs, the Mexicans cheered and shouted, and threw their hats in the air, while the matador walked proudly round the arena, bowing to the people amid a shower of coin which his particular admirers in their enthusiasm bestowed upon him.
I one day, at some diggings a few miles from Sonora, came across a young fellow hard at work with his pick and shovel, whom I had met several times at Moquelumne Hill and other places. In the course of conversation he told me that he was tired of mining, and intended to practice his profession again; upon which I immediately set him down as either a lawyer or a doctor, there are such lots of them in the mines. I had the curiosity, however, to ask him what profession he belonged to,—“Oh,” he said, “I am a magician, a necromancer, a conjuror!” The idea of a magician being reduced to the level of an ordinary mortal, and being obliged to resort to such a matter-of-fact way of making money as digging gold out of the earth, instead of conjuring it ready coined out of other men’s pockets, appeared to me so very ridiculous that I could not help laughing at the thought of it. The magician was by no means offended, but joined in the laugh; and for the next hour or more he entertained me with an account of his professional experiences, and the many difficulties he had to encounter in practicing his profession in such a place as the mines, where complete privacy was so hard to be obtained that he was obliged to practice the most secret parts of his mysterious science in all sorts of ragged canvas houses, or else in rooms whose rickety boarded walls were equally ineffectual in excluding the prying gaze of the unwashed. He gave me a great insight into the mysteries of magic, and explained to me how he performed many of his tricks. All the old-fashioned hat-tricks, he said, were quite out of the question in California, where, as no two hats are alike, it would have been impossible to have such an immense assortment ready, from which to select a substitute for any nondescript head-piece which might be given to him to perform upon. I asked him to show me some of his sleight-of-hand tricks, but he said his hands had got so hard with mining that he would have to let them soften for a month or two before he could recover his magical powers.
He was quite a young man, but had been regularly brought up to his profession, having spent several years as confederate to some magician of higher powers in the States—somewhat similar, I presume, to serving an apprenticeship, for when I mentioned the names of several of his professional brethren whose performances I had witnessed, he would say, “Ah, yes, I know him; he was confederate to so-and-so.”
As he intended very soon to resume his practice, he was on the look-out for a particularly smart boy to initiate as his confederate; and I imagine he had little difficulty in finding one, for, as a general thing, the rising generation of California are supernaturally smart and precocious.
I met here also an old friend in the person of the Scotch gardener who had been my fellow-passenger from New York to Chagres, and who was also one of our party on the Chagres River. He was now farming, having taken up a “ranch” a few miles from Sonora, near a place called Table Mountain, where he had several acres well fenced and cleared, and bearing a good crop of barley and oats, and was busy clearing and preparing more land for cultivation.
This Table Mountain is a very curious place, being totally different in appearance and formation from any other mountain in the country. It is a long range, several miles in extent, perfectly level, and in width varying from fifty yards to a quarter of a mile, having somewhat the appearance, when seen from a distance, of a colossal railway embankment. In height it is below the average of the surrounding mountains; the sides are very steep, sometimes almost perpendicular, and are formed, as is also the summit, of masses of a burned-looking conglomerate rock, of which the component stones are occasionally as large as a man’s head. The summit is smooth, and black with these cinder-like stones; but at the season of the year at which I was there, it was a most beautiful sight, being thickly grown over with a pale-blue flower, apparently a lupin, which so completely covered this long level tract of ground as to give it in the distance the appearance of a sheet of water. No one at that time had thought of working this place, but it has since been discovered to be immensely rich.
A break in this long narrow Table Mountain was formed by a place called Shaw’s Flats, a wide extent of perfectly flat country, four or five miles across, well wooded with oaks, and plentifully sprinkled over with miner’s tents and shanties.
The diggings were rich. The gold was very coarse, and frequently found in large lumps; but how it got there was not easy to conjecture, for the flat was on a level with Table Mountain, and hollows intervened between it and any higher ground. Mining here was quite a clean and easy operation. Any old gentleman might have gone in and taken a turn at it for an hour or two before dinner just to give him an appetite, without even wetting the soles of his boots: indeed, he might have fancied he was only digging in his garden, for the gold was found in the very roots of the grass, and in most parts there was only a depth of three or four feet from the surface to the bedrock, which was of singular character, being composed of masses of sandstone full of circular cavities, and presenting all manner of fantastic forms, caused apparently by the long-continued action of water in rapid motion.