Even then reports of the paying capacities of claims were as apt to be watered as are stocks nowadays.
CHAPTER XII.
SWETT’S BAR.
I think and hope that these attempts of mine to portray the history of the camps on one California gold-bearing river will touch a responsive chord in the hearts of some old Californian, for the life and incident of the bars I describe reflect, in certain respects, the life, history, and incident of hundreds and thousands of places settled in “’49,” and perhaps abandoned by “’60,” which have now no name or place on the later maps of the State. Your genuine old miner likes to revisit the camp where first he dug for gold, in thought if not in person. It was no common affection they entertained for these places. If the “boys” moved away to other diggings, they had always to make a yearly pilgrimage back, so long as the camp lasted. So, yearly from Vallecito, thirty miles distant, used Jake Yager to revisit Swett’s, and he tramped the whole distance, too. What was it that so drew them back? Perhaps the memory of the new and exciting life they experienced from “’49” say till “’58” or “’60,” with its “ups and downs,” its glittering surprises in the shape of “strikes,” its comradeship so soon developed among men who, meeting as strangers, so soon found out each other’s better qualities, its freedom from the restraints of older communities, its honesty and plainness in the expression of opinion, engendered by such freedom; all these thought over and over again during absence brought about that strong desire to see the old Bar again, the scene of so much experience and private history. Then the visitor always met a hearty welcome. He was an old “residenter.” Cabin-owners contended for the pleasure of entertaining him. No wives or families were in the way. Conviviality was uninterrupted.
If a black bottle could be produced it could be worshipped undisturbed until long past midnight. And such was always produced on the return of the old acquaintance. When the “boys” at last tumbled into their bunks and smoked a night-cap pipe abed, there was no wife in special charge of husband to molest or make them afraid or disturb their internal peace by reason of her near presence. Those were the golden seasons of masculine domestic tranquillity on the banks of the Tuolumne. Woman never disturbed the Bar proper with her presence. It was always a masculine Bar, at least on the right bank of the river. On the left, at a later date, on a flat, where I enjoyed the privilege of digging for next to nothing for two years, there did live for a time three foreign households glorified by woman’s presence. But this was after the palmy days of Swett’s Bar proper right bank. I have heard that Swett’s Bar was named after John Swett, once Superintendent of Public Instruction in California. If so, he never there left any relics or reminders of himself—not even a grammar. Swett’s lies equidistant from Hawkins’ and Indian Bars. When last I passed through it the floods had washed out every trace of man’s presence on one side of the river, leaving there an enormous heap of logs and brush-wood. The Bar proper had been smoothed down by the flood, every hole or boulder heap, or heap of “headings” or “tailings,” or the deep pits dug and laboriouly kept free of water by machinery, or heavily rock-freighted crib of logs, the work of miners in the river’s bed, had been planed away. The pebbles and boulders had all been rearranged, the sands were smooth, white, and glistening as though “fresh from the Creator’s hands;” and none save those conversant with the river’s history could have guessed that every foot of the bank adjoining the river had been turned over and over again in the search for gold.
We elected one member of the Legislature from Swett’s. When he left the Bar he distributed his cabin, blankets, and household effects among the remaining miners. He confidently thought never to need these articles again. That was as great a miscalculation as when a Swett’s Bar or any other bar miner would resolve and swear violently that never again would he “strike a pick” in the river. We came to regard such an oath with a superstitious credulity that he certainly would strike such pick again, for never did such a case occur in my recollection but that the mad resolver was back next season, ignoring his vow and striking his pick on some claim generally poorer than the one he worked the season previous. So at the end of four months, after cumbering the law books of the State of California with statutes, whose very existence was forgotten eight months after their passage, our Swett’s Bar legislator was seen one evening coming down the hill, bearing in one hand two whiskey bottles tied together by one string—one being empty and the other full. “Silver and gold have I none,” said he, as he came to my cabin door, “but what I have give I unto thee,” which he did. Next day came his trunk. The principal accession to the legislative wardrobe were three new shirts and a blue coat with brass buttons. That, the session I think of 1859, was known as the “Legislature of ten thousand drinks.” Our law-maker said it had been the “Star Winter” of his existence, and he never expected to see such another. Three days after his arrival at the Bar he borrowed a pair of blankets, “cabined” with a chum and contentedly resumed his pick and shovel. Did Cincinattus do more when he buckled once more to the plough? But our Swett’s Bar Cincinattus was never hunted for to save his country. There were too many other country savers on hand, even in our immediate locality.
Generally speaking, Swett’s was divided in two portions. There was the old bar on the right bank of the river, settled in “’49,” and there was the flat on the other side, whose golden store was not discovered until 1859. Attempts were made to give this flat a distinct name. Various settlers and miners craved the immortality which they supposed might thus be conferred. For a time it was called “Frazier’s Flat,” from a diabolical Scotchman of that name who lived there. Only one of these names would stick, and finally everybody settled down on the old appellation, “Swett’s.” I do not believe that John Swett, if he did confer his name on this Bar, ever realized the local fame and reputation of his name. When first we struck the diggings at Swett’s left bank, we had great expectations. It was a later discovery, a “back river channel.” Consequent on the discovery of pay ground 1,000 feet back of the river, and the definite fixing of the boundary lines between the various claimants, there ensued the usual series of disputes, rows, bad blood, assaults, and threatened shootings. Nobody was shot. Not even a mining law-suit came of it. A local capitalist threw a flume across the river and brought to bear on the flat the upland muddy water, which came down from Columbia diggings, twenty-five miles away, through Wood’s Creek. That flume was being talked of, being planned, being hoped for and very gradually being erected, during the years of “’59” and “’60,” while the rest of the nation was agitated by “Bleeding Kansas,” “John Brown,” “Squatter Sovereignty,” “The Douglas Party,” “The Little Giant” and all that foreboding series of watchword and motto which preceded “The War.” But the Swett’s Bar mind, the Swett’s Bar hope, the Swett’s Bar expedition, was concentrated principally on a wire cable, two uprights on either side of the river, and some 400 feet of rough wooden flume thereby supported, all of which was to bring us water to wash out the expected gold. At last the suspension flume was finished. We had water. We commenced washing. The dirt did not pay as we expected. We averaged week in and week out about three dollars per day, and one dollar of this went for water money.
After the suspension flume was finished and water was on the Flat our claim cleaned up for the first week’s work about fifty dollars a piece. We used quicksilver plentifully in the sluices; and the amalgam was taken to my cabin in a gold-pan and put on the hot coals to drive off the mercury, which it did, and salivated the four of us besides. The sublimated mineral covered walls, tables and chairs with a fine, frost-like coating, and on rubbing one’s finger over any surface a little globule of quicksilver would roll up before it. Then we went to Chinese Camp and gave the doctor about half our individual week’s dividends to get the mercury out of us. Three weeks of sore mouths and loosened teeth followed this intelligent exposure. It was through such experiences as these that we became in California practical mineralogists. However, it’s an easy way of taking “blue mass.” The claim from which great gains had been expected eventually settled down to an average of two dollars and a half to three dollars per day. Break-downs of the flume, failure of water from up country, very stormy weather, building and repairing reservoirs, cutting tail races through rock—all caused numerous delays, and every such delay lessened the average per diem. It was necessary to build reservoirs, to store the water for washing, and these reservoirs broke with the ease and facility of a Bowery savings bank.
CHAPTER XIII.
ONE DAY’S DIGGING.
We got out of our blankets heavily. Legs and back were apt to be a little stiff in the morning. Or if not stiff, they lacked action. Working all the day previous, possibly in the water, or with it splashing all about, tugging at heavy boulders, shouldering wet sluices, to say nothing of the regular pick-and-shovel exercise, would make itself felt even when the limbs and blood were younger than now. Dressing was a short job. A pair of damp overalls, a pair of socks, a pair of shoes, or possibly the heavy rubber mining boots. Flannel shirts we slept in. A face-swabbing with cold water in the tin basin outside and a “lick and a promise” for the hair with the comb. That was about all for week days. Vanity of apparel there was little for the working miner. Who was there to dress for? Woman? The nearest was half a mile, fifty years of age, and married. Then breakfast. The fire kindled in the contrary little stove. Possibly it was necessary to attack with a axe that dried old stump near by and hack off a few chips to cook with. The miner’s wood-pile was generally small. He got in fuel on rainy days, or at the odd intervals to be spared from work. You put on the worn tin teapot, lowered the gauze-covered meat safe from the tree, cut a steak from the chunk of bull mahogany within called beef, slung a dab of lard in the frying-pan, put therein the meat and let it sizzle. Two or three boiled potatoes might be sliced, fried more or less brown in the gravy, and this, with bread and tea, formed the breakfast. The bread was the bread of your own laborious baking, the loaf of an irregular shape, the crust very hard and thick, the color often “pied,” being black where it had burned, brown where it had baked, and of a pallid whiteness where it had not baked at all. Within the loaf might be close, heavy, and in color either a creamy or a canary yellow, in proportion to the improper amount of yeast powder used.
The table is a broad shelf against the wall. There is no table-cloth. You did not always wash up after breakfast, for the dishes, as they stood, were all in place for dinner. Some fastidious miners washed their dishes after each meal; most of us did not. It was too much to expect of hard-worked humanity. The cabin door is open while you eat and from it you look forth on the claim. There lies the bank of red earth as you left it yesterday after the “cave.” There is the reservoir full of coffee-colored ditch water which had run in during the night after being used for washing in a dozen claims “up country.” Then you draw on those damp, clammy rubber boots, either to the knee or hip high, the outside splashed with the dried reddish mud, and smelling disagreeably of rubber as you pulled them on and smelling worse as you became heated and perspiring. In these you waddle to the claim. I forgot. Breakfast over, one of the most important acts of the day was next on the programme. That was the filling, lighting, and smoking of your pipe. Nothing could hurry you through this performance. The filling was cut in slivers with a careful and solemn consideration; the weed was carefully bestowed in the bowl; the match was applied with a deliberation savoring of a religious act; the first puff rose in the air as incense to the early morn, and smoking thus you waddled in your big boots to the claim. There you met your three partners, all likewise smoking. There they stand on the bank, looking into the ground-sluice. There is no “good morning” or other greeting: if anything, grunts. There lay the tools—shovels, picks, crowbar, and sluice-fork—helplessly about, as left last evening. A little muddy water trickles through the line of sluices. One of us goes to the reservoir, a few hundred yards off, and turns on the water. Another goes to the tail of the sluices with the sluice-fork. Then is heard the clicking of the pick and the grating of the shovel against the red dirt; down comes the muddy water over the bank and the day’s work has fairly commenced.