Chinese Camp, five miles distant, stood as the metropolis for Red Mountain Bar. It contained but a few hundred people. Yet, in our estimation at that time it bore the same relative importance that New York does to some agricultural village a hundred miles way. Chinese Camp meant restaurants, where we could revel in the luxury of eating a meal we were not obliged to prepare ourselves, a luxury none can fully appreciate save those who have served for years as their own cooks. Chinese Camp meant saloons, palatial as compared with the Bar groggery; it meant a daily mail and communication with the great world without; it meant hotels, where strange faces might be seen daily; it meant, perhaps, above all, the nightly fandango. When living for months and years in such out-of-the-way nooks and corners as Red Mountain Bar, and as were thousands of now forgotten and nameless flats, gulches, and bars in California, cut off from all regular communication with the world, where the occasional passage of some stranger is an event, the limited stir and bustle of such a place as Chinese Camp assumed an increased importance and interest. Chinese Camp Justice presided at our lawsuits. Chinese Camp was the Mecca to which all hands resorted for the grand blow-out at the close of the river mining season. With all their hard work what independent times were those after all! True, claims were uncertain as to yield; hopes of making fortunes had been given over. But so long as $1.50 or $2 pickings remained on the banks men were comparatively their own masters. There was none of the inexorable demand of business consequent on situation and employment in the great city, where, sick or well, the toilers must hie with machine-like regularity at the early morning hour to their posts of labor. If the Red Mountaineer didn’t “feel like work” in the morning he didn’t work. If he preferred to commence digging and washing at ten in the morning instead of seven, who should prevent him? If, after the morning labor, he desired a siesta till two in the afternoon, it was his to take.
Of what Nature could give there was much at the Bar to make pleasant man’s stay on earth, save a great deal of cash. We enjoyed a mild climate—no long, hard winters to provide against; a soil that would raise almost any vegetable, a necessity or luxury, with very little labor; grapes or figs, apples or potatoes; land to be had for the asking; water for irrigation accessible on every hand; plenty of pasture room; no crowding. A quarter of a section of such soil and climate, within forty miles of New York City, would be worth millions. Contrast such a land with the bleak hills about Boston, where half the year is spent in a struggle to provide for the other half. Yet we were all anxious to get away. Our heaven was not at Red Mountain. Fortunes could not be digged there. We spent time and strength in a scramble for a few ounces of yellow metal, while in the spring time the vales and hillsides covered with flowers argued in vain that they had the greatest rewards for our picks and shovels. But none listened. We grovelled in the mud and stones of the oft-worked bank. Yearly it responded less and less to our labors. One by one the “old-timers” left. The boarding-house of Dutch Bill at the farther end of the Bar long stood empty, and the meek-eyed and subtle Chinaman stole from its sides board after board; the sides skinned off, they took joist after joist from the framework. None ever saw them so doing. Thus silently and mysteriously, like a melting snowbank, the great, ramshackle boarding house disappeared, until naught was left save the chimney. And that also vanished brick by brick. All of which material entered into the composition and construction of that irregularly built, smoke-tanned Conglomerate of Chinese huts clustered near the Keen Fann castle.
“Old Grizzly” McFarlane went away. So did Bloody Bill. So the Bar’s population dwindled. Fewer travellers, dot-like, were seen climbing the steep trail o’er Red Mountain. Miller, the Chinese Camp news-agent, who, with mailbags well filled with the New York papers, had for years cantered from Red Mountain to Morgan’s Bar, emptying his sack as he went at the rate of fifty and twenty-five cents per sheet, paid the Bar his last visit and closed out the newspaper business there forever. Then the County Supervisors abolished it as an election precinct, and its name no longer figured in the returns. No more after the vote was polled and the result known did the active and ambitious partisan mount his horse and gallop over the mountain to Sonora, the county seat, twenty miles away, to deliver the official count, signed, sealed and attested by the local Red Mountain Election Inspectors. Finally the Bar dwindled to Thompson, Keen Fann and his Mongolian band. Then Thompson left. Keen Fann grieved at losing his friend and protector. He came on the eve of departure to the dismantled store. Tears were in his eyes. He presented Thompson with a basket of tea and a silver half-dollar, and bade him farewell in incoherent and intranslatable words of lamenting polyglot English.
CHAPTER XVIII.
MY CALIFORNIA SCHOOL.
I was not confident of my ability to teach even a “common school” when the situation was offered me in a little Tuolumne County mining camp. I said so to my old friend, Pete H., who had secured me the position. “Well,” said he, after a reflective pause, “do you retain a clear recollection of the twenty-six letters of the alphabet? For if you do, you are equal to any educational demand this camp will make on you.”
It was a reckless “camp.” No phase of life was viewed or treated seriously. They did walk their horses to the grave slowly at a funeral, but how they did race back!
It was legally necessary, however, that I should be examined as to my ability by the school trustees. These were Dr. D., Bill K., a saloon-keeper, and Tom J., a miner. I met them in the Justice’s office. The doctor was an important appearing man, rotund, pompous, well-dressed, and spectacled. He glared at me with an expression betwixt sadness and severity. I saw he was to be the chief inquisitor. I expected from him a searching examination, and trembled. It was years since I had seen a school-book. I knew that in geography I was rusty and in mathematics musty.
Before the doctor lay one thin book. It turned out to be a spelling book. The doctor opened it, glared on me leisurely, and finally said: “Spell cat.” I did so. “Spell hat.” I spelled. “Rat,” said the doctor, with a look of explosive fierceness and in a tone an octave higher. I spelled, and then remarked: “But, doctor, you surely must know that I can spell words of one syllable?” “I don’t,” he shouted, and propounded “mat” for me to spell, with an increase of energy in his voice, and so went on until I had so spelled long enough to amuse him and the other two trustee triflers. Then he shut the book, saying: “Young man, you’ll do for our camp. I wouldn’t teach that school for $5,000 a year; and there are two boys you’ll have for scholars that I advise you to kill, if possible, the first week. Let’s all go over and take a drink.”
My school house was the church, built and paid for partly by the gamblers and partly by the good people of Jimtown “for the use of all sects” on Sundays, and for educational purposes on week days.
I was shut up in that little church six hours a day with sixty children and youths, ranging from four to eighteen years of age. In summer it was a fiercely hot little church. The mercury was always near 90 by noon, and sometimes over 100, and you could at times hear the shingles split and crack on the roof of the cathedral. A few years of interior California summers’ suns will turn unpainted boards and shingles almost as black as charcoal.