Prentice Mulford's story: life by land and sea

by Prentice Mulford

Another father was annoyed because I exercised his son mathematically in what, in those days, were called “vulgar fractions.” “I don’t want,” said he, “my son to have anything to do with fractions, anyway. They’re no use in bizness. Ennything over half a cent we call a cent on the books, and ennything under it we don’t call nothin’. But I want Thomas to be well grounded in ‘tare and tret.’”

So I grounded Thomas in ‘tare and tret.’ He grew up, took to evil ways, and was hung by a vigilance committee somewhere in Southern California. A boy who stammered very badly was sent me. I was expected to cure him. Five or six of my pupils were Mexicans, and spoke very little English.

One of my hardest trials was a great stout boy, so full of vitality that he could not remain quiet at his desk. I could not blame him. He had force enough inside of him to run a steam engine. It would have vent in some direction. But it would not expend itself in “learning lessons.” He would work his books into a mass of dog’s ears. His writing book was ever in mourning with ink stains. His face was generally inky. His inkstand was generally upset. He would hold a pen as he would a pitchfork. He seemed also to give out his vitality when he came to school and infect all the others with it. He was not a regular scholar. He was sent only when it was an “off day” on his father’s “ranch.” In the scholastic sense he learned nothing.

But that boy at the age of fifteen would drive his father’s two-horse wagon, loaded with fruit and vegetables, 150 miles from California to Nevada over the rough mountain roads of the Sierras, sell the produce to the silver miners of Aurora and adjacent camps, and return safely home. He was obliged in places to camp out at night, cook for himself, look out for his stock, repair harness or wagon and keep an eye out for skulking Indians, who, if not “hostile,” were not saints. When it came to using the hand and the head together he had in him “go,” “gumption” and executive ability, and none of my “teaching” put it where it was in him, either. He may have grown up “unpolished,” but he is one of the kind who are at this moment hiring polished and scholarly men to do work for them on very small wages.

I do not despise “polish” and “culture” but is there not an education now necessary which shall give the child some clearer idea of the manner in which it must cope with the world in a few years? The land to-day is full of “culture” at ten dollars a week. Culture gives polish to the blade. But it is not the process which makes the hard, well-tempered steel.

The “smartest” boy in my school gave me even more trouble than the son of the rancher. He could commit to memory as much in ten minutes as the others could in an hour, and the balance of the time he was working off the Satanism with which he was filled. His memory was an omnivorous maw. It would take in anything and everything with the smallest amount of application. It would have required two-thirds of my time to feed this voracious and mischievous little monster with books for his memory to devour.

But he was not the boy to drive a team through a wild country and dispose of the load in Nevada, though he could on such a trip have committed to memory several hundred words per day on any subject, whether he understood it or not.

My young lady pupils also gave me a great deal of trouble. They were very independent, and for this reason: Girls, even of fifteen, were very scarce then in the mines. So were women of any marriageable age. There were ten men to one woman. The result was that anything humanly feminine was very valuable, much sought after and made much of by men of all ages. My girls of fifteen, as to life and association, were grown-up women. Young miners and middle-aged, semi-baldheaded miners, who did not realize how many of their years had slipped away since they came out from the “States,” took these girls to balls and whirled them by night over the dusty roads of Tuolumne County in dusty buggies.

It was difficult for one lone man, and he only a schoolmaster, to enforce discipline with these prematurely matured children, who had an average of two chances a month to marry, and who felt like any other woman their power and influence with the other sex. Half of them did have a prospective husband in some brawny pick-slinger, who never went abroad without a battery of portable small artillery slung at his waist, and who was half-jealous, half-envious of the schoolmaster for what he considered the privilege of being in the same room with his future wife six hours a day.

One needs to live in a country where there is a dearth of women to realize these situations. When my school was dismissed at four o’clock P.M., all the unemployed chivalry of “Jimtown” massed on the street corner at the Bella Union saloon to see this coveted bevy of California rosebuds pass on their way home. The Bella Union, by the way, was only a few yards from the church. Extremes got very close together in these mining camps. But the frequenters of the Bella Union, who gambled all night on the arid green baize of the monte table, had more than half paid for that church, and, I infer, wanted it in sight so that no other persuasion should run off with it. I was glad when these girls got married and entered another school of life, where I knew within a year’s time they were likely to have a master.