I was once “barred out” at the close of a summer term. This was a fashion imported from the extreme southwestern part of what some call “Our Beloved Union.” Returning from dinner I found the doors and windows of the university closed against me. I parleyed at one of the windows a few feet from the ground. I was met by a delegation of the two biggest boys. They informed me I could get in by coming out with a disbursement of $2.50, to treat the school to nuts, candies, and cakes. I did not accede, smashed the window and went in. Most of the undergraduates went suddenly out. I clinched with the biggest boy. The other, like a coward, ran away. The two together could easily have mastered me. Order was restored. The mutiny did not hang well together. It was not a good “combine.” The Northern-bred scholars did not quite understand this move, and did not really enter heartily into it. Their backing had been forced by the two big boys, and therefore had not good stuff in it.
The big boy had a cut face. So had I. His still bigger brother met me a few days after and wanted to pick a quarrel with me about the affair. A quarrel with his class always lay within easy approach of knife or pistol. Besides, I was a Yankee. He was a Texan. And this was in 1862, when the two sections in California were neighbors, but not very warm friends, and about equal in numbers.
I was discreet with this gentleman, if not valorous, and think under the same circumstances now I should take the same course. I do not believe in taking great risks with a ruffian because he abuses you.
My successor, poor fellow, did not get off as easily as I did. He corrected the son of another gentleman from the South. The gentleman called at the school-house the next day, asked him to the door and cracked his skull with the butt of his revolver. The risks then of imparting knowledge to the young were great. School teaching now in the mines is, I imagine, a tame affair compared with that past, so full of golden dreams and leaden realities.
If I could have taken that portion of my scholars who were beyond the A, B, C business to a shady grove of live oaks near by and talked to them for an hour or two a day, devoting each day to some special subject, at the same time encouraging questions from them, I believe I could have woke up more that was sleeping in their minds in a week than I did in a month by the cut-and-dried system I was obliged to follow. I would have taken them out of sight of the school-house, the desks and all thereunto appertaining, which to most children suggests a species of imprisonment. I think that amount of time and effort is enough in one day for both teacher and pupil. It would not be trifling work if one’s heart was in it, short as the time employed may seem, because a teacher must teach himself to teach. Knowing a thing is not always being able to make it plain to others. The gifted dunderhead who tried to teach me to play whist commenced by saying: “Now that’s a heart, and hearts is trumps, you know,” and went on with the game, deeming he had made things clear enough for anybody.
Would not one topic to talk about be enough for one day? Take the motive power of steam the first day, the cause of rain the second, the flight of birds and their structure for flying the third, the making of soil and its removal from mountain to plain the fourth, a talk on coal or some other kind of mining the fifth, and so on. Would not subjects continually suggest themselves to the interested teacher? And if you do get one idea or suggestion per day in the scholar’s mind, is not that a good day’s work? How many of us wise, grown-up people can retire at night saying, “I have learned a new thing to-day?”
But I am theorizing. I have placed myself in the ranks of those disagreeable, meddlesome people who are never satisfied with present methods. So I will say that I do not imagine that my suggestions will revolutionize our educational system, based rather heavily on the idea that youth is the time, and the only time, to learn everything, and also to learn a great many things at a time. In after years, when we settle down to our work, we try, as a rule, to learn but one thing at a time. How would a man stagger along if it was required of him five days out of seven to learn a bit of painting, then of horseshoeing, then of printing, and top off with a slice of elocution? It seems to me like an overcrowding of the upper intellectual story.
CHAPTER XIX.
“JIMTOWN.”
On those hot July and August afternoons, when the air simmered all along the heated earth, and I was trying to keep awake in my seminary on the hill, and wrestling with the mercury at 100 deg. and my sixty polyglot pupils, the grown up “boys” would be tilted back in their chairs under the portico and against the cool brick wall of the Bella Union. They did not work, but they spun yarns. How half the boys lived was a mystery—as much a mystery, I do believe, to themselves as any one else. Some owned quartz claims, some horses, and all ran regularly for office. They belonged to the stamp of men who worked and mined in earlier times, but come what might, they had resolved to work in that way no longer. And when such resolve is accompanied by determination and an active, planning, inventive brain, the man gets along somehow. It is speculation that makes fortunes, and plan, calculation, and forethought for speculation, require leisure of body. A hard-working, ten-hour-per-day digging, delving miner works all his brains out through his fingers’ ends. He has none left to speculate with. When I was mining at Swett’s Bar, there came one day to my cabin a long, lean, lank man looking for a lost cow. The cow and the man belonged near Jacksonville, twelve miles up the Tuolumne. I dined that man principally off some bread of my own making, and I had the name then of making the best bread of any one in the house, where I lived alone. After dinner the man sat himself down on one boulder and I on another, and I asked him if he had a good claim. That roused him to wrath. He had, it seems, just reached the last point of his disgust for hard work and mining. Said he: “Don’t talk to me of a good claim; don’t. It sounds like speaking of a good guillotine, or a beautiful halter, or an elegant rack you’re about to be stretched on.” He had gone through his probation of hard work with his hands and had just resolved to let them rest and give his head a chance to speculate. So he did. I don’t know that he ever met the cow again, but eight or nine years after I met him in the Legislature of California. He sat in the biggest chair there, and was Lieutenant-Governor of the State.
In 1860 the certain class of men of whom I speak were in a transition state. They had left off working with their hands and they were waiting for something to turn up on which to commence working with their heads. While thus waiting they became boys and played. The climate and surroundings were eminently favorable to this languid, loafing condition of existence, no long, sharp winters forcing people to bestir themselves and provide against its severities; little style to keep up; few families to maintain; no disgrace for a man to cook his own victuals; houses dropping to pieces; little new paint anywhere to make one’s eyes smart; gates dropping from their hinges; few municipal improvements, with accompanying heavy taxes, and that bright summer sun for months and months shining over all and tempting everybody to be permanently tired and seek the shade. The boys forgot their years; they dreamed away their days; they gossipped all the cool night; they shook off dignity; they played; they built waterwheels in the ditch running by the Bella Union door; they instituted ridiculous fictions and converted them into realities; they instituted a company for the importation of smoke in pound packages into Jamestown; Muldoon was President and the “Doctor” Secretary. It was brought by a steamer up Wood’s Creek; the steamer was wrecked on a dam a mile below town; the company met day after day in old Nielsen’s saloon to consult; the smoke was finally taken to Jamestown and sold; the proceeds were stored in sacks at the express office; there was an embezzlement consequent on the settlement; the money, all in ten-cent pieces, was finally deposited in the big wooden mortar over Baker’s drug store; this the “Doctor” was accused of embezzling, having time after time climbed up the mortar and abstracted the funds dime after dime and spent them for whiskey. Then came a lawsuit. Two mule teams freighted with lawyers for the plaintiff and defendant were coming from Stockton, and the Pound Package Smoke Company met day after day in preparation for the great trial. This fiction lasted about four months, and amused everybody except Captain James S——, an ex-Sheriff of the county, who, being a little deaf, and catching from time to time words of great financial import regarding the Pound Package Jamestown Smoke Company, as they dropped from Muldoon’s and the “Doctor’s” mouths, and being thereby time after time misled into a temporary belief that this fiction was a reality, and so often becoming irritated at finding himself ridiculously mistaken, burst out upon these two worthies one day with all the wrath becoming the dignity of a Virginia gentleman, and denounced them profanely and otherwise for their frivolity and puerility.