Another specimen thinker and speculator of that era was Carroll. He, too, had forever thrown aside pick and shovel, and when I met him he was a confirmed “tilter-back” under the Bella Union portico. Carroll was the theorist of Jamestown. He broached new ones daily; he talked them to everybody in Jamestown, and after making clean work of that hamlet would go up to Sonora and talk there, and lastly published them in the Union Democrat. Said Carroll one Monday morning to the Presbyterian domine: “Mr. H——, I heard your sermon yesterday on ‘Heaven.’ You argue, I think, that heaven is really a place. I think it ought to be a place, too. I’ve been thinking about it all night. I’m satisfied not only that it is a place, but that I’ve got at the locality, or at least have approximated to it. I’ve reasoned this out on purely scientific data, and here they are. We have an atmosphere, and they say it is from thirty-three to forty-five miles high. Angels only live in heaven, and angels have wings. If angels have wings, it’s proof that they must have an atmosphere to fly in. Now, the only atmosphere we are sure of is that around the earth. Therefore, putting all these facts and conclusions together, I’ve proved to myself that heaven must be from thirty-three to forty-five miles from the ground we stand on.”
On commencing my pedagogical career, I rented a room of Carroll. He owned at that time a quantity of real estate in Jamestown, some of which, including the premises I occupied, was falling rapidly and literally on his hands. The house I lived in was propped up several feet from the ground. The neighbors’ chickens fed under this house from the crumbs swept through the cracks in the floor. It was an easy house to sweep clean. Rumor said that during my landlord’s occupancy of these rooms many chickens had strangely disappeared, and that pistol shots had been heard from the interior of the house. The floor cracks did show powder marks, and there was an unaccountable quantity of feathers blowing about the yard. In a conversation with my landlord he admitted that his boomerang could beat a six-shooter in fetching a chicken. Then he showed me his boomerang, which was of accidental construction, being the only remaining leg and round of an oaken arm-chair. Properly shied, he said, it would kill a chicken at twenty yards. French Joe, who kept the grocery next to Keefe’s saloon, and it was in Jimtown a current report that Carroll and Joe had once invited the Catholic priest, Father A——, from Sonora to dinner; that the backbone of this dinner was a duck; that at or about this time Mrs. Hale, five doors down the street, had missed one of her flock of ducks; that on the morning of the dinner in question a strong savor of parboiling duck permeated all that part of Jamestown lying between Joe’s and Mrs. Hale’s; that Mrs. Hale smelt it; that putting two and two—cause and effect and her own suspicions—together, she armed herself with her bun-tormentor fork and going from her back yard to the little outdoor kitchen in Joe’s back yard found a pot over a fire and her presumed duck parboiling in it; and that, transfixing this duck on her tormentor, she bore it home, and the priest got no duck for dinner.
Carroll’s mortal aversion was the hog. His favorite occupation for ten days in the early spring was gardening, and his front fence was illy secured against hogs, for Carroll, though a man of much speculative enterprise, was not one whose hands always seconded the work of his head. There was not a completed thing on his premises, including a well which he had dug to the depth of twelve feet and which he had then abandoned forever. The hogs would break through his fence and root up his roses, and the well caving in about the edges became a yawning gulf in his garden, and during the rainy season it partly filled up with water, and a hog fell in one night and, to Carroll’s joy, was drowned.
Men did their best in the dead of a rainy night to get the poor animal out, but a hog is not a being possessed of any capacity for seconding or furthering human attempts at his own rescue. So he drowned, and was found the morning after a grand New Year’s ball at the Bella Union Hall hanging by Joyce’s clothes-line over the middle of the street between the Bella Union and the Magnolia. The next night they put him secretly in the cart of a fish-peddler who had come up with salmon from the lower San Joaquin, and this man unwittingly hauled the hog out of town.
About four weeks after this transaction, coming home one dark, rainy night, I heard a great splashing in the well, and called out to Carroll that he had probably caught another hog. He came out with a lantern and both of us peering over the brink of the cavity saw, not as we expected, a hog, but a man, a friend of Carroll’s, up to his chest in the water. He was a miner from Campo Seco, who, on visiting Jimtown on one of his three months periodical sprees, had called on Carroll, and on leaving had mistaken the route to the gate and walked into the well. We fished him out with much difficulty, and on gaining the brink he came near precipitating us and himself into the unfinished chasm through the unsteadiness of his perpendicular. As we turned to leave, looking down the well by the lantern’s flash I saw what appeared to be another man half floating on the surface. There was a coat and at the end of it a hat, and I remarked, “Carroll, there is another man down your well.” The rescued miner looked down also, and chattered as he shivered with cold, “Why, s-s-so there is!” We were really horrified until we discovered the supposed corpse to be only Lewellyn’s coat with his hat floating at the end of it, which he had taken off in his endeavor to clamber out.
Carroll, unfortunately, allowed his mind to wander and stray overmuch in the maze of theological mysteries and its (to him) apparent contradictions. He instituted a private and personal quarrel between himself and his Creator, and for years he obtruded his quarrel into all manner of places and assemblages. He arrived at last at that point where many do under similar circumstances—a belief in total annihilation after death, and this serving to make him more miserable than ever, his only relief was to convert others to the same opinion and make them as wretched as himself. Occasionally he succeeded. He came to me one day and on his face was the grin of a fiend. “I’ve got Cummings,” said he. “Cummings thought this morning he was a good Methodist, but I’ve been laboring with him for weeks. I’ve convinced him of the falsity of it all. I knocked his last plank of faith from under him to-day. He hasn’t now a straw to cling to, and he’s as miserable as I am.”
“But with Mullins,” he remarked afterward, “I’ve slipped up on him. I wrought three weeks with Mullins; took him through the Bible, step by step—unconverted him steadily as we went along—got him down to the last leaf in the last chapter of the last book of Revelations, and there, fool like, I let up on him to go home to supper. And do you know when I tackled him next morning, to close out Mullins’ faith in the religion of his fathers, I found Mullins, in my absence, had got scared. He’d galloped in belief way back to Genesis, and now, I’ve got all that job to do over again.”
There was a great deal of life in those little mining camps in Tuolumne County like Jamestown. They might not have the population of a single block in New York City, but there was a far greater average of mental activity, quickness, and intelligence to the man, at least so far as getting the spice out of life was concerned.
The social life of a great city may be much more monotonous through that solitude imposed by great numbers living together. Everybody at these camps knew us, and we knew everybody, and were pretty sure of meeting everybody we knew. In the town one is not sure of meeting an acquaintance socially, save by appointment. There are few loafing or lounging resorts; people meet in a hurry and part in a hurry. Here in New York I cross night and morning on a ferry with five hundred people, and of these 495 do not speak or know each other.
Four hundred of these people will sit and stare at each other for half an hour, and all the time wish they could talk with some one. And many of these people are so meeting, so crossing, so staring, and so longing to talk year in and year out. There is no doctor’s shop where the impromptu symposium meets daily in the back room, as ours did at Doc Lampson’s in Montezuma, or Baker’s in Jamestown, or Dr. Walker’s in Sonora. There’s no reception every evening at the Camp grocery as there used to be at “Bill Brown’s” in Montezuma. There’s no lawyer’s office, when he feels privileged to drop in as we did at Judge Preston’s in Jamestown, or Judge Quint’s in Sonora. There’s no printing office and editorial room all in one on the ground floor whereinto the “Camp Senate,” lawyer, Judge, doctor, merchant and other citizens may daily repair in the summer’s twilight, tilted back in the old hacked arm chairs on the front portico, and discuss the situation as we used to with A. N. Francisco of the Union Democrat in Sonora, and as I presume the relics of antiquity and “’49” do at that same office to-day. These are a few of the features which made “Camp” attractive. These furnished the social anticipations which lightened our footsteps over those miles of mountain, gulch, and flat. Miles are nothing, distance is nothing, houses a mile apart and “Camps” five miles apart are nothing when people you know and like live in those camps and houses at the end of those miles. An evening at the Bella Union saloon in “Jimtown” was a circus. Because men of individuality, character, and originality met there. They had something to say. Many of them had little to do, and, perhaps, for that very reason their minds the quicker took note of so many of those little peculiarities of human nature, which when told, or hinted, or suggested prove the sauce piquant to conversation.