Ah Sam returned to the attorney, apparently deeming that some help might be obtained in that quarter; but Spoke intimated that he could no longer assist him, since it was every man’s special and particular mission to keep his own wife after being married; although he added, for Ah Sam’s comfort, that this was not such an easy matter for the Americans themselves, especially in California.
Upon this Ah Sam apparently determined to be satisfied with his brief and turbulent career in matrimony; and betaking himself again to Swett’s Bar cooked in such a villainous fashion and desperate vigor, finding thereby a balm for an aching heart, that in a twelvemonth several stalwart miners gave up their ghosts through indigestion, and the little graveyard on the red hill thereby lost forever its distinctive character of affording a final resting place only to those who had died violent deaths.
CHAPTER XXI.
ON A JURY.
Year after year, and term after term, the great case of Table Mountain Tunnel vs. New York Tunnel, used to be called in the Court held at Sonora, Tuolumne County. The opposing claims were on opposite sides of the great mountain wall, which here described a semicircle. When these two claims were taken up, it was supposed the pay streak followed the Mountain’s course; but it had here taken a freak to shoot straight across a flat formed by the curve. Into this ground, at first deemed worthless, both parties were tunnelling. The farther they tunnelled, the richer grew the pay streak. Every foot was worth a fortune. Both claimed it. The law was called upon to settle the difficulty. The law was glad, for it had then many children in the county who needed fees. Our lawyers ran their tunnels into both of these rich claims, nor did they stop boring until they had exhausted the cream of that pay streak. Year after year, Table Mountain vs. New York Tunnel Company was tried, judgment rendered first for one side and then for the other, then appealed to the Supreme Court, sent back, and tried over, until, at last, it had become so encumbered with legal barnacles, parasites, and cobwebs, that none other than the lawyers knew or pretended to know aught of the rights of the matter. Meantime, the two rival companies kept hard at work, day and night. Every ounce over the necessary expense of working their claims and feeding and clothing their bodies, went to maintain lawyers. The case became one of the institutions of the county. It outlived several judges and attorneys. It grew plethoric with affidavits and other documentary evidence. Men died, and with their last breath left some word still further to confuse the great Table Mountain vs. New York Tunnel case. The county town throve during this yearly trial. Each side brought a small army of witnesses, who could swear and fill up any and every gap in their respective chains of evidence. It involved the history, also, of all the mining laws made since “’49.” Eventually, jurors competent to try this case became very scarce. Nearly every one had “sat on it,” or had read or heard or formed an opinion concerning it, or said they had. The Sheriff and his deputies ransacked the hills and gulches of Tuolumne for new Table Mountain vs. New York Tunnel jurors. At last, buried in an out-of-the-way gulch, they found me. I was presented with a paper commanding my appearance at the county town, with various pains and penalties affixed, in case of refusal. I obeyed. I had never before formed the twelfth of a jury. In my own estimation, I rated only as the twenty-fourth. We were sworn in: sworn to try the case to the best of our ability; it was ridiculous that I should swear to this, for internally I owned I had no ability at all as a juror. We were put in twelve arm-chairs. The great case was called. The lawyers, as usual, on either side, opened by declaring their intentions to prove themselves all right and their opponents all wrong. I did not know which was the plaintiff, which the defendant. Twenty-four witnesses on one side swore to something, to anything, to everything; thirty-six on the other swore it all down again. They thus swore against each other for two days and a half. The Court was noted for being an eternal sitter. He sat fourteen hours per day. The trial lasted five days. Opposing counsel, rival claimants, even witnesses, all had maps, long, brilliant, parti-colored maps of their claims, which they unrolled and held before us and swung defiantly at each other. The sixty witnesses testified from 1849 up to 1864. After days of such testimony, as to ancient boundary lines and ancient mining laws, the lawyers on either side, still more to mystify the case, caucused the matter over and concluded to throw out about half of such testimony as being irrelevant. But they could not throw it out of our memories. The “summing up” lasted two days more. By this time, I was a mere idiot in the matter. I had, at the start, endeavored to keep some track of the evidence, but they managed to snatch every clue away as fast as one got hold of it. We were “charged” by the judge and sent to the jury room. I felt like both a fool and a criminal. I knew I had not the shadow of an opinion or a conclusion in the matter. However, I found myself not alone. We were out all night. There was a stormy time between the three or four jurymen who knew or pretended to know something of the matter. The rest of us watched the controversy, and, of course, sided with the majority. And, at last, a verdict was agreed upon. It has made so little impression on my mind that I forget now whom it favored. It did not matter. Both claims were then paying well, and this was a sure indication that the case would go to the Supreme Court. It did. This was in 1860. I think it made these yearly trips up to 1867. Then some of the more obstinate and combative members of either claim died, and the remainder concluded to keep some of the gold they were digging instead of paying it out to fee lawyers. The Table Mountain vs. New York Tunnel case stopped. All the lawyers, save two or three, emigrated to San Francisco or went to Congress. I gained but one thing from my experience in the matter—an opinion. It may or may not be right. It is that juries in most cases are humbugs.
CHAPTER XXII.
SOME CULINARY REMINISCENCES.
I lived once with an unbalanced cook. Culinarily he was not self-poised. He lacked judgment. He was always taking too large cooking contracts. He was for a time my partner. He was a lover of good living and willing to work hard for it over a cook stove. He would for a single Sunday’s dinner plan more dishes than his mind could eventually grasp or his hands handle. And when he had exhausted the whole of the limited gastronomical repertoire within our reach he would be suddenly inspired with a troublesome propensity to add hash to the programme. In cooking, as I have said, he lost his balance. His imagination pictured more possibilities than his body had strength to carry out. So busied in getting up a varied meal, he would in a few minutes’ leisure attempt to shave himself or sew on shirt or pantaloon buttons. This put too many irons in the fire. A man who attempts to shave while a pot is boiling over or a roast requiring careful watching is in the oven, will neither shave nor cook well. He will be apt to leave lather where it is not desirable, as he sometimes did. Trousers-buttons are not good in soup. I do not like to see a wet shaving brush near a roast ready to go into the oven. The æsthetic taste repudiates these hints at combination. Then sometimes, in the very crisis of a meal, he became flurried. He rushed about in haste overmuch, with a big spoon in one hand and a giant fork in the other, looking for missing stove-covers and pot-lids, seldom found until the next day, and then in strange places. Nothing is well done which is done in a hurry, especially cooking. Some argue that men and women put their magnetic and sympathetic influences in the food they prepare. If a man kneading bread be in a bad temper he puts bad temper in the bread, and that bad temper goes into the person who eats it. Or if he be dyspeptic he kneads dyspepsia in his dough. It is awful to think what we may be eating. I think the unbalanced cook puts flurries in his stews, for I felt sometimes as if trying to digest a whirlwind after eating this man’s dinners. He ruled the house. I was his assistant. I was his victim. I was the slave of the spit, and the peon of the frying-pan. When his energies culminated and settled on hash, when already the stove-top was full of dishes in preparation, I was selected as the proper person to chop the necessary ingredients. We had neither chopping-knife nor tray. The mining stores then did not contain such luxuries. This to him made no difference. He was a man who rose superior to obstacles, circumstances, and chopping trays. He said that hash could be chopped with a hatchet on a flat board. He planned; I executed. He theorized and invented; I put his inventions in practice. But never successfully could I chop a mass of beef and boiled potatoes with a hatchet on a flat board. The ingredients during the operation would expand and fall over the edge of the board. Or the finer particles would violently fly off at each cut of the hatchet, and lodge on the beds or other unseemly places.
I do not favor a dinner of many courses, especially if it falls to my lot to prepare these courses. Few cooks enjoy their own dinners. For two reasons: First—They eat them in anticipation. This nullifies the flavor of the reality. Second—The labor of preparation fatigues the body and takes the keen edge from the appetite. You are heated, flushed, exhausted, and the nerves in a twitter. The expected relish palls and proves a myth. Ladies who cook will corroborate my testimony on this point. It is a great, merciful and useful vent for a woman that a man can come forward able and willing to sympathize with her in regard to this and other trials of domestic life. Having kept my own house for years I know whereof I speak. Two hours’ work about a hot stove exhausts more than four hours’ work out of doors. Americans in Europe are shocked or pretend to be at sight of women doing men’s work in the fields. They are much better off than the American woman, five-sixths of whose life is spent in the kitchen. The outdoor woman shows some blood through the tan on her cheeks. The American kitchen housewife is sallow and bleached out. I have in Vienna seen women mixing mortar and carrying bricks to the sixth story of an unfinished house, and laying bricks, too. These women were bare-legged to the knee, and their arms and legs were muscular. They mixed their mortar with an energy suggestive of fearful consequences to an ordinary man of sedentary occupations. They could with ease have taken such a man and mixed him with their mortar. Coarse, were they? Yes, of course they were. But if I am to choose between a coarse woman, physically speaking, and one hot-housed and enervated to that extent that she cannot walk half a mile in the open air, but requires to be hauled, I choose the coarse-grained fibre.
I once lived near a literary cook. It was to him by a sort of natural heritage that fell the keeping of the Hawkins Bar Library, purchased by the “boys” way back in the A.D. eighteen hundred and fifties. The library occupied two sides of a very small cabin, and the man who kept it lived on or near the other two sides. There, during nights and rainy days, he read and ate. His table, a mere flap or shelf projecting from the wall, was two-thirds covered with books and papers, and the other third with a never-cleared-off array of table furniture, to wit: A tin plate, knife, fork, tin cup, yeast-powder can, pepper-box, ditto full of sugar, ditto full of salt, a butter-plate, a bottle of vinegar and another of molasses, and may be, on occasions, one of whiskey. On every book and paper were more or less of the imprint of greasy fingers, or streaks of molasses. The plate, owing to the almost entire absence of the cleansing process, was even imbedded in a brownish, unctuous deposit, the congealed oleaginous overflow of months of meals. There he devoured beef and lard, bacon and beans and encyclopedias, Humboldt’s “Cosmos” and dried apples, novels and physical nourishment at one and the same time. He went long since where the weary cease from troubling, and the wicked, let us hope, are at rest. Years ago, passing through the deserted Bar, I peeped in at Morgan’s cabin. A young oak almost barred the door, part of the roof was gone, the books and shelves had vanished; naught remained but the old miner’s stove and a few battered cooking utensils. I had some thought at the time of camping for the night on the Bar, but this desolate cabin and its associations of former days contrasted with the loneliness and solitude of the present proved too much for me. I feared the possible ghost of the dead librarian, and left for a populated camp. Poor fellow! While living, dyspepsia and he were in close embrace. A long course of combined reading and eating ruined his digestion. One thing at a time; what a man does he wants to do with all his might.
Eggs in the early days were great luxuries. Eggs then filled the place of oysters. A dish of ham and eggs was one of the brilliant anticipations of the miner resident in some lonesome gulch when footing it to the nearest large camp. A few enterprising and luxurious miners kept hens and raised chickens. The coons, coyotes, and foxes were inclined to “raise” those chickens too. There was one character on Hawkins Bar whose coop was large and well stocked. Eggs were regularly on his breakfast-table, and he was the envy of many. Generous in disposition, oft he made holiday presents of eggs to his friends. Such a gift was equivalent to that of a turkey in older communities. One foe to this gentleman’s peace and the security of his chickens alone existed. That foe was whiskey. For whenever elevated and cheered by the cup which does inebriate, he would in the excess of his royal nature call his friends about him, even after midnight, and slay and eat his tenderest chickens. Almost so certain as Kip got on a spree there came a feast and consequent midnight depletion of his chicken-coop—a depletion that was mourned over in vain when soberer and wiser counsels prevailed. The pioneer beefsteaks of California were in most cases cut from bulls which had fought bull-fights all the way up from Mexico. Firm in fibre as they were, they were generally made firmer still by being fried in lard. The meat was brought to the table in a dish covered with the dripping in which it had hardened. To a certain extent the ferocity and combativeness of human nature peculiar to the days of “’49” were owing to obstacles thrown in the way of easy digestion by bull beef fried to leather in lard. Bad bread and bull beef did it. The powers of the human system were taxed to the uttermost to assimilate these articles. The assimilation of the raw material into bone, blood, nerve, muscle, sinew and brain was necessarily imperfect. Bad whiskey was then called upon for relief. This completed the ruin. Of course men would murder each other with such warring elements inside of them.
The ideas of our pioneer cooks and housekeepers regarding quantities, kinds, and qualities of provisions necessary to be procured for longer or shorter periods, were at first vague. There was an Argonaut who resided at Truetts’ Bar, and, in the fall of 1850, warned by the dollar a pound for flour experience of the past winter, he resolved to lay in a few months’ provisions. He was a lucky miner. Were there now existing on that bar any pioneers who lived there in ’49, they would tell you how he kept a barrel of whiskey in his tent on free tap. Such men are scarce and win name and fame. Said he to the Bar trader when the November clouds began to signal the coming rains, “I want to lay in three months’ provisions.” “Well, make out your order,” said the storekeeper. This troubled G——. At length he gave it verbally thus: “I guess I’ll have two sacks of flour, a side of bacon, ten pounds of sugar, two pounds of coffee, a pound of tea, and—and—a barrel of whiskey.”