Prentice Mulford's story: life by land and sea

by Prentice Mulford

I went forth at first afoot with the few dollars paid me. I subsisted in a hap-hazard—indeed I must say beggarly fashion, stopping with mining friends and dependent to great extent on their hospitality, while I “held” the few claims I had already found and found others in their neighborhood.

At last I found a man who subscribed the use of a horse for the summer in consideration of being enrolled as a shareholder. On similar terms I gained a saddle, a shot-gun, a dog, and some provisions. This put the “Company” on a more stable footing, for I was now no longer dependent on house or hospitality, and could stop wherever night overtook me, and wood, water, and grass were at hand.

My horse I think was the slowest of his kind in the Great West, and my gun kicked so vigorously when discharged that I frequently sustained more injury than the game aimed at.

My field of operations extended over 150 miles of country, from the foot hills of the Sierras to their summits and beyond in the Territory of Nevada. Land, wood, water, grass, and game, if found, were free in every direction. The country was not fenced in, the meaning of “trespassing” on land was unknown—in fact it was then really a free country—a term also not altogether understood in the older States, where if you build a camp-fire in a wood lot you run some risk from the farmer who owns it, and his bulldog.

Sometimes, I would be a week or ten days without seeing a human face. A roof rarely covered me. I would camp one day near a mountain summit looking over fifty or sixty miles of territory and the next at its base with a view bounded by a wall of rock a few hundred yards distant. Sometimes I was very lonesome and uneasy at night in these mountain solitudes. I longed generally about sundown for some one to talk to. Anything human would answer such purpose then. In the bright clear morning the lonesome feeling was all gone. There was companionship then in the trees, the clouds, the mountain peaks, far and near, yet there were times when the veriest clod was better than all of these. Sometimes nothing but another human tongue will answer our needs, though it be a very poor one.

The first evening I spent alone in the forest, I left my dog “Put” to guard the camp. He wanted to follow me. I drove him back. He went back like a good dog and ate up most of my bacon which I had not hung high enough on the tree. By this experience I learned to hang my bacon higher. Wisdom must always be paid for.

I journeyed in the primeval forests of the Sierras. The primeval forest is dismal and inconvenient to travel through with fallen and rotten tree trunks interlacing each other in every direction. I have travelled half a day and found myself farther than ever from the place I wanted to reach. I have made at eve a comfortable camp under a great tree and when all arrangements were completed scrabbled out of it precipitately and packed my baggage elsewhere on looking up and seeing directly above me a huge dead limb hanging by a mere splinter, ready to fall at any moment and impale me. I think I know just how Damocles felt in that sword and hair business. Wolves sometimes frightened me at night exceedingly with their howlings. Bands of then unwarlike Indians also scared me. They were Utes fishing in the Walker River. Five years previous they had been hostile. Once I stumbled on one of their camps on the river bank. Before I could sneak off unseen one of them came up to me, announcing himself as the chief. He wanted to know who I was, where I came from, and where I was going. I answered all the questions this potentate asked me, acceded to his request for some “hoggadi” (tobacco), and when I found myself half a mile distant from His Majesty with a whole skin and all of my worldly goods intact, believed more firmly than ever in a kind and protecting Providence. I don’t suppose I stood in any real danger, but a lone man in a lone country with an average of one white settler to every five square miles of territory won’t naturally feel as easy in such circumstances as at his own breakfast table.

I learned never to pass a spot having wood, water, and grass after four o’clock in the afternoon, but make my camp for the night there. I learned on staking my horse out, not to give him pasture too near my camp-fire, for more than once in changing his base for a better mouthful of grass, has he dragged the lariat over my temporary possessions, upsetting coffee-pot and frying-pan and knocking the whole camp endways. I learned to camp away from the main road or trail leading over the mountains to Nevada, for it was beset by hungry, ragged men who had started afoot for the silver mines with barely a cent in their pockets, trusting to luck to get through, and who stumbling on my camp must be fed. You can’t sit and eat in your own out-door kitchen and see your fellow-beings eye you in hunger. But they ate me at times out of house and home, and the provision laid in for a week would not last three days with such guests. An old Frenchman so found me one day at dinner. He was starved. I kept my fresh meat in a bag. I handed him the bag and told him to broil for himself over the coals. Then I hauled off in the bush a little while to look at some rock. When I returned the bag was empty; two pounds of beef were inside the Frenchman and he didn’t seem at all abashed or uneasy. These experiences taught me that charity and sympathy for others must be kept under some government or our own meal bags, bread bags, and stomachs may go empty.

Grizzlies were common in those mountain solitudes, but I never saw one nor the track of one, nor even thought of them near as much as I would now, if poking about in the chaparral as I did then. I was camped near a sheep herder one evening, when, seeing my fire about a quarter of a mile from his cabin, he came to me and said, “Young man, this isn’t a good place to stop in over night. You’re right in the track of the grizzlies. They’ve killed twenty-six of my sheep inside of three weeks. You’d better sleep in my barn.” I did so.

I learned never to broil a steak on a green pitch-pine branch till I got accustomed to the flavor of the turpentine which the heat would distil and the meat absorb.