I learned that when you have nothing for breakfast and must kill the only robin in sight or go without him, that robin will be ten times shyer and harder to coax within gunshot than when you don’t hunger for him.
I was not strong physically, and indeed far from being a well man. It was only the strong desire of finding a fortune in a mineral vein, that gave me strength at all. Once I was sick for three days, camped near a mountain top, and though it was June, every day brought a snow squall. A prospector from Silver City stumbled on my camp one day and declared he would not stay in such a place for all the silver in Nevada. The wind blew from a different quarter about every hour, and no matter where I built my fire, managed matters so as always to drive the smoke in my face. It converted me for a time into a belief of the total depravity of inanimate things.
I pre-empted in the name of the Company some of the grandest scenery in the world—valleys seldom trodden by man, with clear mountain streams flowing through them—lakes, still unnamed, reflecting the mountain walls surrounding them a thousand or more feet in height, and beautiful miniature mountain parks. In pre-empting them their commercial value entered little into my calculations. Sentiment and the picturesque, did. Claimants stronger than I, had firmer possession of these gems of the Sierras. The chief was snow, under which they were buried to the depth of ten or fifteen feet, seven months at least out of the twelve.
When once a month I came out of the mountains and put in an appearance among my shareholders, my horse burdened with blankets, provisions, tools, the frying-pan and tin coffee-pot atop of the heap, I was generally greeted with the remark, “Well, struck anything yet?” When I told my patrons of the land sites I had gained for them so advantageous for summer pasturages, they did not seem to catch my enthusiasm. They wanted gold, bright yellow gold or silver, very rich and extending deep in the ground, more than they did these Occidental Vales of Cashmere, or Californian Lakes of Como. They were sordid and sensible. I was romantic and ragged. They were after what paid. I was after what pleased.
The monthly three-dollar assessment from each shareholder came harder and harder. I dreaded to ask for it. Besides, two-thirds of my company were scattered over so much country that the time and expense of collecting ate up the amount received, a contingency I had not foreseen when I fixed my tax rate.
At last the end came. The man who subscribed the use of his horse, wanted him back. I gave him up. This dismounted the Company. Operations could not be carried on afoot over a territory larger than the State of Connecticut. I had indeed found several mineral veins, but they were in that numerous catalogue of “needing capital to develop them.” The General Prospector also needed capital to buy a whole suit of clothes.
I was obliged to suspend operations. When I stopped the Company stopped. Indeed I did not find out till then, that I was virtually the whole “Company.”
CHAPTER XXVI.
HIGH LIFE.
The “Company” died its peaceful death where I brought up when the horse was demanded of me in Eureka Valley, some 8,000 feet above the sea level, at Dave Hays’ mountain ranch and tavern on the Sonora and Mono road. This was a new road built by the counties of Stanislaus, Tuolumne and Mono to rival the Placerville route, then crowded with teams carrying merchandise to Virginia City. The Mono road cost three years of labor, and was a fine piece of work. It ran along steep mountain sides, was walled in many places fifteen or twenty feet in height for hundreds of yards, crossed creeks and rivers on a number of substantial bridges, and proved, like many another enterprise undertaken in California, a failure. In Eureka Valley I spent the winter of 1864-65. I had the company of two men, Dave Hays and Jack Welch, both good mountaineers, good hunters, good miners, ranchmen, hotel-keepers, good men and true at anything they chose to turn their hands to. Both are deserving of a fair share of immortal fame. Hays had most of his toes frozen off at the second joint a winter or two afterward, as he had become over-confident and thought he could risk anything in the mountains. He was belated one winter night crossing the “Mountain Brow,” distant some forty miles east of Eureka Valley. Over the “Brow” swept the coldest of winds, and Hays betook himself for shelter to a sort of cave, and when he emerged in the morning he was as good as toeless. In point of weather the Sierra summits are fearfully deceitful. You may cross and find it as fair as an October day in New England. In two hours a storm may come up, the air be filled with fine minute particles of snow blown from the surrounding peaks, and these striking against you like millions on millions of fine needle-points will carry the heat from your body much faster than the body can generate it. I was once nearly frozen to death in one of these snow-driving gales when less than three miles from our house. Hays built the house we lived in and it would have been a credit to any architect. It was fifty feet in length by eighteen in width, and made of logs, squared and dovetailed at the ends. It was intended for a “road house.” Hays was landlord, cook, chambermaid, and barkeeper. I have known him to cook a supper for a dozen guests and when they were bestowed in their blankets, there being no flour for breakfast, he would jump on horseback and ride to Niagara creek, twelve miles distant, supply himself and ride back to cook the breakfast.
When the winter set in at Eureka Valley, and it set in very early, it commenced snowing. It never really stopped snowing until the next spring. There were intervals of more or less hours when it did not snow, but there was always snow in the air; always somewhere in the heavens that grayish-whitey look of the snow cloud; always that peculiar chill and smell, too, which betoken snow. It snowed when we went to bed; it was snowing when we got up; it snowed all day, or at intervals during the day; it was ever monotonously busy, busy; sometimes big flakes, sometimes little flakes coming down, down, down; coming deliberately straight down, or driving furiously in our faces, or crossing and recrossing in zigzag lines. The snow heavens seemed but a few feet above the mountain-tops; they looked heavy and full of snow, and gave one a crushing sensation. We seemed just between two great bodies of snow, one above our heads, one lying on the ground.