We stop at the “Judge’s” for the night. Wife and child are sent off to the Indian camp in the chaparral. Sam Lugar drops in after supper. The Judge is an incessant talker. The bottles and glasses are placed on the table. The Judge becomes fatherly as to counsel and admonition against excess in drink. Also against gambling. He has peculiar theological views. Moses, he says, was a keen old miner. He and Aaron put up a plan to gain all the gold in the Israelites’ possession. While Moses was on Mount Sinai receiving the stone tables, Aaron was counselling the making and worship of the golden calf. By such means did he concentrate in a lump all the Jews’ jewelry. What then? Moses comes down, sees the calf, gets angry, breaks into pieces, burns it up. But what becomes of the gold? Didn’t Moses and Aaron sneak around that night and “pan it out” of the ashes?
The Judge is his own theologian.
We visit Price, of Hawkins’ Bar. Price is now the sole constituency of Hawkins’. He ran this bar in its golden infancy; he saw it in its youth; he is steadfast to it in its decay. Thirty-four years ago, eight hundred men lived here; the Tuolumne banks were lined with them, shaking their cradles. From the top of yonder red hill the combined grating of the pebbles shaken in hundreds of rocker-sieves sounded like the crash of machinery in a cotton mill.
Old Hawkins first discovered gold here. Price tells of the pickle-jars full he had buried under the floor of his cabin. The secret could not be kept. They came trooping down the steep Red Mountain trail, blankets and tools on their backs, footsore, weary, thirsty, hungry—but hungrier still for gold. They put up tents and brush houses, or crept, slept and cooked under projecting rocks; they stood all day in ice-cold water; they overworked bodies hitherto unused to manual labor; they blistered delicate hands; they lived on bacon and heavy bread of their own making; they drank raw whiskey by the quart; they died, and were buried almost where they died, in nameless graves. Up yonder, but a few yards in the rear of Price’s cabin, is the old camp graveyard. The fence is rotting away and stands at various angles. The inscriptions on the headboards are half effaced by time and the elements. Some are split and have fallen down. Read “Jacob Peiser, æt. 27.” He died close by in the gulch hard by, with a pistol-bullet through him. A dispute over a claim. “Samuel Purdy, 31.” Drowned trying to cross the river during a freshet. “John Wilkins, æt. 35.” Killed by a cave in the bank claim about a hundred yards away. “Samuel Johnson, æt. 25.” He dove with a sand bag to stop a great leak in the Ford Chann’s head wall, and he stopped the leak in part with his own body, for the stream sucked him in the crevice and he never came up alive. “John Weddell, 35.” Blown up by the premature explosion of a blast in the Split Rock quartz claim. “Abram Hewison, 45.” Delirium tremens, stark mad at midnight, jumped into the river from the point yonder, where the stream whirls round the bend with tremendous force and then rushes down toward the long deep cañon a mile away in a succession of great white crested billows, whose sad, never-ceasing murmur seems an eternal requiem for those lying here.
Price has seen all this. That was the climax of his life. Price’s heaven is not in the future. It is in the past. It is embraced in a period about twenty-five years ago, when he made “an ounce per day.” Those, he remarks, were times worth living for. Eight hundred souls then at Hawkins’; five gambling houses in full blast every night; music, dancing, and fandangos at either end of the bar.
The river roars unvexed toward the sea. It has burst through its dams and choked the races with sand. The scars and furrows on the hill sides are quite hidden by the thickly growing vegetation; young oaks and pines are coming up in the place of the old. Trail and road are overgrown with brush. Among the rank weeds we stumble on traces of man’s former presence—the top of a saloon counter, the mahogany leg and faded green cushion of a billiard table, rusty tin ware, broken picks and shovels, a few rude stone chimneys, about whose blackened fire-places years ago gathered the hopeful, sanguine men of “’49.” It is so still. The declining afternoon sun is throwing long shadows from the mountains on the other bank. Slowly they creep up and shade the steeps on our side. Every moan and babble of the Tuolumne falls distinctly on the ear.
“Civilization” here put in a transient appearance. It scarred the hill sides with pits and furrows dug for gold. It cut down the wide-spreading symmetrical oaks. It forced the Tuolumne through race and flume from its channels. It built gaudy temples dedicated to the worship of Bacchus, resplendent with mirrors, pictures, and cut-glassware, located on the very site where a few months previous stood the Indian’s smoking wigwam. It brought toiling men, hard-fisted, awkward, ungainly, clumsy, with all grace and suppleness worked out of them and strong only to lift and dig. It brought all manner of men, educated and ignorant, cultivated and coarse, yet for whom Christian training, Christian Church, Christian Bible, Christian spire in city, town, and village pointing heavenward, had failed to convince that gold was not the chief aim and end of all human effort. By day there was labor drudging, labor spasmodic, a few prizes, many blanks, some hope, much more discouragement. By night, revelry, carousal, gambling, oaths, recklessness, pistol shots, knife thrusts, bloodshed, death. Bird and beast fled affrighted to lonelier and more secure retreats before the advent of the raging, cruel animal man.
But now civilization has flown and nature seems easier and somewhat improved by its absence. Price is ours. He will walk nine miles on election day to Chinese Camp, the nearest precinct, to deposit a ballot for us. An order on the proprietor of the Phœnix Saloon for a generous supply of whiskey stimulates his devotion to his country. What a glorious land of liberty is this! See in the clear azure sky above us, floating a mere speck, the eagle, the bird of freedom! He poises himself for a swoop. He comes rushing down on quivering pinion. Nearer! nearer! It is a turkey buzzard, who has scented a dead horse.
Constituencies can only be found where civilization rages.