But when you stand alone at Dry Bar, where you mined when it was a lively camp in 1857, with its score of muddy sluice streams coursing hither and thither, its stores, its saloons, its hotel and its express office, and see now but one rotting pine-log cabin, whose roof has tumbled in and whose sides have tumbled out; where all about is a silent waste of long-worked-off banks or bare ledge and piles of boulders in which the herbage has taken root; where every mark of the former houses and cabins has disappeared, save a mound here, or a pile of stone indicating a former chimney there, you have a lively realization of antiquity, though it be a recent one. You knew the men who lived here; you worked with them; you know the sites of the houses in which they lived; you have an event and a memory for every acre of territory hereabout. Down there, where the river narrows between those two high points of rock, once stood a rickety bridge. It became more and more shaky and dangerous, until one day Tom Wharton, the Justice of the Peace, fired by a desire pro bono publico and rather more than his ordinary quantity of whiskey, cut the bridge away with his axe and it floated down stream. Over yonder, on that sandy point, was the richest claim on the bar.
Will you go down to Pot-Hole Bar, two miles below? The trail ran by the river. But freshet after freshet has rushed over the bank and wiped out the track made by the footprints of a few years. There is no trace of the trail. The chaparral has grown over and quite closed it up. Here and there is a faint trace, and then it brings up short against a young pine or a buckeye, the growth of the last ten years. Yet in former days this path ranked in your mind of the importance of a town street. You had no idea how quickly nature, if left alone, will restore things to what we term “primitive conditions.” If a great city was deserted in these foothills, within twenty years’ time the native growths would creep down and in upon it, start plantations of chaparral in the streets, festoon the houses with vines, while winged seeds would fill the gutters and cornices with verdure. It is a hard struggle through the undergrowth to Pot-Hole Bar. No man lives there now. No man goes there. Even the boulder piles and bare ledges of fifteen years ago, marking the scarifying work of your race on mother earth’s face, are now mounds overgrown with weeds. What solitude of ancient ruined cities equals this? Their former thousands are nothing to you as individuals; but you knew all the boys at Pot-Hole. It was a favorite after-supper trip from Dry Bar to Pot-Hole to see how the “boys” were getting on, and vice versa from Pot-Hole to Dry Bar.
A cotton-tail rabbit sends a flash of white through the bushes. His family now inhabits Pot-Hole. They came back after all of your troublesome race had left, and very glad were the “cotton-tails” of the riddance. There is a broken shovel at your feet and near by in the long grass you see the fragment of a sluice’s false bottom, bored through with anger holes to catch the gold and worn quite thin by the attrition of pebble and boulder along its upper surface. This is about the only vestige of the miner’s former work. Stop! On the hillside yonder is a mound-like elevation and beyond that a long green raised line. One marks the reservoir and the other the ditch. It was the Pot-Hole Company’s reservoir, built after they had concluded to take water from the ditch and wash off a point of gravel jutting toward the river. They had washed it all off by 1856, and then the company disbanded and went their respective ways. Pot-Hole lay very quiet for a couple of years, but little doing there save rocker washing for grub and whiskey by four or five men who had concluded that “grub and whiskey” was about all in life worth living for. A “slouchy” crowd, prone to bits of rope to tie up their suspenders, unshaven faces, and not a Sunday suit among them.
They pottered about the bar and the bank, working sometimes in concert and then quarrelling, and every man betaking himself to his private rocker, pick, and shovel for a few days or weeks and coming together again, as compelled by necessity. One of them commenced picking into a slim streak of gravel at the base of the red hard-pan bank left by the pot-holers. It paid to the pan first two cents and a little farther in three, and a little farther seven, and then the gold became coarser and heavier and it yielded a bit to the pan. The blue ledge “pitched in,” the gravel streak grew wider and richer, the crowd took up the whole face of the bank, 150 feet to the man, and found they had struck fortunes. And then they worked at short intervals and “went it” at long ones, and all save four drank themselves to death within four years.
They have all long since gone. They are scattered for the most part you know not where. Two are living in San Francisco and are now men of might and mark. Another you have heard of far away in the Eastern States, living in a remote village, whose name is never heard of outside the county bounds. One has been reported to you as “up North somewhere;” another down in Arizona “somewhere,” and three you can locate in the county. That is but seven out of the one hundred who once dwelt here and roundabout. Now that recollection concentrates herself you do call to mind two others—one died in the county almshouse and another became insane and was sent to Stockton. That is all. Nine out of the one hundred that once resided at Dry Bar. It is mournful. The river monotonously drones, gurgles, and murmurs over the riffle. The sound is the same as in ’58. A bird on the opposite bank gives forth, at regular intervals, a loud querulous cry. It was a bird of the same species whose note so wore on the nerves of Mike McDonald as he lay dying of consumption in a big house which stood yonder, that, after anathematizing it, he would beseech his watcher to take a gun and blow the “cussed” thing’s head off. Perhaps it is the same bird. The afternoon shadows are creeping down the mountain side. The outline of the hills opposite has not at all changed, and there, down by the bank, is the enormous fragment of broken rock against which Dick Childs built his brush shelter for the summer and out of which he was chased by a sudden fall rise of the river. But it is very lonesome with all these people here so vivid in memory, yet all gone, and never, never to come back.
You wonder if any of the “old crowd” now living, live over as you do the past life here; if a single one within the last ten years has ever revisited the spot; or if any of them have any desire to revisit it. Some of them did so once. There was Jake Bennett. As late as ’62, Jake, who had removed to the next county, would come every summer on a pilgrimage to “see the boys,” and the boys at Dry Bar were even then sadly reduced in number, for the camp ran down very quickly within the four years dating from ’58. But Jake was faithful to old memories and associations, and proved it by the ten-miles’ walk he was obliged to take to reach Dry Bar. Dry Bar was never on a regular stage route. Jake was an ex-Philadelphian and called rest “west” and violin “wiolin.” But no one comes here now, at least on any such errand. It’s a troublesome and rather expensive locality to reach and mere sentiment does not pay. The nearest resident is a Missouri hog-rancher, whose house is above on the hill a couple of miles away. He neither knows nor cares for Dry Bar’s former history. He came here but ten years ago. His half-wild swine are ambushed about in the shelter of the elder and buckeye bushes, and frightened at your approach plunge snorting into the deeper thickets.
Here it is. The remains of your own cabin chimney, a pile of smoke-blackened stones in the tall grass. Of the cabin every vestige has disappeared. You built that chimney yourself. It was an awkward affair, but it served to carry out the smoke, and when finished you surveyed it with pleasure and some pride, for it was your chimney. Have you ever felt “snugger” and more cozy and comfortable since than you did on the long, rainy winter nights, when, the supper finished and the crockery washed, you and your “pard” sat by the glowing coals and prepared your pipes for the evening smoke? There were great hopes and some great strikes on Dry Bar in those days; that was in ’52. Mining was still in the pan, rocker and long tom era; sluices were just coming in. Hydraulicking 100-foot banks and washing hills off the face of the earth had not been thought of. The dispute as to the respective merits of the long vs. the short-handled shovel was still going on. A gray or red shirt was a badge of honor. The deep river-beds were held to contain enormous store of golden nuggets. River mining was in its wing and coffer-dam phase.
Perhaps the world then seemed younger to you than now? Perhaps your mind then set little store on this picturesque spot, so wrapped were you in visions of the future? Perhaps then you wrote regularly to that girl in the States—your first heart’s-trouble—and your anticipation was fixed entirely on the home to be built up there on the gold you were to dig here? Perhaps the girl never married you, the home was never built and nothing approaching the amount of oro expected dug out. You held, then, Dry Bar in light estimation. It was for you only a temporary stopping place, from which you wished to get its gold as quickly as you could and get away from as soon as possible. You never expected Dry Bar, its memories and associations thus to make for themselves a “local habitation and a name” in your mind. We live sometimes in homes we do not realize until much of their material part has passed away. A horned toad scuttles along the dry grass and inflates himself to terrify you as you approach. Those rat-like ground squirrels are running from hole to hole, like gossiping neighbors, and “chipping” shrilly at each other. These are old summer acquaintances at Dry Bar.
Is it with a feeling of curiosity you take up one of those stones handled by you thirty-one years ago and wonder how like or unlike you may be to yourself at that time? Are you the same man? Not the same young man, certainly. The face is worn; the eyes deeper set; the hair more or less gray and there are lines and wrinkles where none existed then. But that is only the outside of your “soul case.” Suppose that you, the John Doe of 1883, could and should meet the John Doe of 1853? Would you know him? Would you agree on all points with him? Could you “get” along with him? Could you “cabin” with him? Could you “summer and winter” with him? Would the friends of the John Doe of ’53, who piled up that chimney, be the friends of the present John Doe, who stands regarding its ruins? Are the beliefs and convictions of that J. Doe those of this J. Doe? Are the jokes deemed so clever by that J. Doe clever to this J. Doe? Are the men great to that J. Doe great to the present J. Doe? Does he now see the filmly, frothy fragments of scores of pricked bubbles sailing away and vanishing in air? If a man die shall he live again? But how much of a man’s mind may die out and be supplanted by other ideas ere his body goes back to dust? How much of this J. Doe belongs to that J. Doe, and how much of the same man is there standing here?