In El Dorado City we stayed not long enough for the exploration of the once famous surface gold mines, now forming one long vineyard, but, rolling on, were soon among the tents of Placerville, which had been swept with fire a few months before. All these valley diggings have been deserted for deep-sinking—not that they are exhausted yet, but that the yield has ceased to be sufficient to tempt the gambling digger. The men who lived in Placerville and made it infamous throughout the world some years ago are scattered now through Nevada, Arizona, Montana, and the Frazer country, and Chinamen and Digger Indians have the old workings to themselves, settling their rights as against each other by daily battle and perpetual feud. The Digger Indians are the most degraded of all the aborigines of North America—outcasts from the other tribes—men under a ban—“tapu,” as their Maori cousins say—weaponless, naked savages who live on roots, and pester the industrious Chinese.
It is not with all their foes that the yellow men can cope so easily. In a tiny Chinese theater in their camp near Placerville, I saw a farce which to the remainder of the audience was no doubt a very solemn drama, in which the adventures of two Celestials on the diggings were given to the world. The only scene in which the pantomime was sufficiently clear for me to read it without the possibility of error was one in which a white man—“Melican man”—came to ask for taxes. The Chinamen had paid their taxes once before, but the fellow said that didn‘t matter. The yellow men consulted together, and at last agreed that the stranger was a humbug, so the play ended with a big fight, in which they drove him off their ground. A Chinaman played the over ’cute Yankee, and did it well.
Perhaps the tax-collectors in the remoter districts of the States count on the Chinese to make up the deficiencies in their accounts caused by the non-payment of their taxes by the whites; for even in these days of comparative quiet and civilization, taxes are not gathered to their full amount in any of the Territories, and the justice of the collector is in Montana tempered by many a threat of instant lynching if he proceeds with his assessment. Even in Utah, the returns are far from satisfactory: the three great merchants of Salt Lake City should, if their incomes are correctly stated, contribute a heavier sum than that returned for the whole of the population of the Territory.
The white diggers who preceded the Chinese have left their traces in the names of lodes and places. There is no town in California with such a title as the Coloradan City of Buckskin Joe, but Yankee Jim comes near it. Placerville itself was formerly known as Hangtown, on account of its being the city in which “lynch-law was inaugurated.” Dead Shot Flat is not far from here, and within easy distance are Hell‘s Delight, Jackass Gulch, and Loafer‘s Hill. The once famous Plug-ugly Gulch has now another name; but of Chucklehead Diggings and Puppytown I could not find the whereabouts in my walks and rides. Graveyard Canyon, Gospel Gulch, and Paint-pot Hill are other Californian names. It is to be hoped that the English and Spanish names will live unmutilated in California and Nevada, to hand down in liquid syllables the history of a half-forgotten conquest, an already perished race. San Francisco has become “Frisco” in speech if not on paper, and Sacramento will hardly bear the wear and tear of Californian life; but the use of the Spanish tongue has spread among the Americans who have dealings with the Mexican country folk of California State, and, except in mining districts, the local names will stand.
It is not places only that have strange designations in America. Out of the Puritan fashion of naming children from the Old Testament patriarchs has grown, by a sort of recoil, the custom of following the heroes of the classics, and when they fail, inventing strange titles for children. Mahonri Cahoon lives in Salt Lake City; Attila Harding was secretary to one of the governors of Utah; Michigan University has for president Erastus Haven; for superintendent, Oramel Hosford; for professors, Abram Sanger, Silas Douglas, Moses Gunn, Zina Pitcher, Alonzo Pitman, De Volson Wood, Lucius Chapin, and Corydon Ford. Luman Stevens, Bolivar Barnum, Wyllys Ransom, Ozora Stearnes, and Buel Derby were Michigan officers during the war, and Epaphroditus Ransom was formerly governor of the State. Theron Rockwell, Gershon Weston, and Bela Kellogg are well-known politicians in Massachusetts, and Colonel Liberty Billings is equally prominent in Florida. In New England school-lists it is hard to pick boys from girls. Who shall tell the sex of Lois Lombard, Asahel Morton, Ginery French, Royal Miller, Thankful Poyne? A Chicago man, who was lynched in Central Illinois while I was in the neighborhood, was named Alonza Tibbets. Eliphalet Arnould and Velenus Sherman are ranchmen on the overland road; Sereno Burt is an editor in Montana; Persis Boynton a merchant in Chicago. Zelotes Terry, Datus Darner, Zeryiah Rainforth, Barzellai Stanton, Sardis Clark, Ozias Williams, Xenas Phelps, Converse Hopkins, and Hirodshai Blake are names with which I have met. Zilpah, Huldah, Nabby, Basetha, Minnesota, and Semantha are New England ladies; while one gentleman of Springfield, lately married, caught a Tartia. One of the earliest enemies of the Mormons was Palatiah Allen; one of their first converts Preserved Harris. Taking the pedigree of Joe Smith, the Mormon prophet, as that of a representative New England family, we shall find that his aunts were Lovisa and Lovina Mack, Dolly Smith, Eunice and Miranda Pearce; his uncles, Royal, Ira, and Bushrod Smith. His grandfather‘s name was Asael; of his great aunts one was Hephzibah, another Hypsebeth, and another Vasta. The prophet‘s eldest brother‘s name was Alvin; his youngest Don Carlos; his sister, Sophronia; and his sister-in-law, Jerusha Smith; while a nephew was christened Chilon. One of the nieces was Levira, and another Rizpah. The first wife of George A. Smith, the prophet‘s cousin, is Bathsheba, and his eldest daughter also bears this name.
In the smaller towns near Placerville, there is still a wide field for the discovery of character as well as gold; but eccentricity among the diggers here seems chiefly to waste itself on food. The luxury of this Pacific country is amazing. The restaurants and cafés of each petty digging-town put forth bills-of-fare which the “Trios Frères” could not equal for ingenuity; wine lists such as Delmonico‘s cannot beat. The facilities are great: except in the far interior or on the hills, one even spring reigns unchangeably—summer in all except the heat; every fruit and vegetable of the world is perpetually in season. Fruit is not named in the hotel bills-of-fare, but all the day long there are piled in strange confusion on the tables, Mission grapes, the Californian Bartlet pears, Empire apples from Oregon, melons—English, Spanish, American and Musk; peaches, nectarines, and fresh almonds. All comers may help themselves, and wash down the fruit with excellent Californian-made Sauterne. If dancing, gambling, drinking, and still shorter cuts to the devil have their votaries among the diggers, there is no employment upon which they so freely spend their cash as on dishes cunningly prepared by cooks—Chinese, Italian, Bordelais—who follow every “rush.” After the doctor and the coroner, no one makes money at the diggings like the cook. The dishes smell of the Californian soil; baked rock-cod à la Buena Vista, broiled Californian quail with Russian River bacon, Sacramento snipes on toast, Oregon ham with champagne sauce, and a dozen other toothsome things—these were the dishes on the Placerville bill-of-fare in an hotel which had escaped the fire, but whose only guests were diggers and their friends. A few Atlantic States dishes were down upon the list: hominy, cod chowder—hardly equal, I fear, to that of Salem—sassafras candy, and squash tart, but never a mention of pork and molasses, dear to the Massachusetts boy. All these good things the diggers, when “dirt is plenty,” moisten with Clicquot, or Heidsick cabinet; when returns are small, with their excellent Sonoma wine.
Even earthquakes fail to interrupt the triumphs of the cooks. The last “bad shake” was fourteen days ago, but it is forgotten in the joy called forth by the discovery of a thirteenth way to cook fresh oysters, which are brought here from the coast by train. There is still a something in Placerville that smacks of the time when tin-tacks were selling for their weight in gold.
Wandering through the only remaining street of Placerville before I left for the Southern country, I saw that grapes were marked “three cents a pound;” but as the lowest coin known on the Pacific shores is the ten-cent bit, the price exists but upon paper. Three pounds of grapes, however, for “a bit” is a practicable purchase, in which I indulged when starting on my journey South: in the towns you have always the hotel supply. If the value of the smallest coin be a test of the prosperity of a country, California must stand high. Not only is nothing less than the bit, or fivepence, known, but when fivepence is deducted from a “quarter,” or shilling, fivepence is all you get or give for change—a gain or loss upon which Californian shopkeepers look with profound indifference.
Hearing a greater jingling of glasses from one bar-room than from all the other hundred whisky-shops of Placerville, I turned into it to seek the cause, and found a Vermonter lecturing on Lincoln and the war to an audience of some fifty diggers. The lecturer and bar-keeper stood together within the sacred inclosure, the one mixing his drinks, while the other rounded off his periods in the inflated Western style. The audience was critical and cold till near the close of the oration, when the “corpse revivers” they were drinking seemed to take effect, and to be at the bottom of the stentorian shout, “Thet‘s bully,” with which the peroration was rewarded. The Vermonter told me that he had come round from Panama, and was on his way to Austin, as Placerville was “played out” since its “claims” had “fizzled.”
They have no lecture-room here at present, as it seems; but that there are churches, however small, appears from a paragraph in the Placerville news-sheet of to-day, which chronicles the removal of a Methodist meeting-house from Block A to Block C, vice a Catholic chapel retired, “having obtained a superior location.”