The immediate trouble seems partly to have arisen from General Kearny’s insisting that Colonel Mason should remain through the interview, on the ground that he was the officer appointed to succeed to command in California after the approaching departure of General Kearny. The situation was antagonistic. Kearny finally gave Frémont a limited time in which to declare himself as to obeying the General’s orders, and after an hour’s consideration he returned agreeing to obey. He was then directed to report at Monterey at the earliest possible moment. Of the impending insurrection at Los Angeles nothing more is heard.
The great ride which culminated at Monterey in this unsatisfactory interview was one of the most remarkable on record for speed and distance. Few men would have the endurance necessary to accomplish such a feat, but Frémont was a man of iron. At dawn, March 22, 1847, he rode out of Los Angeles accompanied by his devoted friend Don Jesus Pico, like all Californians of that day a superb horseman full of endurance, and by the equally devoted coloured man Jacob Dodson, now, by his long experience, the equal of a Californian in riding and lasso-throwing. Besides their three mounts they drove before them six other horses in good condition, all unshod, and from time to time (about every twenty miles), Dodson or Pico would rope fresh horses from the free band to relieve the tired mounts. Changing saddles was but the work of a few seconds, and off they sped again. By night of this first day they had made 120 miles, over mountains and valleys, part of the way by the Rincon, the precarious path along the coast, possible only at low tide, and they slept beyond Santa Barbara at the ranch of Señor Robberis. The second day the distance covered was 135 miles, over the mountains where the Battalion had been so furiously beaten down by the terrible storm described by Bryant, and they counted the skeletons of fifty horses that had succumbed on that day of exposure and suffering.
Sunset found them at Captain Dana’s place taking supper; and the home of Pico, San Luis Obispo, was reached by nine in the night. Here a warm welcome met Frémont for his clemency to Pico in the matter of the parole, and it was eleven o’clock the next morning before they were again in the saddle, with eight fresh horses and a Spanish boy for herder, and riding for Monterey. Seventy miles to their credit brought them to a halt for the night in the valley of the Salinas, where they were barred from sleep by a number of grizzly bears prowling near and frightening the horses. Frémont was for shooting them but Pico said no, and he shouted at them something in Spanish when they forthwith retired! But a large fire was then built, breakfast was prepared, and at break of day the last stretch of the road to Monterey was taken at a fine pace, the ninety miles being covered by three in the afternoon (March 25th) making a grand total in four days of 420 miles. Frémont, that evening, had the interview, with General Kearny, above referred to, which H. H. Bancroft regards as the “turning point” in the Kearny-Frémont affair. The next day, at four in the afternoon, the party started on the return to Los Angeles and they made 40 miles. The following day 120 miles more were put between them and Monterey, and with 130 miles then on each of the two succeeding days, the Colonel and his companions rode into Los Angeles on the ninth day after his start from there; a total journey of 840 miles over rough country in 76 actual riding hours by the use of 17 horses. To test one of them Frémont rode him without change for 130 miles in 24 hours. The famous ride from Ghent to Aix, immortalised by Browning, was barely more than the least one of these eight days of Frémont. Browning missed an opportunity. Riding with a herd of loose horses running ahead from which the lasso any moment can bring one a fresh mount is highly exhilarating. I tried it once, with 25 horses, for some 300 miles across Utah, but I was not bent on saving Aix or even Los Angeles.
THE LUCK OF ROARING CAMP
BRET HARTE
From “The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches.” Reprinted by permission of the publishers, Houghton, Mifflin Company, Boston.[15]
There was commotion in Roaring Camp. It could not have been a fight, for in 1850 that was not novel enough to have called together the entire settlement. The ditches and claims were not only deserted, but “Tuttle’s grocery” had contributed its gamblers, who, it will be remembered, calmly continued their game the day that French Pete and Kanaka Joe shot each other to death over the bar in the front-room. The whole camp was collected before a rude cabin on the outer edge of the clearing. Conversation was carried on in a low tone, but the name of a woman was frequently repeated. It was a name familiar enough in the camp,—“Cherokee Sal.”
Perhaps the less said of her the better. She was a coarse, and, it is to be feared, a very sinful woman. But at that time she was the only woman in Roaring Camp, and was just then lying in sore extremity, when she most needed the ministration of her own sex. Dissolute, abandoned and irreclaimable, she was yet suffering a martyrdom hard enough to bear even when veiled by sympathizing womanhood, but now terrible in her loneliness. The primal curse had come to her in that original isolation which must have made the punishment of the first transgression so dreadful. It was, perhaps, part of the expiation of her sin, that, at a moment when she most lacked her sex’s intuitive tenderness and care, she met only the half-contemptuous faces of her masculine associates. Yet a few of the spectators were, I think, touched by her sufferings. Sandy Tipton thought it was “rough on Sal,” and, in the contemplation of her condition, for a moment rose superior to the fact that he had an ace and two bowers in his sleeve.
It will be seen, also, that the situation was novel. Deaths were by no means uncommon in Roaring Camp, but a birth was a new thing. People had been dismissed from the camp effectively, finally, and with no possibility of return; but this was the first time that anybody had been introduced ab initio. Hence the excitement.
“You go in there, Stumpy,” said a prominent citizen known as “Kentuck,” addressing one of the loungers. “Go in there, and see what you kin do. You’ve had experience in them things.”