Monday, Nov. 6. Vein-gold in these rocks is as uncertain and capricious as lightning; it straggles where you least expect it, and leaves only a stain where its quick volume seemed directed. It threads its way in a rock without crevice or crack, and where its continuity becomes at times too subtle for the naked eye, and then suddenly bulges out like a lank snake that has swallowed a terrapin. The great Hebrew proverbialist says there are three things about which there is no certainty,—the way of an eagle in the air, the way of a serpent upon a rock, the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and he might have added—the way of a thread of gold in a vein of California quartz; but probably California, with its treasures, had not then been discovered, though some of our wiseacres are trying to make out that this el dorado was the Ophir of the Old Testament: if so, the men of Joppa must have been pretty good seamen, especially as they had no compass. It may be, but I somewhat doubt it, that the Hottentots or Patagonians are the descendants of some shipwrecked men bound in a wherry from Tarsus to California. The adventurers, even in that case, would have been quite as sober in their calculations as some who put to sea on a gold-hunt in these days.
Tuesday, Nov. 7. The price of provisions here is no criterion of their market value on the seaboard, or even at the embarcaderos nearest the mines. The cost of a hundred pounds of flour at Stockton, only sixty miles distant, is twenty dollars; but here it is two hundred dollars. This vast disparity is owing to the difficulty of transportation and the absence of competition. But few can be persuaded to leave the expectations of the pick for the certainties of the pack—the promises of the cradle for the fulfilments of the freighted wagon. All live on drafts upon the future, and though disappointed a hundred times, still believe the results of to-morrow will more than redeem the broken pledges of to-day. Though all else may end in failure, hope is not bankrupt here.
The soil in the mines is evidently volcanic; it resembles in places the ashes which cover Pompeii. You can walk through it when dry, though every footstep stirs a little cloud; but when saturated with the winter rain you slump to the middle. No horse can force his way forward; every struggle but sinks him the deeper, and the miner himself retires to his cabin, as thoroughly cut off from the peopled districts of the coast, as a sailor wrecked on some rock at sea. Years must elapse before human enterprise can bridge a path to these mines, or render communication practicable in the rainy season; nor at any period can heavy machinery be transported here without an immense outlay of capital. The quartz rock has yet some time to roll back the sunlight before it crumbles under the steam-stamper.
Wednesday, Nov. 8. Some fifty thousand persons are drifting up and down these slopes of the great Sierra, of every hue, language, and clime, tumultuous and confused as a flock of wild geese taking wing at the crack of a gun, or autumnal leaves strown on the atmospheric tides by the breath of the whirlwind. All are in quest of gold; and, with eyes dilated to the circle of the moon, rush this way and that, as some new discovery, or fictitious tale of success may suggest. Some are with tents, and some without; some have provisions, and some are on their last ration; some are carrying crowbars; some pickaxes and spades; some wash-bowls and cradles; some hammers and drills, and powder enough to blow up the rock of Gibraltar—if they can but get under it, as the monkeys do, when they make their transit, through a sort of Thames tunnel, from the golden but barren sands of Africa to the green hills of Europe. Wise fellows they, notwithstanding the length of their tails—they won’t stay on the Congo side of the strait, to gather gold, when, by crossing, they can gather grapes. Wisdom is justified of her children.
But I was speaking of the gold-hunters here on the slopes of the Sierra. Such a mixed and motley crowd—such a restless, roving, rummaging, ragged multitude, never before roared in the rookeries of man. As for mutual aid and sympathy—Samson’s foxes had as much of it, turned tail to, with firebrands tied between. Each great camping-ground is denoted by the ruins of shovels and shanties, the bleaching bones of the dead, disinhumed by the wolf, and the skeleton of the culprit, still swinging in the wind, from the limb of a tree, overshadowed by the raven. From the deep glen, the caverned cliff, the plaintive rivulet, the croaking raven, and the wind-toned skeleton come voices of reproachful interrogation—
“Slave of the dark and dirty mine!
What vanity has brought thee here?”
Thursday, Nov. 9. Our baccaro came in this morning, and startled us with the intelligence that last night, while he was on the watch—sound asleep, of course—the wild Indians came, and stole all our horses and mules, save one, little Nina, whom he had tethered close to his post. Rather an awkward predicament for us, in the California mountains, three hundred miles from home, and our horses and mules in the hands of wild Indians, driving them off into some unknown fastness, to be killed for food! But I was on the trail of a small piece of gold, and followed it up with that sort of listless equanimity with which a man will sometimes pick up a curious shell on the rocks where his vessel floats in fragments. If you would acquire those habits which no disaster can disturb, come to California. One year here will do more for your philosophy than a life elsewhere. I have seen a man sit, and quietly smoke his cigar, while his dwelling went heavenward in a column of flame. It seemed as if it were enough for him that his wife and children were safe, and that the green earth, with its bright-eyed flowers and laughing rills, remained; so let the old tenement pass off in smoke to pall some mountain peak, or throw its dusky shadow where—
“The owlet builds his ivy tower.”
Friday, Nov. 10. The Sonoranian, who has been one of the most successful diggers in the ravine, besieged me to-day to sell him my pistols. They are an elegant pair, silver mounted and rifle bore, and good for duck or duelist—no matter which—for twenty or thirty paces. He offered me a pound of gold; so I determined to try the non-resistant principle, and let him have them. As he belted them about his waist, and strode off, you would have advised even a California bear to get out of his way. How well prepared for a last extremity is a man with a new weapon at his side, or a new patent pill in his pocket! The only difference is, that with the former he may chance to kill some one else, and with the latter he is pretty sure to kill himself. But I promised to make no more remarks; my apology must be the loss of our horses, the probable necessity of being obliged to pick our way home on foot, and the refuge which even an irrelevant thought affords from such a dismal prospect. Men have betrayed flashes of humor on the block—an evanescent ray on the verge of endless night! Then why should not my poor pill have place in the pedestrian prospect of three hundred miles, and that, too, through a region marked only by the footprints which linger dimly in the trail of the wild Indian?