[3] In the early days Placerville was often called Hangtown.
The skeleton horses crept up the road toward the mountains. Presently evidence of the stampede to Washoe began to manifest itself. The prairie schooner passed a broken-down stage, a smashed wheel, a splintered wagon tongue snapped in the middle. An empty whisky barrel advertised one of the chief staples of trade. A dead burro lay half buried in the mire.
The road had been a good one once. Perhaps it would be hard and firm again after the slush from the rains had dried. Just now it was one to try the patience of man and beast. There were stretches where even the pack mules bogged down while Mexican drivers beat and hauled at them to an accompaniment of excited curses in their native tongue.
A stage from Virginia City swung down the grade, “Pony” King on the box holding the lines, his long whip crackling out snakelike toward the leaders. The stage was not a handsome Concord, the pride of every employee of the company, but one of the mud-wagons used as a substitute when the roads were bad. A pack train of fifteen animals overtook the covered wagon. These carried nothing but liquors—whisky, gin, lager beer, brandy, some pipes of California wine, and a few baskets of champagne. Foot travellers, carrying outfits on their backs, ploughed wearily forward. Nothing but the wonders of the Comstock Lode could have kept their tired legs moving through the mud.
At every gulch there was a bar, the fixtures improvised from a couple of dry-goods boxes and a canvas top. Restaurants announced themselves every few miles, as well as hotels, which had all necessary accommodations for tired stampeders except food, beds, and bedding.
Later in the day the prairie schooner came into a region where patches of snow began to appear in the hill crotches above. The grade was stiffer and the poor horses made sorry progress. A dozen times they gave up, exhausted. The driver beat them furiously with his whip and flung raucous curses at them. From the wagon a big-eyed child and a wan-faced woman dismounted to lighten the load. Once the woman timidly murmured a protest at her husband’s brutality. Savagely he turned on her, snarling his rage explosively.
She shrank back, afraid that he was going to use the whip on her. “Don’t, Rob,” she begged, face white as the snow in the bank beside the road.
A burro train swung round the bend, and the man flung away from her and lashed the horses instead.