When Bret Harte first became famous
he was accused of misrepresenting Pioneer society.
A California writer of great ability no
less a person than Professor Royce, the eminent philosopher once
spoke of the “perverse romanticism” of
his tales; and after Mr. Harte’s death these
accusations, if they may be called such, were renewed
in San Francisco with some bitterness. It is
strange that Californians themselves should have been
so anxious to strip from their State the distinction
which Bret Harte conferred upon it, so
anxious to prove that its heroic age never existed,
that life in California has always been just as commonplace,
respectable and uninteresting as it is anywhere else
in the world.
But, be this as it may, the diaries,
letters and narratives written by Pioneers themselves,
and, most important of all, the daily newspapers published
in San Francisco and elsewhere from 1849 to 1855, fully
corroborate Bret Harte’s assertion that he described
only what actually occurred. “The author
has frequently been asked,” he wrote, “if
such and such incidents were real, if he
had ever met such and such characters. To this
he must return the one answer, that in only a single
instance was he conscious of drawing purely from his
imagination and fancy for a character and a logical
succession of incidents drawn therefrom. A few
weeks after his story was published, he received a
letter, authentically signed, correcting some of
the minor details of his facts, and inclosing as
corroborative evidence a slip from an old newspaper,
wherein the main incident of his supposed fanciful
creation was recorded with a largeness of statement
that far transcended his powers of imagination.”
Even that bizarre character, the old Frenchman in
A Ship of ’49, was taken absolutely from
the life, except that the real man was of English birth.
His peculiarities, mental and physical, his dress,
his wig, his residence in the old ship were all just
as they are described by Bret Harte.
This is not to say that everybody
in California was a romantic person, or that life
there was simply a succession of startling incidents.
Ordinary people were doing ordinary things on the
Pacific Slope, just as they did during the worst horrors
of the French Revolution. But the exceptional
persons that Bret Harte described really existed; and,
moreover, they existed in such proportion as to give
character and tone to the whole community.
The fact is that Bret Harte only skimmed
the cream from the surface. To use his own words
again, “The faith, courage, vigor, youth, and
capacity for adventure necessary to this emigration
produced a body of men as strongly distinctive as
were the companions of Jason.”
They were picked men placed in extraordinary
circumstances, and how could that combination fail
to result in extraordinary characters, deeds, events,
and situations! The Forty-Niners, and those
who came in the early Fifties, were such men as enlist
in the first years of a war. They were young
men. Never, since Mediaeval days when men began
life at twenty and commonly ended it long before sixty,
was there so youthful a society. A man of fifty
with a gray beard was pointed out in the streets of
San Francisco as a curiosity. In the convention
to organize the State which met at Monterey, in September,
1849, there were forty-eight delegates, of whom only
four were fifty years or more; fifteen were under thirty
years of age; twenty-three were between thirty and
forty. These were the venerable men of the community,
selected to make the laws of the new commonwealth.
A company of California emigrants that left Virginia
in 1852 consisted wholly of boys under twenty.
The Pioneers were far above the average
in vigor and enterprise, and in education as well.
One ship, the “Edward Everett,” sailed
from Boston in January, 1849, with one hundred and
fifty young men on board who owned both ship and cargo;
and the distinguished gentleman for whom they had
named their ship gave them a case full of books to
beguile the tedium of the voyage around Cape Horn.
William Grey, who wrote an interesting account of
California life, sailed from New York with a ship-load
of emigrants. He describes them as a “fine-looking
and well-educated body of men, all young”;
and he gives a similar description of the passengers
on three other ships that came into the port of Rio
Janeiro while he was there. He adds that on his
ship there were only three bad characters, a butcher
from Washington Market and his two sons. They
all perished within a year of their arrival in California.
The father died while drunk, one of the sons was hanged,
and the other was killed in a street row.
The Pioneers were handsome men.
They were tall men. Of the two hundred grown
men in the town of Suisun, twenty-one stood over six
feet high. Many of the Pioneers were persons
for whom a career is not easily found in a conservative,
sophisticated society; who, in such a society, fail
to be successful as much because of their virtues as
of their defects; men who lack that combination of
cunning and ferocity which leads most directly to
the acquisition of wealth; magnanimous, free-handed,
and brave, but unthrifty and incapable of monotonous
toil; archaic men, not quite broken in to the modern
ideal of drudging at one task for six days in the
week and fifty weeks in the year. Who does not
know the type! The hero of novels, the idol of
mothers, the alternate hope and despair of fathers,
the truest of friends, the most ideal and romantic,
but perhaps not the most constant of lovers.
From the Western and Southwestern
States there came across the Plains a different type.
These men were Pioneers already by inheritance and
tradition, somewhat ignorant, slow and rough, but of
boundless courage and industry, stoical as Indians,
independent and self-reliant. Most of Bret Harte’s
tragic characters, such as Tennessee’s Partner,
Madison Wayne, and the Bell-Ringer of Angel’s,
were of this class.
Many of these emigrants, especially
those who crossed the Mountains before the discovery
of gold, were trappers and hunters, stalwart,
bearded men, clad in coats of buffalo hide, with faces
deeply tanned and wrinkled by long exposure to wind
and weather. Perhaps the best known among them
was “old Greenwood,” a tall, raw-boned,
muscular man, who at the age of eighty-three was still
vigorous and active. For thirty years he made
his home among the Crow Indians, and he had taken
to wife a squaw who bore him four handsome sons.
His dress was of tanned buckskin, and one observer,
more squeamish than the ordinary Pioneer, noted the
seeming fact that it had never been removed since
first he put it on. His heroic calibre may be
estimated from the fact that he was capable of eating
ten pounds of meat a day. This man used to boast
that he had killed more than a hundred Indians with
his own hand. But all that killing had been done
in fair fight; and when a cowardly massacre of seven
Indians, captured in a raid led by Greenwood’s
sons, took place near Sacramento in 1849, one
of many such acts, the Greenwood family
did their best to save the victims. After the
deed had been done, “Old Greenwood,” an
eye-witness relates, “raved around his cabin,
tossed his arms aloft with violent denunciation, and,
stooping down, gathered the dust in his palms, and
sprinkled it on his head, swearing that he was innocent
of their blood.”
Another hero of the Pacific Slope
in those large, early days was Peg-leg Smith.
He derived his nickname from a remarkable incident.
While out on the Plains with a wagon-load of supplies,
Smith plain Smith at that time was
accidentally thrown from his seat, and the heavy wheel
passed over his leg below the knee, crushing it so
that amputation became necessary. There was no
surgeon within hundreds of miles; but if the amputation
were not performed, it was plain that mortification
and death would soon result. In this emergency,
Smith hacked out a rude saw from a butcher’s
knife which he had with him, built a fire and heated
an iron bolt that he took from the wagon, and then,
with his hunting knife and his improvised saw, cut
off his own leg. This done, he drew the flesh
down over the wound, and seared it with the hot iron
to prevent bleeding. He recovered, procured a
wooden leg, and lived to take part in many succeeding
adventures.
We owe California primarily to these
hunters, trappers and adventurous farmers who crossed
the Mountains on their own account, or, later, as
members of Fremont’s band:
Stern men, with empires in their brains.
They firmly believed that it was the
“manifest destiny” of the United States
to spread over the Continent; and this conviction was
not only a patriotic, but in some sense a religious
one. They were mainly descendants of the Puritans,
and as such had imbibed Old Testament ideas which
justified and sanctioned their dreams of conquest.
We have seen how the venerable Greenwood covered his
head with dust as a symbolic act. The Reverend
Mr. Colton records a significant remark made to him
by a Pioneer, seventy-six years old, who had four
sons in Fremont’s company, and who himself joined
the Volunteers raised in California. “I
asked him if he had no compunction in taking up arms
against the native inhabitants, the moment of his
arrival. He said he had Scripture example for
it. The Israelites took the promised land of
the East by arms, and the Americans must take the
promised land of the West in the same way.”
And Mr. Colton adds: “I
find this kind of parallel running in the imagination
of all the emigrants. They seem to look upon this
beautiful land as their own Canaan, and the motley
race around them as the Hittites, the Hivites
and Jebusites whom they are to drive out."
But, it need hardly be said, the Biblical
argument upon which they relied was in the nature
of an afterthought the justification, rather
than the cause of their actions. What really
moved them, although they did not know it, was that
primeval instinct of expansion, based upon conscious
superiority of race, to which have been due all the
great empires of the past.
Many of these people were deeply religious
in a Gothic manner, and Bret Harte has touched lightly
upon this aspect of their natures, especially in the
case of Mr. Joshua Rylands. “Mr. Joshua
Rylands had, according to the vocabulary of his class,
‘found grace’ at the age of sixteen, while
still in the spiritual state of ‘original sin,’
and the political one of Missouri.... When, after
the Western fashion, the time came for him to forsake
his father’s farm, and seek a new ‘quarter
section’ on some more remote frontier, he carried
into the secluded, lonely, half-monkish celibacy of
pioneer life which has been the foundation
of so much strong Western character more
than the usual religious feeling.”
Exactly the same kind of man is described
in that once famous story, Mr. Eggleston’s “Circuit-Rider”;
and it is still found in the mountains of Kentucky,
where the maintenance of ferocious feuds and a constant
readiness to kill one’s enemies at sight are
regarded as not inconsistent with a sincere profession
of the Christian religion.
The reader of Bret Harte’s stories
will remember how often the expression “Pike
County” or “Piker” occurs; and this
use is strictly historical. As a very intelligent
Pioneer expressed it, “We recognize in California
but two types of the Republican character, the Yankee
and the Missourian. The latter term was first
used to represent the entire population of the West;
but Pike County superseded, first the name of the State,
and soon that of the whole West.”
How did this come about? Pike
County, Missouri, was named for Lieutenant Zebulon
Montgomery Pike, the discoverer of Pike’s Peak,
and the officer who was sent by the United States
Government to explore the upper part of the Mississippi
River. He was killed in the War of 1812.
The territory was first settled in 1811 by emigrants
from Virginia, Kentucky and Louisiana; and it was
incorporated as a county in 1818. It borders on
the Mississippi River, about forty miles north of
St. Louis; and its whole area is only sixty square
miles. It was and is an agricultural county, and
in 1850 the population amounted to only thirteen thousand,
six hundred and nine persons, of whom about half were
negroes, mostly slaves. The climate is healthy,
and the soil, especially on the prairies, is very fertile,
being a rich, deep loam.
Pike County, it will thus be seen,
is but a small part, both numerically and geographically,
of that vast Western territory which contributed to
the California emigration; and it owes its prominence
among the Pioneers chiefly to a copy of doggerel verses.
In 1849, Captain McPike, a leading resident of the
County, organized a band of two hundred Argonauts who
crossed the Plains. Among them was an ox-driver
named Joe Bowers, who soon made a reputation in the
company as a humorist, as an “original,”
as a “greenhorn,” and as a “good
fellow” generally. Joe Bowers was poor,
he was in love, he was seeking a fortune in order
that he might lay it at the feet of his sweetheart;
and the whole company became his confidants and sympathizers.
Another member of the party was a certain Frank Swift, who afterward attained
some reputation as a journalist; and one evening, as they were all sitting
around the camp-fire, Swift recited, or rather sang to a popular air, several
stanzas of a poem about Joe Bowers, which he had composed during the days
journey. It caught the fancy of the company at once, and soon every member
was singing it. The poem grew night by night, and long before they reached
their destination it had become a ballad of exasperating length. The poet,
looking forward in a fine frenzy, describes the girl as proving faithless to Joe
Bowers and marrying a red-haired butcher. This bad news comes from Joes
brother Ike in a letter which also states the culminating fact of the tragedy,
as the following lines reveal:
It told me more than that,
Oh! it’s enough to make
me swear.
It said Sally had a baby,
And the baby had red hair!
Upon their arrival in California,
the two hundred men who composed this party dispersed
in all directions, and carried the ballad with them.
It was heard everywhere in the mines, and in 1856
it was printed in a cheap form in San Francisco, and
was sung by Johnson’s minstrels at a hall known
as the Old Melodeon. Joe Bowers thus became the
type of the unsophisticated Western miner, and Pike
County became the symbol of the West. Crude as
the verses are they are sung to this day in the County
which gave them birth, and “Joe Bowers”
is still a familiar name in Missouri, if not in the
West generally.
This ballad which came across the Plains had its counterpart in a much better
song produced by Jonathan Nichols, a Pioneer who sailed on the bark Eliza from
Salem, Massachusetts, in December, 1848. The first stanza is as follows:
TUNE, Oh! Susanna. (Key of
G.)
I came from Salem city,
With my washbowl on my knee,
I’m going to California,
The gold dust for to see.
It rained all night the day I left,
The weather, it was dry,
The sun so hot I froze to death,
Oh! brothers, don’t
you cry,
Oh! California,
That’s the land for
me!
I’m going to Sacramento
With my washbowl on my knee.
Under the title of the “California
Song” these verses soon became the common property
of every ship sailing from Atlantic ports for San
Francisco, and later they were heard in the mines almost
as frequently as “Joe Bowers.” But,
as hope diminished and homesickness increased, both
ballads so an old miner relates gave
place to “Home, Sweet Home,” “Olé
Virginny,” and other sad ditties.
Pike County seems to have had a natural
tendency to burst into poetry. In the story called
Devil’s Ford, Bret Harte gives us two lines from a poem otherwise
unknown to fame,
“’Oh, my name it is Johnny
from Pike,
I’m hell on a spree or a strike.’”
In the story of The New Assistant
at Pine Clearing School, three big boys from Pike
County explained to the schoolmistress their ideas
upon the subject of education, as follows: “‘We
ain’t hankerin’ much for grammar and dictionary
hogwash, and we don’t want no Boston parts o’
speech rung in on us the first thing in the mo’nin’.
We reckon to do our sums and our figgerin’,
and our sale and barter, and our interest tables and
weights and measures when the time comes, and our
geograffy when it’s on, and our readin’
and writin’ and the American Constitution in
regular hours, and then we calkillate to git up and
git afore the po’try and the Boston airs and
graces come round.’”
The “Sacramento Transcript,”
of June 11, 1850, tells a story about a minister from
Pike County which has a similar ring. “A
miner took sick and died at a bar that was turning
out very rich washings. As he happened to be
a favorite in the camp, it was determined to have a
general turn-out at his burial. An old Pike County
preacher was engaged to officiate, but he thought
it proper to moisten his clay a little before his solemn
duty. The parson being a favorite, and the grocery
near by, he partook with one and another before the
services began, until his underpinning became quite
unsteady. Presently it was announced that the
last sad rites were about to be concluded, and our
clerical friend advanced rather unsteadily to perform
the functions of his office. After an exordium
worthy of his best days, the crowd knelt around the
grave, but as he was praying with fervency one of
the party discovered some of the shining metal in the
dirt thrown from the grave, and up he jumped and started
for his pan, followed by the crowd. The minister,
opening his eyes in wonder and seeing the game, cried
out for a share; his claim was recognized and reserved
for him until he should get sober. In the mean
time, another hole was dug for the dead man, that
did not furnish a like temptation to disturb his grave,
and he was hurriedly deposited without further ceremony.”
Bret Harte’s best and noblest
character, Tennessee’s Partner, might have been
from Pike County, he was of that kind; and
Morse, the hero of the story called In the Tules, certainly was:
The stranger stared curiously at him. After a pause he said with a
half-pitying, half-humorous smile:
“‘Pike aren’t you?’
Whether Morse did or did not know that this current California slang for a
denizen of the bucolic West implied a certain contempt, he replied simply:
“‘I’m from Pike County, Mizzouri.’”
To the same effect is the historian:
“To be catalogued as from Pike County seems
to express a little more churlishness, a little more
rudeness, a greater reserve when courtesy or hospitality
is called for than I ever found in the Western character
at home."
The type thus indicated was a very
marked one, and was often spoken of with astonishment
by more sophisticated Pioneers. Some of these
Missouri men had never seen two houses together, until
they came to California, so that even a little village
in the mines appeared to them as a marvel of civilization
and luxury. Their dress was home-made and by no
means new or clean. Over their shoulders they
wore strips of cotton or cloth as suspenders, and
their coats were tight-waisted, long-tailed surtouts
such as were fashionable in the eighteenth century.
Their inseparable companion was a long-barrelled rifle,
with which they could “draw a bead” on
a deer or a squirrel or the white of an Indian’s
eye with equal coolness and certainty of killing.
Bayard Taylor describes the same type
as he met it in the ship which carried him from New
Orleans to Panama in ’49. “Long, loosely-jointed
men, with large hands, and awkward feet and limbs;
their faces long and sallow; their hair long, straight
and black; their expression one of settled melancholy.
The corners of their mouths curved downward, and their
upper lips were drawn tightly over their lower ones,
thus giving to their faces that look of ferocity which
is peculiar to Indians. These men chewed tobacco
incessantly, drank copiously, were heavily armed with
knives and pistols, and breathed defiance to all foreigners."
These long, sallow-faced men were
probably sufferers from that fever and ague, or malaria,
as we now call it, which was rife in all the “bottom
lands” of the Western States; and the greater
part of Pike County was included in that category.
Much, indeed, of the emigration from Missouri and
Illinois to California was inspired less by the love
of gold than by the desire to escape from disease.
Bret Harte, in many places, speaks of these fever-ridden
Westerners, especially in An Apostle of the Tules,
where he describes a camp-meeting, attended chiefly
by “the rheumatic Parkinsons, from Green
Springs; the ophthalmic Filgees, from Alder Creek;
the ague-stricken Harveys, from Martinez Bend; and
the feeble-limbed Steptons, from Sugar Mill.”
“These,” he adds, “might in their
combined families have suggested a hospital, rather
than any other social assemblage.”
But these sickly or ague-smitten people
formed only a small part of the Pioneers. The
greater number represented the youth and strength of
both the Western and Eastern States. In 1852,
an interior newspaper called the “San Andreas
Independent” declared, “We have a population
made up from the most energetic of the civilized earth’s
population”; and the boast was true.
Moreover, the Pioneers who reached
California had been winnowed and sifted by the hardships
and privations which beset both the land and the sea
route. Thousands of the weaker among them had
succumbed to starvation or disease, and their bones
were whitening the Plains or lying in the vast depths
of the Pacific Ocean. There was scarcely a village
in the West or South, or even in New England, which
did not mourn the loss of some brave young gold-seeker
whose unknown fate was a matter of speculation for
years afterward.
The length of the voyage from Atlantic
ports to San Francisco was from four to five months,
but most of the Pioneers who came by sea avoided the
passage around Cape Horn, and crossed the Isthmus of
Nicaragua, or, more commonly, of Panama. This,
in either case, was a much shorter route; but it added
the horrors of pestilence and fever, and of possible
robbery and murder, to the ordinary dangers of the
sea. All the blacklegs, it was noticed, took
the shorter route, deeming themselves, no doubt, incapable
of sustaining the prolonged ennui of a voyage around
the Cape. Passengers who crossed the Isthmus
of Panama disembarked at Chagres, a port so unhealthy
that policies of life insurance contained a clause
to the effect that if the insured remained there more
than one night, his policy would be void. Chagres
enjoyed the distinction of being the dirtiest place
in the world. The inhabitants were almost all
negroes, and one Pioneer declared that a flock of
buzzards would present a favorable comparison with
them.
From Chagres there was, first, a voyage
of seventy-five miles up the river of the same name
to Gorgona, or to Cruces, five miles farther.
This was accomplished in dugouts propelled by the
native Indians. Thence to Panama the Pioneers
travelled on foot, or on mule-back, over a narrow,
winding bridle-path through the mountains, so overhung
by trees and dense tropical growths that in many places
it was dark even at mid-day.
This was the opportunity of the Indian
muleteer, and more than one gold-seeker never emerged
from the gloomy depths of that winding trail.
Originally, it was the work of the Indians; but the
Spaniards who used the path in the sixteenth century
had improved it, and in many places had secured the
banks with stones. Now, however, the trail had
fallen into decay, and in spots was almost impassable.
But the tracks worn in the soft, calcareous rock by
the many iron-shod hoofs which had passed over it,
still remained; and the mule that bore the American
seeking gold in California placed his feet in the
very holes which had been made by his predecessors,
painfully bearing the silver of Peru on its way to
enrich the grandees of Spain.
Bad as the journey across the Isthmus
was or might be, the enforced delay at Panama was
worse. The number of passengers far exceeded the
capacity of the vessels sailing from that port to
San Francisco, and those who waited at Panama were
in constant danger of cholera, of the equally dreaded
Panama fever, and sometimes of smallpox. The heat
was almost unbearable, and the blacks were a source
of annoyance, and even of danger. “There
is not in the whole world,” remarked a contemporary
San Francisco paper, “a more infamous collection
of villains than the Jamaica negroes who are congregated
at Panama and Chagres.”
In their eagerness to get away from
Panama, some Pioneers paid in advance for transportation
in old rotten hulks which were never expected or intended
to reach San Francisco, but which, springing a leak
or being otherwise disabled, would put into some port
in Lower California where the passengers would be
left without the means of continuing their journey,
and frequently without money.
Both on the voyage from Panama and
also on the long route around Cape Horn, ship-captains
often saved their good provisions for the California
market, and fed their passengers on nauseous “lobscouse”
and “dunderfunk.” Scurvy and other
diseases resulted. An appeal to the United States
consul at Rio Janeiro, when the ship touched there,
was sometimes effectual, and in other cases the passengers
took matters into their own hands and disciplined
a rapacious captain or deposed a drunken one.
In view of these uprisings, some New York skippers
declined to take command of ships about to sail for
California, supposing that passengers who could do
such an unheard-of thing as to rebel against the master
of a vessel must be a race of pirates. Great
pains were taken to secure a crew of determined men
for these ships, and a plentiful supply of muskets,
handcuffs and shackles was always put on board.
But such precautions proved to be ridiculously unnecessary.
There was no case in which the Pioneers usurped authority
on shipboard without sufficient cause; and in no case
was an emigrant brought to trial on reaching San Francisco.
In the various ports at which they
stopped much was to be seen of foreign peoples and
customs; and not infrequently the Pioneers had an opportunity
to show their mettle. At Santa Catharina, for
example, a port on the lower coast of Brazil, a young
American was murdered by a Spaniard. The authorities
were inclined to treat the matter with great indifference;
but there happened to be in the harbor two ship-loads
of passengers en route for San Francisco, and these
men threatened to seize the fortress and demolish
it if justice was not done. Thereupon the murderer
was tried and hung. Many South Americans in the
various ports along the coast got their first correct
notion of the people of the United States from these
chance encounters with sea-going Pioneers.
Still more, of course, was the overland
journey an education in self-reliance, in that resourcefulness
which distinguishes the American, and in that courage
which was so often needed and so abundantly displayed
in the early mining days. Independence in the
State of Missouri was a favorite starting-point, and
from this place there were two routes, the southern
one being by way of Santa Fe, and the northern route
following the Oregon Trail to Fort Hall, and thence
ascending the course of the Humboldt River to its
rise in the Sierra Nevadas.
At Fort Hall some large companies
which had travelled from the Mississippi River, and
even from States east of that, separated, one half
going to Oregon, the other turning westward to California;
and thus were broken many ties of love and friendship
which had been formed in the close intimacy of the
long journey, especially between the younger members
of the company. Old diaries and letters reveal
suggestions of romance if not of tragedy in these
separations, and in the choice which the emigrant
maiden was sometimes forced to make between the conflicting
claims of her lover and her parents.
In the year 1850 fifty thousand crossed
the Plains. In 1851 immigration fell off because
even at that early date there was a business “depression,”
almost a “panic” in California, but in
1852 it increased again, and the Plains became a thoroughfare,
dotted so far as the eye could see with long trains
of white-covered wagons, moving slowly through the
dust. In one day a party from Virginia passed
thirty-two wagons, and during a stop in the afternoon
five hundred overtook them. In after years the
course of these wagons could easily be traced by the
alien vegetation which marked it. Wherever the
heavy wheels had broken the tough prairie sod there
sprang up, from the Missouri to the Sierras, a narrow
belt of flowering plants and familiar door-yard weeds, silent
witnesses of the great migration which had passed
that way. Multitudes of horsemen accompanied
the wagons, and other multitudes plodded along on foot.
Banners were flying here and there, and the whole appearance
was that of an army on the march. At night camp-fires
gleamed for miles through the darkness, and if the
company were not exhausted the music of a violin or
a banjo floated out on the still air of the prairies.
But the fatigue of the march, supplemented by the
arduous labors of camping out, was usually sufficient
to send the travellers to bed at the earliest possible
moment.
The food consisted chiefly of salt
pork or bacon, varied when that was possible
with buffalo meat or venison, beans, baked
dough called bread, and flapjacks. The last,
always associated with mining life in California,
were made by mixing flour and water into a sort of
batter, seasoning with salt, adding a little saleratus
or cooking soda, and frying the mixture in a pan greased
with fat. Men ate enormously on these journeys.
Four hundred pounds of sugar lasted four Pioneers
only ninety days. This inordinate appetite and
the quantity of salt meat eaten frequently resulted
in scurvy, from which there were some deaths.
Another cause of illness was the use of milk from
cows driven along with the wagon-trains, and made
feverish by heat and fatigue.
Many of the emigrants, especially
those who undertook the journey in ’49 or ’50,
were insufficiently equipped, and little aware of the
difficulties and dangers which awaited them.
Death in many forms hovered over those heavy, creaking,
canvas-covered wagons the “prairie-schooners,”
which, drawn sometimes by horses, sometimes by oxen,
sometimes by mules, jolted slowly and laboriously
over two thousand miles and more of plain and mountain, death
from disease, from want of water, from starvation,
from Indians, and, in crossing the Sierras, from raging
snow-storms and intense cold. Rivers had to be
forded, deserts crossed and a thousand accidents and
annoyances encountered.
Some men made the long journey on
foot, even from points east of the Mississippi River.
One gray-haired Pioneer walked all the way from Michigan
with a pack on his back. Another enthusiast obtained
some notoriety among the emigrants of 1850 by trundling
a wheelbarrow, laden with his goods, from Illinois
to Salt Lake City.
Bret Harte, as we have seen, reached
California by sea, and there is no record of any journey
by ox-cart that he made; and yet in A Waif of the
Plains he describes such a journey with a particularity
which seems almost impossible for one who knew it
only by hearsay. Thus, among many other details,
he speaks of “a chalky taste of dust on the mouth
and lips, a gritty sense of earth on the fingers,
and an all-pervading heat and smell of cattle.”
And in the same description occurs one of those minute
touches for which he is remarkable: “The
hoofs of the draught-oxen, occasionally striking in
the dust with a dull report, sent little puffs like
smoke on either side of the track.”
Often the cattle would break loose
at night and disappear on the vast Plains, and men
in search of them were sometimes lost, and died of
starvation or were killed by Indians. Simply for
the sake of better grazing oxen have been known to
retrace their steps at night for twenty-five miles.
The opportunities for selfishness,
for petulance, for obstinacy, for resentment were
almost innumerable. Cooking and washing were the
labors which, in the absence of women, proved most
vexatious to the emigrants. “Of all miserable
work,” said one, “washing is the worst,
and no man who crossed the Plains will ever find fault
again with his wife for scolding on a washing day.”
All the Pioneers who have related their experiences
on the overland journey speak of the bad effect on
men’s tempers. “The perpetual vexations
and hardships keep the nerves in a state of great
irritability. The trip is a sort of magic mirror,
exposing every man’s qualities of heart, vicious
or amiable."
The shooting affairs which occurred
among the emigrants were usually the result of some
sudden provocation, following upon a long course of
irritation between the persons concerned. Those
who crossed the Plains in the summer of 1853, or afterward,
might have passed a grave with this inscription:
BEAL SHOT BY BOLSBY, JUNE 15, 1853.
And, a day’s journey further,
they would have noticed another grave thus inscribed:
BOLSBY SHOT FOR THE MURDER OF BEAL, JUNE
16, 1853.
This murder, to call it such, was
the consequence of some insult offered to Bolsby by
the other. Bolsby was forthwith tried by the company,
and condemned to be shot the next morning at sunrise.
He had been married only about a year before, and
had left his wife and child at their home in Kentucky.
For the remainder of the day he travelled with the
others, and the short hours of the summer night which
followed were spent by him in writing to his wife
and to his father and mother. Of all the great
multitude, scattered over the wide earth, who passed
that particular night in sleepless agony of mind,
perhaps none was more to be pitied. When morning
came he dressed himself neatly in his wedding suit,
and was led out to execution. With rare magnanimity,
he acknowledged that his sentence was a just one,
and said that he had so written to his family, and
that he had been treated with consideration; but he
declared that if the thing were to happen again, he
would kill Beal as before. He then knelt on his
blanket, gave the signal for shooting, and fell dead,
pierced by six bullets.
The misfortunes of the Donner party
began with a homicide. This is the party whose
sufferings are described by Bret Harte without exaggeration
in Gabriel Conroy. It included robbers,
cannibals, murderers and heroes; and one interesting
aspect of its experience is the superior endurance,
both moral and physical, shown by the women. In
the small detachment which, as a forlorn hope, tried
to cross the Mountains in winter without provisions,
and succeeded, there were twelve men and five women.
Of the twelve men five died, of the five women none
died!
Indians were often encountered on
the Great Plains and in the valleys of the Colorado
and Rio Grande. They were well-disposed, at first,
and soon acquired some familiarity with the ordinary
forms of speech used by the Pioneers. Thus one
traveller reports the following friendly salutation
from a member of the Snake Tribe:
“How de do Whoa haw! G d
d n you!”
On another occasion when a party of
Pioneers were inquiring of some Indians about a certain
camping-ground ahead of them, they were assured that
there would be “plenty of grass there for the
whoa haws, but no water for the g d d ns.”
Later, however, owing chiefly to unprovoked
attacks by emigrants, the Indians became hostile and
dangerous. Many Pioneers were robbed and some
were killed by them. The Western Indian was a
figure at once grotesque and terrible; and Bret Harte’s
description of him, as he appeared to the emigrant
boy lost on the Plains, gives the reader such a pleasant
thrill of horror as he may not have experienced since
Robinson Crusoe made his awful discovery of a human
footprint in the sand.
“He awoke with a start.
A moving figure had suddenly uplifted itself between
him and the horizon!... A human figure, but so
dishevelled, so fantastic, and yet so mean and puerile
in its extravagance that it seemed the outcome of
a childish dream. It was a mounted figure, yet
so ludicrously disproportionate to the pony it bestrode,
whose slim legs were stiffly buried in the dust in
a breathless halt, that it might have been a straggler
from some vulgar wandering circus. A tall hat,
crownless and brimless, a castaway of civilization,
surmounted by a turkey’s feather, was on its
head; over its shoulders hung a dirty tattered blanket
that scarcely covered the two painted legs which seemed
clothed in soiled yellow hose. In one hand it
held a gun; the other was bent above its eyes in eager
scrutiny of some distant point.... Presently,
with a dozen quick noiseless strides of the pony’s
legs, the apparition moved to the right, its gaze
still fixed on that mysterious part of the horizon.
There was no mistaking it now! The painted Hebraic
face, the large curved nose, the bony cheek, the broad
mouth, the shadowed eyes, the straight long matted
locks! It was an Indian!"
There were some cases of captivity
among the Indians the details of which recall the
similar occurrences in New England in the seventeenth
century. Perhaps the most remarkable case was
that of Olive Oatman, a young girl from Illinois,
who was carried off by one tribe of Indians, was sold
later to another, nearly died of starvation, and,
finally, after a lapse of six years, was recovered
safe and sound. Her brother, a boy of twelve,
was beaten with clubs by the Indians, and left for
dead with the bodies of his father and mother; but
he revived, and succeeded in making his way back for
a distance of seventy miles, when he met a party of
Pima Indians, who treated him with kindness.
Forty-five miles of that lonely journey lay through
a desert where no water could be obtained.
Abner Nott’s daughter, Rosey,
the attractive heiress of the Pontiac, was made of
the same heroic stuff. “The Rosey ez I knows,”
said her father, “is a little gal whose voice
was as steady with Injuns yellin’ round her
nest in the leaves on Sweetwater ez in her purty cabin
up yonder.” Lanty Foster, too, was of “that
same pioneer blood that had never nourished cravens
or degenerates, ... whose father’s rifle had
been levelled across her cradle, to cover the stealthy
Indian who prowled outside.”
It was from these Western and Southwestern
emigrants that Bret Harte’s nobler kind of woman,
and, in most cases, of man also was drawn. The
“great West” furnished his heroic characters, California
was only their accidental and temporary abiding-place.
These people were of the muscular, farm type, with
such health and such nerves as result from an out-door
life, from simple, even coarse food, from early hours
and abundant sleep.
The Pioneer women did indeed lack
education and inherited refinement, as Bret Harte
himself occasionally points out. “She brushed
the green moss from his sleeve with some towelling,
and although this operation brought her so near to
him that her breath as soft and warm as
the Southwest trades stirred his hair,
it was evident that this contiguity was only frontier
familiarity, as far removed from conscious coquetry
as it was perhaps from educated delicacy."
And yet it is very easy to exaggerate
this defect. In most respects the wholesomeness,
the democratic sincerity and dignity of Bret Harte’s
women, and of his men as well, give them the substantial
benefits of gentle blood. Thus he says of one
of his characters, “He had that innate respect
for the secrets of others which is as inseparable from
simplicity as it is from high breeding;” and
this remark might have been put in a much more general
form. In fact, the essential similarity between
simplicity and high breeding runs through the whole
nature of Bret Harte’s Pioneers, and perhaps,
moreover, explains some obscure points in his own life.
Be this as it may, the defects of
Bret Harte’s heroines relate rather to the ornamental
than to the indispensable part of life, whereas the
qualities in which they excel are those fundamental
feminine qualities upon which, in the last analysis,
is founded the greatness of nations. A sophisticated
reader would be almost sure to underestimate them.
Even that English critic who was perhaps his greatest
admirer, makes the remark, literally true, but nevertheless
misleading, that Bret Harte “did not create
a perfectly noble, superior, commanding woman.”
No, but he created, or at least sketched, more than
one woman of a very noble type. What type of
woman is most valuable to the world? Surely that
which is fitted to become the mother of heroes; and
to that type Bret Harte’s best women belong.
They have courage, tenderness, sympathy, the power
of self-sacrifice; they have even that strain of fierceness
which seems to be inseparable in man or beast from
the capacity for deep affection. They have the
independence, the innocent audacity, the clear common-sense,
the resourcefulness, typical of the American woman,
and they have, besides, a depth of feeling which is
rather primeval than American, which certainly is
not a part of the typical American woman as we know
her in the Eastern States.
Perhaps the final test of nobility
in man or woman is the capacity to value something,
be it honor, affection, or what you will, be it almost
anything, but to value something more than life itself;
and this is the characteristic of Bret Harte’s
heroines. They are as ready to die for love as
Juliet was, and along with this abandon they
have the coolness, the independence, the practical
faculty, which belong to their time and race, but
which were not a part of woman’s nature in the
age that produced Shakspere’s “unlessoned
girl.”
Bret Harte’s heroines have a
strong family resemblance to those of both Tourgueneff
and Thomas Hardy. In each case the women obey
the instinct of love as unreservedly as men of an
archaic type obey the instinct of fighting. There
is no question with them of material advantage, of
wealth, position, or even reputation. Such considerations,
so familiar to women of the world, never enter their
minds. They love as nature prompts, and having
once given their love, they give themselves and everything
that they have along with it. There is a magnificent
forgetfulness of self about them. This is the
way of nature. Nature never counts the cost, never
hoards her treasures, but pours them out, to live or
die as the case may be, with a profusion which makes
the human by-stander economical, poverty-stricken
man stand aghast. In Russia this type
of woman is frequently found, as Tourgueneff, and
to a lesser degree Tolstoi, found her among the upper
classes, which have retained a pristine quality long
since bred out of the corresponding classes in England
and in the United States. For women of the same
type in England, Thomas Hardy is forced to look lower
down in the social scale; and this probably accounts
for the fact that his heroines are seldom drawn from
the upper classes.
Women of this kind sometimes fail
in point of chastity, but it is a failure due to impulse
and affection, not to mere frivolity or sensuality.
After all, chastity is only one of the virtues that
women owe to themselves and to the race. The
chaste woman who coldly marries for money is, as a
rule, morally inferior to the unchaste woman who gives
up everything for love.
It is to be observed, however, that
Bret Harte’s women do not need this defence,
for his heroines, with the single exception of the
faithful Miggles, are virtuous. The only loose
women in Bret Harte’s stories are the obviously
bad women, the female “villains” of the
play, and they are by no means numerous. Joan,
in The Argonauts of North Liberty, the wives
of Brown of Calaveras and The Bell-Ringer of Angel’s,
respectively, the cold-blooded Mrs. Decker, and Mrs.
Burroughs, the pretty, murderous, feline little woman
in A Mercury of the Foot-Hills these
very nearly exhaust the list. On the other hand,
in Thomas Hardy and Tourgueneff, to say nothing of
lesser novelists, it is often the heroine herself who
falls from virtue. Too much can hardly be made
of the moral superiority of Bret Harte’s stories
in this respect. It is due, not simply to his
own taste and preference, but to the actual state
of society in California, which, in this respect as
in all others, he faithfully portrayed. The city
of San Francisco might have told a different story;
but in the mining and agricultural parts of the State
the standard of feminine virtue was high. Perhaps
this was due, in part at least, to the chivalry of
the men reacting upon the women, to that
feeling which Bret Harte himself called “the
Western-American fetich of the sanctity of sex,”
and, again, “the innate Far-Western reverence
for women.”
In all European societies, and now,
to a lesser degree, in the cities of the United States,
every man is, generally speaking, the enemy of every
young and good-looking woman, as much as the hunter
is the enemy of his game. How vast is the difference
between this attitude of men to women and that which
Bret Harte describes! The California men, as he
says somewhere, “thought it dishonorable and
a proof of incompetency to rise by their wives’
superior fortune.” They married for love
and nothing else, and their love took the form of
reverence.
The complement of this feeling, on
the woman’s side, is a maternal, protecting
affection, perhaps the noblest passion of which women
are capable; and this is the kind of love that Bret
Harte’s heroines invariably show. No mother
could have watched over her child more tenderly than
Cressy over her sweetheart. The cry that came
from the lips of the Rose of Tuolumne when she flew
to the rescue of her bleeding lover was “the
cry of a mother over her stricken babe, of a tigress
over her mangled cub.”
Bret Harte’s heroines are almost
all of the robust type. A companion picture to
the Rose is that of Jinny in the story When the
Waters Were Up at “Jules’." “Certainly
she was graceful! Her tall, lithe, but beautifully
moulded figure, even in its characteristic Southwestern
indolence, fell into poses as picturesque as they were
unconscious. She lifted the big molasses can
from its shelf on the rafters with the attitude of
a Greek water-bearer. She upheaved the heavy flour
sack to the same secure shelf with the upraised palm
of an Egyptian caryatid.”
Trinidad Joe’s daughter, too,
was large-limbed, with blue eyes, black brows and
white teeth. It was of her that the Doctor said,
“If she spoke rustic Greek instead of bad English,
and wore a cestus instead of an ill-fitting corset,
you’d swear she was a goddess.”
Something more, however, goes to the
making of a handsome woman than mere health and muscle.
Bret Harte often speaks of the sudden appearance of
beauty and refinement among the Western and Southwestern
people. Kitty, for example, as the Reader will
remember, “was slight, graceful, and self-contained,
and moved beside her stumpy commonplace father and
her faded commonplace mother, in the dining-room of
the Boomville hotel, like some distinguished alien.”
In A Vision of the Fountain, Bret Harte, half
humorously, suggested an explanation. He speaks
of the hero as “a singularly handsome young
fellow with one of those ideal faces and figures sometimes
seen in Western frontier villages, attributable to
no ancestor, but evolved possibly from novels and
books devoured by ancestresses in the long, solitary
winter evenings of their lonely cabins on the frontier."
It seems more likely, however, that
a fortunate environment is the main cause of beauty,
a life free from care or annoyance; a deep sense of
security; that feeling of self-respect which is produced
by the respect of others, and, finally, surroundings
which have either the beauty of art or the beauty
of nature. These are the very advantages which,
with many superficial differences, no doubt, are enjoyed
alike by the daughters of frontiersmen and by the
daughters of a nobility. On the other hand, they
are the very advantages with which the middle class
in cities, the cockney class, is almost always obliged
to dispense, and that class is conspicuously deficient
in beauty. Perhaps no one thing is more conducive
to beauty than the absence of those hideous creations
known as “social superiors.” Imagine
a society in which it would be impossible to make
anybody understand what is meant by the word “snob”!
And yet such was, and to a considerable extent still
is, the society of the Far West and of rural New England.
Bret Harte himself glanced at this
subject in describing the Blue-Grass Penelope.
“Beautiful she was, but the power of that beauty
was limited by being equally shared with her few neighbors.
There were small, narrow, arched feet besides her
own that trod the uncarpeted floors of outlying cabins
with equal grace and dignity; bright, clearly opened
eyes that were equally capable of looking unabashed
upon princes and potentates, as a few later did, and
the heiress of the County judge read her own beauty
without envy in the frank glances and unlowered crest
of the blacksmith’s daughter.”
No less obvious is the connection
of repose with beauty. Beauty springs up naturally
among people who know the luxury of repose, and yet
are vigorous enough to escape the dangers of sloth.
Salomy Jane was lazy as well as handsome, and when
we first catch a glimpse of her she is leaning against
a door-post, engaged in the restful occupation of chewing
gum. The same repose, amounting indeed to indolence,
formed the chief charm of Mr. MacGlowrie’s Widow.
Whether or not the landscape plays
a part in the production of womanly beauty is a question
more open to dispute. Not many persons feel this
influence, but, as experience will show, the proportion
of country people who feel it is greater than that
of city people, although they have considerably less
to say upon the subject. The wide, open spaces,
the distant horizon, the gathering of storms, the
changing green of Spring and Summer, the scarlet and
gold of Autumn, the vast expanse of spotless snow
glistening in Midwinter, these things must
be seen by the countryman, his eyes cannot escape
them, and in some cases they will be felt as well as
seen. Whoever has travelled a New England country
road upon a frosty, moonless night in late October,
and has observed the Northern Lights casting a pale,
cold radiance through the leafless trees, will surely
detect some difference between that method of illumination
and a kerosene lantern.
A New England farmer whose home commanded
a noble view of mountain, lake and forest was blessed
with two daughters noted for their beauty. They
grew up and married, but both died young; and many
years afterward he was heard to say, as he looked
dreamily out from his doorway, “I have often
thought that the reason why my girls became beautiful
women was that from their earliest childhood they
always had this scene before their eyes.”
And yet he had never read Wordsworth or Ruskin!
Bret Harte’s heroines enjoyed
all the advantages just enumerated as being conducive
to beauty, and they escaped contamination from civilization.
They were close to nature, and as primitive in their
love-affairs as the heroines of Shakspere. “Who
ever loved that loved not at first sight!” John
Ashe’s betrothed and Ridgeway Dent had known
each other a matter of two hours or so, before they
exchanged that immortal kiss which nearly cost the
lives of both. Two brief meetings, and one of
those in the dark, sufficed to win for the brave and
clever young deputy sheriff the affections of Lanty
Foster. In A Jack and Jill of the Sierras,
a handsome girl from the East tumbles over a precipice,
and falls upon the recumbent hero, part way down,
with such violence as to stun him. This is hardly
romantic, but the dangerous and difficult ascent which
they make together furnishes the required opportunity.
Ten minutes of contiguity suffice, and so well is
the girl’s character indicated by a few masterly
strokes, that the reader feels no surprise at the result.
And yet there is nothing that savors
of coarseness, much less of levity, in these abrupt
romances. When Bret Harte’s heroes and heroines
meet, it is the coming together of two souls that
recognize and attract each other. It is like
a stroke of lightning, and is accepted with a primeval
simplicity and un-selfconsciousness. The impression
is as deep as it is sudden.
What said Juliet of the anonymous
young man whom she had known something less than an
hour?
“Go, ask his name: if he be
married
My grave is like to be my wedding bed.”
So felt Liberty Jones when she exclaimed
to Dr. Ruysdael, “I’ll go with you or
I’ll die!”
It is this sincerity that sanctifies
the rapidity and frankness of Bret Harte’s love-affairs.
Genuine passion takes no account of time, and supplies
by one instinctive rush of feeling the experience of
years. Given the right persons, time becomes
as long and as short as eternity. Thus it was
with the two lovers who met and parted at midnight
on the hilltop. “There they stood alone.
There was no sound or motion in earth or woods or
heaven. They might have been the one man and woman
for whom this goodly earth that lay at their feet,
rimmed with the deepest azure, was created. And
seeing this they turned toward each other with a sudden
instinct, and their hands met, and then their lips
in one long kiss.”
But this same perfect understanding
may be arrived at in a crowd as well as in solitude.
Cressy and the Schoolmaster were mutually aware of
each other’s presence at the dance before they
had exchanged a look, and when their eyes met it was
in “an isolation as supreme as if they had been
alone.”
Could any country in the world except
our own produce a Cressy! She has all the beauty,
much of the refinement, and all the subtle perceptions
of a girl belonging to the most sophisticated race
and class; and underneath she has the strong, primordial,
spontaneous qualities, the wholesome instincts, the
courage, the steadfastness of that Pioneer people,
that religious, fighting, much-enduring people to
whom she belonged.
Cressy is the true child of her father;
and there is nothing finer in all Bret Harte than
his description of this rough backwoodsman, ferocious
in his boundary warfare, and yet full of vague aspirations
for his daughter, conscious of his own deficiencies,
and oppressed with that melancholy which haunts the
man who has outgrown the ideals and conventions of
his youth. Hiram McKinstry, compared with the
masterful Yuba Bill, the picturesque Hamlin, or the
majestic Starbottle, is not an imposing figure; but
to have divined him was a greater feat of sympathetic
imagination than to have created the others.
It is characteristic, too, of Bret
Harte that it is Cressy’s father who is represented
as acutely conscious of his own defects in education;
whereas her mother remains true to the ancestral type,
deeply distrusting her husband’s and her daughter’s
innovations. Mrs. McKinstry, as the Reader will
remember, “looked upon her daughter’s studies
and her husband’s interest in them as weaknesses
that might in course of time produce infirmity of
homicidal purpose and become enervating of eye and
trigger finger.... ’The old man’s
worrits hev sorter shook out a little of his sand,’
she had explained.”
Mr. McKinstry, on the other hand,
had almost as much devotion to “Kam” as
Matthew Arnold had to Culture, and meant very nearly
the same thing by it. Thus he said to the Schoolmaster:
“’I should be a powerful sight more kam
if I knowed that when I was away huntin’ stock
or fightin’ stakes with them Harrisons that
she was a-settin’ in school with the other children
and the birds and the bees, listenin’ to them
and to you. Mebbe there’s been a little
too many scrimmages goin’ on round the ranch
sence she’s been a child; mebbe she orter know
sunthin’ more of a man than a feller who sparks
her and fights for her.’
“The master was silent.
Had this selfish, savage, and literally red-handed
frontier brawler been moved by some dumb instinct of
the power of gentleness to understand his daughter’s
needs better than he?”
Alas that no genius has arisen to
write the epic of the West, as Hawthorne and Mary
Wilkins and Miss Jewett have written the epic of New
England! Bret Harte’s stories of the Western
people are true and striking, but his limitations
prevented him from giving much more than sketches of
them. They are not presented with that fullness
which is necessary to make a figure in fiction impress
itself upon the popular imagination, and become familiar
even to people who have never read the book in which
it is contained. Cressy, like the other heroines
of Bret Harte, flits across the scene a few times,
and we see her no more. Mrs. McKinstry is drawn
only in outline; and yet she is a strong, tragic figure,
of a type now extinct, or nearly so, as powerful and
more sane than Meg Merrilies, and far more worthy
of a permanent place in literature.