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COBCRIGifT DSPCSfT 



AFOOT AND ALONE; 

A WALK 

FROM SEA TO SEA 

BY THE SOUTHERN ROUTE. 
ADVENTURES AND OBSERVATIONS 

IX 

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, NEW MEXICO, ARIZONA, TEXAS, ETC. 

BY 

STEPHEN POWERS. 



* «♦» - 



ILLUSTRATED BY NUMEROUS ENGRAVINGS. 



" With Nature's freedom at the heart ; 
To cull contentment upon wildest shores, 
And luxuries extract from bleakest moors ; 
With prompt embrace all beauty to enfold, 
And having rights in all that we behold." 

— Wordsworth. 



HARTFORD, CONN.: 

COLUMBIAN BOOK COMPANY. 

1872. 



■c 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1871, by 

COLUMBIAN BOOK COMPANY, 
in the office of Librarian of Congress at Washington, D. C. 



f1 






\ 



/ 



> 



^ 



tf 



PREFATORY 



The walk from Sea to Sea, the story of which is here 
narrated, was undertaken, partly, from a love of wild ad- 
venture ; partly, from a wish to make personal and ocular 
study of the most diverse races of the Republic. 

An earnest love of Nature, even in her grimmest and sul- 
lenest moods, made me look forward with delight to the 
deserts of the Southern route ; and my anticipations were 
realized. Tramping month after month across the great 
empire of Texas ; then wandering free and glad beneath 
the skies of Arizona and New Mexico ; beholding now 
and then the nag of the Republic, flaunting in its wide 
authority over those lonesome and hungry wastes of the 
Middle Continent — this is a pleasure, to be fully enjoyed 
only by the pedestrian. These were the happiest days of 
my life, and there comes to me sometimes an insatiable 
longing to roam again, in the large liberty and lawlessness 
of the prairies, and to grapple once more with the sav- 
age deserts. 

The book makes no pretention to learning in ethnology 
or geology, but seeks simply to give some pictures of men 
and places, with a narrative of the incidents attending the 
journey. S. P. 

Sacramento, July, 1871. 




felsflLLUSB^I 



^ ■< ♦ », +. 



The Piney-Woods Cabin at Night,— Frontispiece, 
A Southern Mansion, .... 

A Home in Ruins, ------ 

The Cotton Plant, ----- 

An Alabama Planter's Home, - - . - 

A Negro Village, - 

The Cotton-Press, ..... 

The Caves at Vicksburg, - 

Tamany Jones' Fireside — "Wal Now, I Sa-ay," - 

The Bayou Region— A Louisiana Scene, 

A Live-Oak Grove, - 

After the War, - 

An Ox-Team, ...... 

A Texan Ranger, ..... 

A Little Sleepy, ------ 

Sunset, ------- 

Scene on the Desert — Antelopes and Mirage, 
View of Fort Davis, - - - - - 

Waiting for Something to Turn up, 

The Insulted Herdsman, . . - - 

A Mexican Cook, ------ 

Captured, ...... 

A Portrait, ..-.-- 

A Pimo Family, . . - - - 

The Cayote, .----- 

Mountain View, - - - - - 

Roxy's Suitors— A Scene in Southern California. 
End of the Bear Hunt, .... 

A Night with the Shepherds, 



Pass 

40 

41 

49 

77 

80 

81 

81 

88 

98 

99 

107 

119 

133 

141 

145 

153 

153 

157 

173 

201 

208 

211 

216 

235 

246 

268 

280 

281 




CHAPTER I. 



Pagk 



Outfitting— Robert as Quartermaster—" Packin' a Shirt in a Hat " — My 
Dress and Equipments — Departure from Raleigh, 19 

CHAPTER II. 

The Turpentine-Makers — In the Piney-Woods — Meeting with a Freed- 
man — Sherman's Ash-Cakes — Southern Characteristics — A Roadside 
Cooper — Sam and Jim — Spectral Chimneys — My Cape Fear Ferryman 
— " I am not a Peddler " — Experiences at Jonesboro' — Graduating in 
Pine — Winter Scenery — Anecdote — The Cross-Roads Groceryman — A 
Southern Anthropometer — A Clay-Eater — Street Scenes in Fayette- 
ville — An Old Shingle-Shaver — Hospitality in the Old North State — 
The Piney-Woods Cabin at Night — Religious Manifestations — The 
Piney-Woods Man— The Women of the South— My Host's Wife, 34 

CHAPTER III, 

Among the Rice-Eaters — A High-Toned Southron — An Unskillful Waltz 
— Over the Little Pedee — Noble Plantations — '" A Prodigious Screech- 
ing " — The Planters Home — Carpetless Rooms — Footfalls of Poverty 
— The Cavalry Sergeant and the Tar-Heels — Looking for Lodgings — 
" We never Keep Peddlers " — On the Santee — A night with a Planter 
< — Approach to Charleston — Talk with a " Sand-Hiller " — On the Bat- 
tery — Reminiscences of Secession Times — Picture of a Planter's Man- 
sion before the War — Another Picture — A Ruined Home — The Widow 
and Orphans — The Happy Freedmen — In the Overseer's Cabin — The 
Rice Negroes — The Marion Planters — After the Battle, 49 

CHAPTER IV 

Over the Red Hills — A City of Shade and Silence — Farewell to the Atlan- 
tic — A Woman's Story — Along the Ogeechee — Cotton Trains — A 
Black City — A Pumfoozled Freedman — A Night at Captain Truhitt's 
— An Unkind Cut — By the Planter's Fireside — The Captain's Story — 
His Experience with Bummers — " Sherman Is Coming " — Ungrateful 
Slaves — The Little Pickaninny — Return of the Runaways — The Story 
of Old Shade — The Emblem of Poverty — Georgia in the War, 64 



Xll CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER V. 

Among the Cotton Planters — Across the Chattahoochee — Story of an 
Alabamian Planter — Harry and his Master — The Valley of the Alaba- 
ma — In the Suburbs — Montgomery— View of the State House — On 
the Ferry-Boat at Selma — Description of a Planter's Home — Talks on 
the Veranda — Women of the Alabama Valley, 77 

CHAPTER VI. 

With the Yam-Eaters — A Mean Country — March Peepers — At Meridian 
— Drake's Story — Strange Superstition — Building a Cabin — A Win- 
some Legend — A Piney-Woods Village — The Meeting-House and 
Singing School — " Jest Jim " — Across the Pearl — A Mississippi Teu- 
ton — A Grotesque Hut and its Occupant — Approach to Vicksburg — 
Hallowed Ground— The Caves — The National Cemetery — The Hill 
City — Visit to Tamany Jones — The Primeval Forest — A Piney-Woods 
Character — The Red and the Blue — Draw-Bead College — The Dogs — 
Outside the Cabin — Inside — " Waal Now, I Sa-ay " — Story of Cap- 
tain Jarnley — The Contrary Cannuck — Supper, and Afterwards, 93 

CHAPTER VII. 

On the Doleful Flats — Sherman's Track to Vicksburg — Across the Mis- 
sissippi — The Peninsula — Tookey Sraook — A Story of the Siege of 
Vicksburg — The Bayou Region — Crossing a Bayou — Deserted Vil- 
lages — Sad Pictures — A Voodoo Priestess — Negro Superstitions — Too- 
key and the Goose — The Monroe Planters — The Red River — Shreve- 
port— An Editor's Sanctum— The War of Races— The Poor Whites, . . 107 

CHAPTER VIII. 
In the Land of Oxen — Cotton-Wains and Their Drivers — The Tribes of 
Joshua — Portrait of a Texan— A Texas Norther — A Texan in Love — 
The Last Cotton-Field— Hail to the Prairies !— Meeting with a Cattle 
Hunter— A Norwegian Village — Trinity Forest — Texan Refugees — Wax- 
ahatchie — Waiting for the Train — Rangers and Ox-Drivers, 119 

CHAPTER IX. 

Over the Rolling Prairies— Catechism for Pups— Starting for California 
— An Unruly Pageant — A River of Horns — Hog- Wallows — Cross Tim- 
bers — Bill Snodgrass and the Ichthyosaurians — The Valley of the 
Brazos — Texan Grocery Stores — View near the Paloxy — Cattle At- 
tacked by Wolves — A Rancho and its Surroundings — Rawhide — An 
Old Hermit — A Night Stampede — A Scene of Confusion — On the Run 
— An Awful Storm — In the Camanehe Country — School Attacked by 
Indians— The Cow-Boys and their Training— On the Brazos Prairie. . . 133 



CONTENTS. Xlll 

CHAPTER X. 

On the Windy Plain — Last Vestige of Civilization — Peg-Horn Gladiators 
—The Little Concho— The Old Sailor and the Mule— A terrific Nip— Fire 
in Camp— The Staked Plain— A Last Drink— The Start— Midnight- 
Restive Herds — Halt for Coffee — The Camanches !-The Doctor's gallant 
Charge — Approaching Day — Cainanche Tracks — A forced March — 
Baby Emigrants — A sleepy Train — A Wild Walk — Alone on the Des- 
ert—Short of Water— A Pass of Peril— Antelopes— The Third Night 
— Exhausted — Rescued — Approaching the River — A Run for the Pecos 
— Appalling Spectacle — Drowning Cattle — A polite Negro Corporal — 
Spanish Ojos — An Altercation — Mud Forts — Negroes on Guard — The 
perplexed Sentinel — Magnificent Sunset — A Night Halt, 145 

CHAPTER XI. 

In Apache Land — A " Cullud Gal " — Sensation in the Negro Camp — 
Scaling Wash-Bowl Hill — Olympia Canyon — A Government Train — ■ 
The Giant's Causeway of Texas — A Messenger — Waiting for Rain — 
Swallows — Fort Davis — Singular Phenomena — The Palmilla — Curious 
Spectacle — Tom and Fanny — Rain at Last — The Start — A Night Jour- 
ney — Gorgeous Sunrise — Pushing for the Rio Grande — Encounter with 
the Apaches — The Soldier's Life on the Plain — Deserters and their 
Experiences, 157 

CHAPTER XII. 

First view of Mexico — Chihuahua Mountains — Encamped on the Rio 
Grande — Our Harlequin — Dave the Ranger — San Antone the Ox-tamer 
— The Young Emigrant — The Melon-Stealers — Mexican Retribution — 
Mexican Farmers — Sheep Dogs, and Their Charge — Rancheros and 
Peons — San Eleazario at Noon — A Drowsy Village — Mexican Beauties 
— Street Scenes — Fort Bliss — The Pass of the North — Last View of 



168 



CHAPTER XIII. 

Among the Enameled Hills — A Mysterious Visitor — Indian Yells— The 
Organ Mountain — Lazoing a Steer — A Ranchero and His Spouse — A 
funny Sight — Breaking a Mustang — Fort Selby — Frightened by Indians 
— Dividing Cattle — Picturesque Scene — An Insulted Herdsman — The 
Chase — Crossing the Rio Grande — A Serenade — Horses Stolen — Mount- 
ain Storm — The Picture Galleries of New Mexico — Beautiful Scenery 
— Attack on Train — Apache Superstition — The Mirage — Nature's Cock- 
loft — A Mexican Fandango — Winking for a Partner — The Playas — An 
Enchanted Desert — The Belles of the Train — The Mexican of the Bor- 
der — Shall We Annex Mexico ? 185 



XIV CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER XIV. 

A Family Plot — Gateway to Arizona — Climbing a Mountain — On the 
Summit — A narrow Escape — Apache Pass — A Night of Terror — Comic 
Elements — Cudjoe and the German — An Arizonian Apache Fighter — 
How Indian Affairs are Managed — An Apache Massacre — Wayside In- 
scriptions — Demoralized Caravan — The Chaparral City — The Fate of 
Tucson Pioneers — The Papago Indians — Life in Tucson — Gambling 
Scene — The Soldiers — Funny old Mexican, 201 

CHAPTER XV. 

Miseries of Emigrant Life — Midnight Start — The Santa Cruz — The Sen- 
tinel of the Desert — A Landmark — Surprised by Indians — Successful 
Strategy — A Disagreeable Captive — Escape — A good Omen and the 
Sequel — Another Fright — A Night on a Sage-Bush — Blue Water Sta- 
tion — The grumbling Keeper, 211 

CHAPTER XYI. 

Down the River of Despair — Sacaton — Pimo Villages — A man of Family 
—Squaws and Pappooses— Inside a Wigwam— Pimo Dolls— A Texan Em- 
igrant in Arizona — Sad Incident — The Painted Rocks — Lunch with the 
Maricopas — Merry Savages — Grand Scenery — Twilight on the Desert 
— A Sleepless Night — A dreary Walk — The Estrella Mountains — Sun- 
set — Starving for Water — Gila Bend Station, 226 

CHAPTER XVII. 

In the Home of the Heat — Down the Gila — The Impertinent Cayotes — 
" Oft in the Stilly Night "—Veteran Hunter— A Shot in the Dark— A 
Hideous Chasm — Massacre of an Emigrant Family — Taken for a Mule 
— Denizens of the River — An interesting Character — Love in the Des- 
ert — An odd Genius — The Predatory Cow — Arizonian Civilization — 
Apache Slaves — A Woman's Camp — Arizona City, 235 

CHAPTER XVIII. 

Walks on the Desert — Fort Yuma — The Colorado — Yuma Indians — A hap- 
py Event — Drifting Sands — Skeletons — Fate of a Deserter — Yankee 
Station-Keepers — A Walk by Moonlight — Approaching the Sierra 
Nevada — A Mysterious River — Sunrise at Carriza Station — A Fairy 
Spectacle — A Soldier Boy's Story — Vallecito Oasis — Diegeno Huts — 
Invited to Ride — "You Bet" — SanFelipe Pass — View from the Mount- 
ains— Farewell to the Chaparral, 246 



CONTENTS. XV 

CHAPTER XIX. 

Honey in Green Hills — Diegenos Village — Buying Pan-Cakes — In the 
Valley of San Felipe — California Birds and Flowers — Encounter with 
a Diegeno — An Impromptu Circus — A Fearful Adventure — An Amazed 
Vaquero — Amusing Incident — Forlorn Habitations — My Host at 
Temecula — A Silent Mexican — A Moonlight Night — One of the Forty- 
Niners — Peter Qnartz's Adventures — A Miner's Story — Flour Sacks 
vs. Biled Shirts — Early Mining Times — A Preacher in Camp — Gam- 
bling and the Result, 263 

CHAPTER XX. 

Wine in Dry Valleys — California Rivers — The Santa Ana — The Chino 
Plains — An Amusing Sight — About Blackbirds — A Night with a Mex- 
ican — The Corn-Huskers — Autumn Scenery — The Valley of San Jose 
— Roxy and Her Suitors — The City of the Angels — A Visit to the 
Wine-Cellars — Life in Los Angeles — Socrates Hyacinth in Trouble — 
Vineyards and Wine Making — Wine vs. Whiskey — Tropical Fruits — 
On the Mustard Plains — The Mexican Shepherd — Starting for a 
Bear Hunt — Santa Susana Mountains — A Bear Hunter — Game Discov- 
ered— "Load for Your Life "—End of the Hunt, 280 

CHAPTER XXI. 

Coast Walks — An Immense Rancho — Inside the Hut — A Night with the 
Shepherds — California Girls — Early Days in California— The Native 
Inhabitants— The Fatal Gold-Discovery— First View of the Pacific — 
The Music of the Sea — My first Chinaman — A Day in Santa Barbara 
California Farmers — Story of James W. Marshall, the Original Gold 
Discoverer — Ruined by a Gold Mine, 293 

CHAPTER XXII. 

With the Shepherds— Gaviota Pass— Reminiscence of Fremont's Guide 
— Teamsters and Tramps — Mission Santa Ines — Inside the Old Church 

. Adjacent Grog-Shops— Talk with a Stage-Driver— The Alfileria— Dry 
Sowing— A Dingy Town— The Hot Sulphur Springs— The Great Wool 
Growing Region— Sequestered Shepherds— A Child of Nature— Herd- 
ing Sheep— New Sensations— The Humming Bird's Song— Old John 
and the Migueleno Boy— A Whistling Indian— Story of Jack Powers 
the Famous Brigand— The Influence of the Mines— Evidences of Pov- 
erty—The Large Land-Owners— About Trees— The Valley of the Sali- 
nas—Life of a Vaquero— The Chinese Cook— Blanket-Men— An Earth- 
quake—A Typical Californian— Mania for Wheat— A Wheat-Colored 
Maiden— Domestic Felicity— The Tale of an Ox-Tail, 308 



XVI 



CONTEXTS. 



CHAPTER XXIII. 

Down the Yalley of Gardens — Interview with a Blanket-Man — An Agri- 
cultural Experiment — Redwood Villages — San Juan — Standing Treat 
Wheat Fields — The Windmills — California Pumpkins — San Jose — A 
Noble Yalley — Suburban Residences — Rural Life in California — The 
Laboring Classes — The Employers — The Story of the Seizure of Mon- 
terey by Commodore Sloat, 318 

CHAPTER XXIY. 

1846 — The Stevenson Regiment — The Thomas H. Perkins — Incidents of 
the Yoyage — Story and Fate of a Pioneer's Son — Yictim of a Yigi- 
lance Committee — Approach to San Francisco — The Bay — Autumn. 
Scenery — Mission Hill — Dolores — Lone Mountain — Then and Now — 
Our Ultimate City— California Children— The Chinese—" Grass Wid- 
ows " — " Spiritual Widowers " — Local Characteristics — Sunset at the 



^* «"«'**• """"-J 








ITINERARY. 




From Raleigh 


to Charleston, - 


300 


" Charleston 


" Savannah, - 


- 110 


" Savannah 


" Macon, .... 


191 


" Macon 


" Columbus, - 


- 100 


11 Columbus 


" Montgomery, 


00 


" Montgomery 


11 Selma, - 


- 50 


" Selma 


" Meridian, ... 


107 


" Meridian 


" YlCKSBURG, - 


- 140 


" VlCKSBURG 


" Shreveport, 


175 


" Shreveport 


" Athens, - 


- 120 


11 Athens 


" Marshall, 


90 


" Marshall 


" Waxahatchie, 


- 165 


" Waxahatchie 


" Franklin, (El Paso,) 


600 


" Franklin 


" Tucson, - 


- 305 


" Tucson 


" Los Angeles, ... 


569 


" Los Angeles 


u San Francisco, 
- 


- 444 


Total Walk, 


3,556 



A JOURNEY FROM SEA TO SEA. 



CHAPTER I. 
OUTFITTING. 




OBERT,' said I to the colored factotum of the 
^ hotel in Raleigh, " come hither and let me behold 
J^your beauty." 

Robert came and stood before me — an oldish African, 
say forty-five, with his head a little grizzled, his eyes pop- 
ped out nearly half their diameters, and his mouth always 
ajar, disclosing the absence of every alternate tooth ; they 
having been principally eliminated in the process of his 
youthful fights. 

" Robert, I propound unto your intelligence the follow- 
ing theorem, to wit : — That many a bold soldier boy, in 
the recent sanguinary unpleasantness, who might have 
fought gloriously for his country, was prevented from so 
doing by the Quartermaster, who so overloaded him with 
baggage that he broke down before seeing the enemy. 
Do you admit the correctness of the postulate, Robert ?" 

" Well, sah, a nigger dat waited on a gemmen in de San- 
guinary Commission, sah, he tell me de Quartermaster 
mighty hard on de boys sometimes, sah." 

" That's it, Robert, undoubtedly. Now, I am going on 
a journey of some thousands of miles, and I intend to be 
my own Quartermaster, or rather, I am going to promote 



18 OUTFITTING. 

you to that office, as an experiment. You perceive scat- 
tered on the bed yonder, the entire extent of my worldly 
possessions. Here is my hat, Robert, and I desire you 
now to fill it with such articles, selected from my personal 
property, as you consider most necessary for my uses dur- 
ing a journey of that length. If you succeed in filling it 
according to my notions, all that remains over of my 
goods and chattels shall accrue to you, as the emoluments 
and perquisites of your office, the same to continue and 
appertain to yourself and your lawful heirs or assigns in 
perpetuum. You comprehend perfectly, Robert ?" 

" Wha' fur gwine fur to pu 'em in de hat '?" asjied Eob- 
ert in profound astonishment. 

" It is necessary for me to start very soon, Robert ; will 
you make the experiment, or not ?" 

He scrutinized me with one searching look, as if to sat- 
isfy himself that I was not demented, then with another, 
to assure himself whether or not it was a solemn jest; 
then he took the hat and proceeded hesitatingly to the 
bedside. The bedstead was of unpainted pine, undimin- 
ished at the head, but the upper segment of the foot-board 
had been kicked off by some piney-woods lodger of too 
long legs ; and on it was spread a counterpane with a white 
ground, upon which were depicted in green, divers crooked- 
necked cranes or gourds, I am uncertain which. 

First, he selected a couple of gorgeous neckties, and laid 
them carefully in the hat. Then he took a box of collars, 
and endeavored to put them in also, without rumpling the 
neckties ; but finally he had a happy inspiration, took out 
the collars and the neckties, wrapped the latter around the 
box, and then returned them triumphantly into the hat. 
Then he ventured another furtive glance, before I could 
smooth out of my face the smile with which it was wrink- 
ling, and immediately the explosion took place. 

'•' Yah, yah, yah ! De hat won't hold nuffin more but 



OUTFITTING. 19 

jest dese hyur an' de socks — yah, yah ! — an' mighty soon 
you jest go plumb naked, 'cept socks and a collar. Yah, 
yah, yah !" 

I thought Robert would certainly have fallen on the 
floor. He clutched the bed-post convulsively with both 
hands, bowed down his head between his arms, and finally 
tumbled over helplessly on the bed, and the foot-board 
seemed about to be demolished entirely. 

" Packin' a shirt in a hat !" and then he yelled outright, 
and the house shook under his " irrepressible laughter." 

" I see, Robert, I shall have to retire you from the rank 
of Quartermaster, and take upon myself the high functions 
of that office." 

So I produced a traveling-bag and placed therein the 
following articles : — a " diamond edition " of Longfellow, 
the Harper's text of Horace, a manifold note-book for the 
res gestae, a change of flannel, a tooth-brush, my sister's 
spool of snuff-colored thread, and my mother's hussif. 
This latter article was very wonderfully and inscrutably 
made, and contained a thimble, an elegant assortment of 
pins, needles and buttons, scissors, and leaves for needles, 
some of white flannel, daintily stitched with pink thread 
around the edges, and some of scarlet, stitched with white. 
When wrapped together it was no larger than a cylindri- 
cal nutmeg-grater ; and it was of such marvelous potency 
in repairing rips and rents, that I herewith state my belief 
that, if my mother simply sat in the room with it, it could 
keep house itself. 

I was dressed in a pair of doeskin trowsers ; light top- 
boots, with the ends of the trowsers inserted therein ; a 
shortish frock-coat ; and a planter's hat. 

Thus rigged out, and equipped with a mighty jackknife, 
I left Raleigh on New Year's day, 1868. 




CHAPTER II. 
THE TUEPENTmE-MAKEES. 

WEAKLY everybody to whom I imparted my 
tremendous secret sought to dissuade me from the 
enterprise. I was solemnly warned that I should 
certainly be assassinated by the freedmen ! Even Madge- 
howlet herself, sitting alone in a tree-top in the sol- 
emn deeps of the pineries at evening, called out to me, 
"Tou fool ! you fool ! fool ! fool !" Nevertheless, no enemy 
assailed me more terrific than the robber Peynard, prowl- 
ing in the gloaming by the fence, and shooting back at 
me, Scythian-like, a couple of blood-red bullets from the 
end of his wry neck. 

Awful is the gloom and the solitude by night in these 
philosophic pines of the Old North State. Presently there 
comes a mournful and fitful moaning for a moment, as the 
wind soughs through the topmost branches. Then the 
wind is still, and the silence is doubly awful. Hear the 
dull thud of the assassin's bludgeon, and the gurgling of 
the blood ! 'Twas only the hoarse-throated owl. Hist ! 
see those dreadful bogeys, stalking through the woods in 
their flaming sarks ! Fool ! it is only the long gashes on 
the pines, faintly phosphorescing with gum. 

Some hear in this plaintive lament of the pines the voice 
of Nature, weeping over the follies and miseries of her 
children. The disciples of Darwin may detect in the 
moaning some inchoate brother's fractional " world-soul," 
struggling for its human development. Every imagina- 
tive soul hears its own language, as Homer says the wor- 



IX THE PIXEY WOODS. 21 

shipers at Delos heard the priestesses each in his own 
tongue. 

Of these two theories, O wise reader, "ehuse you 
whilk." Let us dip our drinking-cups into this deft little 
pocket chopped in the pine, and quaff some gum-water, 
for it will make us wise like a medicine ; and then let us 
reason together. For my part, I cleave to the Darwinian 
theory, for in no other manner can we account for the 
extraordinary populousness of these woods. 

Here, too, it was that Sherman passed — the comet of 
the war — when, disdaining the meaner orbits of little men, 
he wheeled on his baleful flight through Confederate 
heavens, while his fiery train consumed many homes and 
hoary tyrannies together. Here it was that he returned, 
beneath the shadow of the Eagle and the Stars, while his 
cannon-wheels laughed their big chuckling laugh, as they 
went home, and these old woods winked with the glinting 
of bayonets. 

Ah ! how many bright star-lives, both in Northern and 
and Southern orbits, were blotted out in the night when 
this comet crushed the rival luminary of the Republic ! 

The first freedman I met, instead of assassinating me, 
grinned fearfully, when he discovered I was a Northern 
man. He wore but one shoe, and that was much dilapida- 
ted. His trowsers were sustained by a corn-husk belt, and 
he wore a government blouse, split all the way down the 
back, and kept to duty by a tow-string tied around his 
neck. Yet from his tattered breast fluttered a Union 
League badge, a bit of ribbon worth five cents, for which 
he said he expended a dollar. Said I to him : 

" Uncle, do you enjoy ' the feast of reason and the flow 
of soul ' in the Union League ?" 

" No, sah ; I can't say as we does, sah." 

" What stands between you and your soul's enjoyment. 
Uncle ? Tell me about your troubles." 



22 ONE OF SHERMAN'S ASH-CAKES. 

He glanced rather dubiously at his badge, as if he had a 
faint suspicion I might be poking fun at it ; then he shift- 
ed his weight upon his other leg, as if to shift off the bur- 
den of conscience for telling the little family secret he was 
about to impart. 

"Well, you see, sah, we was 'joy in ourselves pretty 
sharp, and feelin' de lub ob de Union in de sperrit of de 
flesh, 'till dese hyur free niggers jined in. Dey was boun' 
for to rule de roost, and dey was all de time a kickin' up a 
fuss." 

" But you are all free negroes now." 

" But dese hyur is de old free niggers, I mean, afo' de 
wah. Dey calls us, sence de wah, Sherman's ash-cakes, 
and dey's all de time a kickin' up a fuss." 

The boys would have deserved well of posterity if they 
had only exterminated that melodious " pot-rack, pot-rack 1" 
of the southern guinea-hens. But every African fowl once 
boiled in Sherman's mess-kettles had risen like a Phoenix ; 
and every one of those geese which had such an insane 
propensity for swallowing Federal ramrods, had reappeared 
upon the scene, with all the iron-rust still in its screeching 
throat. "Wonderful is the South for the multitude of these 
pensive fowls, warbling " their native wood-notes wild." 

Every one of the original rail-fences is rehabilitated in 
its pristine vermiculation. Kot one is missing of those 
tan, baked-looking hogs, with the "imped ribs" and 
arching spine, which are muzzling in the pine-straw in 
every well wellrregulated landscape of the South. Again, 
as before the war, slender columns of shingles flank the 
road, towering among the aromatic, golden snow-drifts of 
the Carolinas. 

The fat gold of shingles gives yellow gleams from the 
new-made cabin-roof. Does the carpenter stretch a plum- 
met against his work ? He steps away ten paces, and ran- 
ges his infallible perpendicular by any pine. 



MY CAPE FEAR FERRYMAN. 23 

Here, in a roadside shop, a dusky cooper beats his com- 
plaining barrel, in a kind of Runic rhyme, expounding the 
constitution the while to his neighbor. It is pleasant to 
hear these sable Federalists explain our polity so absolutely, 
without any of the customary friction and lire. 

" Whackety-whang- whang-whang ! "Whackety-whang ! 
Mind, Sam, de gallantry ob de cons'tution is 'zactly — 
whackety — whang ! — is 'zactly what I tell you, life, liberty, 
and de 'suit ob property. Whackety — whang !" 

" Ta'n't de 'suit ob property ; it's de de 'suit ob happi- 
ness, I tell you," said the other earnestly. 

" Go 'way, you fool nigger ! Tell me I don't know ! 
When you got property you got happiness, ha'n't you ? 
"Whackety — whang — whang ! It's de same anyhow." 

" Dat's so, Jim. But dere a' n't no gallantry ob de con- 
stitution. De gallantry — why, dat's de wimmen." 

" Go 'way ! I knowed you didn't know nuthin' nohow. 
Whacket — whang — whang ! De gallantry ob de constitu- 
tion, I tell you, is de obscurity ob de fundileus principles. 
Whackety — whang !" 

" Dat's so, Jim, come to think. De pundibus princi- 
ples — yes, dat's so." 

Here and there in an " old field " is a pair of spectral 
chimneys, whose great eyes of fireplaces alow and aloft 
glower wrathfully at each other across the intervening 
heap of ashes, flickering at each other as the cause of the 
disaster. But most of them are rebuilt, and the Old 
North State has "beauty for ashes, the air of^ joy for 
mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heav- 
iness." 

At the Cape Fear one of those gigantic negroes, nearly 
seven feet high, who are occasionally seen in North Caro- 
lina, sat in the stem of a frail punt, and wafted me over 
the river. He had never seen a Yankee before, and he 
riveted his great eyes on me, and never moved them till 



24 EXPERIENCES AT JOXESBORO'. 

we touched the other bank, while he sat dipping first on 
this side, then on that, slowly and abstractedly, as if he 
were slicing invisible cheese. He did not even quench his 
gaze when the boat touched, and I handed him my fare, 
but he came to the bow, and stood looking at me till I 
reached the top of the bank, when his eyes reached my 
traveling-bag, and speech came to him again at last. 

"Got anything to sell dar, boss — rings or sich like 
truck?" 

" I am not a peddler," I replied. " I carry about with 
me no worldly possessions but justice and an equal mind." 

" Well, 'scuse me, boss ; but I thought, bein' you was a 
Yankee, you mout hev some sich truck." 

In Jonesboro town I graduated in pine. I sat down in 
a little pine house, on a bare pine floor, before a bare pine 
table, and a rosy little woman, very communicative for a 
piney-woods inhabitant, gave me some capital yams, baked 
and mealy, and spareribs thinly fattened on pine roots. 
Then I sat down by a stove which was under heavy bom- 
bardment with tobacco juice from a circle of blue-nosed, 
yellow-faced, piney-woods men, who were discussing the 
price of tar and rosin. Presently one of them produced a 
black bottle from his pocket, and passed it around. When 
it reached my neighbor, he extracted it from his mouth 
with a clamorous " flunk," and offered it to me. 

"Hev pinetop, stranger?" 

But in the spareribs I had tried the pine roots, and I 
excused myself, not caring to become familiar with the 
higher branches. 

In these great pineries of the coast, sometimes the gol- 
den sun, shining with a rich piney yellowness, is let right 
down into natural glades, gilded over with the dying 
broom-grass. Here, in these sheltered dells, a January 
noon is the finest relish of the year ; amid the golden and 
evergreen splendors of the sunny Carolinas; the pale- 



ILLUSTRATIONS OF NEGRO CHARACTER. 25 

green "mystic mistletoe" aloft; the tender myrtle, the 
cassena, and the row-palmetto alow; the Spanish moss, 
which bourgeons on the lustrous-leaved magnolia, or swings 
its soft festoons, in their delicate pearly-gray, across the 
purple and frosted berries of the cedar. Here, in the mel- 
low lilac of the haze, the brooding silence of the softened 
winter is broken only by the swift straight whiz of some 
roving bee, or, perchance, occasionally by the silvery gar- 
rulity of the bobolink, that genuine Yankee, spending the 
winter in the South, but not for bronchitis. He babbles 
so fast one would think he had come down peddling. 

"Notions here ! Notions here ! cheap— cheap— cheap 1" 

How these piney woods and turpentine villages swarm 
with those strange, little, timid, bloodless, sand-colored 
children, whom it makes one sad to behold ! Yet they are 
remarkably healthy. 

In one of these villages I saw a couple of incidents 
which illustrate negro character. A tall sallow woman 
came out of a house, evidently in anger, picked up a splint- 
er, and started towards a group of children playing on the 
lumber. Her little girl saw a rod was in pickle, and 
started to run, crying, while the mother said, " Now I 
will whip you ! I will whip you this time !" None of the 
white children pitied the little girl, but a colored lad 
caught her up, and hurried with her toward the mother, 
pleading, " Please don't, Mrs. Martin, let her go this time." 
He scudded away to the door, and so averted the 
catastrophe. 

Next, I saw a couple of pickaninnies who had toddled 
down to a puddle of refuse tar, with which they smeared 
their little pug noses, then touched them together and 
pulled them apart — an operation which they accomplished 
with great and hilarious cackling. This same boy was 
sent by his mother to bring the babies ; but, instead of 
showing the kindness he did toward the white child, he 



26 THE CROSS-ROADS GROCERYMEX. 

ran down and pushed them over, and the little woolly 
head of one of them went into the tar so deep that the 
boy lifted him almost perpendicular, before it was extri- 
cated. 

Now, while I am in a village, I want to inquire in my 
most indignant tones, why, because a fellow is not afraid 
to pull off his coat and walk, must every pesty little gro- 
ceryman in these cross-roads try to sell him maggoty 
cheese? Does that act constitute him an idiot, that he 
should be supposed to be fond of " animated nature ?" 

And in this country store there is inevitably a sleek, 
paternal-looking gentleman, hollow-cheeked and much 
wrinkled about the mouth, with a greasy coat, and read- 
ing a paper with spectacles. When the cheese is under 
discussion, and the unfortunate pedestrian is meekly ob- 
jecting to it, the elderly gentleman invariably thrusts his 
sharp nose into the circle, examines the cheese, and pro- 
tests that it is the very kind he always purchases for his 
family consumption, and that it is the supreme solace and 
consolation of his life to be permitted to masticate the 
same. 

One day I constructed a kind of social thermometer or 
anthropometer, which was of great service to me in my 
subsequent journey ings. On a slip of paper I scaled off 
certain points, by regular intervals, with negro cabins for 
degrees. Thus, for instance, a house with no negro quar- 
ters around it was at zero, and marked " loyal." At five 
degrees, or cabins, the house was " doubtful ;" ten, " op- 
posed to secession, but went with his State;" twenty, 
"fire-eater," etc. 

To particularize: — a very small log-cabin, with three 
dogs at the door, generally indicated a thrifty negro, freed 
by his own money before the war. The same kind of 
cabin, with two dogs, denoted a poor white man, loyal as 
a sheep. 



A SOUTHERN ANTHROPOMETER. 27 

At zero I dined off boiled bacon and collard greens. 
Our talk was about predestination, baptism by immersion, 
the relative excellences of salted and gammond pork, and 
the " d — nigger," considered as a thief and a liar. The 
host was drafted into the Confederate army, but " took 
the bush." 

At two or three degrees, there would be a pile of dog- 
eared school books on the table, but no newspaper. The 
sons volunteered, to avoid the conscription, but " always 
shot over the Yankees' heads." 

Five degrees indicated a copy of the county paper on 
the table, and some sad-looking rosebushes in the door- 
yard. The sons all enlisted early, and never shot over 
the Yankees' heads. "When Sherman came along, he 
found this family " had always been good Union people," 
but at night their boys stuffed the soldier's pipes with dis- 
loyal substances. They had a " faithful nigger," (nearly 
every family had one,) but the Yankees pricked him with 
bayonets, to make him disclose the hiding-place of the 
horses. 

Arrived at ten degrees, I would find a fine painted 
house, and a library, and the family sufficiently cultured 
to enable them to converse very intelligently for twenty 
minutes before they imparted to me the inevitable infor- 
mation, " Free niggers won't work." About at this 
point I found the Co-operationist of 1860, who was not a 
Secessionist pure and simple, but wanted the South to act 
together, whether for or against secession. 

From twenty degrees upward there was splendid classi- 
cal culture, plenty of silk and of silver, and lusty disloy- 
alty, i. e., original and separate Secessionism. In return 
for the generons hospitality of these families, for which, 
especially in South Carolina, they would accept no com- 
pensation, I was obliged to listen, for the thousandth time, 
to the accursed truism, " The nigger is the natural infe- 



28 INTERVIEWING A CLAY-EATER. 

rior of the white man," and " without a master to care for 
him, the nigger is relapsing into hideous sensualism, and 
is on the high road to extinction." Nevertheless I am 
bound to add that, as a general rule, (though, of course, 
there are many exceptions,) real, substantial, bread-and- 
meat kindness to the freedmen increases jpari jpossu with 
the degrees on this anthropometer. Nowhere is there 
more cruelty and intolerance towards the negro than at 
zero. 

The broadest and most truthful rule in regard of the 
two populations of the South may be formulated in these 
words : — Tolerance towards the negro broadens with the 
planter's acres. Let a man be in such abject poverty as to 
own no land whatever, and he finds himself thrown in 
direct competition with the freedman, and hates him ; let 
him own but sixty acres, and work with his hired negro 
occasionally in the field,. and he already acquires towards 
him a kindlier feeling. 

Approaching Fayetteville, I came up with an undoubted 
specimen of the North Carolina clay-eater. On his dray 
there was a single fagot of light wood, and a small bale of 
peltry, and he was astride of the donkey, with his legs 
outside the thills, though the animal was comically small. 
His legs dangled down so long that he could have doubled 
1 h an twice around the donkey, and on one of his callous 
heels he wore a mighty spur, with which he frequently 
digged the unhappy animal nearly on top of its back. 
His trowsers were slipped up to his knees, his coat was 
made of gunny-cloth, and out of the top of his hat pro- 
jected his reddish-yellow hair. His eyes were watery, and 
had a kind of piggish leer. I thought I would ask him 
questions fast enough and directly enough to force from 
him a positive answer of " yes " or " no " — a thing which 
it is exceedingly difficult to obtain in the piney-wood- — ■ 
but I found he was no liripoop. After salutations I said : 



INTERVIEWING A CLAY-EATER. 29 

" Is there any tavern on the road to Fayetteville V 9 
" I reckon mebbe yon mout find one, ef you looked in 
the right place." 

" This is the direct road to Fayetteville, I suppose V 9 
" You'll be putty apt fur to git thar, ef you keep goin' 
straight ahead," and he gave me a kind of low cunning 
leer , as if he understood already what I was attempting. 
" Do you sell much wood in Fayetteville V 
" I reckon this hyur jack thinks it hag to haul a right 
smart chance." Hereupon he took out a cake of tobacco, 
and a knife some eight inches long, and cut off a mouth- 
ful which he inserted far into the hollow of his cheek, 
performing the whole operation with such a kind of delib- 
erateness as showed he felt bored. 
" Does wood bear a good price now ?" 
" It's jest accordin'. Some fetches more, and some agin 
not so much." 

" Oak fetches more than pine, I suppose V 9 
"Ca-an't say as it does reglar. Mout; then agin it 
moutn't. Green oak kinder needs a little lightwood fur 
to set it goin'. You got to hev both." 

" I believe you Southerners burn green wood mostly ?" 
" Tain't perticular. Every feller to his likin'." 
" Well now, my friend, pardon my impertinence ; but I 
am writing a book on the subject of wood, and I am en- 
deavoring to acquire some trustworthy information on the 
matter, as to the fiber, durability, combustibility, and other 
qualities of the various woods. If now you were called 
upon in a court of law to give your personal and unbiased 
opinion, you would declare upon oath, would you not, that 
a hundred pounds of green oak are heavier than a hun- 
dred pounds of dry pine ?" 

He gave me a quick glance, then he looked steadfastly 
at the ass' ears. 

" Well now, stranger, you kin jest set down in your 



30 STREET SCENES IX FAYETTEVILLE. 

book, when you git to that place, that all the people of 
North Caroliny wos sech denied fools you hed to weigh it 
yerself." 

Fayetteville. A genuine Southern city, with its broad, 
sunken, sandy streets ; the inevitable rows of mulberries 
and China-trees ; the street-lamps smashed in some lively 
row; the moldering damp-cracked fronts of stucco; the 
drowsy stir in the streets ; the exquisitely beautiful, mar- 
ble-white, black-eyed girls, gliding timidly along in their 
limp dresses ; the lazy swinging wenches, with buckets of 
water on their turbaned heads, which they screw around 
so carefully and so stiffly to catch every sight ; the young 
men, sitting sharply angular on goods-boxes along the 
pavements ; the spavined plantation coaches, with withed 
axles, and harness pieced with gunny-cloth, and not nearly 
so oily-black as the negro atop, in his cast-off finery, a gor- 
geous silk hat, breastpins galore, and white grocery twine 
in his shoes, smirking and grimacing to every dark woman 
on the street, as he drives along. 

One day I came upon a very old man, sitting prone on 
the ground, shaving shingles. Singularly enough for a 
piney-woods man, he was rather communicative, and we 
discoursed on various matters. At last he asked me about 
the public debt, and I set it forth to him in all its impo- 
sing roundness of millions and billions, but it appeared to 
make no adequate impression, for he only looked blank 
and said nothing. Then I wrote it out on a shingle, and 
gave it to him to contemplate. He took it, turned it 
wrong side up, regarded it vacantly for a time, as if in 
profound cogitation of its greatness, then carefully laid it 
down, bottom side up, and commenced shaving again, with- 
out uttering a word. Presently he stopped again, and 
asked : 

" What mout rosom be wuth in Kaleigh I" 

" Eeally, I can't say. I didn't read the market reports 
before I started." 



THE riNEY- WOODS CABIN AT NIGHT. 31 

A gleam of triumph brightened his face as he glanced 
quickly at me. 

" Well now, 'sense me stranger ; but 'pears like it's 
rather singular. Come all the way down from Raleigh, 
and don't know what rosom are wuth." 

The old man had his revenge. He knew that I knew 
that he could not read, and had endeavored to turn the 
tables. 

The Old North State is not in repute for hospitality. 
If I was belated at night, and saw the glimmer of a roar- 
ing lire through the chinks of a piney-woods cabin, I 
sighed inwardly at my approaching tribulation. First, 
there would be the villainous hounds, fiercely intent On 
fleshing their tusks in my legs, and then the geese would 
set up a diabolical squalling and clapperclawing. Still no- 
body would come to the door. 

Rap, rap, rap ! 

" Who's thar?" 

Then I would extemporize an animated biography of 
myself, sandwiching in the chapters thereof between the 
flurries of yelps, and kicking desperately right and left the 
while, to prevent the brutes from tearing away the tails of 
my coat. At last there would be a low consultation on the 
inside, then the man would shuffle to the door, open it 
cautiously, and, standing behind it, stick his head out, and 
look. Seeing I was not armed, he would let me come in- 
side. There would be eight or ten whitish-clad, whitish- 
faced people around the hearth, some of them smoking, 
some sucking the snufF-swab, the rest doing nothing. 
Finding out at last who I was, they sometimes seemed to 
be a little ashamed, and explained that their extreme cau- 
tiousness was learned towards the end of the war ; and, in 
consideration of the ruffian horrors of which they told me, 
I was disposed to be charitable. 

The people of the South, especially of such old steady 



32 RELIGIOUS MANIFESTATIONS. 

going communities as North Carolina, are far more reli- 
gious, if often only formally, than we of the North. 
They seem to feel almost universally, chastened by the 
great and terrible war. The very lowest classes, as for 
instance those who subsist chiefly by renting turpentine 
trees, gave feeble religious manifestations, but I seldom 
stopped with a planter or even with the humblest farmer, 
where grace was not pronounced at table, though it was 
frequently done in a painfully flippant and formal maimer. 

Dr. John "W. Draper, suckled on the materialism of 
Buckle and Comte, in his History of the American Civil 
War, says the climate of the South "promoted a senti- 
ment of independence in the person, and of State Eights 
in the community." In the Thoughts on American Civil 
Policy, he says again of the South, " More volative than 
reflective, it can never have a constant love for a fixed con- 
stitution." On the contrary, the South is notably old- 
fashioned in everything ; — in legislation, in dress, in wor- 
ship, in forms of speech. Simply because it is " more vol- 
atile than reflective," and therefore not introspective and 
inventive, it is content to slip along in the ancient grooves. 
Note such quaint Cethegan uses as, " holp," " love " for 
" like," " for to " with the infinitive, " drug " for " drag- 
ged," etc. The ladies dresses are at least a year behind 
the fashions of the North. Go into the churches, even in 
the largest metropolitan cities, and you will be impressed 
with the quaint and simple antiquity of certain usages, 
such as that of standing in prayer, of lining out the hymn, 
etc. And it must be confessed, if a man has any heart of 
old-fashioned honesty in him, he often finds himself mak- 
ing comparisons very unfavorable to many of our flippant 
Northern innovations. 

Yet there is some sprinkling of truth, in Dr. Draper's 
ponderous disquisitions, and there is some subtile analogy 
between men and trees. Lucretius seems to have felt 



THE TYPICAL PINEY- WOODS MAX. 33 

some vague apprehension of this, and every classical rea- 
der will remember the famous trees of the Hellespont, 
which Pliny fancifully says grieved for the death of 
Protesilaus. 

The typical piney-woods man is tall and guant, like the 
pines ; sunken-breasted ; hair coarse and Jacksonian ; fin- 
gers bony and long. As his frosty gray eyes are the far- 
thest remove from the pale dreamy eyes of the cypress- 
breeding Orient, so is his voice a great way removed from 
the Oriental softness, because it is resined too harsh. Per- 
sian Hafiz compares the soft articulation of his verses to a 
string of pearls, and Homer likens the speech of Pylian 
Nestor to falling snow, but what was the voice of Caroli- 
nian Benton, roaring in the Senate % The piney-woods face 
has none of the generous roundness and curves of beauty 
of the oak-leaf, but the hard sharp lines of the pine-leaf. 
Wadsworth says of little Lucy : — 

" And she shall lean her ear 

In many a secret place, 
Where rivulets dance their wayward round, 
And beauty born of murmuring sound 

Shall pass into her face." 

Whence, then, the hardness of face and of soul of the 
piney-woods man, but from the cold sour roar of his sol- 
emn pineries? 

The remark of Ruskin, as to the traditional valor of the 
dwellers in the piney-woods, applies to the mountaineers, 
but scarcely to the representative piney-woods character 
of the Atlantic coast. The piney-woods have, indeed, 
given to the Republic its greatest captain (Jackson,) but 
the names of Johnson, Vance, Bragg, Polk and Holden 
are coupled with little else but disaster. The record of 
military desertions in North Carolina is more disgraceful 
than that of any other State, either North or South. 

How superior the women of the South are to their 
2* 



34 



SUPERIORITY OF THE WOMEN. 



brothers ! Whatever my opinion may be of the latter, for 
the former, considering the domestic and literary educa- 
tion they received, I have the most profound respect. 

My last dinner in North Carolina was eaten in a thrifty 
farm-house, and, after it was ended, I offered the host a 
piece of currency. He refused it — the one solitary in- 
stance when my money was refused in the Old North 
State. I saw he was not a man to be offended by the offer, 
so I urged it upon him, and while we were talking, his lit- 
tle wife stood looking at us through the door. At last she 
could no longer restrain herself. Laughing a little, but 
with her wonderfully black eyes glittering in a way which 
was suggestive of an immense amount of latent fire, she 
said to me : — 

" You ought to have offered it to me. You Yankees 
never conquered no woman." 





CHAPTER III. 

AMONG THE RICE-EATERS. 

NE afternoon, after wading through an immeasur- 
able contiguity of naked sand, set with scraggy 
oak shrubs, I came to a planter's house on firm 
ground. It was white and somewhat pretentious, with 
the chimneys outside, but nothing about it except some 
out-houses of logs. We had fine collards and sweet po- 
tatoes for dinner, but I saw the planter take boiled rice on 
his plate, and eat it heartily without condiments, and then 
I knew I was in South Carolina. 

The planter was a little man, with a grim, gristly face, 
a basilisk eye, and a snow-white poll. He quoted Carlyle 
wildly, and there was in his tone a bitterness which at 
times was almost fierce. 

" The nigger, sir, is a savage whom the Almighty Ma- 
ker appointed to be a slave. A savage, sir, a savage ! 
With him free the South is ruined, sir, ruined. But Ave 
bide our time. ' Aye ! to-day ' — how is that 1 to-day, to- 
day — yes, so — 

' Aye ! to-day 
Stern is the tyrant's mandate, red the gaze 
That flashes desolation, strong the arm 
That scatters multitudes. To-morrow comes !' 

Ah — a — a — a, ' to-morrow comes !' Our people treasure 
in their deepest hearts a bitter galling wrong ; and if this 
generation, and the next, and the next, pass into the realm 
of black forgetfulness, still the sacred heritage of revenge 



3G A HIGH-TOXED SOUTHRON. 

will be transmitted unimpaired from sire to son, even to 
the last syllable of recorded time." 

I thought it best to let him run down, like a new-wound 
clock, so I paid respectful attention and said nothing. 

" Never, sir, depend on it, will any high-toned Southron 
consent to remain any longer than brute force compels him 
in a Union controlled by the nutmeg-eyed, muslin-faced 
Yankees who now control it. Live in an alliance with 
pump-handle-makers and cheese-pressers ! Honor is dearer 
to every Southron than the ruddy drops that visit our sad 
hearts, but what is honor to men whose gods are the goods 
with which they juggle us, and whose idolatry is the art 
of making the two ends meet? The winds which blow 
from whatever quarter of heaven over the broken and 
bloody battlements of the South kiss no more the waving 
folds of the ' Bonnie Blue Flag,' and in its stead there 
nutters in the breeze an alien banner, planted by foreign 
hands ; but so long as there remains a mother, a wife, a 
sister, to turn an imploring eye upward to the God of the 
injured and the innocent, so long as there lives beneath 
the sun, whether in this or in foreign climes, one of her 
wandering and unhappy sons, in whose veins the blood 
leaps hot at the mention of the accursed thing, so long 
shall the South wait with confidence the coining time which 
shall bring in her revenges. ' For Freedom's battle once 
begun ' — you know the rest." 

" You present certain points of the Northern character 
forcibly, but do you think you do justice to them as a 
people ?" 

The mere sound of my voice seemed to wind him up 
again to the top of his bent. 

" Justice ! — It is nothing, sir, it is nothing ! If you be- 
lieve them, they are the elected overseers of the solar sys- 
tem. If you believe the abolition papers, they can not 
only deliver more eloquent orations than Tully, but make 



AN UNSKILLFUL WALTZ. 37 

sfiirts faster than ISTessus. They can indite pleasanter ec- 
logues than Virgil, sounder treatises on the quinsy than 
Hippocrates, and more profound logic than Aristotle. 
They can shoulder bigger oxen than Milo, and sew can- 
vas faster than St. Paul. They can extract more canned 
apple-sauce from sawdust than Dr. Faustus, reconstruct 
from their ashes more primordial gimcracks than the me- 
dieval alchemists, and twist more lightning from the clouds 
than the loftiest pine tree in the State of South Carolina." 

" Ha ! ha ! ha ! I see I shall never persuade you to be- 
lieve any good can come out of Nazareth. But it is late 
in the afternoon, and I must walk." 

One of my last days in North Carolina was occupied 
chiefly in wading through shallow swamps, and in balan- 
cing over the widest on foot-logs, from which one is mode- 
rately certain to slip off in the deepest places. On one of 
these, a very long one, I met a good deal of rural beauty 
in green calico, and she was very obliging, and would not 
drive me all the way back to the other end, but showed 
me the fashion of the country in these matters. I took 
her by the arms and swung her round, as in a waltz, but 
the operation was not skillfully performed, and we both 
fell into the water, on opposite sides of the log. 

But, once over the Little Pedee, I emerged suddenly in- 
to a country of noble and immense plantations, where 
King Cotton's hair, like poor old Lear's, still thinly shook 
in the winds of winter. " Blow, wind, and crack your 
cheeks " at him ; he is king no more. It was a tiny snow- 
storm, caught and pinioned in the manner. 

Here, every mile or so, is a cotton-gin, with its rumbling 
bowels of machinery, stilted high upon posts. Beneath it 
is the sweep, and a little pickaninny mopes round after the 
mule, holding his tail, and smiting his hams. Hard by is 
the press, with its umbrella of roof, and its huge sweep, 
like a carpenter's opened compass, straddling down to the 



38 THE PLANTER'S HOME. 

ground, and its parasol of roof above the umbrella. How 
it yells with, the fiendish delight of a gorilla, as it squee- 
zes the bale tighter and tighter in its wooden hug. 

" You make a prodigious screeching, uncle." 

" Well, yer can't get along much in dis world, boss, 'less 
yer does yer own screechin'," said Sambo, picking the 
shredded cotton out of his wool. 

In North Carolina blacksmithing, coopery, and other 
sorts of horny-handed industry, were in noisy blast along 
the wayside. In South Carolina all this vulgar buzz and 
clatter of greasy mechanics was mellowed down into the 
genteel whisper of molasses in the country store. 

In the Old North State a white man would grub, or rake 
grass and leaves into the fence-corners for compost — how 
handy those ugly fence corners are, after all ! — and white 
and black chopped together on opposite sides of a pine. 
In the Palmetto State the land-owners sat in the country 
stores, " chopping straws and calling it politics ;" while 
ragged land- workers strolled in legions in the road, " look- 
ing for a job." " Job " here means a bottle of molasses 
and a box of paper collars, in some industrious negro's 
trunk. 

In North Carolina the farmer's humble house stands 
close by the road, and the narrow yard accommodates the 
hounds, the geese, all the paraphernalia of the farm, and 
two switched and haggled rosebushes. A worm fence, 
which you can contemptuously straddle over, with both 
feet touching the ground, keeps the wood-yard out in the 
road. In South Carolina the planter's stately abode stands 
haughtily aloof, fenced with thorn or cedar hedge, and 
deeply embowered in pine, and orange, and holly, and the 
pretty loblolly-bay. At evening, as I passed, sometimes 
there came down to me from the far veranda, floating, fly- 
ing, trilling through those cones and braids of tender 
green, the sad, soft music of the mourning South. 



CARPETLESS FLOORS. 39 

But the sweetest strains of Munich lyre or lute of Cre- 
mona could not drown the noisy footfalls of Poverty, as 
he stalked in his discontent through those carpetless halls. 
On many a sad field beside the Potomac or the Kapidan, 
those missing carpets were mouldering into earth, where 
the houseless soldier slept in them his last sleep. 

The step of the North Carolinian, too, was loud upon 
his rattling floors, but it fell upon accustomed ears. To 
him who was more delicately bred it was an unwonted 
sound ; and I have sometimes fancied I could see a lonely 
father start at the ghostly echo of his own tread, as if it 
brought back to him the loved image of his gallant boy, 
who went down in the great slaughter. 

Ah ! those naked floors of South Carolina ! Their sad 
and lonesome sound echoes in my memory still. 

I staid one night with a young man, whose family were 
away, leaving him all alone in a great mansion. He had 
been a cavalry sergeant, wore his hat on the side of his 
head, and had an exceedingly confidential manner. 

" You see, sir, the Tar-heels haven't no sense to spare. 
Down there in the pines the sun don't more'n half bake 
their heads. We always had to show 'em whar the Yan- 
kees was, or they'd charge to the rear, the wrong way, you 
see. They haven't no more sense than to work in the 
field, just like a nigger. If you work with a nigger, he 
despises you for equalizin' yourself with him, you see, and 
you can't control him. The Tar-heels never could control 
but two or three apiece." 

He left off his wild and rambling gestures for a moment, 
and raked two more yams out of the ashes, which we 
peeled, holding them in our fingers. 

"But any man is a dog-oned fool to work, when he can 
make a nigger work for him. If a man works, he sweats, 
and gets stiff, and can't dance, you see. He's a d — fool. 
What's that ? O, but we can get niggers to work for us. 



40 "WE NEVER KEEP PEDDLERS." 

No high-toned gentleman is goin' to work. Whether we 
can get niggers or not, I tell yon, sir, no gentleman is goin' 
to degrade himself to work." 

With this he leaned far over toward me, in a very con- 
fidential way, and rapped with the end of his knife a dozen 
times on the table. 

Oh ! yes, that was it, sergeant. In North Carolina 
every tnb stood on its own bottom, and every head on its 
own shoulders, even if they were black; but in Sonth 
Carolina emancipation took off every negro's head, and 
every white man's arms. One knew well enough how to 
work through another, and the other well enough how to 
work for another ; but there was nobody, as in the Old 
North State, who had learned how to work for himself. 

Thus it was, when the gusty days of rebellion, and the 
awful typhoons of battles swept over her, and her princely 
planters, in the days of their bitter need, saw their cotton 
turn to paper, and their paper to dingy rags, and their 
clingy rags to ashes, that proud South Carolina was wreck- 
ed with such appalling ruin. It was not alone the blood 
of their best sons, the ashes of their pleasant mansions, 
their gold, their cotton, their jewels, and their slaves,, but 
even labor itself, the very base and beginning of existence, 
was swept away in that wild tempest. 

Night overtook me as I was passing one of these lordly 
mansions, and I went in to seek for lodgings. There was 
a great silence over everything, and my step rang loud 
and lonely in the great veranda. A negro girl answered 
the bell, but straightway there swept down upon me a 
classically beautiful, black-eyed woman, in deep mourning, 
who seemed anxious to forestall the girl. 

" Can I get lodgings here to-night, madam ?" 

" No, sir ; we never keep peddlers." 

Poor woman ! I learned at the next house the cause of 
her testiness, and in an instant all my resentment vanished. 




A SOUTHERN MANSION. 




A HOME IN RUINS. 



OX THE SANTEE. 41 

Her beloved and only daughter had just borne a negro 
babe. 

Having my curiosity piqued by this case, I afterward 
made diligent inquiry all the way across the South, and I 
will give the result for the benefit of those whose days 
and nights are rendered wretched by fear of amalgamation. 
I never found but this one instance in high life, or even in 
respectable life. In those districts of South Carolina 
where the black population was densest, and the poor 
whites, by consequence, most degraded, these unnatural 
unions were more frequent than anywhere else. In every 
case, without exception, it was a woman of the lowest 
class, generally a " sand-hiller," who, having lost in the 
war her only supporter, " took up with a likely nigger " 
to save her children from absolute famine. In South Car- 
olina I found six cases of such marriages, but never more 
than one in any other State. 

Down near the Santee I staid with a planter who said 
he had owned over a hundred negroes, and every indica- 
tion corroborated his assertion. He was a little old man, 
with a wonderfully high standing collar, and gold-bowed 
spectacles. His wife was an invalid, and his only servant 
was an awkward wench, a former field-hand ; so he pres- 
ently left me alone in the great carpetless room, and mys- 
teriously vanished. At supper he poured the coffee, and I 
strongly suspect he made it himself. 

Next morning it gave me much pleasure to pay him a 
dollar, for he had earned it personally, and was, moreover, 
struggling to " accept the situation '^ in a manner that was 
worthy of encouragement. He snatched it out of my 
hand, as if he despised both it and himself. With an al- 
most fierce glitter in his eye, he said : — 

" I expect to see the day, sir, when I can exchange my 
bluebacks for greenbacks, dollar for dollar ; and I have a 
roll of $100,000 laid away for that purpose." 



42 APPROACH TO CHARLESTON. 

Can it be, I wondered, that — 

" Grave men there are by broad Santee, 
Grave men with hoary hairs," 

to whom the Government of this our great Bepublic still 
seems so utter a farce as that ? 

Between Florence and Charleston there are dismal belts 
of piney woods. In one of these I talked with a poor 
yellow " sand-hiller," who was shivering so with ague 
that he could scarcely keep the pipe in his mouth. He 
told me the astonishing fact that he did not hear of the 
first capture of Sumpter till three months after its occur- 
rence. Speaking of one of his rich neighbors, he said : — 

" He swore he could drink all the blood as would be 
spilled in the war ; but long befo' Sharman come his old- 
est gal was a ploughin' corn with the bull, and his wife a 
bobbin' fur catfish in a cypress swamp." 

Be it known to the reader that to seek catfish in a cy- 
press swamp betrays great inexperience ; and it amused 
the poor man so much, despite his ague, that he almost 
shook himself out of his chair. 

The live-oaks gradually thickened among the pines, as I 
approached Charleston, which I did not enter till after 
nightfall. I rose early next morning, and went down to 
the end of the narrow tongue of land which is thrust 
down between the Ashley and the Cooper. Sitting on the 
low drab-colored walls of the Battery, I watched the sun 
make pleasant summer around the head of Sumter, then 
all along the low, dark, piney walls of the harbor. Not a 
sail was spread in the idle air, and only a single long wher- 
ry sped lightly over the steel-gray waters, carrying a bone 
in its mouth. The birth-place of the great rebellion still 
slumbered in the deep sluggard languor of Southern cities 
on a winter morning. 

Away down the harbor, broken and blackened by the 



REMINISCENCE OF SECESSION TIMES. 43 

lightnings of tlie ships, standing haughtily aloof from the 
beach, like a discrowned king still spurning the touch of 
the swinish multitude, Sumter sullenly glooms above the 
waters. Over against it is Moultrie, buttressing its vast 
strength upon the coast, and glowering through its stony 
eyes upon the bay with a hard unwinking stare. Grim 
twins are they ! terrible eye-teeth in this whilom jaw of 
Disunion ! 

Back among the ruins of the great burnt district I found 
two or three negroes poking and grubbing in the crum- 
bled walls ; also a white man, who gave me the following 
reminiscence of the heated times of secession : — 

" Sam, wha' fur de white folks secedin' ?" 

" Go 'long, you fool nigger ! Dey aint secedin', dey's 
exceedin'." 

" Wha' fur dey excee'din', den ?" 

'• Oh, you don't know nuthin', nohow. De white folks 
got rights, haint dey ? Well, den, when dey go out ob de 
Union to git deir rights, dat's concedin'." 

" But when dey go out ob de Union to git deir rights, 
and gits whaled, what's dat V 7 

" Why dat — dat 'ar " — scratching his wool — " you fool 
nigger, dat's secedin'." 

Charleston was a city, first, of idle ragged negroes, who, 
with no visible means of support nevertheless sent an 
astonishing multitude of children to school; second, of 
small dealers, laborers, and German artisans, starving on 
the rebel custom ; third, of widows and children of plant- 
ers, keeping respectable boarding-houses, or pining in 
hopeless and unspeakable penury ; fourth, of young men 
loafing in the saloons, and living on the profits of their 
mother's boarding-houses; fifth, of Jews and Massachu- 
setts merchants, doing well on the semi-loyal and negro 
custom ; sixth, of utterly worthless and accursed politi- 
cal adventurers from the North, Bureau leeches, and pro- 



44 A SOUTHERN PICTURE. 

miscuous knaves, all fattening on the humiliation of the 
South and the credulity of the freedmen. 

Let us, in fancy, ascend in a shallop the Edisto or the 
Pacatalico, and behold a landscape passing all the beauty 
of florid Cole or tropic Church. It shall be in the spring, 
before the swamp malaria — more deadly than the breath 
of the bohun upas — has banished the whites to the up- 
lands ; and while there are plenty of lilies waltzing and 
winking above the waves. 

In the foreground of the lagoon the green lush waves 
of the rice chase each other in languid softness, and white- 
clad laborers bow themselves to their toil between the rows, 
or punt and paddle their clumsy bateaux along the ditches. 
The idiotic hrutishness which sits on the faces of these 
poor rice-eaters, and their grunting, gutteral, sea-island 
patois, might make you believe yourself on the deadly 
shores of the Senegal. Far across the rice-field, where it 
swells like a long Atlantic wave to meet the upland, the 
planter's mansion towers white above its groves of tender 
green, now sprinkled over with a mellow orange snow of 
blossoms. Beyond and higher up the grand old pines hold 
up their arms toward the soft blue sky, and swear by the 
beautiful sun that no evil shall ever befall this earthly 
Paradise. 

"\Ve disembark. The mansion is girt about on three 
sides with a deep and breezy veranda, " rose- wreathed, 
vine-encircled," through whose leafy trellises sleepily sift 
all day, into open windows, odors of a mellow and lan- 
guishing sweetness, and at night the coolness of the briny 
sea. Ten thousand butterflies and humming-birds, tricked 
in their brilliant gauds, and house-keeping bees, more 
plain in attire, flutter endlessly over the painted flowers, 
every one of which is pumped a hundred times a day. 

"We stroll down curving alleys, between the dainty 
privet hedges, which are here allowed to shoot into a grace- 



ANOTHER TICTURE. 45 

ful cone, and there to arch above a gateway which invites 
us to enter. We wander on and on, through another and 
another, by many a luring pathway, among acres of roses, 
and shady bowers, and unnamed geometric tricks of — 

" Damask-work, and deep inlay 
Of braided blooms," 

gay with brilliant lily-like amaryllis, and white and orange 
woodbines, and pittosporum, with its soft-green, honey- 
edged leaves. Here, the columnar palmetto shakes its 
sword-tipped vanes in the breeze with a cool whispering 
rustle; there, the golden lotus its crest with a dreamy 
murmur ; yonder, the banana its giant leaves with many a 
lazy unwieldy flap. Hard by, the century-plant heaves 
its huge club-leaves, gray with the lapse of forgotten win- 
ters — an ancient anchorite, living on its austere and monk- 
ish life fourscore years among all these trooping and splen- 
did generations, which come and go as the dews of the 
morning. The orange, like a true daughter of the South, 
weaves a little tender green embroidery for its last year's 
gown, and thinks, what with its ornaments of native gold, 
it will do for another year. A bevy of golden-haired 
wood-nymphs roll the plate, or play at the mystic Druidi- 
cal game of the South — Honon, Cronon, Thealogos — be- 
neath the ancestral live-oaks, which wag their old gray 
beards of moss with pleasant laughter at the gay sports 
below. 

" Merry suithe it is in the halle, 
When the beards wavelh alle." 

What is that picture now ? 

The magnificent avenue of live-oaks, if the ruthless 
tomahawk of the war has spared so much, with their hoary 
beards, like Barbarossa's in the cave, sweeping and sway- 
ing in the mournful breeze, conduct through a rank and 
noxious jungle of weeds to a heap of ashes. The two 



46 A RUIXED HOME AXD FAMILY. 

blackened chimneys, like lonely unpropitiated ghosts of 
this once happy home, stand bleakly alone near the cabins 
of the blacks, as if to summon them to vengeance. But 
they summon all in vain, whether the freedmen to ven- 
geance, or the master to return. Far off beside the Rapi- 
dan or James he slumbers in his forgotten grave, which 
many a summer's sun has covered over with grassy thatch, 
and his dull ear is not more insensible to the wail of his 
houseless orphans than is the happy freedman to solicita- 
tions for his revenge. 

The sounds of joyous music, melodious as the echoes of 
the Mseonian song, and the sweet trill of childish laughter, 
float no more through the orange groves on the wings of 
the evening breeze ; but all the air holds a tepid and sickly 
stillness, which quivers now and then with a wintry ripple. 
The hedges are wrenched and wrung into hideous shape- 
lessness, and all the pride and the glory of the gardens is 
eaten by hungry mules. The waters of the swamps flap 
and swash unhindered through the broken mains, while 
loathsome sirens and turtles crawl among the rasping sed- 
ges and the slimy pools. Acres upon acres of abandoned 
rice-swamps are dun with weeds, or black with rotting and 
reeking lilies, and dark with pestilence and death. 

The widow and her orphans — ah, where are they \ 

Happy for them if they, too, sleep in the quiet grave, 
where the brutal pillaging and rage of contending armies 
terrify no more. 

In the grocery it is you must look for the rising states- 
men. You shall find them in a circle, with their long lank 
hair, unsunned faces, and easy, flippant, laughing man- 
ner, comparing notes on the doings of their respective, 
thieving, lying freedmen, and narrating histories of their 
regiments. 

The typical man of the State is the great rice or cotton 
planter, like him I talked with in Marion. Haughty, iras- 



IX THE OVERSEER'S CABIN. 47 

cible, but prodigally hospitable and sunny to his friends, lie 
has a type close at hand in his cotton-balls, which, when 
they are touched by the frost, straightway so swell with 
rage that they burst their garments. 

Yet there is a strange sombreness in the South Caroli- 
nian mind. Let the reader recall the Biblical studies of 
Allston, the grim and ruthless logic of Calhoun, and the 
absence of humor in the novels of Simms. They were 
the Puritans of the South. In their very refinement 
there was an alkalinity which withered the nonconformist. 
"VYe cannot forget that Puritan and Cavalier were both 
Englishmen, and that, if one used a fanaticism of religion, 
the other used a fanaticism of gentility. 

But, alas for South Carolina, the current generation of 
this close-bred, martial, alkaline race is almost extinct. 
Choleric old rice-planters, with cottony polls, I saw ; class- 
ically molded, pale, saddened, but heroic women, and ex- 
quisitely beautiful girls, I saw in Charleston, all in mourn- 
ing weeds ; but the youths, who should continue the intense 
but erring vigor of South Carolina in another generation 
— where were they ? 

Never can I forget that miserable walk from Charleston 
to Savannah; drenched with ceaseless rains; wading in 
endless swamps; twisting myself in the most unseemly 
monkey-jumps, to keep on the foot-logs ; scared at night 
by the awful thunders, which cracked right overhead in 
the vast and lonely forest, and the lightnings splitting in 
the swash of the rain. But the ghastly ruin, and the 
silence of death were more terrible than all beside. Be- 
tween the two cities there were only two planter's houses, 
both built after the war. 

There are white men who can live in these swamps 
through the summer, as overseers, and I staid with one 
such, who may be taken as a representative of his class. 
He lived in the edge of the piney-woods, where they joined 



48 GENEROSITY OF THE MARION PLANTERS. 

the swamp, in a cabin a little larger than the negro quar- 
ters about it, with two rooms, but not ceiled or wainscoted. 
We bivouaked sheer on the floor, where the wind swoop- 
ed and howled down upon us through the open gables. 

His cook was a rice negro, decently clad in plantation 
cloth, but of the most hideous Guinea physiognomy. He 
talked volubly with the overseer about a love affair, told 
him how another negro had come between him and his 
soul's beloved, Eliza, and how, by beating him soundly, he 
won Eliza who was at first favorable to the other. He 
acted out the whole proceeding with graphic gestures, and 
his eyes would roll at times with a wild and idiotic glare 
which made me feel uncomfortable. "What a specimen of 
savage energy for a man who ate absolutely nothing but 
rice ! 

As in the Old North State, no son of the piney-woods 
ever refused my money for his victuals, but the hospitality 
of the overseer and middle planters class was green and 
unwithering as their palmetto. A poor North Carolinian 
woman — and she was ardently loyal, too — spoke to me in 
such glowing words of the large Marion planters as made 
me a pleasant surprise. One year of the war there was 
no maize in her state, and she, like many of her neighbors, 
put money in her sacks, and victuals for the way, and went 
down, like the sons of Jacob into Egypt. 

" Three times I had to go," she said, " and nary time 
would they take my money. They alius give me all the 
corn my hoss could pack, and wunst cold victuals to last 
me back agin." 

During the war South Carolina committed two egregious 
offenses against the Castor and Pollux of the South, Vir- 
ginia and Georgia ; first, in killing Stonewall Jackson by 
mistake ; second, in refusing to send militia over to assist 
the Georgians in making head against Sherman. Hence 
it was greatly the mode, particularly in Georgia, to say 



SOUTH CAROLINIANS IN THE WAR. 49 

bitter things of the little sister, as being the author but 
not the finisher of the secession. Some of the upland regi- 
ments, like the North Carolinians, had too much earth in 
their brains to war well ; but the luxurious and hair-brain- 
ed sons of the lowland planters, standing on the perilous 
edge of battle, taught America to fight. 

Not one whit do I detract from the noble, the sublime 
constancy of the Union armies by insisting that for straight 
fighting in the field, for brilliant and daring charges, the 
rebels had no equals on the continent. As my patriotism 
hates rebellion, so does my soul despise that littleness 
which would deny to a fallen adversary one tittle of his 
deservings. 

But after the battle — then is the test of greatness. 
Then order and continuity conquer. The women of the 
South were greater before the battle, but their Northern 
sisters were greater after. 





CHAPTER IV. 
OYEE THE RED HILLS. 

little gentleman, once a Major on Beauregard's 
staff, gave me the best description of Savannah 
that I have seen. " Savannah," said he " is a 
very elegant and retired country residence, which a very 
absurd railroad is trying to make into a cotton warehouse." 
This agrees also with ]N~. P. Willis, who calls Savannah 
the City of Shade and Silence. 

The thing which seemed to me most curious was to see 
such prodigious quantities of cotton whisked about beneath 
a shadow so gloomy and so cemeterial. But this is only 
along the quays. The vast and sombre evergreen oaks 
roof in all the streets alike ; but farther back the cushion- 
ing sand stills the noise of the few carriages into a ghostly 
silence, and only now and then a pale woman, stricken and 
mourning, but proud as a Roman, glides blackly along like 
a spectre. 

The principal street is like the "long-drawn aisle" of a 
cathedral, stretching away beneath a superb groined arch 
of old oaks, in which the marble statues in the middle of 
the street stand like silent worshipers. High overhead, in 
the mellow lamplight, sweeps and sways the long gray 
moss, as if it knew the secrets of primeval years, and were 
nodding and whispering mysteriously about them. Far 
out in the unpeopled darkness of the park, I sat a while 
beneath the solemn shadow of the pines, and as I looked 
out through their dark tops, slowly rocking against the 



FAREWELL TO THE ATLANTIC. 51 

stars, in the sweet and soothing quietness of that hour 
I seemed to hear no longer a cold roar, as in the Old 
North State, but rather — 

" The still sad music of humanity, 
Nor harsh, nor grating, though of ample power 
To chasten and subdue." 

Savannah was even more crammed than Charleston with 
plantation negroes, who were thumped and banged by cit- 
izen and soldier alike. All along my route the freedmen 
were drifting, wave upon wave, driven by a fatal destiny 
toward the coast, the region of malaria, semi-idiocy, death. 

One day I went down in a fishing-smack to take a final 
and formal leave of the ocean. A raw and gusty wind 
hustled our little craft bowling cherrily down the bloody 
Savannah ; and as we returned, now dodging this way, 
now that, among the green islets of rushes, I looked back 
over my shoulder, and bade a chattering, shivering fare- 
well to the Atlantic. 

Next day the capricious calendar of Savannah whisked 
us in a fair day, and I wound up my resolution for the 
Pacific. Now, said I, Laucelot Gabbo, use your legs. 

The first evening out of the city I stopped at a great 
wooden house, with half of the veranda floor rotted away, 
rags in the windows, and not a carpet in the house. A 
little, green-eyed, sharp-nosed, wrinkled old woman presi- 
ded at supper, and just as I was sitting down on the end 
of the long bench, I let out the unlucky secret that I was 
from the North. On the instant she set down the coffee- 
pot, and, standing right over me, began : — 

" O, you're a Yankee, be ye ? You're one of them Yan- 
kees ! Well, I haint got no sympathy with ye. A Yankee, 
be ye ? Well, I haint seen a Yankee now goin' on three 
year, and I've got mighty full of bad feelings, but I never 
thought I'd ever see one of 'em in my house, so as I could 
jest tell him what I think. O, them beasts ! That was 



£2 ALONG THE OGEECHEE. 

some of your Yankees, it was, done that ! Tuk my pots 
and busted 'em up— pure ugliness, it wos — and tuk my 
new cullender, that wasn't no use to 'em on the face of the 
livin' y earth, and punched holes into it with nails, they 
did, jest in pure ugliness. Destructed every last thing we 
had on the face of the livin' yearth ! And then jest to 
think of 'em, their black nigger soldiers fur to stop a poor 
woman on the road, jest gwine to Savannah with some 
eggs fur to buy dishes agin; and make me stand four 
hours in the hot sunshine, with the big, greasy corporal a 
settin' in a chair, and me a standin' up ! O, them beasts ! 
but they wouldn't have done it, for niggers was larnt bet- 
ter manners, but them Yankees put 'em up to it." 

And so forth, for at ]east ten minutes, before she stop- 
ped for breath. Munching meekly away, I had nearly 
finished all I could stand of the burnt pone and the beef- 
steak fried in grease, before the tempest subsided. At last 
she sat down, apparently amazed at my quietness ; but her 
wrath had expended itself like a wind which strikes no 
wall. I had to listen to plenty of these histories yet, but 
by hearing her through, I made her one of my most devo- 
ted friends. 

Ninety miles I followed the railroad in its dismal track 
along the Ogeechee. How nice and convenient it is to 
have the stations just ten miles apart. Are these grimy, 
gray, pig-rooted villages, dropped down into augur-holes in 
these owl-inhabited piney-woods, the great Empire State ? 
I wondered. No, it is only her brachial artery, running 
down ninety miles to her right-hand Savannah. These 
mighty cotton-trains, snorting and yelling, like a caravan 
of white elephants, twelve times a day through this mise- 
rable wilderness — these are the pulsations of Georgia's big 
heart of hills. 

This led me up from the endless, dreary level of the 
coast, into the red and rolling hills. Down on the weary 



A BLACK CITY. 53 

flats of South Carolina the Juggernaut car of the slave- 
lords crushed the masses utterly ; but up among these good 
red hills of Georgia there lived many a ruddy farmer, 
above whose head its wheels rolled high and harmless. 

Herein was the reason why the heart of Savannah was 
not so utterly eaten out by the war as was that of unhap- 
py Charleston. It drew replenishment from a sounder 
middle class in the back country. 

An old negro, ploughing on a hill, stopped his mule and 
came down to ask the time of day. It was only a pretense 
for talk, which I found would last till night, if I were only 
willing. Pointing to his furrows, I said : — 

" Uncle, you must have made those after dark, they are 
so crooked." 

" O," said he, laughing immoderately, " nebber see dem 
ofo' % Ya ! ya ! ya ! Dirt all run down hill, sah, ya ! ya ! 
ef you ploughs straight down hill." 

Georgia approaches much nearer to Yankee thriftiness 
than does South Carolina — uses more industry. In both 
the Carolinas I saw not one sawmill, but here there were 
many, whizzing and whistling among odorous mountains 
of lumber, and sending up their long diminuendo groans. 

When I passed through Macon, it was undoubtedly the 
blackest city in the Union. As housenies gather in the 
warm eastern casement on a winter morning, thaw their 
frosted thighs, chafe and scrape their toes on their wings 
till they are limber, then essay little jumps across a pane, 
so keeping up a cheerful buzz till noon, when they migrate 
to the western windows, so did the negroes in the streets, 
vice versa. 

" What time is it ?" I heard one citizen ask of another, 
soon after I arrived. 

Without looking at his watch, he pointed to the dusky 
multitude on the east side of the street, and said " I see 
they have moved across ; it must be about one o'clock." 



54 PLANTATION NEGROES IN MACON. 

They were all " waiting to be hired ;" yet the rascals 
were most effectually giving the lie to any stories of star- 
vation by their oily, sooty faces, for the negro quickly 
shows " the mettle of his pasture," by turning ashen when 
thinly fed. You could easily tell the plantation hands 
from the original Macon negroes, for the former lay in lazy 
torpor all along the pavements choking the passage, while 
the latter would gather in knots about the lamp-posts, and 
now and then a guffaw would explode in the midst, and 
nearly throw them all over backward. What an immeas- 
urable blossom of grins can grow on the face of your jolly 
African ! 

Macon is a clean, and pretty, and airy city, of bright 
colors, and broad streets, and plenty of sunshine. You 
seldom see any " crackers," as in Atlanta. The faces are 
ruddier and heartier than in Savannah, and the people not 
so stiff and grim, but more humorsome, and less harsh 
and rigorous toward the negroes. Said a gay and dapper 
little reporter to me : — 

" A Yankee can marry §100,000 in Macon, but he can't 
marry §50,000 in Savannah." 

It is as notable for its mulberries as Savannah for its 
oaks. With knarled, and ridged, and warty trunks, scar- 
red with chaps and chinks of every idler's blade — for 
whittling is scarcely less a part of a Georgian than of a 
!Nantucket education — they stand in rows along the sunken 
streets, and mercifully shade the fiery sand in summer. 

Between Macon and its counterpart Columbus, there 
stretches a great plateau, of a dark-red soil, very deep and 
fertile. In all this noble country I did not see a fortieth 
part of the negroes I saw in Macon alone. A few were at 
work in the cotton-fields, drowsily thwacking down the 
cotton-stalks for the spring ploughing. 

I walked awhile with a freedman and his wife, who were 
taking a journey of fifty miles to see a Bureau agent. 



A PUMFOOZLED FREEDMAN. 55 

They providently carried their victuals for the journey, 
whereat I wondered ; but I found they had learned such 
prudence in North Carolina. He was a taciturn, hard- 
headed, resolute negro, and was going in quest of justice, 
a thing hard for a freedman to find in the South — far har- 
der to find than pity. He told his story laconically : — 

" You see, sah, I raised cotton with Dr. Majors on sheers 
one-quarter an' found. When it come to dividin', he tried 
to pumfoozle me 'bout de figgerin', an' let on as if I'd eat 
up all my sheer in de 'visions he sole me. I wasn't gwine 
to be pumfoozled no sich way, sah, so I jest straddled de 
bales, but he got de Sheriff, and drug me off, and tuk de 
cotton." 

" Some of the negroes do eat up all their share by the 
time the cotton is picked, don't they ?" 

" Some does. Dey don't know nothin' 'bout figgerin', 
an' runs in debt for mo' 'n their sheer, an' then growls 
when they takes it away. But I done no sich way." 

" Do the planters give you a plenty of bacon ?" 

" No, sah ; dey don't give a nigger nuff to grease his 
mouf aroun' de outside, let alone de inside." Then look- 
ing at my traveling-bag, he said " haint got nothin to 
drink dah, boss ?" 

" Not a drop. Now that you are free, I suppose no- 
body gives you anything but what you work for ?" 

" No, sah ; and don't git all dat." 

I really wished that I had something, that I might cause 
to shine around him, for once at least, the " light of other 
days." 

It is a strange fact that, in the universally tippling South, 
I have never seen a negro drunk. They may have been 
in the days of slavery, but as freedmen they are sober, 
though it is often because they have no money. 

In Columbus I saw my freedman again, and he cursed 
the Bureau agent bitterly. 



56 A NIGHT AT CAPTAIN TRUHTTT'S. 

" Wouldn't lift a finger, sah, 'less I give him fifteen 
dollars fust." 

As the representative Georgian, let us visit Captain 
Xerxes Podalirius Truhitt. He shall be about a twenty- 
bale planter, employing three or four freedmen, with whom 
his sons occasionally labor in the fields, in shirt-sleeves. 
As I approach his house, several sad-eyed hounds, with 
ears that sweep away the morning dew, come tumbling 
over the rail-fence, with long melancholy cries. A woman 
comes to the door, with a pipe in her mouth, and with 
much shrill clamor drowns the sweet music of the hounds. 

The Georgia farmer's house is of an invariable pattern, 
wooden and paintless, somewhat longish, and with two flat 
wing-roofs, one of which covers the "piazza," parallel 
with the road. This contains the spinning-wheel, saddles 
and bridles, and a water shelf, on which there are two 
cedar buckets with shining brass hoops, and a long-hand- 
led gourd, bound around the rim with linen. 

The body of the house contains two rooms ; there are 
twin bed-rooms under the rear wing-roof, and one of them 
has the " spare-bed," covered with a quilt on which there 
are sundry crooked-necked gourds depicted. There is an 
immense bed of feathers. Ah me ! how often, after eat- 
ing salt pork, I have smacked my dry lips, and lain thrust 
down into the feathers in the shape of an ox-bow, with my 
head pointing up toward heaven, and my heels also. 

They always cook and eat in a log-cabin behind the 
house, as if it were an operation they were ashamed of. 
Here are pots and kettles, sooty and innumerable. There 
is one long clothless table, with a bench on either side, on 
which the numerous little cotton-heads range themselves. 

We sit by to supper. A frowzy ragged wench shuffles 
drowsily about, handing coffee. 

" Have fry on your plate," says the host, shoving to- 
ward me a platter of leathery bacon. 



BY THE PLANTER'S FIRESIDE. 57 

" Have liominy." 

He always speaks as if commanding you, and omits the 
partitive some. The wench awkwardly thrusts a cup of 
coffee over my shoulder. The mistress takes one of the 
pones and breaks it up small — cuts it never. 

" Have bread." 

In the centre of the table there is a saucer of pale, sickly- 
looking butter, smoothly rounded up, but without a single 
crease or dimple tasty women know so well how to im- 
print. The younger children often look wistfully at it, and 
then at the mother, but are repressed by a frown. I probe 
it gently once, but do it no more. It is a mistake, I find. 
Its uses are purely ornamental. Next morning it appears 
again, marred with that solitary gash — that unkind cut. 

Toward the end of the meal a thin pone comes hot and 
smoking to the table. 

" Have more bread." 

At last the white butter is passed around in solemn 
silence, of course, untouched. It is a signal that supper 
is ended. 

In the sitting-room there blazes on the hearth a huge 
pile of logs, with their ribs stuck full of pine splinters. 
Ah ! these Southern people are more musical than we 
Yankees. Like Alonzo of Arragon, we always demand 
old wood to burn, which yields us only spiteful staccato 
popping ; but the green logs of the South shed the soul of 
music from the great fireplace, piping, whistling, fizzing, 
purring, in melodious querulousness, as if the soul of Mer- 
lin were in the logs. 

What need of a candle ? The gorgeous yellow firelight 
floods everything in the room ; — the impossible heroes on 
the wall, wounded and dying, lying straight as a marline- 
spike, with arms prettily composed, unruffled uniforms, 
and a sweet doll-like smile on their faces ; the dried 
" yarbs," and the ears of maize hanging by the husk ; the 
3* 



58 "HE CAPTAIN'S STORY. 

polished rifle and powder-horn on wooden hooks ; the fly- 
specked plaster dogs and lambs on the mantel ; the dog- 
eared almanac; the twists of cotton yarn; the broken 
legged reel. 

Captain Trowhitt is a man of years, but prematurely 
old from the mental shocks of the war, of its sleepless 
dread of insurrection, of its buoyant pride so cruelly and 
tragically wrecked. The full florid face, the hair a little 
curled, are those of the Georgia farmer. 

While his wife and the wench are combing cotton in the 
corner, the old man sits in his easy chair, crooning of 
other days. 

" Yes, sir, the South is ruined forever, forever, sir. The 
niggers won't work, and they're just perishin' the country 
to death. I wish they had the last nigger up thar among 
'em, they loved 'em so much. You back agin ? Begone, 
you Ring ! Freedom is dead in the United States, dead as 
a stewed cat, and I wish we had a king. I'll never vote 
agin, as long as I live ; I have no confidence in nuthin'. 
I've swore never to vote agin in my life." 

They persist in leaving the outside door open, and I am 
all the while roasting before and freezing behind. 

" Sherman passed through here, I believe ?" 

" Well, now, you're mighty right, he did. Two of his 
cussed, unhung, sneak thieves — * bummers ' I reckon they 
was — rode up here, and asked me whar my silver was hid 
before ever I could say, ' howdy.' When I told 'em I 
hadn't no silver, one of the dirty villians cocked his pistol, 
held it close to my head, and swore he'd let light through 
my character if I didn't tell, mighty quick, too." 

" Did they actually shoot any of your neighbors ?" 

" They killed one man, but it was some of those hyur 
crackers done that, who went away and jined Sherman, 
and come back a-purpose for such doins. But the ever- 
lastin' scalawags ! they jabbed their hands in my wescoat 



HIS EXPERIENCE WITH BUMMERS. 59 

pockets, and when they didn't find no-thin' but Confede- 
rate money — ha ! ha ! ha ! rather thin pickin', as the goose 
said to the turkey, when it swallowed the knife-blade — 
when they didn't find nothin' but Confederate money, 
they pulled my boots off, and jerked so they drug me out 
of the cheer, and I come down on the floor a settin." 

" Ha ! ha ! ha ! But the soldiers were not so brutal as 
these bummers, I think ?" 

" No, thar was a Ohio captain — you Watch ! William, 
why dont you drive them dogs out ? — a mighty clever man, 
that captain was. He wouldn't nigh let the soldiers come 
in the house, and when the water got riley in the well, he 
wouldn't 'low 'em to tech it, though I've seen many a poor 
soldier look mighty wishful at it, as if he was starvin' for 
water." 

Will nobody shut that dreadful door ? Once I venture 
to shut it myself, but straightway somebody goes through 
again, and leaves it open, purposely, I suspect. 

" Captain, it must have been gloomy for men of your 
years toward the end of the war." 

"O, my Gocl ! my God ! when I think of it, I wonder 
that I am still alive. As soon as night come, I always 
made my boy Toney — a faithful nigger he was, I could 
trust him even when the Yankees come — lock every door 
on the place, and sleep with a gun and pistol before my 
door. We never knew at night, when we laid down, but 
our house, and we with it, would be burned to ashes be- 
fore morning. The w^ "°° country was full of rovin' bum- 
mers, and our own deserters and bomb-proofs begun to 
creep out of their holes, like hyenas when they scent the 
carrion, and prowl about at night, to be revenged on the 
conscript officers. Three times a shot was fired across my 
hairth, and nearly every fortnight we heerd of somebody 
bein' shot down at night before his own fireplace. D'ye 
see them thick shutters of boards 1 I had to have them 



60 "SHERMAN IS COMING !" 

made to keep murderers from firin' into the house at 
night."* 

" I have seen hundreds of houses with such shutters ; 
but I supposed it was owing to the scarcity of glass in the 
Confederate times." 

" Then we heerd Sherman was comin', and one night I 
told my wife the sky looked mighty red off yonder, and 
then we knew he was comin', and the next night it was a 
heap redder — O, my God ! to see the blue bright sky red- 
den up with a steady pace,brighter and more luridly dread- 
ful night after night, towards all you have and love on the 
yearth, till at last thar comes a night when all you can see 
of God's great heaven is a naming concave of fire, and to 
have children runnin' and cryin' that they will all be shot, 
and kiverin' themselves in the cotton ! And then to have 
my niggers settin' up all night long, the night when Sher- 
man come, a singin' and shoutin' praises, though they 
knew my wife and children was skeered nigh about to 
death, and a watchin' the red sky. They thought he was 
comin' in a chariot of fire, and I really believe old Dinah 
'lowed to go to heaven in the chariot." 

" Yes, grandpa," interrupts a little girl, " I heerd her 
say so, and aunt Betsy 'lowed all her gals was gwine to 
have Yankee husbands too." 

What a study for some future Beard was that — a little 
group of life-long bondmen, sleepless with the vague and 
and ineffable transports of that coming something, sitting 
and singing at midnight, and watching that great glare in 
the heavens, where Sherman, by the light of a burning 
State, was gathering his red sheaves ! 

" How did your negroes behave when freed ?" 

* O, they went plumb crazy, like everybody else's nig- 
gers. I always treated my niggers with the greatest kind- 

*It is only just to say that this description was more applicable to the 
mountainous regions of the Carolinas. 



THE UNGRATEFUL SLAVES. 61 

ness, never struck a grown-up servant in my life, always 
give 'em a peck of meal and four pound of bacon a week, 
and every one had their truck-patch, and their own hogs 
and chickens. As soon as ever one got sick, my wife al- 
ways toted 'em here before our own hairth, for they won't 
nuss one another ; and many a time my wife has sot up 
with 'em, when their own mothers was a carousin' and a 
cuttin' up monkey shines all night. But, after all my 
kindness, why, the last one of 'em showed me their heels, 
like a passel of colts, and away they went, though they 
left all the old women and the children on my hands." 

" The negroes everywhere, I believe, seemed to think 
they were not free unless they left the old master." 

" Yes, but they was so ongrateful ! They didn't even 
come to ask for advice about goin' away. I called my nig- 
gers all up one mornin', and tole 'em the war was comin' 
to an end, and they'd ail be free, and asked 'em if anybody 
had ever been kinder to 'em than ' old master,' and offered 
'em wages if they'd stay, and every one promised to do it. 
But the very minit they see a blue-coat, away the fool 
whipper-snappers went, every one of 'em as crazy as a bed- 
bug. I never did see sech fool doins in all my life as 
them niggers done." 

Here the little pickaninny in the corner stealthily leaves 
his stool and crouches along to the sleeping cat, in whose 
ear he blows a stiff blast, and is infinitely amused to see it 
jump up and shake its head. 

" Ha ! you black rascal, your mother run away and left 
you for me to feed, and as soon as you are big enough, 
you'll run away, too. Sech fool doins — why, when the 
first bummers come, my niggers wanted to hug 'em, they 
did. When the bummers couldn't find nothin' on me, 
they called all the niggers into the gin, and told 'em a long 
cock-and-bull story about Uncle Abe and his dear children, 
and how they'd never want anything more in this life, and 



62 RETURN OF THE RUNAWAYS. 

wouldn't have to work, and then they made the niggers 
give 'em all their silver — and many a nigger in the old 
time had more ready cash hid in old rags than his master 
— all their silver, and rings, and things, and they rode off 
with 'em." 

" I think the negroes were not often duped so." 
"No, 'twas only bummers done the like. I always 
treated my niggers kind. Every mornin', as regular as 
the day come, I went down to their quarters, and looked 
through 'em to see if all was right ; and I always took a 
flour biscuit in my pocket to divide among the children. 
They'd all set on the fence, with their little woolly heads 
in a row, and their eyes a shinin' as pert as crickets, waitin' 
for ' Ole Mawssa ' to come, and they'd run to meet me like 
as if it was their father. I done it to make them love me. 
Sometimes, when I was sick or away, they'd set thar nigh 
about all the forenoon, wonderin' why i Ole Mawssa ' 
didn't come. Yet, when Sherman came along, do you 
think, every last skunk of 'em run away." 

" Did none of your negroes ever come back ?" 
" Yes, in two or three years all of 'em that was livin' 
come back, but I had all the niggers hired I wanted, and 
couldn't take 'em back. I didn't wonder so much at these 
young ones, but thar was one nigger, old Shade, had ought 
to knowed better. Me and Shade was jest of an age, and 
when I come of age my father give me Shade, the h'rst 
nigger I ever owned. I used to reason with Shade, just 
like a white man, and asked his advice many a time. I 
used to think mighty few niggers would ever git to heaven, 
but I was certain old Shade would be one of 'em. He 
swam once three miles in a dreadful freshet to save my life. 
But Shade got the biggest bug in his ear of any of 'em, 
and he left a comfortable home in his old age to go spear 
pismires in Savannah. % 

"About three months after the surrender he come 



STORY OF OLD SUADE. 63 

crawlin' back, worn plumb down to a skeleton, so I didn't 
know him till he spoke, and wanted to come back. He 
said he had been sick in a Federal hospital, and he saw 
the nurses sprinkle some white stuff in the big kettle of 
soup they made for the niggers, which he said was arsenic ; 
but I never more'n half believed this part of his story, 
though Shade always did tell the truth. I don't think it 
would have been possible, such devilish work, do you? 
Still, I never knew Shade tell a lie in my life, never. 

" First, I told Shade he'd run away without askin' my 
advice, and now I couldn't let him come back ; but he 
plead so hard, for the sake of my son Americus — he's dead 
and gone now, poor boy ! — who he used to coddle a thous- 
and times on his knees, and said if I didn't let him die in 
the old cabin, he'd die under the eaves, and I couldn't 
refuse him. My wife took some rags and blankets, and 
made him a bed in his own little cabin, where he lived all 
his life, and when we went to him in the morning, sure 
enough poor old Shade was dead." 

At these recollections the old man is deeply moved, 
bows his head upon his hands, and remains silent for a 
long time, now and then brushing away with the back of 
his hand a trickling tear. At length he recovers himself, 
and with a laugh points to the pickaninny, whose head has 
for many minutes been weaving and circling in a sleepy 
maze, and jerking as if trying to fling itself off its 
shoulders. 

And so, with garrulous talk and jocularity, as of Grand- 
father Smallweed, amid that large satisfaction which men 
feel when they find they do not hate each other as they 
supposed, the evening slips along far into the hours when 
the great clock takes so long to deliver its solemn message, 
as if it, too, were almost asleep. 

There is a rough and ruddy vigor in the Georgia farmer 
which smacks of his good red hills. The pine is generally 



04: THE YANKEES OF THE SOUTH. 

tlie emblem of poverty, of which in ITorth Carolina there 
is one dead and hopeless level. The live-oak is the sign 
and surety of wealth in the soil, and in South Carolina 
this alternates with the pine in a level which is equally 
dead and hopeless. In all that part which is the heart and 
best of Georgia the pine alternates with the deciduous oak, 
in a rolling land ; and there is distributed wealth, energy, 
variety. 

The Georgians in the war were of that type of heroes 
sung by Pindar, plucking a slow flower of glory, but of a 
lofty and enduring fortitude. Mortally stricken at the 
last, and all her iron sinews rent from end to end, as if by 
the lightnings, Georgia yet pillared resolutely up upon her 
hundred regiments the tottering Confederacy. Despite 
the secret machinations of a few men, based on a petty 
personal pique against Davis, the people of the State were 
the mainstay of the rebellion, next after the Old Domin- 
ion. In all the Confederacy none deserved less than did 
stalwart and honest, and hard-headed Georgia to have 
thrust upon her the ghoulish and damning infamy of 
Andersonville. 





CHAPTER V.i 
THE COTTON-PLANTERS. 

S I crossed over from Columbus on the great 
Opelika bridge, the Chattahoochee was roaring 
over the gray rocks far beneath, all gory, as if 
the lightning had wounded the big red heart of Georgia. 

An Alabama planter told me a story which illustrates 
the ancient disbelief of his class in the negro's ability to 
keep his own life in his body. He owned a ferry on the 
Chattahoochee, and to make his ferryman faithful gave 
him half the profits. Harry saved his gains carefully, and 
in the course of time proposed to his master to buy his 
freedom. He consented, and a bargain was made that 
Harry should pay $800 for himself, half in hand. Not 
long after there came a prodigious freshet, Harry's skiff 
was capsized in the middle of the stream, and himself car- 
ried down two or three miles before he could get ashore, 
more dead than alive. Wofully bedraggled and dilapida- 
ted he presented himself before his master. 

" Mass' John, dis chile like to trade back." 

" What's the matter, Harry f" 

" Tell you what, mass' John, four hundred dollars mo' 
money 'n I want to risk in dis hyur nigger. 

From Columbus to the Coosa it was Georgia over again 
— wearisome with its red-clay hills and its woods of pine. 
And down the Coosa, too, with its aguish fens of bul- 
rushes, everything was blue and detestable with falling 
rain. 



6Q THE VALLEY OF THE ALABAMA. 

But down the lordly valley of the Alabama I walked 
with delight. It is a land of plenteous pork, and corn, 
and juice of corn ; a land of log-cribs, high and spindling, 
and full of snow-white corn ; of red smoke-houses, strongly 
locked, whose inside walls laughed with gammoned hams, 
and " middlings," and sacks of hominy, and jars of but- 
termilk, old and mighty. The whole face of the magnifi- 
cent valley was wreathed in a ham-fat pone, and butter- 
milk smile. 

As soon as you enter the suburbs of a southern town, 
you see two negroes leaning across a gate. 

" Good mornin', uncle Jim, howdy ?" 

" "Well, I'se jest tolable like ; how's yesself ?" 

" Jest midlin'. Seems like I has rheumatiz all de time. 
How's yer wife, uncle Jim ?" 

" "Well, aunt Betsy, she's mighty bad ; got de glorium 
squeezus, doctor says." 

Who ever saw two negroes meet, who were not in very 
bad health, I wonder? They are never more than "jest 
tolable," at best. 

Montgomery is built in a pretty cove in the river hills, 
in the shape of an arc of a parquet in a theatre. Stand- 
ing on the lofty walls of the capitol, on the highest out- 
side hills, the spectator looks league upon league both up 
and down the ox-bow Alabama, which bowls its broad 
waters straight into the city ; gnaws forever at the raw 
and bloody bluff; and then goes off in nearly the same 
direction it follows in approaching. 

Albert Sidney Johnston pleaded forcibly the claims of 
Montgomery to be the capital of the Confederacy, saying 
that the heart of the body ought not to be worn on the 
shoulder, for every daw to peck. But the querulous old 
Mother of Presidents was hesitating, and they tossed her 
the bauble. 



MONTGOMERY. 67 

Richmond won the coveted crown, but, unlike the chap- 
let of laurel worn by Tiberius to shield himself from the 
bolts of Jove, it encircled her haughty brow with the war's 
whole coronal of lightenings. 

As one travels westward, one departs continually farther 
and farther from the strictness, straightforwardness and 
sternness of the Atlantic States. "Western breadth and 
blandness increase. Sombre Savannah was the crudest 
master of the freedmen I passed in all my journey. Mont- 
gomery was far enough west to laugh a little. When the 
freedmen were first marshaled as voters, a wag in Mont- 
gomery, among other tricks, induced over a score of them 
to vote in the letter-box in the post-office. 

A plantation negro not far from the city, when I asked 
him for whom he had voted, said, " I voted for mass' 
McLeod, an' de 'Publican party, an' de United States, an' 
de Congress." 

I am constantly astonished at the quickness with which 
the freedmen pick up the catch-words and slang of politics, 
reading, music, carpentry, and such superficial acquire- 
ments. I hazard little in saying that, in these matters, 
they are apter than any class of whites. But the difference 
between white and black is indicated in the remark of 
Themistocles, who said he could not learn to fiddle, but he 
could make a great city grow where a village was before. 

From Montgomery to Selma the Alabama wanders down 
by the longest way, like a whining school-boy in the morn- 
ing, slipping smooth and haggard through many a superflous 
sinuosity, as if loth to leave the regal valley which itself has 
created. Beneath the overhanging fringes of sweet-gums, 
magnolias, and sycamores, which hold up their white arms 
in holy horror at this murderer of the hills, it rambles 
backward and forward, and moans against the bluffs, which 
hurl it away with loathing. 



68 OX THE FERRY-BOAT AT SELMA. 

On the ferry-scow at Selma there were several men of 
the poorest class, white-faced, gaunt, tobacco-chewing men, 
talking with that flippancy of vulgarity characteristic of 
the ignorant in the South. 

" I'm d — ef I don't think that was the meanest trick I 
ever heerd of — 'lowin a nigger to testify agin a white man," 
said one, spitting vehemently into the river. 

" Thar aint one nigger outer ten but what you can hire 
him for five dollars to swear a man's life away," echoed 
another, to which they all assented. 

There was a negro on board who, in passing the heels of 
a mule, was kicked out into the river. It was after night- 
fall, but no one offered him any assistance, nor did they 
even stop the scow. I afterwards found out that he 
swam ashore. 

" Only one woolly head the less," said the first speaker, 
with a brutal laugh. D — 'em, I like to see 'em droppin' 
off. And that ar's the benefit to we po' men of this hyur 
freedom they've give 'em. Ef that had been some man's 
slave, they'd raised heaven and yearth to save him, and 
gin him thirty-nine for fallin' in." 

The great plateau between Selma and Demopolis, jut- 
ting down between the Alabama and the Tombigbee, is 
one vast undulating cotton-field, islanded with magnificent 
natural groves of oak, and dotted with the lordly mansions 
of the planters. The flag with which Sergeant Bates pass- 
ed me on the railroad track, fluttered its starry folds 
within easy sight of ten thousand negroes, plowing for 
cotton between the two cities. 

In her normal condition Alabama, though younger than 
Georgia, feels less in her councils the influence of the mid- 
dle class, the small planters. Hence, as the typical Ala- 
bamian, it will be proper to select a great planter, who shall 
be designated as Colonel A. St. Leger Yarnell. 



AN ALABAMIAN PLANTER'S HOME. 69 

lie lives in a white house, which is square, and has a 
four-sided hip-roof. The chimneys are sometimes extra- 
foraneous, but, in this pattern of house, they are oftener 
taken in-doors. There is always a veranda extending 
across one side, and sometimes more, with columns which 
are also square, plain, and formal. 

Around it there is a good characteristic of the lovely 
and thriftless South. A smiling bed of verbenas ill con- 
ceals the jagged rift in the trellis which supplies the place 
of range-work ; and the gate by which we enter this gar- 
den of delights leans one lazy shoulder on the post, for 
lack of a hinge. In the rear there is a double row of 
whitewashed negro cabins, and a garden of collards. 

The house is bisected by a spacious hall, which contains 
a banister ending in a rich heavy whorl, a hat-stand, and 
the inevitable gold-headed cane. The apartments are of 
the old-time, stately, frigid sombreness, and are joined by 
folding-doors. In one of them is a rich grand piano, 
which bears atop a tiny negro statuette in bronze, dancing 
on top of a wire, and reaching out his hand for his mis- 
tress' music. 

At the hour for dinner we retire, as always, to a sepa- 
rate cook-house. A number of lively pickaninnies, dress- 
ed in coarse, white kirtles, flutter about with superfluous 
assiduities. Few sights in the South are more pleasant 
to me than these little waiters about a planter's table. 

First, there is sweet-potato soup, rarely good. The 
body of the dinner offers sweet potatoes boiled, dry, floury 
and exceedingly digestible, and baked red potatoes. Take 
selected potatoes, which bake juicy, almost like candied 
honey, and a bowl of buttermilk, old and rich, and slightly 
acid, and you have the best eating in thirty-seven States. 
Then there is a sweet-potato pudding, and the mouth of 
my memory waters when I write thereof. 



70 TALKS WITH CGLOXEL TARXELL 

After the tiny cup of black coffee and corn-bread, which, 
often singularly conclude a southern dessert, we sit in the 
veranda, and the table talk is renewed. Colonel Tarnell 
is a young man; tall; spare; black, fine, long, clinging 
hair, combed behind the ears; straight nose; skin dead 
and rather dark ; drawling voice — a melancholy but fiery 
character, and capable of intense devotion. 

" O, sir, there is not the slightest affinity or community 
between our people and the Yankees. En efet, the North 
first seceded from the old constitution to a ' higher power,' 
from the old religion into infidelity, from the old language 
into transcendentalism, from the old fashions into naked- 
ness, and there remained nothing for us but to sever the 
only remaining bond, that of government. It was inevi- 
table, sir." 

" But was not this simply the work of slavery, and not 
the result of inherent incompatibilities P 1 

"No, sir, by no means, sir. We follow the noble pur- 
suit of Washington and Lee ; the Yankees are peddlers, 
and greasy operatives. We are a free and fighting people; 
the Yankees are hucksters, and swallow any insult for the 
sake of the main chance. Add to this, sir, the national 
genius of the Yankees is essentially prying and austere, 
while our people are genial, jovial, humorous. Question 
history, and you will find that no thoroughly humorous 
people, like the modern Spaniards, or the medieval Vene- 
tians, have ever been able to maintain any true republic. 
Revenons a nos moutom. The tendency in the South is 
continually toward the limitation of fanatical notions 
among the masses, and the establishment of strong-handed 
order." 

" You mean monarchy. But you will remember the 
provision of the constitution, that Congress shall guaran- 
tee a republican form " 



ON THE VERANDA. 71 

(Fiercely.) " I understand, sir. Pray don't flaunt that 
bloody rag before my eyes. 

' Force rules the world still, 
Has ruled it, shall rule it.' 

It was fit that that should come from Boston. But Deo 
volente, the South will make that a false prophecy. Do 
you suppose, sir, that Illinois will submit forever to see 
her glorious prairies tapped to pour eleemosynary wheat 
into the sacks of the blue-bellied, pinch-penny, cod-liver- 
eaters of Maine ? The day will come, sir, and delay not, 
when the East and the West shall be torn asunder as a 
pledged garment is rent by the dicers. And when the 
keepers fall upon the bloody ground, clutched in a fierce 
embrace, who then will keep the caged lion ? Aye, who 
will keep him then?" 

" Call the garment seamless, and the comparison is good. 
Now I will show you what things are bound to make it 
seamless, and therefore not easily torn. 

" In weaving this great garment, Agriculture stretches 
the warp, but Manufactures weave in the weft. You see, 
therefore, the seam between the East and West is continu- 
ally pushed inland, and it will finally be woven entirely 
out into the Pacific. 

" The seam between the North and the South will be a 
good deal harder to get rid of, because it is the seam be- 
tween white and coffee-color or downright black. But the 
South will bleach itself, just as New England did long ago, 
but more slowly. The negroes, now that they are free to 
go where they choose, are moving toward the coast, and 
toward Liberia faster than formerly. 

" The deplorable misfortune of our country has always 
been that our struggle for homogeneity has been, not as in 
England, a social one, but as in Germany, a sectional one ; 
and the only thing that creates this lack of homogeneity 



72 TALKS WITH COLONEL VAKXELL 

is difference of opinion about the negro. If negroes were 
distributed all over the Union, we should all think alike 
about them, because we should all know alike, and there 
would be no quarrel. The civil feuds died out in Eng- 
land, because it was neighbor against neighbor all over the 
island ; but in Germany they never subside, because, as 
with us, it is one great united section against another, 
whom it is impossible to make acquainted with each other. 

" To recapitulate. I have shown how we are making 
the garment seamless, as between East and West; and 
how it is becoming seamless, as between North and South, 
by the gradual bleaching of the latter into white. The 
South will not attempt to tear it again, though the sec- 
tions will always find cause of quarrel and of hatred, until 
they become of one color. 

" The negro is the real Disunionist of the South ; in 
fact, he is disunion itself, not by any disloyalty of his — far 
from it — but by his mere presence, for which he is not 
responsible." 

" If your argument be true — and ( thou reasonest well ' 
— may we never lack a nigger to drop into the Federal 
hell-broth in which the South is mixed, to resolve it apart ! 
Yet I shrink from the abhorred infliction. Consider, sir, 
what a high-toned people suffer from the contact with a 
brutish race, when they can not control them by force. 
No northern man can understand it. The nigger has no 
property, and you can't get redress in the courts. He has 
no honor, and you can't even insult him. All our lives 
we have chid them as inferiors, and with our words there 
was an end ; but now they give curse for curse. I will 

none of it ! I will none of it ! by ! sir, no man whose 

hair grows in his head at both ends, shall ever give me 
words in my teeth. He shall die in his tracks like a beast. ' : 

" You will give the negro the same privilege ?" 



ON THE VERANDA. 73 

" What, put myself on a level with a nigger ? Do you 
believe a nigger is human ?" 

" There are, as Fray Jay me Bleda would say, a hundred 
marks to show he is not human. A negro, as you are 
aware, wraps his only blanket around his head, and turns 
it toward the fire, but a white man sleeps with his feet 
toward the fire. A majority of negroes are left-handed, 
but white men are mostly right-handed. The nostril of a 
negro " 

" Ah ! you are jesting." 

" I was only stating facts." 

" But, if you please, let us speak seriously, jocis relictis. 
Our people are hardly in the mood for jesting now. 
Each fresh disaster seemed to nerve our enemies to a 
fiercer energy, but when the final and awful ruin fell upon 
our people, they were broken with unutterable grief and 
despair. Our sons and brothers in the bloody grave, our 
cherished homes in ashes, our beloved country a smoking 
and desolated waste, before us a life of poverty, brutal 
insult, and unknown and unimaginable retributions, and 
these foolish and miserable beings leaping in exultation 
around us, almost on the fresh-made graves of our heroic 

dead, and even taunting us with being— G ! did not 

some bite the dust for their impudence !" 

A pause ensues, during which the host goes out and 
calls a negro from his plow, nearly a quarter of a mile dis- 
tant, to fetch him a drink, though he went as far to call 
him as he would have done in going to the well. 

" Colonel Varnell, I am anxious to hear an intelligent 
Southern opinion as to the freedman's future." 

" Well, before I attempt that, let me give you some 
grounds for an opinion. I shall give you hard facts, Yan- 
kee fashion. 

" In the first place, the nigger is a thief l by spherical 
4 



74: A SOUTHERX OPINION 

predominance.' Before emancipation, my old pastor used 
to instruct all the sen-ants of his congregation in the base- 
ment of our church ; and in his absence I often taught 
them myself, not Yoodooism, but the pure religion of the 
Eible. But the moment they were free, they must have 

their own church and preacher, and the d rascal 

preached his first sermon in the boots he stole from my old 
pastor." 

" But will not the sense of responsibility which comes 
with freedom cure this evil ?" 

" Not at all, sir. Since they become free, they steal less 
from their masters, but more from each other. 

" In the second place, they are incurably lazy. Let me 
tell you a fact you may not have noticed. "When a white 
man constructs a well-sweep, he so adjusts the load at the 
end that it will not quite balance the full bucket ; but 
when a nigger makes one for his own use, he balances it 
in such a way that he has to throw a good part of his 
weight on the pole to lower the bucket, but when this is 
full, it returns of itself. Why is this \ Simply because he 
will not lift, or is what we call a ' lubber-lifter'." 

" I have noticed this fact, vaguely, but your explanation 
is new." 

" In the third place, they are outrageous sponges. On 
my plantation I have one of my old servants named Ad- 
dison, the most faithful and industrious nigger I ever saw, 
and his wife is just as good. But they have about forty 
children, grandchildren, nephews, cousins, and second cous- 
ins, who are, with few exceptions, low-down thieves. 
They have an amazing affection for Addison, however, and 
every Saturday and Sunday his wife has to set three or 
four tables. The amount of turkey dinners, chicken pot- 
pies, biscuits, and roasted pigs consumed there is incredi- 
ble. You would be astonished if you knew how many 
niggers get half their living off the few industrious/' 



OF THE FREEDMEX'S FUTURE. 75 

" It is this gregariousness, doubtless, which makes the 
negroes so widely acquainted. I think I never saw two 
meet who did not know each other." 

" In the fourth place, niggers are not naturally inclined, 
as is supposed in the North, to be tillers, much less owners 
of the soil. Go among the Fantis and Ashantis of Africa, 
from whom we got most of our servants, and you find 
them rather ingenious, imitative, and deft in mechanical 
pursuits, but not tenacious of the soil, though there is no 
superior race to interfere with their ownership. The nig- 
ger is fond of cities. Have you. in your journey, found 
any niggers owning land V 9 

" I found three in North Carolina." 

" Did you ever know a nigger in the North who owned 
any land ?" 

" I don't recall any." 

" Well, then, here is my opinion of the nigger's future. 
All who can possibly live there will crowd into the cities, 
particularly near the coast. A great majority of those 
who stay in the country will avoid long contracts, working 
as much as possible by the day or week. Just after the 
war they had a fine fancy for renting land, because the 
Yankees talked so much to them about it, but they are fast 
abandoning it for set wages, because, like regular soldiers 
or college boys, they don't want the trouble of balancing 
chances and precasting the future. I don't deny the quick- 
ness with which many of them learn, which is often won- 
derful ; but it is only superficial, and don't give them tact, 
don't give them what you Yankees call a knack of affairs. 
Why, I had a boy named Wilton, forty years old, the 
most sensible nigger and the best driver I ever had ; but 
when he became free, he rented forty acres of me, and 
planted the last acre of it in cucumbers, because the only 
Yankee he ever saw was fond of them ! He thought it 
would be the best crop in the market." 



76 • ALABAMlAN ORATOKb. 

u How about politics V 9 

" Ah ! we'll capture that battery quick enough, and turn 
it on its makers. "We have the argumentum ad crume- 
nam. "What's the nigger's vote to him without work ? 
He'll find himself voting for us malgri soi. The Yankee 
is near heaven, in the nigger's thinking, but we are on 
earth yet, and own a little of it, and the nigger will vote 
at last for the men who give him work. The masses 
couldn' control them, for the niggers had always despised 
them and called them * poor white trash ;' but let the 
South get back its leaders in politics, and they will follow 
them. The niggers worked for us before, and we were 
strong enough ; now they'll work and vote too for us, and 
we'll be stronger than before, and make the masses know 
their places." 

The Alabamians are the Greeks of the South ; The 
Georgians are more like the Romans. The former excel 
in eloquence, or in what Coleridge calls the " literature of 
power ;" the latter in the " literature of fact," in comedy, 
and in humor. Young as Alabama is, she has produced 
more and greater orators than Georgia. Hamilton, Yan- 
cey, Clay, Calhoun — these are all Alabamian names ; and 
though none of them were greatly wise in office, or even 
crafty in the conduct of caucuses, they were all greater 
than any Georgian, save one, in that swift and voluble 
eloquence, which wields at will the " fierce democraty " 
of the South. 

In Mobile, it was, I am told, that a certain orator, with 
truly Ionic craftiness, pressed the blacksmith into the work 
of " firing the Southern heart," by bringing upon the 
rostrum manacles inscribed " For Yancey," " For Toombs," 
etc., which he told his audience were captured at Manassas. 

I think the women of the Alabama valley, especially at 
Selma and on the great plantations west of it, are the best 



WOMEX OF THE ALABAMA VALLEY. 



77 



type of American beauty. The ideal of Alabama — often- 
est seen in Selma and Montgomery — is an oval face ; eyes 
black and flashing ; skin rather dead and bloodless ; raven 
hair — constant, impassioned, proud, slaying with a glance 
of her eyes. Another type frequently seen on the planta- 
tion is ; — face a wider oval ; eyes hazel or blue ; fair haired ; 
skin dead and marble-white, or transparent, and revealing 
an exquisitely tender glowing pink — loving, modest, cheer- 
ful, earnest. The former type prevails, however. 

The inhabitants of the great cotton plateau, specially 
those living on the Tombigbee, are the tallest men I have 
seen in the lowlands of the whole South. Like the lordly 
sycamore of that river among trees, or the peerless Chero- 
kee rose among its kindred, — matchless in stature as in 
beauty — so are they who drink from the rivers of Alaba- 
ma, among the men and the women of the South. 








CHAPTER VI. 
WITH THE YAM-EATEKS. 

'% J, - " 

Eastern Mississippi I crossed a hundred miles of 
piney-woods, just like those of North Carolina. A 
weary, mean, stale country is this same piney forest. 
The sallow-looking soil, though it has an unbounded capac- 
ity for producing yams, is full of unseemly toads, all 
manner of spiders, ague-seeds, and biliousness. "When at 
last you find a glade in the mighty woods, every tussock 
of broom-grass is a covert for a ^rattlesnake, whose tail 
suddenly shivers with a fine delicate intonation. 

Mother Nature herself seems to have the chills in Mis- 
sissippi. Now and then there comes up the dank breath 
of the swamps ; a cloud intercepts the sunlight ; the pine 
leaves sough in a kind of cold blue shudder. 

In a moment after comes the fever. The sun's rays 
stream down in a very yellow, aguish glare, shimmering 
on the fences like fever-stricken witches, and blinking 
among the pines. Now the trees move with an uneasy 
stir, as a fever patient rustles the drapery of his couch, in 
his burning restlessness. 

At evening the " March peepers " begin to wriggle and 
chirp in the scummy marsh, which is the abode of Yellow 
Jack ; thrust out their cold green noses, and wink silvery 
winks in the moonlight. Then the first breath of coming 
spring floats through the open windows, alternately in 
sickly clouds of warm and cool. 



AT MERIDIAN— DRAKE'S STORY. ' 79 

In the middle of Meridian there was a huge barn-like 
tavern with, a deep veranda — a good confederate in its 
1 in ten-gray. It was settled and cracked in the middle ; 
chairs punched through the rain-rotted veranda floor; and 
swine insinuated themselves at night under the bar-room, 
and emitted dolorous noises at uncertain intervals. It was 
the sole lingering representative of ante-helium Meridian, 
being the only house which escaped Sherman's brand. It 
stood up in its grimy bulkiness, among the funniest little 
houses, all smirking in white paint, built since the war in 
place of the log-cabins hastily thrown up after Sherman 
retired. Here then was one representative of the old 
Uniced States, encircled by these pert younglings of the 
new United States ; and these again were surrounded by 
an outside rim of the Confederacy — log-cabins with stick- 
and-clay chimneys. 

When I went into the dining-room of this tavern, I saw 
one of the waiters start, look sharply at me, and move a 
few paces toward me. He had tine Caucasian features, 
but was jet-black. He afterward took his station behind 
my chair, and seemed to penetrate my every wish before 
it was uttered. He brought me everything that was rarest 
and best. 

" What is your name ?" I asked, wondering what he 
could mean by these attentions. 

He asked me to wait a little, and as soon as the other 
guests were gone, he leaned down on the table, and began 
in a low, soft voice : — 

" I thought you was my young master, sah, as died at 
Antietam. You look 'zactly like him, and I thought shoo' 
'nuff you was him, riz from the dead. 'Deed I did, sah, 
at first, and I was mighty nigh boo-hooin', sah, 'cause you 
didn't speak to me, 'cause I thought mebbe he wasn't killed 
after all. My young master was mighty good to me, and 



80 A STRANGE SUPERSTITION. 

when he was a dyin' on the field, and couldn't speak, sah, 
he whispered to 'em to tell his mother to set us all free, 
and he mentioned Drake particular — that's me. I was 
mighty glad to see you, sah, 'cause I knowed anybody 
looked like my young master would treat me kind. They 
don't treat me kind here, sah, shot at me twicet. 

Next morning Drake came to my room when I was 
about to leave, and, with the tears standing in his great 
dark eyes, begged me to take him away from Meridian. 
Of course I could not. When I took him by the hand, 
and spoke a last word, poor Drake wept like a child. 

A man with whom I staid one night told me that, in the 
days of slavery, it was an ordinance of the Almighty that 
no man should ever own a thousand slaves. I found this 
strange superstition more than once in the South. Every 
one had some instance of his personal knowledge, where a 
planter, owning nearly a thousand, resolved to own that 
number for once ; but before he could get the requisite 
number some that he already had would die or escape, 
and balk his purpose. 

Thus does the conscience of man, however blunted or 
dulled, yield assent to that command which the Almighty 
leveled against avarice, when he forbade the Israelites to 
lay field to field. 

When you chop off a place for it to stand upon, you 
have nearly logs enough to build a Mississippi cabin. The 
immigrant's family can live ten days in the wagon, while 
he chops goodly trunks, and flattens them on two sides. 
On the eleventh there come to him men out of the path- 
less depths of the woods, summoned by some mysterious 
telegraphy, and they " raise." In five days more he mor- 
tises a bedstead into the corner, and knits a chimney with 
sticks. 
The next cabin springs up even more quickly, and is 




CAVES AT VICKSBUEG. 



DESCRIPTION OF A PINEY-WOODS VILLAGE. 81 

embellished with a feather-board gable, and a smooth shin- 
gle, bearing that winsome legend of Mississippi — " Gem 
Saloon. " Its face of golden pine smiles npon the thirsty 
wayfarer, alluring him to the delusive grog. 

Next comes the grocery ; then another saloon, with a 
little, square, white gable, and a boarded awning ; then a 
tavern. At last there is a village, but it is only an auger - 
hole in the woods. Like potato-chits reaching palely up 
in a cellar, the Mississippian grows very tall. Cut off from 
the shining of the sun, and the light of the " eternal and 
incorruptible heavens," what w T onder if the soul of the 
piney-woods man is hard, uncanny, and unsusceptible ? 

What an index of souls is this meeting-house, with the 
hard, pitiless stare of its paintless wainscoting and pulpit, 
and the straight-backed seats, where little legs stick away 
out like chubby handspikes. You can just hear the sol- 
emn •' whangdoodle " whine the moment you enter. Yet 
there assemble here a multitude of pale tall children, to 
intone the rudiments of music, as they lift up their voices 
with the master in a sacred howl. Whence do they all 
come? 

Huge ox-wains come and go, groaning beneath their 
baled portions of Mississippi's great fleece. But you see 
no opening in the piney-woods. Whence do they all come ? 

Once a day the locomotive staggers out of the forest, 
pauses amid a crowd of little cotton-heads, corn-dodger, 
heads, burnt corn-dodger-heads, pigs, pups, hounds, wisps 
of cotton, bales of cotton, then vanishes in the woods like 
a scared buck. The unaccustomed traveler stands on the 
platform, and I hear him ask, " Whence do they all come ?" 

In Brandon a former Union officer told me a story, 
which illustrates a phase of emancipation. During the 
war a negro was brought into the lines, and an attempt 
was made to get some useful information from him. 
4* 



82 ACROSS THE PEARL— JACKSON. 

" What's your name ?" they asked. 

" Jim." 

" Jim what ?" 

" No, sah ; not Jim "Watt ; I'se jest Jim, sah." 

" But what is your other name ?" 

" Haint got no other name, sah. I'se jest Jim nothin' 
mo'." 

" What's your master's name ?" 

"Haint got no mawssa, sah; he runned away — yah! 
yah ! yah ! I'se free nigger now." 

" Well what's your father's name ?" 

" Haint got none, sah ; neber had none. I'se jest Jim 
hisself." 

" Have you any brothers or sisters ?" 

" No, sah. Haint got no sister, no brother, no mother, 
no father, nor nothin'. Neber had none. I'se jest Jim. 
Dat's all there is of us." 

That filtny misnomer, the Pearl, separates the piney- 
woods from the valley of the Mississippi with the greatest 
sharpness. On one side the endless piney- woods ; on the 
other side a magnificent prairie-like roll of Miami loam, 
bearing noble forests of beeches in their russet suits, sweet- 
gums still flickering with snatches of autumn flame, the 
oak, the holly, the gorgeous magnolia. Here is the cotton- 
wood, too, which begins, and is co-extensive with, the 
Great West. 

And Jackson, just over the river, is really the first city 
in the West. Entering it, I thought to cheer my thirsty 
soul with lager beer. It was a very small .glass of very 
meambeer, but the price was twenty-five cents. As I laid 
down that amount of currency, I quietly remarked to the 
proprietor that, in Montgomery, I drank as good for fif- 
teen cents. Thereupon, with a most lordly and contempt- 
uous wave of the arm, he shoved the currency back. 



a mississiiti teuton. 83 

" Never mind, sir ; I'll make you a present of one glass 
of beer," said this Mississippi Teuton. 

I felt entirely demolished. What a deal of scorn was 
in that red pudding-sack face ! Ah yes, I was now fully in 
the West, and knew it not. 

In a pitiful den, cobbled up one story high, among the 
ruins of burnt brick, and roofed with canvas, you might 
see a retired young officer, still in his Confederate buttons, 
complacently stroking his pale, soaped beard, and regard- 
ing his donkey-load of groceries with an air of serene in- 
difference as to trade. A planter, with the skirts of his 
sheep' s-gray coat studiously and rebelliously long, in pro- 
portion as the Yankee fashion is short, enters in his swag- 
gering way, and orders muslin. He suits himself with 
the first piece, and tosses down the money. Does he ask 
the price ? No ; he disdains a thing so " picayunish." 
What a fine and lofty scorn of small moneys ! 

Nowhere else in the Union do men so frequently assert 
that inalienable prerogative of an American — the right to 
draw and pass a resolution. Nowhere else are the people 
so devoted to great political principles, for every candidate 
has one. Every principle also has a candidate. The peo- 
ple of Jackson live in the greatest harmony and friendli- 
ness. Just before an election, every citizen announces 
himself a candidate, each " at the request of many friends." 

Between Jackson and Vicksburg I staid in a grotesque 
hut, built of fragments, in which paintings of a most gor- 
geous and sensuous beauty embellished a room like a sty, 
and the piano shone in absurd grandeur between the dres- 
ser and the pot-rack. A very little man, of extreme and 
dainty culture, leaned away back in his rocking-chair, with 
an air of utter listlessness and disgust, and kept his delicate 
hand constantly in motion before his face, as if he were 
brushing away cob-webs, while he rocked, and delivered a 



84 APPROACH TO VICKSBUHG. 

monologue on Eeeonstruction about half an hour in length. 

" O, we brush this altogether to one side, sir. Let them 
fight it out among themselves. We have nothing to do 
with it, sir ; nothing whatever to do with it. They have 
subjugated us, sir; and we have laid down our arms, 
and have nothing more to do with these things, and now 
why don't they just settle everything to "suit themselves, 
and not trouble us to put our hands in the disgusting 
business ?" 

And then he quoted Byron : — 

" And if we do but watch the hour, 
There never yet was human power 

Which could evade if unforgiven, 
The patient search and vigil long 
Of him who treasures up a wrong." 

All through the woods, from the Big Black onward, 
there were crowds of graves or trenches, digged in haste 
at midnight, by the nicker of the yellow torch, or the 
uncertain flash of the cannonade. There the unreturning 
dead of that sad, sad war slept side by side, Unionist with 
rebel — one with his name on " Fame's eternal bead-roll," 
x the other consigned to obloquy or sweet oblivion. I was 
treading already on ground more sacred than Trojan dust. 

Mother Earth herself, like Minerva with the Greeks, in 
that memorable battle-summer made auxiliary war on yon 
haughty stronghold. All along these yellow earth-billows 
which she hurled against it are the sodded breakers of bat- 
tle ; and- there, where human wave met wave, and the 
spray of bayonets fiercely flashed, the early grass grows 
greener from its bloody watering. 

And here, half-way down this slope, sat two men once, 
and broke a celebrated backbone ; and here the long can- 
non stands silently up, erect upon the pedestal, and stares, 
like Cyclops, with its grim eye toward heaven. 



THE MISSISSIPPI AT VICKSBURG. - 85 

And here are the caves in the steep, yellow walls, almost 
as undecaying as rock. Crouching here in terror, the peo- 
ple counted through weary nights the slow heart-beats of 
the cannonade, or listened breathless to its awful tumult 
by day. They heard the stupendous how — w — w — w of 
the sixty-four-pounder ; the keen ping — g — g — g of the 
of the rifle ball ; and that most fiendish and blood-freezing 
sound of battle, the diabolical yell of bursted bombs — 
whew — zz — zu — whish — e — ye — woop ! Vicksburg shud- 
ders yet at these hideous memories ; nay, it is itself one 
great ghastly shudder of hills, a perennial geologic death- 
rigor. 

A minute more and I stand upon the hill by the court- 
house. Looking down into the sooty chimneys of the 
steamboat, I can almost see their flaming hearts of fire. 
Over on the low opposite shore Grant's terrible dogs of 
war, squatted on their haunches, bayed iron-throated sum- 
mons at the doomed city, while the blazing earthworks in 
its rear wrapped it in a sheet of level flame. 

Far across the blue flat of Louisiana I can see where the 
smooth old Mississippi, coming down from the frozen 
North, reads his long argument for the Union. He rolls 
his great flood southward, as if forgetting the Hill City, to 
a point west of me ; then doubles grandly backward, then 
eastward ; flows in a slow and solemn march toward the 
National Cemetery beneath the hill, where he turns again 
southward, chafing his huge flank, as if in affection, al- 
most against the serried graves, and chanting an eternal 
requium to the asserters of his liberty ; hews his giant 
highway in the hillside ; then sweeps before the cockloft 
city in the pride of its greatness. 

In Mississippi we will visit Tammany Jones, one of those 
drollest of all mortals, the Western piney-woods men. It 
was over the doors of such, or around their hats, that the 



86 A VISIT TO TAMMAXY JOXES. 

Union vanguard sometimes found the mystic cord, twisted 
of a red strand and a white one, which said as plainly as 
words could say, " The blue we dare not, but the red we 
will not." This was the blood sprinkled upon the lintel 
which Sherman passed over in that direful day when he 
smote the first-born of the rebellious.* 

In the vast primeval forest where he lives, there are 
never any tempests to keep his door in a ghostly clacking ; 
but he hears all night, above the roof, the melancholy 
soughing of the pines, like the sighing of some lonely, 
wandering wraith of a Pascagoula. Sometimes he is start- 
led at midnight by a clutch of talons on his roof, and then 
the sepulchral voice of Madge-howlet resounds through the 
attic like a roll of stage-thunder. 

One of the queerest things in human nature is the early 
rising of these piney- woods men, coupled with their egre- 
gious laziness and personal uncleanness. A score of times 
I have known them rise long before daybreak, spit on their 
hands, " to git a good start," make a fire, and then sit in 
the house the whole livelong day. 

By the door there are some stunted sun-flowers — those 
universal hierophants of the rude poetry which blossoms 
in the soul of the lowly. There is, also a harmless and 
necessary log-built hen-house, and a little patch of cow- 
peas, okra for the dish of gumbo, and " sich-like truck." 
Against the house are stretched all manner of pelts — rac- 
coons', opossums', foxes', and beavers' — whose ring-streaked, 
speckled, and spotted tails flutter like the captured battle- 
flags I once saw on the cabin of a conquering Major-Gene- 
ral. These are the parchments testifying to his graduation 
in Draw-bead College, and these caudal ribbons are fairer 
in his eyes than all baccalaureate silks and seals. 

*To be accurate, it is necessary to say that all the members of this secret 
organization whom I ever saw were in, and natives of Georgia. 



A PINE Y- WOODS CHARACTER. 87 

If I omit to speak of his dogs, and of dogs in general, 
may my name be Icliabod. Nobody in the chivalrous 
South, except Cuffee, is such a fool as to walk ; and in the 
night we all looked of one color, and, either by mistake 
or by design, they gave my calves many an outrageous 
ante-helium nip. A sad-eyed hound, with his drooping 
ears, and his long, melancholy cry, making 

" So musical a discord, such sweet thunder " 

as he runs in the glorious chase, I admire to a passion ; 
but these mangy tykes, with their ears eaten off close up 
to their heads, and their bobbed tails — to be bitten by such 
beasts ! The fondness of some of the piney-woods men for 
these wretched curs passes anything recorded of London 
or Benares. 

Tammany Jones wears an old-fashioned brindled suit 
throughout, bagging trowsers, jerkin, waistcoat buttoned 
up to the chin, and a fox-skin cap with a queue of tails. 
He has an immense shock of hair, which stands out all 
around in a bushy rim beneath his cap. In that part of 
his gristly face not concealed by his beard, you can no 
more read any workings of his soul than you could on a 
Dutch clock which winks its eyes, except now and then, 
when he gives it a sort of dry squeeze of self-satisfaction. 
You must watch his eyes for every thing. The pupils 
contract and dilate continually, like a cat's. Now they 
glint with a flash of clownish humor, and now they roll 
whitely upward, when he is about to utter some extraor- 
dinarily whimsical conceit which has just flashed upon him. 

In the cabin, what a clutter ! 

I have a confused recollection of pots, pans, kettles, po- 
ker, wife, axe, stag's-horns, snuff-swab ; but the only objects 
of whose presence I am positively certain, are, the long- 
handled gourd, ornamented with a raccoon's tail, and a 
cob-pipe whimsically embellished with several rattlesnake's 



88 MRS. JONES AND THE CHILDREN. 

rattles. The thirteen small children are all girls, regularly- 
graded in height, except where the war made a gap in the 
succession. Their only garments, I judge, are kirtles of 
coarse negro-cloth, once almost white, which hang to the 
floor, as limp and as straight as if thej were wholly unoc- 
cupied. 

Jones sits on a tripod stool at one chimney-corner, and I 
at the other, while the children huddle all over the wood- 
pile in the corner, and watch me with the owl-eyed, un- 
winking stare of childhood. Mrs. Jones dusts the clay 
hearth with a brush of broom-grass, and puts more yams 
into the ashes for the stranger. Then she sifts meal into 
a tray, and makes pones. These she pats and pats, and 
chucks with the spoon over and over again in a kind of 
fariuaceous roundelay, which seems to say : — 

" The corn-bread is rough, 
The corn-bread is tough, 
But thank the good Lord we have enough." 

Then she lays two of them side by side in a broken hand- 
led spider. Meanwhile Jones and I fall to talking. 

" Well, now, I sa-ay ! if I'd been gwine to shoot a Yan- 
kee, I'd never pinted a gun at you. You look mo' like 
one of we uns." 

" I am not one of the original stock ; but I suppose you 
call every Northern man a Yankee since the war ?" 

•' Well, I reckon, ya-as. That 'ar war wuz a onlucky 
circumstance. I alluz kinder tuk to Yankees befo' but 
that 'ar sorter rubbed the ha'r up my back." 

" Were you badly treated by our army ?" 

" Eight smart, ya-as. . D'ye see that 'ar gal thar ? Well, 
she wus'nt bigger'n a fyste then, and was as purty as a 
speckled pup. A soldier feller come along, and thought 
as how he must have somethin', though 'twuz the last 
blanket we hed in the honsen ; so he jest laid the gal onto 
the no', tuk the blanket by the corners, and lusted it up, 



JUDGE SOURS AND CAPTAIN JARNLEY. 89 

an' you orter seed that 'ar gal roll out 'cross the flo'." 

" The soldiers couldn't always tell who their friends 
were." 

" But they sometimes knowed mighty well who their 
enemies wuz. Thar wuz Jedge Sours, up in Hinds ; they 
run him clean off, and burnt his housens, and tuk his pi- 
aner and his picters out in the yard fur to make targets 
outen. But I kinder felt hull-footed when I heerd that 
'ar, fur he'd wanted secession so bad his teeth wuz loose. 
lie could whup a hull cow-pen full of Yankees, and mind 
the gap, he could. He would fight a saw-mill, and give it 
three licks the start. But when a passel of cavalry fellers 
come a trottin' into his yard one mornin', the way he lit 
outen them diggin's wuz a caution to tom-cats. He wuz 
that bad skeered he run plumb agin' a yaller calf he had, 
but he wuz half a mile off befo' he heerd it blart." 

" Ha ! ha ! He was considerably cooled, then, before the 
surrender came." 

" You could a' tuk him out through the stitches of his 
breeches, he wuz so small. I seed him 'bout a fortnit after 
his housens wuz done burnt, and he looked like he'd 
let a bird go. He's the wust w T hupped man in the lay-out, 
1 reckon. Now, thar wuz his neighbor, Cap'n Jarnley, he 
w t uz a ole-line Whig, and went agin' secedin' original ; but 
when he seed 'twuzn't no use, he lit in, and he fit till the 
hull kit and bilin' busted up. I never seed a man keep 
his dander up so. He wuz like the dog said to the cat, 
when he seed her tryin' to pull a mouse out of the hole by 
nippin' onto the eend of the tail — ' you must purr-severe." 

" If everybody had been as obstinate, the South would 
have won, perhaps, and the result would have been more 
agreeable to you." 

"Well, now, stranger, you're sorter feelin' under my 
ribs. I reckon a man had a leetle ruther see his neighbor's 



90 MR. JONES' OPINION. 

housen blowed down as hissen. But I've often thought, 
kinder to myself like, mebbe so 'twuz better as it turned 
out. If we'd gained our freedom, us po' men would a' 
been like little dogs in high oats." 

" How so ?" 

" Well, all the big secessioners as had niggers, would 'a 
made laws for no man to vote 'less he had niggers ; then 
they'd tuk away eddication from us ; then they'd jest held 
sticks for us to jump over, like trainin' pups." 

" But now that the negro works for wages, like white 
men, every tub will stand on its own bottom." 

" Well, you see, when a nigger is hired, it's mighty nigh 
as if he wuz a slave agin. They knows they is onpleasant 
to white men, aud that 'ar makes 'em sorter meek like. 
A secessioner, as is alluz used to slingin' his orders round 
promis'cus, ruther have a nigger he kin cuss, as a white 
man that kin do his own cussin' back again. Us po' men 
is 'bout the most independent people ever was, I reckon ; 
and they ca-ant feather their beds off of that goose with- 
out gittin' some squawkin'. 

" But they all say now, they want to see the negroes 
sent out of the South." 

" Well, you've heerd a 'skeeter on a bull's horn befo' 
now, I reckon. They want niggers to stay bad enough ; 
and most of 'em haint got no mo' use fur we po' men than 
a coon has fur Sunday. That's what makes niggers sech a 
cuss to us. And any furriner as comes hyur in reggard of 
benefitin' of hisself, he's a comin' to a goat fur to git wool. 
If the niggers alone wuz agin' us we could scratch out 
a livin' ; but secessioners and niggers both — that 'ar's too 
many coons for the pup. You ca-an't have two blackbirds 
a pickin' the back of one sheep ; and so long as niggers is 
round, us po' men's not gwine to git any work." 

" But I think you can find enough for both to do." 



OF " SECESSIOXERS AND NIGGERS." 91 

"I reckon thar's enough; but niggers works cheaper 
anyhow. They lives jest on corn-bread and meat, and no 
white man ca-ant do that : he wants a change, as the bar 
said when he wuz tired of man-meat. But niggers is the 
most triflin'est, no-'countest, low-down bein's on the face 
of the livin' yearth. Jest let a nigger drink as many new 
malasses as he wants, and ride the gates, and he's happy 
as a lizard onto a rail." 

" But I see a good many white folks, who, if not riding 
the gates, are at least in the house most of the time." 

" But the secessioners has all the land, and the niggers 
gits all the work ; and that 'ar gives a po' man 'casion fur 
meditatin' a good deal in a settin' postur. All them things 
together makes the ile onto our soup powerful thin like. 

"Now, speakin' of niggers, thar wuz a little circum- 
stance happened hyur as shows how worthless they is. 
Thar wuz a couple of shoats of 'em a livin' together in 
one cabin with both thur families about two miles over 
towards Yallobosh, which folks never made out what they 
lived onto. They never done no work, not a lick ; they 
didn't beg nuthin', and they hedn't nuthin nohow, only 
the housens they lived into. Facts, I wuz too fast ; I orter 
said they had two guns, and two or three pistols. 

" Well, one day them two niggers they went out for to 
hunt, as they said. 'Pears like they made thar livin that 
'ar way. They hunted an' they hunted, and they couldn't 
find nuthin' but a cow belongin' to one of my neighbors. 
They shot the cow, bein' as they couldn't find nuthin' else, 
and then they commenced a skinnin' of her. But 'pears 
she jumped up all to wunst, and hooked 'em both to death ! 
Leastways that was the story roun hyur. But the curo'- 
usest thing of all wuz, she gored 'em both into the head, 
and the holes wuzn't bigger'n my little finger, and went 
plumb through. 



92 A CONTRARY CANUCK. 

Well, the story got out 'bout the cow hookin' two nig- 
gers to death, and of course, thar hed to be a coroner's 
jury set onto 'em. Me an' another feller, an' a Canuck as 
wusn't naturalized, and a boy seventeen years old, an' two 
niggers, wuz the jury; an' we went out fur to hunt 
fur 'em. We beat up an' down right smart amongst 
the bushes, but couldn't find nuthin'. 

" Last the coroner — he was a right sensible cuss — says 
he ' boys, we'll take the testimony of this hyur feller as 
heerd 'bout them dead niggers, or said he seed 'em, 'an 
we'll swear to't, and it'll be all right'. So he sot down, 
an' writ out a verdict, how it happened that the niggers 
was killed by a cow, an' read it to us, and we made our 
marks to't. But this hyur Canuck, the derned skunk ! he 
swore he wouldn't make his mark to no sich docyment, 
'less he seed the niggers we sot onto. So we had to git up, 
an' go to huntin' agin, all on account of this ornary con- 
trary cuss ; an' it tuk us the best part of the day to find 
the niggers, and set onto 'em. Then the Canuck he made 
his mark to't." 

He knocked the ashes from his pipe, blew a strong blast 
through the stem, then laid it on the mantle, and added 
" Come, set up, stranger, and take a snook." 

We place each his stool or bench around the table, which 
the fat pine fire lights up more gorgeously than many-jet- 
ted gas. There are the roast yams from the ashes, deli- 
cious as can be eaten only in Mississippi; chitterlings ; 
and bacon with cabbage. If the reader knows what chit- 
terlings are, the word is enough ; if not, let it suffice to 
say they are sausages. The cabbage, or collards, boiled 
with bacon, are a materia circa quam for a good deal of 
sport-making by Northern travelers, and over them a 
great many noses are daintily turned up — and justly, when 
the dish is prepared by the negroes and the lower class of 



SUPrER, AND AFTERWARD. 93 

whites. But, after all, it is a dish which was served up to 
Jupiter himself, as recorded by Ovid, in "Baucis and 
Philemon." 

Supper is dispatched in profound silence. Then the 
woman sits by the chimney-corner, rests her gaunt, sallow 
elbows on her knees, leans her head upon her hands, and 
sucks her snuff-swab. There is an hour or two of talk, 
with many a stupid pause, and many a long, clownish 
yawn from all parts of the house. Then the family dis- 
tribute themselves in various beds and " shakedowns." I 
decline any of them, and, being somewhat modest, am 
obliged to look hard at the fire till there is profound silence 
in the rear, indicating that the transition has been effected. 
During the night there is an ominous mauling and scratch- 
ing in the bed-quilts, and occasionally a faint squeal from 
a child, when the attack is heavier than usual. But 
thanks to the good ventilation of the cabin, I make a tole- 
rable night of it in the only rocking-chair. 





CHAPTER VII. 
OK THE DOLEFUL FLATS. 

HEN I arrived in Yicksburg, I entered in my 
notes this : — Starting at Raleigh, where Sherman 
ended, I rested in Savannah, where he rested, and 
am now in Yicksburg, where be began. The track which, 
with the mobility of an ancient conqueror, he drew eight 
hundred miles through the rebellion, I have traced by the 
echoes of his dreaded and hated name. Six weeks I have 
listened, with what patience I could, to the story sounded 
nightly in my ears of the pullets and the breastpins filched 
away by his bummers. Many have been these " tales of 
a wayside inn," but, instead of the birds of Killingworth 
slain in one of them, it was that identical turkey-cock 
killed in all of them, by swallowing a Federal ramrod. 

To-morrow I will walk by a way which Sherman never 
marched in ; and then I hope to hear these accursed hen- 
stories no more. Yet I feel that my self-immolation has 
been productive of benefit, for it seemed to do my hosts 
good to find some new ears for their grievances. 

A sable Charon ferried me over Old Soap-suds, on 
whose vast bosom somewhere it always rains. He was a 
greasy, sleepy pot-wolloper, and nearly capsized his wretch- 
ed craft by missing his stroke in the water and falling flat 
on his back. 

I scrambled up fifteen feet of stratified muck and turn- 



BEYOND THE MISSISSIPPI. 95 

ed to look for Vicksburg. But a dense fog, swirling up 
the river, Lad buried boats, wharfs, and city, and I only 
caught a glimpse of the highest building floating like 
Nephelococcygia on the clouds. 

Along the bank there was a row of little negro-huts, 
miserably cobbled of driftwood — the sole occupants of the 
deep, dense, mahogany soil. They are planted thus close 
to the river so that, in those days when the Mississippi 
covers States, and all the mules are ranged along the levee, 
braying piteously to the passing steamboats, and nibbling 
each the other's tail of burrs for lack of hay, their wretch- 
ed tenants can flee away in skiffs to Yicksburg. 

Opposite Yicksburg there is a long and narrow penin- 
sula. Hence, in a winter flood, the river surges with 
stupendous force over the bank, but chiefly at the neck, 
where the current bowls straight upon the land, and leaps 
all levees in a mighty lunge, sweeping down gigantic 
sweet-gums of centuries growth. A mile or two back 
from the river the road plunged into the original forest, 
and there my tribulations began. Enormous gullies were 
ripped in the ground, as if the truculent river-god, wroth 
with men who had dared build railroads in his domains, 
had not only demolished them, but swallowed the very 
ground underneath. In other places this demon of floods 
had climbed up the embankment, seized the detested track, 
and laid it over, unbroken for rods together, high upon 
the bushes. 

The water of the lower Mississippi is said to be the 
heaviest fresh water on the continent. Certainly it is, if 
the amazing strength with which it hurls and wrenches 
iron rails is any indication. 

In a dense canebrake I ran on a bear nosing about. "With 
a frightened snort, he tore away, smashing down a wide, 
cracking swath of canes. There were the most execrable, 



96 A NEGRO PLANTER— TOOKEY SMOOK. 

scratching thickets of dewberry creepers, trumpet-flowers, 
elders, and all manner of brambles, rasping and tearing 
me at every step. 

Here the negroes are beating down the burrs in a cot- 
ton-field, scarcely visible in the bristling tangle. How 
lusty is the burden of song they thwack along the swath ! 
A negro's poetry, like his religion, is all in his arms and 
legs. 

Let any one wade from Yicksburg across this dreary flat 
in winter, and he will then possess a lively conception of 
the vastness of the valley of the Mississippi — and not till 
then. And when sixty miles from Yicksburg, he still sees 
the mark of its yellow grip upon the trees, and, seventy- 
five miles in the interior, still has to answer the planter's 
anxious question, " What is the river doing ?" — then does 
he begin to comprehend the greatness of the Mississippi. 

And here I saw a strange sight, one that I never saw 
before. It was a negro on horseback. And — what was 
stranger still — the dogs that followed him were not the 
wretched curs negroes keep, but blooded hounds. His 
horse was sleek, and himself of a noble physical stature, 
portly and majestic as any cotton-lord. He owned a broad 
plantation, and spoke with that gravity whicji is given to 
the possessors of the soil. Mark what he said: — 

" Perhaps one half of my race have the will to make 
an honest living. But not one third of them have judg- 
ment enough to keep land, if they had any. It would 
speedily pass out of their hands. But the white man is 
as much to blame as the negro for his laziness. I work 
with my men in the field, and they do me twice the labor 
they do for a white overseer." 

I journeyed several days with an old negro, named Too- 
key Smoot, who was going to Texas. He had a sad and 
melancholy history. He and his wife and a little daughter 



A STORY OF TIIE SIEGE OF VICKSBURG. 97 

were slaves in Yicksburg when the war broke out, but he 
contrived to escape, and enlisted in a colored regiment. 
He was present at the siege of Yicksburg, and with his 
captain's glass, toward the last of the siege, he could see 
his own little cabin, with the morning-glory trailing over 
the back-window, just as it did when he left it two years 
before. But his wife and daughter were hidden in the 
caves with their owners, and, as he looked day after day 
and saw the cabin always deserted, he thought they were 
dead. 

They had almost perished from famine in those dreadful 
months, and when one day the thunder of the cannonade 
stopped, and there were whispered rumors of a surrender, 
and his wife and daughter crawled out into the sunlight 
once more, they were dazed and blinded. They sat on 
the top of a hill, and eagerly watched and waited. Too- 
key' s wife was determined, if the cannonade commenced 
again, she would sit there and await the coming of a 
friendly cannon-ball. At last "little Jinny" his daugh- 
ter, spied the flags of truce, and cried out : — 

" O, mammy ! They're shakin' out their table-cloth, aint 
they ? It's been such a long time since we shook out our 
table-cloth, aint it, mammy ? Papy will come now, and 
bring us a piece of bread?" 

Then at last Tookey marched in with the troops, past 
his old cabin, where his wife was waiting for him. She 
knew him a long way off, and tried to run and meet him, 
but fell to the ground. He lifted her tenderly in his arms, 
while " little Jinny " clung around him ; but at that last 
moment of supreme happiness some fatal bullet pierced 
her heart as she hung swooning in his arms. And, to fill 
his cup of sorrow, "little Jinny" died in the freedmen's 
hospital. 

Poor Tookey was utterly broken-hearted, and wept like 



08 THE BAYOU REGION— CROSSING A BAYOU. 

a child while he told me this sad story. Yet, with the 
buoyancy of his race, he would be passing merry at times. 

Nothing could be more ugly, more dismal, than this 
bayou region. Long naked grapevines swing down from 
the vast cypresses, through which the wind swoops with 
an inexpressibly ghostly hollow moan. Either there are 
no birds, or they partake the sullen spirit of the woods. 
There is one poor little songster, known only to Audubon, 
which seems to be acting as a land-agent, and constantly 
chirrups, in a most doleful strain, " Soil, soil, muck, trees, 
trees 1" There are not even the windrows of leaves, brown 
and russet, raked by prankish winds, but all the ground is 
strewed with the wrecks and rubble of the freshets. And 
then these snaky bayous, wriggling in the yellow muck, 
arched over with gloomy gray cypresses and funereal 
moss ! 

One day, late in the afternoon, we came to the worst 
bayou of all, choked up with bridge-timbers and driftwood. 
The bridge was gone, and the raft was on the other side 
of the bayou. I shouted to a negro who was far away on 
the other side, then Tookey took up the refrain, then I 
yelled again, until I was " out of all whooping." 

It was rapidly growing dark ; the long moss overhead 
began to sway with a mysterious and ghostly motion, pre- 
saging a storm ; and the hoarse and eldritch screams of 
the owls were echoing with a most dismal reverberation 
among the cypresses. Poor Tookey was so frightened 
that his teeth actually chattered. 

A piece of timber floated idly in the edge of the bayou. 
By much persuasion I induced Tookey to get on it, and 
attempt to cross over after the raft. He crawled carefully 
on it and then slowly raised himself up into a semi-circle, 
looking like a circus monkey, and was about to poke the 
water with his pole, when pop ! the treacherous log bob- 



DESERTED VILLAGES. 99 

bed over, and with a shuddering " O, Lawd a massy !" 
poor Tookey soused in head foremost like a bullfrog. He 
grabbed his hands full of muck, and just as his woolly 
head emerged, I heard an owl laugh like a fiend. 

Tookey scrambled out, and laughed. " Well," said he, 
as he held his head over and thumped on the other side, 
to knock the water out of his ear, " de moral tale dat I 
induces from dis fact ob de succumstance is dis : — When 
you can't git along in dis world a standin', you must git 
along a settin'." 

With that he leaped courageously astride the log, pad- 
dled it across, and brought the raft. When we finally got 
across the bayou it was pitch dark, and I could neither 
keep the path nor find any house. After much forlorn 
groping, I crept into a gin, and upon a downy heap of cot- 
ton slept snugly. 

Though it was the third year after the war, no healing 
hand of reconstruction had touched this dismal region. 
Sometimes I would see a few fowls or domestic animals 
wandering vacantly about the cabin, with a strange shy- 
ness in their actions, as if they felt the house was haunted ; 
and when I knocked, there would be no response. 

No words can describe the sense of loneliness I felt when 
wandering among these deserted hovels, where the fowls 
had been left without a master. The poor creatures seem- 
ed frightened by the long silence ; and they would run 
away in mute terror, or stand at a distance, watching, 
without uttering a single sound, as if under the spell of 
some ghastly spectacle of death or murder. I have been 
moved almost to tears by the mournful pleading gaze 
which the old house-dog, left all alone, turned upon me as 
he ran away a little, and then stopped to look back. 

Again, I approach a squalid hovel, where two or three 
children are playing in an unnatural silence before the 



100 SAD PICTURES. 

door, A faint voice invites me to enter. The floor of the 
only room is trodden with mire, and all the household 
utensils are strewn about. Both father and mother lie on 
wretched pallets, the fever-flame slowly wasting in the 
socket ; or, perhaps one lies already sinless and pallid with 
the " white radiance of eternity." The dim glazing eyes 
of the living are turned upon me, and I faintly hear : — 
<: ¥e wanted to earn our bread, but there was none to 
hire us." 

God, pity the white poor man in a land where labor is 
black, and the black man in a land where weakness is a 
crime ! 

And the houses of the strong — where were they % And 
the strong themselves ? " O Rome !" cried Lucan, as he 
wandered through the ruins of the civil war, " O Home ! 
destroyed by Roman valor I" 

In South Carolina, even in those places which the flames 
of war wasted for forty months, there were never lacking 
witnesses, living witnesses, of their times. There were 
always blacks in the little colonies of cabins who knew 
the history of '* Ole Marse," and could relate the tradi- 
tions of the two spectral chimneys that stood among them. 
But here I wandered through street after street of these 
humble villages, which once were musical with the cackling 
of little pickaninnies, and the weird mournful voice of sing- 
ing women ; but they were now silent as the grave. 
Sometimes a negro child crept stealthily among the wrecks 
of the cabins, with a crouching tread, so unusual for a 
black in daylight, as if afraid of hearing its own footfall, 
and shivering in the dank blasts of winter. " Poor Tom's 
a-cold." 

But where were the others ? Ah ! when the Mississippi 
shall give up its teeming dead ; and when the forgotten 
multitudes who sleep in unknown trenches shall come up 



VISIT TO A VOODOO PRIESTESS. 101 

through the yielding sod ; then shall they appear ! No 
loyal household in the North was disturbed in its warm 
woolens when each swarthy corpse went down at mid- 
night, with a cold gurgle, into the Mississippi ; or was car- 
ried out from the putrid camp to be flung like offal to a 
common infamy. No Dix or Nightingale was there in 
those pest-camps, to speak some sweet and soothing word 
to each troubled soul before it went out on its dark flight ; 
or to drop a pitying tear for the unspeakable sorrow of 
the freedman, who, like poor Tookey, in the very moment 
of reunion and of his great joy, had seen the long-lost one 
stricken before his eyes, and sat now at her grave, 

" At those willing feet, that never 
More would lightly run to meet him, 
Never more would lightly follow." 

When I was in Yicksburg, I visited one of the freed- 
men's graveyards, to which those two memorable winters 
of 1863 and 1864 contributed their holocausts. In the 
great multitude of unmarked graves, here and there was 
one which bore some trifling shrubs of affection. On one 
of them — touching emblem ! — were some withered cotton- 
stalks. Thus Sappho relates that Themiscus laid his oar 
and net on the grave of his son, who was a fisherman. 

One day I went with Tookey to visit an old crone who 
was reputed to be a Yoodoo priestess. She was a with- 
ered old hag, whose occupation seemed to be gone since 
the negroes were emancipated, and so, with many pious 
prayers and ejaculations upon our heads, she asked us for 
alms, "jest a quarter, massa, fur a mighty little '11 do me, 
'cause I'se gwine to die right soon." Tookey had nothing 
to give, and, from the appearance of her cabin, I was not 
inclined to consider it a case of special hardship ; so we 
moved along. Then she began to heap upon us terrible 
imprecations. 



102 NEGRO SUPERSTITION. 

Tookey was frightened beyond measure, for his super- 
stition was involved, and he begged me to give her some- 
thing, for he said the curse of this old woman would bring 
upon us the direst vengeance of heaven. To pacify him, 
we went back, and I gave her a small piece of the current 
paper of the Republic. This appeased her wrath, and 
Tookey evidently felt much relieved in his mind. I start- 
ed on again, but he still lingered, half-fascinated, half-ter- 
rified, like a charmed bird, as if fearful he should leave 
her with some evil spell on his soul. They talked ear- 
nestly and mysteriously together many minutes, and when 
he rejoined me, he said she had offered to sell him a ticket 
to heaven for ten dollars. He regretted exceedingly that 
he had not that amount of money. 

As nearly as I could penetrate Tookey' s mind, his belief 
in regard to this old hag was, that she was an agent of the 
devil, or at least empowered to inflict upon men the direst 
torments of hell ; and yet could insure his entrance into 
heaven ! 

Yet, away from these miserable superstitions, Tookey 
was a sensible negro. One day we stopped at a plantation, 
where the simple fellows, gathering about, and finding I 
was from Yicksburg and a " Yankee," wanted a speech. 
I commissioned Tookey to speak in my behalf. Mounting 
a barrel, he launched forth : — 

" I tell you, you tinks you is free, but you an't, say 
what you is a mind to. You is slaves ob laziness, slaves 
ob pride, slaves ob ig'nance, slaves ob — ob bavin' no mon- 
ey. Git you some chickens in de coop, a sow an' pigs in 
de pen, git yer wives some clean caliker, some book-larnin' 
in you' heads, an' some money in you' buckskins, — ef you 
got any — den you is 

At this point of his oration the barrel head collapsed, 
and he dropped down on an old goose sitting at the hot- 



TOOKEY AND THE GOOSE. 103 



torn. He pitched forward with the barrel around him, 
and the goose seized his wool, and commenced hammering 
him with her wings, to the infinite amusement of his 
audience. At last he got up, beat off the goose, scratched 
his wool, and let off his pet phrase : — 

" De moral tale dat I induces from dis fact ob de suc- 
cumstance is dis : — Slavery was jest like dat 'ar goose ; 
when freedom come, we jest dropped plumb down to the 
ground, and ole marse, 'stead of dividin' up de land an, 
helpin' us, jest jumped onto us, like dat 'ar goose," shaking 
his fist at it — " dog-on yer picter, you old lightnin' sep- 
ulchre dat lays rotten eggs !" 

The planters of the Mississippi valley proper are some- 
thing more reserved and frigid than those of the sunny 
" homes of Alabama." One of their number explained to 
me that it was a relic of the flat-boat era. Flat-boatrnen 
coasting along, or walking home from New Orleans 4 far 
from home and its enforced morals, sometimes shamefully 
forgot the proprieties of life, and abused the confidence of 
planters and their wives. 

Yet, for all this, I know not where in all the Union we 
may better seek for one bearing — 

" The grand old name of gentleman." 

You shall see him in the public bar-room of Monroe. 
He comes in his broad-brimmed hat, and his honest Ken- 
tucky jeans, and his " cotton-bale solidity of suavity." 
The habit of authority sits lightly upon him. The soul 
of serenity is in him. The election of the people is more 
unerring than the investiture of courts. The " Count " 
or the " Duke " may be a born churl, but your " Judge " 
or your "Colonel" seldom. 

From the Washita to Red River it is much like Geor- 
gia — red-clay hills and piney-woods, inhabited by a hearty 
and manly race of planters. 



101 SHREVEPORT— VISIT TO AX EDITOR. 

Shreveport lias a most admirable location — a natural 
bench of bank for its wharf, and one a little higher up, 
safe above high-water, for its business. Most of its stores 
are little, raw-looking, one-story brick houses, with contin- 
uous awnings, in the Southern fashion. The streets are 
laid with boards, and are full of red dust, dogs, and im- 
mense teams of huge-horned, Texan oxen, hitched to cot- 
ton-wains and lying down along the middle of the streets ; 
while the pavements are thronged with big-bearded, sal- 
low, gray-coated Texans. 

I went up to an editor s sanctum to get some exchanges ; 
but there were only three, and they were under the edi- 
tor, who was asleep on his back on top of the table. I 
went out and staid an hour, " assisted*' at two dog-fights, 
one cock-fight, and a negro revival meeting ; then returned, 
and found the editor picking his teeth with a bowie-knife. 
He gave me all the old papers he had, and invited me to 
take supper with him. 

Did Grant and Lee terminate the "irrepressible conflict" 
at Appomattox ? the thoughtful patriot, who travels in the 
South, will often ask himself. Doubtless there will never 
be another general appeal to arms ; but can we hope that 
the ground-swell of bitter rancors, following the mighty 
storm, will subside as soon as it did in England, as soon 
even as in Rome { 

Can there ever be fraternal concord and ardent devotion 
to a common government in a country, of which one half 
is democratic and the other radically aristocratic i 

But is the South necessarily and permanently aristocratic? 
Lacedaemonia, though only one hundred and fifty miles 
south of the " fierce democracy n of Athens, was built 
into a grim and rigorous aristocracy by the presence of 
the Helot slaves. The great hacendados of Mexico, too, 



THE WAR OF RACES. 105 

form an aristocracy which stood on the necks of Indian 
peons. But there is Italy, where no slavery exists, and 
where there is no inferior race, which is greatly more dem- 
ocratic than Prussia. The Italian nobility is more liberal 
than the German. Indeed, in the political sphere, the 
German is the most absurd man on earth. Above all 
other men, he should pray most earnestly with the prayer 
of Agur ; for when his stomach is full, he is a courtier ; 
and when it is empty, he is a demagogue. 

But I hear the Northern objector say, now that the 
negroes are free, the South will gradually become demo- 
cratic. Let us seek a comparison again. There is Bohe- 
mia, populated by the two races, Tzechs and Germans. 
There is not such a vast gulf between these two as between 
the Southern whites and negroes ; yet the Germans are 
thrust down to a position of the utmost poverty, and are 
very rarely landholders. There is Hungary, peopled 
nearly equally by Magyars and Slovacks. The Slovacks 
belong to the great and powerful Slavanic race, but, be- 
ing thrown among the superior Magyars, they are trod- 
den down infinitely below them, into a squalor and deg- 
radation worse than the negroes ever were in as slaves. 

Just so long as there are negroes numerous in the South, 
with their admitted and incurable inferiority, whether 
bond or free, just so long will the few put their hands on 
their shoulders, and lift themselves up, and tread down the 
many. Just so long as there are negroes in the South, 
whether bond or free, just so long will there be a " poor 
white trash." 

Then consider the effect on the negroes themselves of 
this most unhappy mingling of races. Everybody who 
has been much in the South has doubtless often heard one 
call another "you nigger," or "you black nigger." "Would 
they do this in Africa ? Why not ? Because there are no 



106 THE POOR WHITES. 

white men there. They would not do it here, if it did 
not sting. How can a negro reach the highest things 
which are possible to him, when both white and black are 
ever ready with this brand to scorch the wings of his 
ambition % 

I think I can claim, without egotism, that I sought out 
the poor whites in their homes more faithfully than most 
travelers in the South have done. I have seen and felt as 
few have cared to, the saddening ignorance and apathy of 
that class, and the unspeakable mischiefs and miseries that 
grow up from the juxtaposition of the races. 

And yet there is a remnant of good blood in these men, 
good lighting blood. It was these same stolidly apathetic 
and ignorant men who fought the battles of the rebellion. 
And who of us can forget the keen and bitter anguish 
with which we beheld that despised rabble break our noble 
legions in the day of battle, when the miserable bungling 
on the Potomac turned their magnificent valor into shame. 

It was some small consolation, and yet a most sadden- 
ing reflection, that these were Americans all, and not for- 
eigners. As I have wandered at midnight over the bloody 
and shot-torn sward about Atlanta, where thirteen times 
beneath a summer's sun these intrepid fellows, though 
guiltless of the wicked rebellion, had charged the very 
intrenchments of Death, and where the placid moon and 
the stars looked down upon the pale cold faces of the fallen 
— brother slain by brother — I have cried, " Ah ! my be- 
loved country, how many bloody tears hast thou poured 
for that primal sin of bringing to thy shores a race of 
bondmen 1" 

Then came the surrender, and these haggard and wasted 
regiments, after serving all too well their wicked deceivers, 
crept back to an estate which was worse than death. 

Some of them had had their eyes partly disenchanted. 



AFTER THE WAR. 



107 



They had sometimes seen the sword brandished over them 
with the old insolence of the cotton-lord ; they had seen it 
swim in its airy circles with the trained flourish of the 
lash. They saw dimly the source of their calamities, and 
when disbanded, many of them wreaked blindly on lord 
and freedman, the guilty agent and the innocent cause, 
their indiscriminating vengeance. 

But the saddest thing of all that sad war was its termi- 
nation. The conqueror went back to an anvil or a loom 
on which lay only the softened malediction of the Al- 
mighty ; but the conquered returned to a plough on which 
the negro had riveted the degradation of the curse of Ca- 
naan. The one returned to ovations, to pensions, to a 
happy home; the other, to humiliation, to unspeakable 
poverty and despair. It is a cruel and heartless falsehood 
to say that the degradation of the Southern poor is of their 
own making. As well accuse the poor of England of 
being oppressed by their own volition, or a starving man 
of dying wilfully. For my part, I have more tears for 
these unhappy people than plaudits for the triumph of any 
man who finds it in his heart to make this accusation. It 
were easier to break through the columns of Sherman 
than through the black and Canaanitish curse which rests 
upon the poor in the South. 





CHAPTER Yin. 
IN THE LAND OF OXEN. 

r NE day, early in March, I stopped at a house for 
a drink of water. The woman went to one end 
of the piazza, and brought an ox-horn full of 
water from Louisiana, which I, standing in the other 
end, drank in Texas. 

A rise in the price had set the great staple to running, 
and all day long the road resounded with the heavy sluck 
— sluck — sluck of the ponderous wheels — the big exultant 
laugh of King Cotton, coming to " his own again." It is 
a picturesque spectacle of Texas, these great cotton-wains. 
Six or eight oxen, which have smelt no hay all winter, 
stagger wearily along, sometimes leaning together by mu- 
tual consent to keep from falling. The scraggy black- 
jacks by the roadside, hideous though they are, are in 
alliance with the birds, and take copious toll from the rag- 
ged ends of the bales. High atop is perched the negro 
Jehu, in his " shadowed livery," with his enormously 
long whip, which, in the intervals of the hymns, he twirls 
and cracks like a pistol. 

" O, I'se a marchin' down — you Darby ! what a' doin' 
thar ? I'll bust yer head if you don't come up thar — O, I'se 
a marchin' down to de New Jerusalem — blast yer picter, 
Darby ! — to de New Jerusalem — you Brandy ! I'll be 



COTTON-WAINS AND THEIR DRIVERS. 109 

double diddly dog-on my skin, ef ever I see sech an ox. 
Whoa come ! — de New Jerusalem, my happy, happy 
home ; O, de New Jerusalem — well, de Lor' bless me, ef 
dat 'ar steer aint fell down dead !" 

"When belated at night, I would run a continuous gaunt- 
let of their camp-fires, spangling the edges of the woods, 
and throwing a yellow glare around the circle of shaggy 
heads. As soon as the oxen are halted anywhere, like vet- 
eran volunteers, they drop at once, to the order, "In place, 
rest," given by themselves. All along the main roads 
great horned skulls stare mournfully out from little heaps 
of bones — the remnants of some poor old Darby. 

You, Mr. Ox-driver, with your Baptist and Methodist, 
and Rock and Brandy, why don't you throw that sapling 
from the road, instead of driving over it fifty times a 
month, with a great pounding jounce ? You are the laziest 
man I ever saw. | 

The Texans have the repute of being the laziest people 
in the United States, and so they are, with the exception 
of the freedmen. One day I took the trouble to count 
the teamsters riding and walking ; Of the twenty-three 
white teamsters whom I passed, all but eight were walk- 
ing ; but, of the seventeen negroes, all but two were riding 
on the cotton. There is ethnology for you, demonstrated 
on the ends of the fingers. 

With the cotton from the Red River and Sabine counties 
come also the cattle from the great Trinity prairies. Fine 
bony steers they are, a little raw-made, perhaps, and tall, 
and walking as only Texas cattle can, faster than horses. 
When they come to a river, all the boys, and negroes, and 
dogs of the village collect, and huddle them about the 
scow, and then commences the thumping, the thwacking, 
the whooping, the prodding, and the shoving. Some are 
thrust into the boat, which moves away ; others follow it 



110 " THE TRIBES OF JOSHUA." 

till they get water in their ears, when they come back, 
shaking their heads in disgust, and are crowded in again 
by the vast mass surging upon them. Those in the boat 
look back and low in much distress ; and then at last they 
all tumble in together, snorting and sighing in the cold 
water, and swim across, or foolishly in circles till many 
drown. 

The Texans display a startling originality of imagina- 
tion, as shown in their nomenclatures. They live, like the 
old Hungarian King, altogether super grammaticam. 
Witness these names in geography : — Lick Skillet, Buck 
Snort, Nip and Tuck, Jimtown, Bake Pocket, Hog Eye, 
Fair Play, Seven League, Steal Easy, Possum Trot, Flat 
Heel, Frog Level, Short Pone, Gourd Keck, Shake Eag, 
Poverty Slant, Black Ankle. 

The cant term for a Texan is " Chub." I know no ex- 
planation of this, unless it be found in the size of the 
Eastern Texans. It is related of the Fifteenth Texas In- 
fantry, for instance, that no member of it weighed less 
than one hundred and eighty pounds, while a large num- 
ber made the scale-beam kick at two hundred. 

" Josh " is the cant designation for a citizen of Arkan- 
sas. According to the Texans, it originated in a jocular 
attempt to compare Arkansas, Texas, and part of Louisi- 
ana to the two tribes and a half who had their possessions 
beyond the Jordan, but went over with Joshua to assist 
their brethren. Just before the battle of Murfreesboro, 
the Tennesseeans, seeing a regiment from Arkansas ap- 
proaching, cried out, a little confused in their Biblical 
recollections, "Thar come the tribes of Joshua!" 

The fierce military spirit of the South, especially of 
Texas, is shown in the unutterable scorn and contempt 
they heaped upon the shirks. In Texas they called them, 
with an allusion to their auto Idlum rhodomontade as to 



PORTRAIT OF A TEXAX. Ill 

what we could do, and with a side-play on the -word women 
(in the South often pronounced weemen) — "we-men." 
With a reference to their brag that "one Southron could 
whip ten Yankees," they called them by a term used in 
billiards, " Ten-strikers." A man can utter no stronger 
approval of another's opinion than by saying " you're 
mighty confederate." 

In the town of Henderson I made the temporary ac- 
quaintance of a young man so characteristically Texan 
that I give his portrait. He was slender and rather "dish- 
faced," as they say in Texas, with long, sandy hair, and a 
feeble goatee, both of which he soaped down straight and 
stiff. He was a dead shot with a revolver at fifty paces ; 
had a convivial reputation ; was said to cleave to his friends • 
and looked daggers at intellectual people. 

At the tender age of twenty-one he had had over a hun- 
dred personal fights ; shot to death three men, and wound- 
ed eight more; was then under five bail-bonds in one 
county, and two in another ; had gone through the entire 
war ; married ; buried an infant daughter ; and separated 
from his wife, who was then in school. Yet he was a man 
of good understanding, and was fond of Byron. So 
strangely is talent sometimes wedded to ferocity and indo- 
lence in this strange, fierce State. 

How long, how long must I struggle to get out of these 
mourning and complaining pines ? Where is the fabulous 
fertility of the South ; All these thousand miles have I 
walked in these dreary pines, the sign and substance of 
poverty, save now and then, when I crossed some river 
valley, whose fatness was stolen bodily from the Great 
West. 

These heavens of Texas in March are the most leaden I 
ever walked beneath. One wanders for miles along a 
sandy road, among the leafless, stnnted post-oaks and the 



112 A TEXAS NOKTHER. 

blackjacks, which are scraggy enough to scratch out the 
eyes of the very wind. The sand is full of iron tilings, 
like a rubble of chopped nails ; and wherever there is clay, 
it is of a purplish-chocolate color ; and frequently you can 
brush away the iridescence mantling on a spring, and 
drink chalybeate or sulphur waters, thick enough to be 
healthy. Now and then there is a cleared space, faintly 
tinged with bleached crab-grass ; and some hungry cows 
roam about, and lap their long rasping tongues around the 
maize-stalks, with a noise that sends a cold shudder down 
one's backbone. 

But not while I live shall I forget that first norther I 
ever experienced. 

One day the atmosphere became almost as sultry as in 
July, and the next day it became oppressively warm, 
though the sun was shorn of half his brilliance, and shone 
with a strange and portentous gloom. Not a breath of air 
was abroad in all the woods. About the middle of the 
afternoon, the sun was totally obscured, though there 
were no clouds ; and the gloom, and the stillness became 
deathlike. 

Presently I see on the northern horizon a narrow rim 
of cloud, perfectly straight on its edge, and stretching far 
across the heaven. It surges upward with appalling black- 
ness and swiftness, but never ruffles that even margin. 
The forest grows dark. The cattle hasten into the ravines 
and stand with their heads averted from its coming. Still 
that dread and sultry silence. Still there is not the slight- 
est whisper in the leaves. At last they quiver a little, fit- 
fully, and then are still again. Now I hear a faint dis- 
tant sighing, and the blast comes on with a stately tread, 
and the sighing deepens rapidly into a hoarse and hollow 
moan, which has in it more of a ghostly and chilling ter- 
ror than any other sound in nature. It rushes on, not in 



A TEXAN IX LOVE. 113 

fitful gusts, but with the solid and majestic tread of an 
army, and strengthens itself mightily in its outrageous 
fierceness. Every particle of warmth is chased away by 
bitter cold ; all the earth is darkened ; the woods howl 
and roar together ; 

" While trees, dim-seen, in frenzied numbers, tear 
The lingering remnants of their yellow hair." 

This fearful blast lasted all that night and the next day 
in an unbroken hurricane, which seemed as if it would 
blow the very moon out of the concave. Ice was formed 
in vessels six inches thick. 

After this experience I understood why all trees in 
Texas grow so short and stout ; and why the people are so 
extremely sensitive to changes of weather, and so irritable 
in their tempers. 

From Henderson I went over to Tyler, and then wan- 
dered widely around, wherever I heard it was, in quest of 
a certain emigrant company about to start for California. 
But I could never find it. 

Waiting for a creek to fall, I staid several days with a 
strapping big Texan, of twenty years, and two hundred 
pounds avoirdupois, but with no beard, who was greatly in 
love, not with any damsel in particular, as I found out, but 
with the sex in general. His wide mouth was always ajar, 
and his vast loamy countenance always radiant with a 
smile, like sunshine on the side of a barn. He would cut 
brushwood in the field an hour or two, then come and sit 
by me, where I was writing. After twisting about in his 
chair a while, with the elephantine grin on his face, he 
would say : — 

" Well, it kinder seems like 'twas every feller's duty to 
get mahried." 

" Yes, I think every man in the South should marry, 
now since the war has destroyed so many." 



Hi THE LAST COTTON-FIELD. 

Then I would become intent on my writing, and lie 
would go and bring a bucket of water for his sister. Then 
he would return, and sit there, and lean on his elbows far 
over toward me, and grin. 

"If a feller could only git 'round the gals. They're so 
all-fired cute and sassy like, you can't tech 'em." 

" You don't get on well with them then ?" 

" 'Pears like the gals are kinder skeery of me. The 
other fellers, 'pears like they liked 'em well enough ; but 
when I go to devilin' 'em, or ticklin' 'em in the ribs, they 
flops about so I can't git nigh 'em agin," 

From Tyler I went back to Marshall, passing the famous 
stockade near the former town, wherein so many Union 
prisoners died. The cemetery is just across the road, on 
a gentle sandy slope ; and though it was more than three 
years after the burials, it emitted a dreadful odor. The 
whole vicinity seemed accursed of the Almighty. The 
widow who owned the land of which it was a part was 
obliged to sell it for a mere song, and remove her family. 
The bravest man in Tyler dreaded to pass it after night- 
fall, and many persons would make a wide circuit. There 
were horrible stories of ghosts that had been seen, and of 
spectral horsemen. It is in the midst of a thickly settled 
region, yet the nearest occupied house on the road was 
three miles away. 

From Marshall I turned west a second time, crossed the 
Sabine the third time, and bore away straight to the west 
for "Waxahatchie. Out of the pines at last forever, for 
which I was thankful ; over the mighty ridges of sand ; 
then came the last cotton-field. 

Rapidly the hills melt away toward the prairies, and the 
great post-oaks squat low, and bow their heads toward the 
east, for they have fought their hard way up through many 
a century of wind and rain. Now there comes up far 



IIAIL TO THE PRAIRIES! 115 

through the woods the drowsy tinkle of a cow-bell, or the 
lordly bellow of the bull, where, potent among herds in 
the unyoked glory of his neck, he writes his savage laws 
upon the ground. Now there skims before me a sylvan, 
airy herd of deer, the Graces of the woods. They pause 
a little way off to look at me, with their curious innocent 
stare, and holding their heads and tails straight up in 
dainty scorn. Now they are off again, and those pretty 
cotton-tails teeter away like the wind, so light, so long, so 
leisurely are their limber leaps. 

Then came the prairie, the great green floor of the 
world ; and after famishing for months on the poor tallow 
candles of the piney-woods, how my eyes gloated on this 
regal plenty of sunshine. Ah ! this, this is breath. 

The first man I met on the prairie wore a yellow beard, 
and a face that was a good wind-splitter, and rode a — nim- 
ium ne crede calori — "claybank" horse. The animal 
was as gaunt as a Canada pad that has been about a month 
in the Horse Latitudes, and so sway-backed that the 
rider's feet almost dragged on the prairie. Nevertheless, 
it held up its head like-a banner, and so high that a line 
drawn from the top of it, across the rider's head, would 
have touched the top of its little stump of a tail, which 
stuck up like an ear of maize. 

" Stranger," said he, reining up and taking a portent- 
ous chew of tobacco, " p'raps you mout 'a seen a red mul- 
ley cow somewhar, with a cross and a underbit in the right, 
and a marked cross and a swallow-fork in the left." 

" I don't remember any such animal ." 

" Well, did you see a brown-and-white pied ox, with a 
overslope and a slit in the right ; or a black-and-white- 
paint boss ; or a gray mare, a little flea-bitten, with a blazed 
face, and a docked tail ?" 

I was obliged to say I had not, and he rode away. 



116 NORWEGIAN VILLAGE— TRINITY FOREST. 

In the Norwegian village of Prairieville I saw a singu- 
lar illustration of the truth that Northern peoples are gov- 
erned more by reason and less by passion than Southern 
peoples. They were hoeing with negroes in the field, and 
even — horrible to relate ! — sat side by side with them at 
table. Negroes who have lived a while with the Norwe- 
gians get such lofty notions that the Americans refuse to 
employ them. Now Germans, at least Bavarians, frighten 
their children by saying Mohr to them ; and the Germans 
of Western Texas treat them very much in the Ameri- 
can manner. 

As you approach the Trinity, being somewhat above it, 
you can trace it and all its branches, like a vast tree flung 
down, by the gray threads of forest which wander far 
through the green prairie. But the valley — O moon, and 
ye stars, look ye on earth upon its fellow ? In all that jet- 
black mile there was not a bush nor a leaf; nothing but a 
colonnade of black-washed trees. As ^Eschylus fancifully 
says the ^Egean blossomed with the broken spars and 
corpses of the shipwreck, so did this whole mile vegetate 
with skids and pieces of corduroy. 

But the Trinity forest is sadly memorable in Texan an- 
nals as the refuge of fleeing Unionists. Here the bear 
was often startled in his dreary lair by strange bed-fellows ; 
and his savage dreams were scared by the bloodier doings 
of man, by the appalling yell, the clutching, the groan, the 
gurgle, that echoed here in those evil and memorable 
years of the rebellion. 

It was not far from here, in Yan Zandt county I think, 
that they showed me a place where forty Unionists were 
hanged on the trees in one day, all within sight of each 
other. 

From the Trinity to Waxahatchie, all one long sunny 
day, the dim-seen trail cleaved before me, like the flight 



TRINITY RIVER— WAXAHATCHIE. H7 

of an arrow, the burned prairie from the unburned. On 
the burned side it was all spring now with tender grass, 
speckled over with the nibbling myriads ; but on the un- 
burned side still lay the tawny, shaggy winter, nickering 
with a vivid heat. 

All that long day there was not a sound abroad on the 
great prairie, save the booming of the prairie-cock. This 
conceited fowl ruffles his pretty yellow-speckled neck, 
stretches it out close along the ground, hoists his ridicu- 
lously little fan, which, seen from the side, sticks up like a 
railroad spike, and utters his love-lorn jeremiad. It is 
louder and more mournful than the cooing of the tame 
pigeon, and has a regular rising and falling accent. 

In Waxahatchie I waited many weeks for the departure 
of the train. 

Although the Trinity lies twenty miles within the prai- 
rie, on its bank you cross a thin stratum of red clay ; 
whence it may be taken as the line between the red-clay 
or cotton belt, and the limestone prairie or wheat belt. 
Among the wooded hills of this red-clay belt you find lit- 
tle of the Texas of tradition, the Texas of Rangers and 
Mustangs, the land which has spilled so much blood for 
the gusto picaresco literature of the million. Just as in 
Georgia, they never dig a cellar, never teach their chil- 
dren to shut the door, build the chimney outside, add a 
breezy " piazza " to a cabin, however small it may be, 
generally omit the partitive some, seldom use the article 
an, and say " tole," " I reckon," " holp," etc. 

" Who drives fat oxen should himself be fat." The 
Texans drive anything but fat oxen, and those who live on 
the prairies are anything but fat ; but the foresters are by 
no means small, though not quite so gigantic in stature 
as the men of Arkansas. They have a singular bluish- 
sallow complexion, like a man half frozen. 



118 TEXAN RAXGERS AXD OX-DRIVERS. 

We are accustomed to think of the Texan less as the 
ox-driver than as the ranger, the fierce, the wily, the wild, 
mounted on a fleet mustang. But ox-driving Eastern 
Texas furnished to the Confederacy several infantry regi- 
ments who were worth more than all the mustang cavalry 
together. In the flight of Bragg from Kentucky a brigade 
of four Texas regiments left behind only about a score of 
its soldiers ; while a regiment from Arkansas, whose gaunt 
but bony sons are considered the most robust men of the 
South, left half its members by the roadside. Walker's 
famous division once marched thirty miles a day for five 
consecutive days, and left only six behind, and by this and 
other feats earned from the Union troops the compliment- 
ary equi vogue of " Greyhounds." 

Where did they acquire these extraordinary powers of 
endurance, if not in their manifold journeyings beside 
their oxen ? On the other hand, perhaps the slow motions 
of their oxen have had a hand in making them the laziest 
of all Americans. 

Texas, like Italy, is a land of oxen and cows, but the 
Texan cannot say, with Italian Cory don, " Lac mihi non 
cestate novum, nonfrigore defitP A Texan once told me 
that his ideal of earthly happiness was to plough corn and 
drink buttermilk; but they have less of this supreme nour- 
ishment of genius than any other Southern State. A 
man with one cow drinks some milk, he with a hundred 
drinks none. 

Despite the mercurial temperament of individuals, Tex- 
as is the most bovine of all civilized communities. Far 
out around the threshing-floor of Time these " ox-born 
souls " creep their round beneath the yoke of the Union, 
treading out the slow wheat of civilization, and eating un- 
muzzled, the chaff of many ordinances. " So many laws 
argues so many sins." 



A PERPETUAL ENIGMA. 



119 



The people of Texas, like its weather, are a perpetual 
enigma, a tissue of contradictions. They have the most 
ponderous and complicated machinery for law-making of 
all our States, and they break more laws than any other. 

In the war, Texas was the most backward of all the 
Southern States, but when the others laid down their arms, 
then the Texans wanted to fight. 

I once knew a man who rode all night in a dreadful 
tempest of wind, and rain, and lightening, swimming over 
raging creeks at the imminent peril of his life, merely to 
" stand by a friend in a fight ;" yet he did not scruple to 
defraud a white man of his six months' wages. The Tex- 
ans do everything for honor, but nothing for justice. 

Even in their code of morals they contradict all the rest 
of mankind. That code consists of two sayings. The 
first is, " Revolvers make all men equal." The second is 
the famous utterance of Houston, " If a man can't curse 
his friends, whom can he curse I" 





CHAPTER H . 
OYER THE ROLLING PRAIRIES. 

ANY distinguished authors, from Alcibiades to 
Burns, have owned dogs, and thought it not be- 
neath them to teach them sound wisdom. En- 
couraged by their example, I have composed the following 
Catechism for Texan j?ups, which, in consideration of the 
many attachments they conceived for me, I humbly inscribe 
to Bouncer's eye-teeth. 

Q. Why are many dogs in Texas naked? 

A. Because they have the ague so often they shake off 
all their hair. 

Q. Why is the grass all worn off the roadside in 
Texas ? 

A. Because, like "His Highness' dog at Kew," no 
dog ever meets another without sitting down beside the 
road to talk. 

Q. Why does every high-toned dog, when he meets a 
neighbor, always wag his tail around in a circle? 

A. If he w r agged it straight backward and forward, 
the other might feel himself insulted, and a dreadful and 
bloody quarrel ensue. 

Q. Why does every high-toned dog, when he meets 
another, never hold his tail slanting? 

A. By holding it perpendicular, he plainly indicates 
that he considers himself the equal of any dog that 
breathes, and will not " take anything from any dog." 

Q. Where do all wicked dogs go, when they die? 



STARTING FOR CALIFORNIA. 121 

A. They stay in Texas. 

Q. Does a good dog ever die? 

A. He does not. The wind dries him up, and blows 
him into Mexico, where all good dogs go. 

Q. What auspicious event does every prudent dog 
await, before he sets out on a journey? 

A. He waits for the grass to grow. 

If a dog cannot set out before the grass grows, much 
less can oxen. But the grass did grow — an inch high, two 
inches, three, four — and the cattle on a million acres put 
on their shiuing vernal calico, and still some emigrant had 
a pipe to purchase. 

At last, in the first week of May, all were ready. 
" Starting for California." Ah ! how the heart of the im- 
aginative leaps at the mention of that magic name ! It was 
a great day for Waxakatchie, was that day. First came 
the white-covered wagons, then the wild rush and clatter 
along the hard, black streets of the village, for hours to- 
gether, of untamed cattle, and shouting galloping herds- 
men — sweeping away, like an avalanche, now a hitched 
horse, now a lumbering wagon with its oxen. The inhab- 
itants looked down from their windows till they were 
w r eary, went away, and came again to look ; and still that 
glistening river of horns surged on beneath them. The 
little village had seldom seen a mightier or an unrulier 
pageant. Beef, beef, beef everywhere, and only bacon for 
dinner. 

As one approaches the creeks which run through these 
prairies, one first sees far off the dark-green thread of 
trees rising in a slice, as through a slit in the pale-green 
sward. Just on the edge of these ravines crop out strata 
of limestone, the floor of the prairies, which old Ocean 
laid, and well laid, in those ancient times when Proteus 
led forth here his finny flocks to pastures of brine. 
6 



122 OUR OUTFIT. 

Here and there are curious level reaches of indented 
prairie, which the swinish imagination of the Texan, al- 
ways on the lookout for a chine of bacon, calls " hog-wal- 
low." Professor KiddePs theory, founded on the ancient 
Mexican tradition, that they were made by a terrible 
drought, is not satisfactory, for all the depressions are cir- 
cular. They may have been made by the tramping and 
wallowing of the buffalo, for each hole is about large 
enough for one of those huge annuals. 

At night the herds are impounded in some settler's pen, 
the tent is pitched beside a brook, under a spreading hack- 
berry, and our coffee-pot is set with its shining new cheeks 
to the fire. The happled oxen go waltzing off with infi- 
nitesimal steps, but the horses impatiently rear up and 
jump with the fore feet, then kick up and jump with the 
hind feet, as if they were trying a bear-dance or an equine 
minuet. 

The outfit of our mess was Spartan in its simplicity, 
and wisely so ; therefore we squatted on the grass around 
the biscuits and the rashers of "Old Ned." Strange men, 
just setting out on a long journey, notice each other sharp- 
ly. That tall young man uses his own jack-knife, carefully 
wipes it, and puts it into his pocket. He must be a Yankee. 
No, he was "born and raised in old Tennessee." 

This pale sickly man has a camp-knife, combining fork, 
spoon, etc. Surely he is a Yankee. No, an Alabamian. 
But then he never displays that camp-knife again, to be 
sure. It is like the boy's tin watch, whose hands always 
stay in the same place ; thereafter its blades and spoons are 
never opened. It is quite too handy. 

Seeing me rake together leaves on which to spread my 
blankets, one said : — 

" Well, you certainly are a Yankee. "When we were 
campaigning in Tennessee, we sometimes captured the 



BILL SNODGRASS. 123 

Yankee camps, and always found them so comfortable, with 
beds of leaves, or beds built up on crotches, whilst our 
boys slept plumb on the ground." 

Then we rolled ourselves in our blankets, and stretched 
our feet toward the fire, but the negro cook put his head 
close to the embers. We were lulled to sleep by the mu- 
sic of the bull-bat and the chuck- wills- widow, such as it 
was, the best they could furnish. 

Near Alvarado there are some prairies which it is not 
trite to liken to the waves of ocean. They are not like 
waves which roll over any earthly ocean ; but such as we 
may imagine surge against the ancient continents of Jupi- 
ter — a hundred feet in height, and at the base half a mile 
in width. Across these undulations the cattle were tramp- 
ing on, like myriads of speckled poppies, one herd some- 
times stretching out a mile from the road toward the right, 
another^ perhaps, as far to the left. It was an imposing 
panorama. Ah ! who would square the circle of this 
great, green world upon the noisome walls of a city ! 

The magnificent roll of the prairie is broken abruptly 
off against the woody run of the Cross Timbers ; but the 
prairie often asserts itself in the midst of the belt, now in 
a grassy patch flung down, and now in a sunny glade, 
where the eye sweeps through a long vista cleft in the for- 
est. Let the imagination go back with Agassiz, in his 
Icarian flights into the Past, and it beholds here an ocean 
of quiet waters, and this strip of woodland cleaving them 
through the midst, and covered perhaps with the progeni- 
tors of the oaks it bears to-day. 

But the ichthyosaurians have long since made room for 
Bill Snodgrass. His log-cabin stands inside of the rail- 
fence circle, and in the dreary yard there is not a bush, 
absolutely nothing else but the pyramidal ash-hopper stand- 
ing on its head. In the door sits his sallow wife, barefoot 



124 VALLEY OF THE BRAZOS. 

and with disheveled hair, her elbows on her knees, and 
her chin elevated across her hands ; while a group of wea- 
zle-faced children, and a monstrous brindled dog squat 
about. Bill lies on the bed, under a mountain of clothes ; 
and a neighbor sits smoking and feeling his pulse. 

" Chillin' it much now, Bill?" 

" You're mighty right — rattle of teeth — I — rattle, shiver 
— a-a-a — heavy rattle and shiver — I am — long rattle — I 
am, Bacon." 

In the field there is some pale phantom corn among 
the stumps, with childish generosity sharing the ground 
with the sumac. A horse is in there serenely eating it, 
and he runs frantically to see our horses. The Texan 
horses learn sociableness from their masters. While I was 
in Waxahatchie waiting, I rode several educated nags, and 
never one did I ride but would stop whenever it passed 
another horse or horseman. 

In the great valley of the Brazos, which seems to be 
merely a depressed prairie, it is so vast, occur the first of 
those wonderful pyramidal knolls of "Western Texas. 
Some are simply truncated pyramids, others are like great 
earth-forts, others terraced almost as regularly as the an- 
cient pyramid of Cholula. 

In half the villages of Texas one asks one's self, why 
was this village set precisely here, I wonder ? In "Western 
Texas I found out the secret of their genesis. 

Itomulus and Remus noted the flight of eagles for the 
site of the Eternal City, but the Texans watch the horses. 
In a place where they most do congregate, they make a 
" horse-rack." Around this they lay out a public square 
for a hitching-ground, and surround this with little grocer- 
ies, having square gables and awnings. The horse-racks 
presently become a city directory. "Where there is a 
hewn one with nice strong pegs there is a keen trader, 



VIEW NEAR THE PALOXY. 125 

who walks briskly behind his counter, and has good wares ; 
where one end is fallen down, there is a genuine Texan 
who will not walk the length of his counter to serve you ; 
where there is none at all, beware of him, his butter is 
rancid, and his thread is rotten. 

On rainy days these groceries are full of long-haired 
men with, suits of sheep's-gray, so cut from the web 
that the gray looks right across the seam to the brindle. 
They stalk up and down, to tinkle their great bell-spurs, 
and toss down their " spizerinctums " with lofty contempt, 
to see them stagger and spin around on the counter. 

We will take the glass, and climb one of these terraced 
knolls by the Pak>xy. From the summit the eye ranges 
over a maze of whitish limestone hills and ridges, meager- 
ly grassy, and dapple with darker shrubbery. See that 
pair of black wolves, leisurely galloping down yonder 
ravine! They often look back over their shoulders. 
Doubtless many a calf lies heavy on their consciences. 
Now they walk slowly up the hill toward a group of cat- 
tle, and prowl about, wistfully stretching out their necks, 
and snuffling. The calves run with flying tails into the 
herd, and the cows advance with heads uplifted and snort- 
ing, and the marauders trot away. 

Away yonder on that hillside there seems to be a mon- 
strous black tarantula, fumbling about in the grass, as his 
wont is, to get a foothold for a spring. But look with the 
glass. Ah ! it is only a herd, and the fumbling legs are 
the herdsmen, circling continually around. 

There is not a sound to disturb this nightly solitude, 
except the bawling of some calves, de/pulsi a lacte, on yon- 
der rancho. We will visit this rancho for our last drink of 
buttermilk. The house cowers from the buzzard ken of 
the Camanche beneath the spreading live-oaks, and the 
fence, Indian-like, skulks hither and thither. Hard by is 



126 AN OLD HERMIT. 

the cow-pen, and at the end of it the narrow passage, 
through which in spring the yearlings are crowded, one 
by one, while the branding-iron is clapped fizzling npon 
their backs. Rawhide is pegged to the ground to dry, 
rawhide is stretched across the yard to be oiled, rawhide is 
nailed to the house to grow limber. Rawhide laces the 
shoes, bottoms the chairs, makes the bedstead, is glue, 
nails, pegs, mortices. In the morning one vaults into his 
rawhide saddle, takes his rawhide lariat and cow- whip, and 
rides out with the herd, the source of all rawhide. The 
others plough a little in the corn, then sit on the cow-pen, 
where one boy holds a frantic calf by the tail, while 
another practices on it with the lasso. 

But these men are not wholly given over to the worship 
of the drowsy gods. Do you observe that scraggy pole, 
with gourds for the martins hung on its shoulders ? There 
is hope of him who has a birds-nest in his soul. 

One day we saw an old hermit, who had lived so long 
in these solitudes , yelling at his cattle, that he spoke in 
tones of thunder. His voice could be heard half a mile 
in ordinary conversation. He was of a gigantic stature, 
bareheaded and barefooted, and with no outer garment, 
save a pair of buckskin breeches, with knit woolen suspen- 
ders. In the night his cattle took fright, and were likely 
to break the pen, when he ran out in his shirt, in a tower- 
ing passion and roaring like a lion, leaped into the pen, 
and emptied both his revolvers into them promiscuously. 
This quieted them effectually. 

About nine o'clock one night we were awakened by a 
heavy rumbling, like that of an earthquake. We all leap 
to our feet, and hear the terrible cry, " A stampede ! a 
stampede !" They are coming toward us ! O, if that mighty 
herd, rushing frenzied with terror through the darkness, 
should pass over our little camp ! Women and children 



A STAMrEDE. 127 

run screaming and crying, they know not whither ; men 
swing flaming fire-brands in the air ; the herds-men around 
the quiet herds, to drown the noise, set up a whooping and 
singing. 

But the frightened cattle are stopped by the fire-brands, 
just before they reach the cordon of wagons. 

AVe lay down to sleep again, and Dave told us a fright- 
ful story of a Mexican whom he had seen trampled into 
fragments in a stampede. Scarcely had he ceased when 
the solid earth trembled again like a leaf, and we rushed 
forth in terror. Again and again did the frightened herd 
surge against the men, and after midnight they broke 
away and ran thirty miles without stopping. "When a 
herd of Texan cattle get well in motion, the herdsmen 
make no more resistance, but gallop along with them till 
they are exhausted. 

On the open prairie we experienced one of those awful 
storms which make Western Texas dreaded. It was to- 
ward evening, when the great slate-colored clouds began 
to be heaped up on the prairie, bulging up in portentous 
grandeur above the green world. When the heavens were 
all covered they seemed to settle, as if about to plunge in 
headlong ruin upon the prairie. The clouds far off beat 
the long roll of battle, and some were already spilling 
their thin lightenings over the horizon. But they flamed 
up in an incredibly short time half-way to the zenith, 
whence they shook down their fiery javelins across a 
quarter of the heaven. 

The brazen belt which betokened hail, widened itself 
upward with amazing rapidity, as if the storm-god were 
running to battle with a thousand chariots of brass. The 
cool breath of the hail now rippled gently through the 
sultry calm. 

Then came the fierce rush and sighing of the wind, 



128 AX AWFUL STORM. 

slinging hailstones and scattered drops of rain. Many of 
the stones were as large as a strong man's fist, and, slung 
from the far heights of heaven, smote upon the solid 
ground with fearful violence, sometimes bounding fifteen 
feet into the air* The first blast of wind swept down the 
tent. In attempting to raise it, a herdsman was struck by 
an enormous stone, which pierced through his hat, and 
felled him like an ox upon the ground. The cattle moved 
off at first in a solid column, then broke into a tumultu- 
ous gallop ; the loose horses cruelly mauled and bleeding, 
fled in terror, and vanished beyond that white and terrible 
curtain stretching from heaven down to earth. 

There was a momentary lull in the storm, then came 
the rain. "We had lifted the tent-pole, and with all our 
united strength we braced it up against the mighty torrent, 
while the slackened tent clung about us almost to suffoca- 
tion. In oceans upon oceans it surged and seethed, and 
swashed around us, as if it would drown the very wind 
itself. It ran along on the prairie in a flood, hurled by 
the mad wind ; it deadened even the crash of the thunder 
into a dull wet thud, so that we heeded it not, except 
when one bolt, with an appalling flash, spread the prairie 
close before us. 

Then the rain ceased as sudden as it began, but the wind 
still swept along in fitful gusts. TTe crawled from the 
dismal wreck of our tent, only to see to our dismay that 
the rain-cloud was coming back. For a moment the wind 
surged on against the hot and ragged rims of the lighten- 
ing, rolling blackly up and hurling back the edge of the 
clouds, as if to stay their return. Its struggles grew rap- 
idly weaker, then it fell dead calm, then it turned, and 
that black cloud, like some monstrous kraken balked of its 
prey, came rushing to a second assault. 

Thus we were drenched a second time, and then a third 



MAGNIFICENT LIGHTNING. 129 

time, and the third torrent was, if possible, more dreadful 
than the first. 

The darkness was now intense, but the lightening show- 
ed us that the storm-god was driving off his clouds. As a 
pledge of his reconciliation, there was a sudden lift in the 
clouds, and the evening star shot down a pure liquid ray 
through an air thrice washed. 

A long time I sat in the door of the tent, and watched 
the magnificent glitter of bolts around him, as he drove 
his dark car eastward into the night. Sometimes the 
lightening would issue upward from a fallen cloud, so that 
it seemed as if a jagged flame leaped right out from the 
prairie. Then a half of the whole heaven would be rent 
with a ragged network of fissures, revealing another heav- 
en on fire beyond. Again, a bolt would strike horizon- 
tally, and, like Acestes' arrow, burn to ashes in its flight ; 
then suddenly kindling afresh, dart out to an amazing 
length, and explode into a hundred quivering stems, like a 
clump of fiery coral. Beside the play of the celestial ele- 
ments in Texas, the most gorgeous pyrotechnics that man 
ever devised pale into utter contempt and insignificance. 
Yet all these magnificent corusations were drowned into 
silence by the far-off music of the storm, as Pindar 
sublimely says the forked lightenings of heaven are 
quenched in the strains of Apollo's golden lyre. 

In Camanche, the uttermost end of human habitations, 
I saw the second country school-house of my whole jour- 
ney in the South — both were in Texas — wherein the hum 
of the alphabet was sometimes interrupted by the crack 
of the Camanche rifle. Genuine Texan perverseness ! 
i What is the use of having a school where you don't have 
to fight for its privileges ? I saw a youth, six feet and an 
inch in the buff, strap his spelling-book to his revolver 
belt, and take his little sister by the hand, to go home. 
6* 



130 SCHOOL-HOUSE ATTACKED BY CAMANCHES. 

" Do the Camanches come near your school ?" I asked. 

" They come mighty closte sometimes ; closte enough, I 
reckon." 

"Did they ever attack your school?" 

" They run in onto us wunst ; they thought thar was so 
few houses they could skin us out, but they was mighty 
bad fooled. Thar was lots of bustin' big fellers in the 
school-house ; and we waded into 'em, and skinned 'em 
out mighty sudden. I tuk a scalp myself, and hung it up 
in the school-house a while." 

From the Leon westward it is a dreary and shaggy re- 
gion. Wearisome whitish ridges, marled with chaparral 
and cumbered with limestone boulders, shoot across great 
plateaus, frizzy and churlish with cactus, and wisps of 
thorns, and jagged dwarfish live-oaks. 

In one place, at the base of a ridge, there was an acre 
of saltlick. The tongues of the cattle had rasped out a 
Stonehenge. Here was an earthen pillar, roofed by a flat 
rock, which you could stand erect beneath ; there another, 
bearing atop a goodly tree. 

The tender pink pellets of the mimosa, and the rich and 
milky morning-glory, had long since given place to the 
exquisite crimson and orange hound' s-ear, and to the great 
apple-red, lemon, or yellow cactus flowers, which rim its 
corpulent leaves. The mawkish grass-nuts had yielded to 
the little wild chives, which we fried on our toothsome 
steaks. 

Of the many varieties of cactus I will describe only 
one. It is a pretty bush, with branches in links, like a 
string of little Bavarian sausages; and every joint has a 
knob or boss of prickles like a small pincushion stuck full 
of needles. 

From the Trinity westward across the prairies — that is 
Texas. Here the future " cow-boy " is furnished at six 



THE COW-BOYS AND THEIR TRAINING. 131 

with a cow-whip Hve times as long as his body, and lifted 
into the stirrups. As soon as he can twirl this absurd 
whip without winking ; follow the steer's dodges as if his 
horse were tied to his tail ; and throw a lasso over him as 
he runs, he is educated. But he is not accomplished till 
he can clutch his hat from the ground, as his horse gallops 
past it, and drive the pin at thirty yards. 

A little later he rides after straying cattle, and sleeps 
sub Jove for weeks, never near the roadside, never without 
his revolver in order. He seldom rides past a stranger 
without laying his hand on his pistol-butt. He dogs an 
earmark among a thousand others, which we could little 
better interpret than Mr. Pickwick could the sign-manual 
of Bill Stubbs. He passes unnumbered curious and crook- 
ed brands without a pause, then pounces upon one we 
thought we had seen before. But he is right in his read- 
ing. If not, his little one-eyed scribe will make it right. 

Such another school of shrewdness, jugglery, audacity, 
personal daring and independence as these janglings of 
multiplied marks and brands, the wide wild roamings, and 
this constant watchfulness create, is, I suppose, not to be 
found on earth. 

He leaps in his stirrups with frenzied delight in the 
maddening chase of the steer ; he swings the lasso over his 
head in circles large and free. "What cares he for the 
plough? The nipping air of Illinois braces the farmer 
strongly up to industry ; but these glorious, sunny wilds 
of Texas, the wide, the pure, the buxom air — who w^ould 
tread the stupid furrow here ? "Who would know any other 
law but himself and his fleet mustang ? 

The self-reliant and fiercely independent Texan is little 
in accord with the pacific genius of the Republic. Go 
out on the Brazos prairies, and you will see a clump of 
small live-oaks tillering from one tap-root, one being erect 



132 TEXAS CHIVALRY. 

in the middle, and all the rest straining away to the 
utmost extent from every other. That is Texas. 

Texas has a chivalry, but it is not Kentuckian. The 
Kentuckian murders a negro also, but he pays him his 
wages before. When we think of Texan chivalry, we 
think of a gray glitter in the eye, and a cold pistol in the 
belt. There is something dwarfish, something selfish in 
the Texan character ; it is a kind of blue, skinny, aguish 
chivalry, which, while it scorns your money for lodging, 
will yet pinch the negro's hire to the utmost copper. 

The Kentuckian adores his horse ; but the Texan, -though 
proud of a good horse, lets him gather " roughness " at 
the end of a picket-rope, and is too lazy to keep him in 
plight. The Kentuckian, like the Englishman, is ambi- 
tious to excel on the noble course ; The Texan, like the 
Italian, delights in mountebank tricks, and in his horse's 
heels above his head, and rides him to death. The Ken- 
tuckian hunts often and with keen relish on horseback; 
the Texan, now and then shoots a jackass hare with his 
revolver, as he rides around his cattle. 

The cavalry record of Texas in the war was sorry, com- 
pared with that of Kentucky and Tennessee. Many an 
honest farmer of Georgia and Alabama has graphically 
described to me how he welcomed the Texan rangers, with 
open eyes and with ears joyfully cocked up, as if they had 
been sons oi the Anakins, come to destroy their enemies 
utterly from off the face of the earth ; and how they were 
always so busy in killing and eating turkeys that they 
never had time to find the Yankees. Forrest weeded 
them from his command as Sherman did colored infantry 
from his army. That great summoner of small garrisons, 
imperious and terrible as we used to think him, more than 
once cringed before their drawn pistols, and dared not 
summon a court-martial. It is their tradition and their 



TEXAX CAVALRY IN THE WAR. 



133 



proud boast that no Texan was ever capitally punished by 
a cis-Mississippi court-martial. 

It was not that the Texans are cowards on horseback, 
for on foot in Virginia and in Tennessee they fought with 
a desperation never surpassed. 

It was partly because they owned their own horses, and 
would not expose them ; partly because they were too in- 
tent on plunder ; partly because they had little heart in 
affairs beyond the Mississippi. Texas hurled her long- 
haired hordes to Red River in the saddle ; but it was as 
infantry — three lighting and one holding the horses — that 
they crushed the unhappy Banks. The Texans in Wheel- 
er's cavalry made it the scoif of many rebels. Sherman 

d ■ them to immortality ; " Wheeler's cavalry are the 

best provost guard I ever had ; they keep up my strag- 
glers." Wheeler's famous battle-cry shows their character. 
When riding into battle he would cry out, " Off with 
your coats !" They were blue. 




CHAPTER X. 
ON THE WINDY PLAINS. 

^EYER can I forget the feeling of saddening and 
/ ntter lonesomeness which crept over me, as I saw 

T$f one after another, every vestige of civilization 
slowly fade away. 

We seldom saw now even those vanguards of Texan 
culture, the marked and branded cattle ; and at the unwont- 
ed spectacle of a footman they would stand afar off, and 
gaze at me with heads high up-lifted, then turn in terror, 
and run for miles without once stopping to look round. 
Often I would be in advance of the train, and the sight of 
these beautiful animals — the only lingering reminders of 
the great world we had left behind — which we are accus- 
tomed to see so tame and confiding in man, now lleeing in 
such dread, and the first outlook over the great, the lone- 
some, the silent plains, gave me a feeling of desolateness, 
so sad, so strange, as never I felt before, except when from 
the deck of the steamer I saw my beloved country, with 
all that was dear to me on earth, slowly drowning in the 
deep Atlantic. 

The first day on the plains we journeyed all day through 
a vast republic of prairie-dogs. Multitudes of these blue- 
nosed, thin-whiskered squeakers sat bolt upright as a cu- 
cumber on their chimneys, chirruping faster and faster as 
we approached, and winking with their little black tails at 
every chirrup. When we came quite near, they would 
drop down, with only their heads and tails visible, look a 



"ORGANIZATION." 135 

moment, then pop! the tails would twinkle down the 
holes. 

Despite his ugliness, I like the prairie- dog, he is so 
thoroughly honest and simple. It is a pity he submits so 
tamely to the outrageous impositions of those Bohemians 
of the plains, the owl and the snake. 

Few of us saw a living buffalo. They had gone north, 
to summer on the " billowy bays of grass " in Nebraska. 
Hundreds of dead ones lay scattered about, embalmed 
in unbroken and almost imperishable skins ; and in one 
place two old peg-horned gladiators lay head to head, 
where they had crushed each other's skulls for some shag- 
gy mistress. A hair-brained fellow came upon seven alone, 
wounded one with his revolver, then flung himself off his 
horse upon its back, and rode it till it drove its head hard 
against the iron plain in its dying agony. 

As soon as we were well upon the plains, there began 
to be bruited through camp mysterious and dark rumors 
of something about to happen. " Organization," and 
"military organization" were the portentous words that 
might be heard muttered by little knots of shaggy 
herdsmen. The Texan mind cropped out straightway. 
A solemn, long-whiskered conclave of owners met in a 
tent, with a candle, and forthwith it was surrounded. 

" Eo Jeff. Davis on the plains !" grumbled a short, bul- 
let-headed herdsman. 

" D yer organizin' ! "We got enough of it in the 

Confederacy," growled a lank ranger. 

"I consider organization entirely unnecessary, super- 
fluous and supervacaneous," protested the little Doctor, in 
a squeaking falsetto. 

One of the conclave came forth, and whittled down to a 
point the purport of the business, whereat they were 
appeased. 



136 BIRDS AND CATFISH. 

Nature has a hard task here, to lead down the little 
Concho more than a hundred miles across this great and 
howling wilderness, beneath the naming glare of the sun, 
where every thirsty tongue of wind will lap, then hasten 
to make room for another. A Claudian aqueduct were 
not amiss. The great trees are the bricks ; the currants 
which yield our dry messes sundry fringes of tarts, the 
India-rubber bushes, the plums bending under their sour 
back-loads — these do the chinking. Beneath this magnifi- 
cent canopy slip the thin waters, in long and languid pools, 
gliding among towering islands of grass-tufts, no thicker 
than your hat, or pontooned over with lilies for the march 
of Naiad armies. 

To see a catfish of over forty pound's weight come 
flouncing out on a naked hook into this scorching and tree- 
less desert — that seemed a strange thing. Everybody had 
a string of fish at his wagon-tail. We fried them under 
the vast pecans, and ate them with the oil of joyfulness. 

The lack of water in June drives in from the desert to 
this thread of greenery a multitude of birds. Sometimes 
I would stroll on in advance of the train, and fling myself 
under a bush, to snatch a description, or a dustless minute 
for resting. If it was in the morning, I would hear the 
mournful Carolina dove, the mocking-bird, lark, linnet, 
and many others. Foremost of all would be the mount- 
ain quail, with its dominique corselet, and its jaunty plume 
of white, always saying in its very positive way, "Pretty" 
hot! Pretty hot!" 

All these, except the latter, belong to the prairies ; but 
by noon there would be nothing but that songster of 
the plains, the cicala, with its long metallic rasping, or, 
perhaps, an occasional raven cawing. Presently even 
these would cease, and all the desert would be hushed in 
the ghostly silence of midnight. Then a red-jo wled buz- 



THE OLD SAILOR. 137 

'zard, having eyed me a long time, would flop heavily up, 
striking a bush with his wings, and their sharp winnow- 
ing of the air would be such a relief to the intolerable 
nightmare of stillness as is the cheerful ticking of one's 
watch, when one awakens from an abhorred dream. 

There was an old sailor with the train, in a greasy pea- 
jacket, and with, a bald and oily head, who afforded us 
much amusement. One evening he sat on a sack of flour, 
some of which adhered to his trowsers, and then he lay 
down to sleep face downward. In the night a half-starved 
mule came nibbling and sniffing about, and, smelling the 
flour, joyfully drew near and gave the unconscious sleeper 
a terrific nip. The hot-headed old man gave a loud squeal 
of pain, leaped up, and seized a frying-pan, with which he 
thwacked and thumped the poor beast till he chased it 
nearly out of hearing. 

On the plains everybody has to dig a fire-pit, to save his 
fire from being whisked away by the wind which blows 
forever during daylight. One evening we encamped in 
rank grass near the river, somebody neglected to dig a pit, 
and in a twinkling a raging fire was sweeping right down 
upon the wagons. Everybody fell to beating it with sticks 
and pouring on water. The old sailor, while thrashing 
about, fell into the fire and had his eyebrows singed off. 
After swearing frantically a while, he concluded thus : — 

" In this cussed country it takes two men to hold one 
man's hair on, and he can't keep it all on then." 

At last we reached the uppermost spring of the Concho, 
and encamped to prepare for the dreadful Jornada across 
the Staked Plain. Every ox, every mule, every horse, 
was driven into the brook, and by all devices of kindness 
encouraged to drink enough. Then everybody took a 
drink himself, sat down on the ground a while, then took 
another and last drink. 



138 ACROSS THE GREAT STAKED RLAIX. 

About two o'clock p. m. we set out, and moved briskly 
up a broad flaring valley, which led us easily up toward 
the mighty plateau. The great sun sank slowly down ; 
ail the stars, and the emigrating moon came forth, and 
beckoned us to follow ; and the long train rolled on with 
majestic quietness into the thickening night. 

Toward midnight the herds became restive, and surged 
back in vast masses upon the train, seeking to return ; so 
there was a momentary halt for coffee. Then we were on 
the way again and I plodded on beside the sleeping train. 

Ha! the Camanches! See them yonder, where they 
ride in the mystic moonlight. No, it is only the palmas, 
in their grimly sleepless vigils, with their great bristling 
heads of bayonet leaves. The little Doctor, however, 
thought the first one he saw was a Camanche in good sooth, 
and spurred gallantly upon it, with his heart in his throat, 
as he afterwards confessed, and clutched his revolver. 

Long, long hours were they before the stars began slowly 
to drown in the morning light. Before daybreak I had 
begun to reel a little, in my sleepiness, and gazed vacantly 
about, seeing nothing ; but, with the approach of daylight, 
returned to a state of dazed and bewildered consciousness. 
At one time I was as thoroughly asleep as a somnambulist, 
and to waken by degrees, with the increase of light, was a 
novel and singular sensation. 

What a picture was that to which my eyes at last opened 
— the Staked Plain, gray with withered grama grass and 
the heather, vast, solitary, voiceless. 

Many civilized landscapes, like the cup of Thyrsis or 
the shield of Achilles, are crowded too full of figures, and 
the effect is only exasperating confusion. Not so the desert. 
A few grim and simple touches — nothing more. 

During that day a slight ripple passed over the dead sea 
of our march, at the rumor that one had seen fresh tracks 



NIGHT MARCH— A SLEEPY TRAIN. 139 

of Camanclies. Strange what a thrill runs through fifty 
men of valor, at the sight of a track without a heel. 

All through the second night the wagons roll tranquilly 
on, without a halt. Along the whole line not a teamster 
keeps his feet. Now and then there issues from some 
wagon a sleepy dull croak, but the oxen heed it not. The 
very wagons have gone to sleep and forgotton to cluck. 
Now some baby emigrant, rudely jostled in its slumbers, 
squalls within the canvas ; but presently all is quiet as belbre. 

Like poor fuddled Burns, 

" I stacher'd whyles, but yet took tent ay 
To free the ditches ; 
An' hillocks, stanes, an' bushes kenn'd ay 
Frae ghaists an' witches." 

The distance we had traveled was nothing, if I could 
have marched briskly a while, then rested ; but I was 
obliged to observe the snail-pace of the train, and w T alk 
incessantly. At last I was utterly overpowered. I was 
constantly in danger of falling under the wheels. Probably 
half an hour before daybreak, no longer knowing what I 
did, I reeled aside a little, and tumbled down beside a bush. 
I lay on one arm till it was benumbed and cold, then flung 
the other over on it, and leaped up with a sickening shud- 
der of terror. My eyes were wide open, but they saw 
nothing. For at least ten seconds I did not remember a 
single event of my whole existence. By chance my eye 
fell upon a grass-tuft, and then, as the electric spark flashes 
from one wire to another under the experimenter's touch, 
so did my thought leap from that grass-tuft seen to that 
grass-tuft remembered, as I fell upon it in the night, and 
everything broke upon me in an instant. The train ? -* — it 
was gone ! In that instant there leaped upon me an appall- 
ing word — Camanche ! I scarcely dared look around. 
But there were none in sight. It was broad daylight, but 



140 THIRD NIGHT— SHORT OF WATER. 

the desert was silent as the grave, hushed in the awful 
stillness of eternity. 

Remembering that the Camanches often do prowl in the 
rear of great trains, to pick up straggling horses, I shudder 
to this day to think what might have happened. 

The oxen now began to suffer poignantly from thirst, as 
their sunken eyes sadly betrayed. At noon I was carrying 
a canteen of water past our oxen, when one of them 
smelled it, and came running to me, pleading with a look 
of such piteous dumb eloquence, that I was moved almost to 
tears. By the beard of my wife's cat ! old Duke, if you had 
never hauled my blankets a mile, I would have poured the 
last drop down your dusty gullet, if you could only have 
mouthed the canteen. 

In descending from the Staked Plain to the valley of 
the Pecos, the road passes through Castle Mountain. This 
is no mountain, neither yet like a castle, but simply such 
a ridge of limestone as has been before described; and, 
seen far off, looks like the vast pile of the Tuileries. Though 
Castle Mountain looks so tame at a distance, Castle Gap is 
a pass of peril, of awful and sublime grandeur. It is as if 
some ocean of tumbling waters, whose bottom the Staked 
Plain was, and of whose beetling shore Castle Mountain 
was a section, had, in its upheaved and stupendous lashings, 
rent this jagged gorge, and rushed down the lower level. 

See that antelope galloping away over yon patch of steely 
grayish azure ! Another one leaps upon its back, like dark 
Care behind the Horatian horseman, and mimics every 
motion. At last the impostor rises so high that his hoofs 
no longer touch the groundling's back, but still his shadowy 
legs move with the same motions. And now they gallop 
out of that phantom lake, and presto ! the upper one kicks 
his seeming into nothingness, and becomes even as a wink 
of the unseen when it is past. 




A LITTLE SLEEPY 



A RUN FOR THE l'ECOS. 141 

When we emerged from Castle Gap, it was after night- 
fall of the third sleepless night, and fourteen miles to the 
river yet. There was still water in the casks for the women 
and children, but we of the sterner sex had not had a 
mouthful for many an hour. I started on in advance 
of the train, in hope of reaching the river before midnight. 
The herds were many hours in advance, but little knots of 
the weaker ones, maddened by thirst, with eyes sunken 
and fiercely glaring, were still reeling along in the moon- 
light. One of them made a desperate lunge at me, and I 
avoided it barely in time to see him plunge headlong, and 
bury his head deep in the sand. At last I could not walk 
over a rod at a time, without stopping to rest. It was less 
the weakness of thirst than of sleeplessness and of exhaus- 
tion. I struggled desperately, for many coming jests and 
banters were involved, but it was of no use, and finally I 
lay sprawled upon the sand, helpless as any capsized turtle. 
A crazy steer made a pass at me, but stumbled and missed, 
and we lay there side by side. 

When our team came up, the driver put me into the 
wagon, and we soon reached the river. 

" Shall we have any trouble in approaching the river % " 
I asked of a veteran. 

" You're mighty right we will. 'Less yer oxens is well 
broke, you'll have to put .a man onto the tongue with a 
axe, and ef San Antone can't stop 'em, when you git near 
the river, whale away and cut the tongue, and let 'em flicker." 

But our oxen behaved admirably. They stood patiently 
till they were unyoked ; and as each poor fellow was released, 
we could see him wabble away in the dim moonlight, and 
see his tail whisk at the moon as he went over the bank 
with a stupendous souse. 

Then every man made a run for the Pecos, and the 
amount of water which we drank was astonishing. Though 



142 AX APPALLING SPECTACLE. 

it was thick with red clay, we all agreed that it was the 
sweetest we ever drank. Then we spread our blankets 
on the sand, and lay down between the hard stiff tufts of 
the white grass, and slept the sleep of the weary. 

Next day I went back to the point where I fell exhausted, 
and passed over the ground again afoot, so restoring the 
missing link in my inter-oceanic chain. 

The spectacle presented that day was appalling in its 
ghastliness. Many great droves had arrived before us, and 
thousands upon thousands of cattle lay dead about the 
Pecos, while all the road was white with fleshless bones. 
The Pecos is the very abode and throne of Death, for even 
the cayote and the raven avoid it, and leave the carcasses 
to waste away, ungnawed. Some of the frenzied animals 
had rushed headlong into the glittering pools of alkali, 
and quaffed the crystal death, falling where they stood. 
The Pecos has absolutely no valley and no trees, but wrig- 
gles right through the midst of the plain, which is hideous 
with bleaching skeletons. Scarcely wider than a canal, 
deep, with its banks very steep, it swept down in its swift 
and swirling flood, innumerable cattle and horses, which 
had struggled so bravely and so uncomplainingly only to 
perish at the last. "When another train arrived, I saw a 
man run along the bank a mile, almost beside himself as 
he watched his gallant horse, which had borne him over 
the desert so well, now feebly struggling with his remaining 
strength, and looking at his master with a pleading, piteous 
gaze, until at last he went down in the treacherous Pecos. 

When, after many days, the poor remnants of the cattle 
w ere gathered together, it was a sad sight. Of those mag- 
nificent herds which swept out so lordly upon the Staked 
Plain, with their long and swinging stride, twelve hundred 
head lay dead along the Pecos, or fed their festering flesh 
to its waves. 



CROSSING THE PECOS-A POLITE CORPORAL. 143 

The women and children were ferried over in a Govern- 
ment yawl at Ilorseliead Crossing, and the dainty belles 
of the South, as well as more robust maidens, accepted the 
hand of a negro corporal, who assisted them into and out of 
the boat. 

On the plain west of the Pecos there begin to occur 
those peculiar desert springs, the Spanish ojos, the eyes, 
which weep brackish tears. Far off we would see a deep- 
green streak, very sweet to look upon in the dusty dearth ; 
but when we drew near, we would find the grass unprofit- 
able for man or beast, and the ground moist-looking, or 
glistening with sweat of salt — a muriatic winter in the 
summer heats. 

One of the greatest of these curious holes is Antelope 
Spring. Right in the midst of the level plain, without a 
wink, or a twinkle, or a flinching beneath the torrid glare 
of the snn, it weeps its miserable abundance straight up 
from a socket which no plummet has yet sounded. 

But the name is full of significance. What the swallow, 
or the gull, or the tern is to the long-tossed mariner, the 
antelope is to him who voyages over these trackless 
oceans of dust. Wherever he sees it scud away before 
him, he knows that water is not far off. 

And here I must write, though the words fly in the face 
of all tradition, and break a lance over the heads of all 
poets, that the antelope has nothing pretty except its slen- 
der hoofs. Short, squat, square, of an uncertain rat-color, 
with horns as stupid as the legs of a milk-stool, it runs 
away with stiff, chopping leaps, like those of a sheep when 
it runs into battle. Presently it stops to humor its curiosity, 
looks back a moment, then ducks its head in a quick, silly 
whirl, and is off again. It has acquired a reputation for 
beauty, as the cicala enjoyed a celebrity with the Greeks 
for song, because it is usually found in a hideous place. 



144 ARCHITECTURE IN MUD— NEGROES ON GUARD. 

The employer of the old sailor was a big Texan, with 
his trousers in his boots and a ring on his finger, taciturn, 
wilful, chaotic,and always leaving his herd to go to the 
dogs, to ride ignominiously in the wagon with a wife no 
bigger than his thumb ; and he had no patience with the 
choleric but kind-hearted old man. One morning he fell 
into an altercation with him, drew his revolver, and fetch- 
ed him a thump on top of his head. 

At the next fort we passed he left ; but before he went 
away, he came and asked me to write a letter to his mother- 
less daughter, and dictated to me some admirable precepts. 
"When I read to him that part respecting the dying admo- 
nitions of his wife, the old man covered his face and wept 
till the tears trickled out through his fingers. 

The Government seems to maintain troops on the plains 
in order that they may commence their education, as Plato 
gravely advises the pupil, by studying architecture in mud. 
All these valorous "forts "are nothing but villages of lead- 
colored mud, roofed with canvas ; and each house is just 
long enough for the soldier to stretch himself therein, like 
a sardine in a box. 

Yery unprofitable to the soldier of peace are all the uses 
of drilling ; but to the negro it is meat not sweat for, and 
rejoices his soul. How serenely large and martial yon dus- 
ky Meriones paces his beat, with his shoes and his brass all 
a shining ! Inadvertently I tread on the corner of some 
sacred and awful ground, when he calls out loudly, " Halt !" 
I go around toward him, and he looks hard at me knitting 
his brows with portentous sternness. Keeping his musket 
stiffly at a " shoulder " he says : — 

" You dassent tromp on dat 'ar ground. Dat's de p'rade 
ground. You rebels goin' by hyur alius tromps on dat 
ground, an' I has orders to 'rest any man don't keep off/' 

Just then an officer comes in sight, riding toward us. 



THE TROUBLED SENTINEL— A NIGHT HALT. 145 

The negro becomes suddenly and strangely troubled in his 
mind. He rolls his eyes wildly; he glances first at me, 
then at the approaching officer. In reply to a question I 
ask him, he finally gasps in a whisper, looking partly as if 
he were choked, partly as if he had just seen a ghost, "I 
can't speak." All at once a light beams upon him ; he sees 
the ghost no longer ; he suddenly recollects how to do it ; 
he whips down his gun, and " presents arms," the officer 
being now several paces past him. 

From Leon Hole, another of those strange weeping eyes 
of water, flung down like bits of the sea to sweat and swel- 
ter in the plain, we set out across a forty-mile stretch with- 
out water. At sunset I sat down by the roadside to see our 
last day on the plains expire. And not in all the bloody 
climes of the Orient, where not even the daylight is per- 
mitted to die a natural death, was ever a fray so disastrous 
between Day and Night. The whole earth and the sky 
were flooded with that fierce, sullen redness, as from a 
burning city in the night, which closes in at sunset around 
the ancient Sphinx. 

Late in the night the train halted. There came to us 
from some pond the music of those damp singers of Aris- 
tophanes — "Brekeke-Kesh ! Kooash ! Kooash I" But sweet- 
er far was the clinking of the chains, as one after another, 
down the long lines of teams, they dropped from the tired 
yokes upon the ground. 





CHAPTER XL 
IN APACHE LAND. 

[A YLICSrHT revealed to us two spurs of the Apache 
Mountains, straddled far out into the plain, like a 
pair of tongs. After traveling hundreds of miles 
over plains corrugated with limestone lomas, as regular as 
the plaits on the crimped caps of our grandmothers, it was 
an inexpressible satisfaction to gaze, in the early morning, 
upon these old granite monsters heaped up into the heavens 
in their lordly and savage lawlessness. 

From the day we began to ascend the Concho, we were 
in a prickly country, but it grew steadily worse. If Doctor 
Sangrado cured all diseases by letting blood, a man ought 
to enjoy good health in Western Texas. 

On the Concho some seventy sorts of cactus sting him, 
and forget to pull out their stingers. The mesquite rakes 
him fore and aft, the red and black chaparro jab thorns into 
him. If he would pluck a few tempting berries from 
the cranberry bush, red with the blood of Yenus, the 
needles of its leaves prick his fingers. The cat-claw 
holds him fast, the wax-berry rips long scratches in his 
ankles. The junco has no foliage, except immense, green 
thorns. In July some of these thorns blossom into thyrses 
of minute whitish flowers, each thorn becoming like a spin- 
dle full of fragrant yarn. Even the India-rubber bush 
keeps a stock of thorns on hand. 



A SENSATION IN THE NEGRO CAMP. 147 

Here, the mesquite and cactus are rarer ; but all the others 
are in good health. If there were any lack, the bear-grass 
and the agave would scratch out the full tribute of blood. 
The hill mesquite demands its share, and even when the 
traveler, in sheer desperation, flees to the palma, and sits 
down in its tiny shade — the only shade there is — its sav- 
age bayonets stab him in the neck. 

The bear-grass sends up its great scope fifteen feet high, 
with a head like wheat, but six feet long, though the roots 
burrow in the thinnest, rockiest soil. Squatting on the 
ground, and defended by a porcupine armor of leaves, each 
one edged all along with cat-claws, is the sweet cabbage or 
bulb, from which Bruin is wont to make his Kool slaa with- 
out vinegar. 

With one of the families there was a young wench, serv- 
ing as a Jane -of- all- work. Before the horses died or 
were stolen by the Apaches, she was allowed to ride ; but 
after awhile she was compelled to walk a great part of the 
time. Not only was she forced to work all the time we 
were in camp, and often far into the night, while three or 
four able-bodied women lounged in their marquee, disdain- 
ing to cut the bacon, but they compelled her to gather 
wood while she walked, such as it was, the dry stalks of 
bear-grass, cherioudic, etc. More than that, the outrageous, 
little, spoiled brats of the family often insisted on walking, 
and as soon as they were a little tired, they would yell, and 
beat her with their tiny lists if she did not lug them on her 
back. 

I hoped she would desert them at some of the negro sta- 
tions we passed, but she never did. To see thirty or forty 
sable sons of Mars, gorgeous in their shining brass and their 
blue, with an abundance of elegant leisure to keep them- 
selves trig, swarm around this one, poor, forlorn wench, 
barefooted, bareheaded, with the same dress she had worn 



143 THE BEAUTIFUL OLYMPIA CANYOX. 

for three months, and to see their ineffable grins, their chuck- 
ings under the chin, their snatched hugs, as they grew 
bolder, and their surreptitious kisses — this being the first 
" cullud gal " they had seen for many a month — that was 
rare sport. 

Ah ! how the sun flames and shakes down between these 
rusty iron ridges into this yellow valley ! At Barilla "Well 
we got a little good water, for which we gave thanks. 

And now we approach that wonder and great captain of 
pinnacles, Washbowl Hill, where it grandly " stands up 
and takes the morning." On top of a perpendicular, solid 
washstand of iron, a half-mile thick, there is an inverted 
washbowl, as perfect as ever was made at Dalehall, even to 
the chimb. 

I was sick and could not go up, but San Antone scaled 
it to the foot of the inaccessible washstand, and brought 
back specimens of apparently pure magnetic iron, which 
would clang like steel. In one of the awful canyons whose 
depths he sounded, he was surprised to hear the sound of 
falling waters. This would have been a miracle on that 
bald mass of granite in summer, and upon looking about, 
he found it was only the wind whistling around the sharp- 
cut edges of iron or granite. 

Next came the famous and beautiful Olvmpia Canyon. It 
is a valley paved with gold, and perpendicularly walled 
with iron. Standing by moonlight in the center of this 
valley, surrounded on all sides by the vast palisades, which 
loo.n above the slopes of yellow grass, forming the tiers of 
seats, I could almost believe myself again within the Col- 
iseum's walls, so thievish is this air of distance. Yet the 
valley is three miles long, and a third as broad. 

But what pen can picture the simple and natural glories 
of this amphitheatre? Thickly covering all the valley, 
and all the slopes up to the palisades, creeps the ripened 



THE GIANT'S CAUSEWAY OF TEXAS. 149 

grass, which the sun and the rainless summer days have 
gilded with a gold of which Titian never caught the spell, 
nor Claude Lorraine the witchery, as it lies, and seems to 
creep and faintly shiver with the very richness of its mel- 
lowness. Elsewhere, these gigantic palisades, towering far 
up to the home of the " century-living crow," but shaken 
and shivered with age, have hurled down the slope a mighty 
rock, which lies now, in a sea of color which to call by the 
name of gold is a mockery. 

In this canyon there was encamped a Government train, 
with its enormous blue wagons, like wheeled ships, and 
with it an English tourist. He was manifestly not travel- 
ing, as they say of Englishmen on the Continent, to wear 
out his old clothes ; but he was very evidently somewhat 
the worse for Mexican brandy, or something else. His 
peon had his horse at the spring, and was vainly tugging 
and chirruping in his sleepy way to get him to the water, 
when his master bore down upon him with his face at a red 
heat. 

" Boy, get away from that hawse ! " 

Then he jumped upon him, turned his head, and fetched 
a keen cut under his belly, whereupon, he shot away across 
the valley, and so around back to the spring. Then he 
dismounted, and led him down without trouble. 

As we advance up the canyon, it draws its mighty walls 
closer together, till there is barely room for the road and 
the creek. There are little mimbres, swaying their long 
green hair, and bright dwarf walnuts, and vast cottonwoods, 
which swell almost across from palisade to palisade. The 
stupendous architecture of Time is here shown forth in 
pilastered facades, great needles, half a hundred feet high, 
poised on end, fluted and cluster columns, standing out 
in bold relief from the wall. It is the Giant's Causeway 
of Texas. 



150 A MESSENGER FROM FORT DAVIS. 

Then there is the Devil's Senate Hall, an easy slope, 
thick-set with stones like pulpits, and all among them little 
live-oaks. How is it that Old Scratch takes so much inter- 
est in natural wonders % On the Kanawha and the Mus- 
kingum he has " tea-tables," in Weber Canyon a " chute," 
in the Hartz Mountains a " chancel," etc. On the other 
hand, presumptuous man considers his own puny works 
the suggestions of the Almighty; as for instance Pope 
Nicholas V., who declared that St. Benedict's famous 
bridge in Avijnon was built by the inspiration of the Holy 
Ghost. This is to say, we are little better than the Apaches, 
who believe that the Bad Spirit is mightier than the Good. 

At last the road led us out from the canyon, and up among 
a thousand great grassy knolls, which the recent rains had 
quickened into tender green. Here, like Apollo bathing 
in Castalian dews and renewing his youth, we scoop from 
the grass with our hollowed hands the pearly arrears of 
months. One night we slept close under the blue rafters 
of Adam's primal house, snug in the crib of a deep, little, 
Swiss valley, and gathered the green knolls for pleasant 
curtains round our beds. When the moon came up, just 
washed in milk, it hung right above our curtain-posts ; and 
all night long the shining tears of St. Lawrence dropj>ed 
one by one from the heavens above us, and fell upon the 
knolls. 

And this in the very heart of parched and desert Texas I 

A messenger here returned from Fort Davis, and made 
his report. More than a hundred miles to the Bio 
Grande, and no water but in springs, where you might 
dip a gourdful. If two steers drink before us, the reservoir 
is dry. What was to be done? The awful lessons of 
the Pecos warned us not to attempt another forced march ; 
and there was nothing for us but to wait for the rainy sea- 
son, which usually sets in about the middle of July. 



WAITING FOR RAIN— FORT DAVIS. 151 

Then, as we sat at evening around the " green cloth " 
of our corral, great was he who was counted crafty as a 
rain-maker, and who knew whether cats look most at the 
cheese in its first quarter or its third. A party of us went 
geologizing ;— 

11 Hammering and clinking, chattering stony names 
Of shale and hornblende, rag and trap and tuff, 
Amygdaloid and trachyte." 

We found some pretty bits of chalcedony, and many 
curious specimens of metamorphic feldspar, and silicates, 
one-half of which had been fused by intense heat, while the 
other retained its crystalline form. On a rocky promontory, 
where persons from the fort had lunched and cast away 
their oyster cans, one found a piece of agate-colored flint 
which he insisted was a petrified oyster. 

On top of the Sierra there was a granite bowlder, forty 
feet high, standing on the small end, like a wedge entering 
a log. San Antone put his herculean shoulder against it, 
foolishly attempting what "the innumerable series of 
years and flight of times " had failed to accomplish. 

Up among the jagged mountain cedars there stood lordly 
up, here and there, a cliff of clean, clear granite, with niches 
for the swallows, which were flitting about in hundreds. 
Three hundred miles we had traveled without seeing a 
swallow. Could anything be more dismal ? 

The great pass through the Apache Mountains is fash- 
ioned just as if a strip had been cut from the Staked Plain, 
twenty miles long and five wide, and let down right across 
the mountain backbone. At either end it terminates in 
huge grassy knolls, where the road goes winding down to 
the arid deserts. Far across this green prairie, where it 
surges in like a sea against the base of a thousand perpen- 
dicular feet of granite, Fort Davis cowers in a corner of 
the mighty wall, beneath its grove of cotton woods. 



152 SINGULAR PHENOMENA. 

" Sown in a wrinkle of the monstrous hill, 
The city sparkles like a grain of salt." 

All the rocks in these Apache Mountains seem to have 
been scorched and molten b y fierce fires. In some of those 
old nights, when the earth shook with her flaming and 
sulphurous vomit, gigantic bowlders thundered smoking 
down the sides of the cliff, and stand now like houses on 
the edge of the plain. 

Beside one of these, and beneath a little live-oak, we sat 
to our hard-earned lunch. AVe sat right upon our table- 
cloth,which was of a subtiler texture, with lush green floss, 
than all linens of Morlaix or Limerick poplins. We pro- 
fane this charming panorama by no urbs in rure ; we clink 
no invidious silver, or glass, or china, for all those have 
been prone to break ever since the days of unfortunate 
Alnaschar. Our vessels are of tin, and made for service. 
How happy one can be on the plains with spring water and 
jerked beef ! 

Keturning to camp, we found they had been employing 
the time in jerking beef. Everybody had a rope stretched 
from his wagon to everybody else's wagon, and three whole 
beeves slit and hung thereon. 

The rainy season, in coming on, presents some singular 
phenomena to a man bred in a land where it rains in season 
and out of season. Vast and woolly masses of fog would 
float overhead during the day, densest when the sun was 
hottest ; but at night the moon would drive them all away. 

Never have I seen a lordlier portion of man's heritage 
for lack of rain so absolutely turned to inhospitable dust. 
This valley has the soil of Egypt. Cantelopes grow wild 
here, but bitter as the quintessence of gall. The thrifty 
palmilla, with its long seed-stalk atop, looks like a Croin- 
wellian soldier standing on sentry, with his halberd reaching 
far above his head. 




A VIEW ON THE DESEkT. 




iOKT DAVIS. 



RAIN AT LAST. 153 

The rainy season set in on the mountains several days 
sooner than it did here, and the animals began to suffer 
again severely. One morning, however, we saw large 
flocks of cloudlets pasturing along the top of the sierra, 

" Shepherded by the slow, unwilling wind ;" 

but as soon as the air began to shake with fervent heat, 
they were all whisked away. The first level beams of the 
day pierce and gnaw, like fresh coals; toward noon the 
heat is suffocating and stifling, like the interior of a furnace. 
All around us, and far through its bleak house, whose wide 
corridors shook with a fierce glare, all the infinite air stood 
still, with a faint tremor dying, dying, as if transfixed by 
the sun. Yast columns of dust stalked like giants across 
the flaming and shimmering plain. 

Then it was we beheld a curious spectacle. A cloud 
came up out of the south, and sailed over the valley far 
away, utterly alone in the sky, and compact and black as 
the head of Medusa, with an unaccountable quantity of 
hair of lightnings, blazing and crackling in every direction 
continually. Then others came up, and spitefully slung 
some drops far down like bullets into the dust. At last, 
to our great joy, there came up in the west a dark and 
mighty bank, bringing the principal rain. It ran straight 
up the valley, and in a few minutes we were buried in a 
shrilling, oozing, rushing, wet rain. 

I saw men take off their hats and swing them, in a frenzy 
of delight at having their heads rained upon. Tom dis- 
mounted, and, running from one little puddle to another, 
snatched muddy gulps, though he never could get more 
than half a mouthful before the well-beloved Fanny would 
thrust her nose in beside him. The Doctor, like him who 
won Dorf Huffelsheim 3 drank the water that was caught 
in his top-boots. 
Y* 



15 A A GORGEOUS PAGEANT. 

It was well understood that, but for this rain, some of 
us would have perished, and all the cattle. We could have 
reached Eagle Spring in time, probably, to have saved most 
of our lives, but it could have been of no avail to the 
animals. 

Journeying through the greater part of the night suc- 
ceeding the rain, we beheld in the morning a natural 
pageant whose equal I do not expect to look upon again 
on earth. The sun had just risen into a notch in the sierra, 
when with remarkable suddenness there stood up on the 
opposite sierra a rainbow, than which not that on which 
the bewildered eyes of the lonely family on Ararat first 
gazed could have been more gorgeous. All the seven 
colors of the spectrum were broad and transcendently 
bright, and even the secondary was more brilliant than any 
rainbow of common atmospheres. All the space within 
the arch was gorgeously illuminated with orange, which, 
reflecting on the rocks below, tipped them as with shining 
gold. This is no poetical fancy, for they actually gleamed, 
with a brightness equaled only on the rims of clouds some- 
times. The sky outside the bow was dun with heavy haze, 
and still dim in the morning, and the sun shining through 
the gorge, only illuminated so much of the sierra as the 
rainbow spanned ; so that all the rest of heaven and earth 
assumed, by contrast, the weird and portentous gloom of 
an eclipse. 

Only a moment, one brief moment, a pendulum-beat of 
eternity, it stood before us, like a beatific vision seen by 
Dante ; then the sun buried itself in the thick vapors, and 
it was gone, and dull time beat on again. 

To this day, when I look back in memory upon that 
rainbow, so great, so glorious, so beautiful, in that lonely 
desert, my eyes fill, as then, with the tears of a joy that 
cannot be uttered. Homer says even the immortal gods 



APACHES— A PASS OF PERIL. 155 

gazed with rapture on the grot of Calypso ; so, on the other 
hand, it does seem to me that not even when we walk 
down through the august chambers of Paradise, will our 
eyes behold more grandeur. 

Still we were traveling down between the parallel sierras, 
with the herd ahead again, pushing hard for the Rio Grande. 
After a weary night's march, one morning I saw Fanny 
standing by a bush, a little distance from the road. What 
can have happened to Tom? 1 wondered. Approaching 
carefully, I found him prone on the sand, asleep, but hold- 
ing the bridle in his hand, and Fanny treading over and 
about him as reverently as Jenny Geddes trod over poor 
drunken Burns. When she saw me, she gave the merest 
little whinny in the world, as if careful not to awaken her 
master. 

Four miles the wheels ground, and girded, and screeched 

along the gravelly arrojo which runs through the pass into 

the valley of the Eio Grande. It is a savage and bristling 

hole, with every stone in it stained with blood, and we 

went through with bated breath, and every man with his 

musket on his shoulder. What are those moving objects 

away up yonder on the white cliffs, so high that they must 

scrape the sun of a morning? Bring the glass to bear. 

Ah ! three Apaches dancing on the rocks, and flouting us 

with unseemly gestures. A long Enfield sends a bullet 

hurtling somewhere through those old, upper solitudes, 

and the flouters suddenly act as if they heard something. 
******** 

To any man of ideas the existence of a soldier on the 
plains is " the weariest and most loathed worldly life," the 
most complete canker of the soul, that can be conceived. 
To the soldier in Europe there is often little better offered ; 
but any human being who can be content in the ranks of 
our Kegular Army, while all this great world is spinning 



156 THE SOLDIER'S LIFE OX THE PLAINS. 

" down the ringing grooves of change," is only one degree 
removed from the beasts that perish. 

And then, precisely when it is least expected and least 
prepared for, comes, at daybreak, the horrid and heart- 
sickening yell of the Camanches ; the wild swoop through 
the camp; the stinging bite of the swift and quivering 
arrow : the frenzied panic and clutching of weapons, but 
ever too late ; the flight in retreat ; the hasty pursuit, where 
the half-starved cavalry horses are goaded through the 
fiendish chaparral, until they are torn and reeking with 
bloody sweat, in the useless attempt to overtake the swift- 
footed ponies; the blind and blundering lunges in the 
darkness among the bowlders and the horrid brambles of 
the mountains, until at last some poor fagged brute plunges 
headlong, and, by a merciful fortune, dashes out its brains 
on the ledges. 

Then they set out to return, many on foot, cursing the 
miserable imbecility which kept them rotting in camp 
while the savages were preparing their death; without 
trophies and without provisions ; maddened with hunger 
and a raging thirst ; until some fall in a delirium, and die 
in the desert. 

What we need most in the Indian service is, men who 
will be inflexibly just, and then, if necessary, strike, and 
strike home. The English in Canada, are not troubled by 
the Indians. They are not so plagued with sentimentaiism 
but that they can occasionally shoot a savage from the 
cannon's mouth ; and, by thus sacrificing one life, they save 
the dozen Indians and the half-hundred white men whom 
we murder by our wretched, half-hearted method. 

And, while I shot one Indian from the cannon's mouth, 
I would shoot two of those miscreants, agents, traders, 
and the like, who by their cheatery and their swindling, 
stir up trouble on the border. 



SAD EXPERIENCES OF DESERTERS. 



157 



Be just to an Indian, but never be generous. Generosity 
they take for weakness. Our republican form of govern- 
ment is the best in the world for its own citizens, but the 
worst in the world for outsiders, and especially for savages. 

It is little wonder that soldiers desert from a service so 
grossly mismanaged. More than once, in my long journey, 
some pallid and haggard wretch — his knees trembling and 
his voice quivering with the pangs of hunger — hesitating, 
retreating, and giving me searching glances, as if with his 
eager hollow eyes he would read the very record of my 
soul, has at last half- whispered the dread secret that he was 
a deserter. Whatever I might think of his act elsewhere, 
I could not expose him in the deserts of Texas. 





CHAPTER XII. 
UP THE YALLEY OF OXIOXS. 



ROM a foothill of the Sierra Blanca, covered over 
with spiny tussocks of spear-grass, I looked down, 
upon the mighty valley of the American Nile. 
The sun was momentarily hidden in the clouds, and the 
dark, and sterile, and rigorous grandeur of that prospect I 
have never seen surpassed. 

Away over yonder are the "blackly magnificent and sav- 
agely gloomy mountains of Chihuahua. And that is Mexico ; 
the wild and bloody Ishmaelite of nations , the Battle-God's 
Elected ; the ancient and perennial dwelling-place of Assas- 
sination ; the home of stealers of asses and kidnappers of 
men, of sellers of justice and buyers of salvation, of mer- 
chants of revolution and farmers of superstition ; a land 
of the most gorgeous natural landscapes of the Occident, 
wherein the children, by their candy skeletons, are made 
familiar with figurative death ; and the most inhospitable 
and burning deserts, wherein they struggle face to face 
with actual death, but yet take away bread from the mouths 
of the living to make rusk for the spirits of the dead ; a 
land of dark-souled treachery in the men, and wondrous, 
dark-eyed beauty in the women ; always enchanting, always 
disquieted, always unhappy Mexico, forever "wedded to 
calamity " as to a bridegroom. 

"We were all that afternoon traveling down the gravelly 
desert to the river. There was no green thing on this 
desert, excepting the cheriondia, a pretty bush, with bright 



OUR FIRST VIEW OF MEXICO. 15Q 

sea-green leaflets, which, when they are crushed, give forth 
an amazing stench. Few and far between were branches 
of that strange mountain shrub, the tasajo. At a distance 
a clump of it looks like a number of Mexican lances planted 
in the ground, some of them reaching up fifteen feet or 
more. Approach closer, and you have wax candles, spirally 
wrapped with slips of green paper, thickly set with clus- 
ters of thorns and minute stemless leaves. 

The sun had already been " welcomed with bloody hands 
to a hospitable grave " beyond the mountains of Mexico, 
when we reached the Rio Grande. Leaning over the low, 
steep banks, we dipped and drank its waters. Then it was 
I learned to appreciate its name. In my mind's eye I saw 
the first thirsty Spaniard, who, after journeying long ago 
across some infinite desert of Mexico, laid himself down 
upon the bank, and quaffed the fertile waves. Then rising 
up, with the deep, and quiet, and unspeakable satisfaction 
of a thirsty traveler who has drank enough, he murmured 
its pompous name — " O Great Brave River of the North !" 

But how strange is this — a boiling, rich, and rushing 
river, bounded by absolute and unmitigated dust, and that 
dust by a desert! A Nile running through an Egypt 
twenty rods wide, in the middle of a Sahara twenty miles 
wide. 

We encamped here a short time to recruit ourselves and 
the animals, and I shall take this occasion to introduce the 
reader to the members of our mess, the Nothing-at-Steak. 

First there was the sunny-tempered, golden-haired Tom, 
a consumptive, poor boy '.—seeking yet a little lease of life 
in this " diviner air ;" as egregious a Rebel as ever rode 
after Wheeler in his marauding raids, and withal as light- 
hearted, as merry, and as noble a soul as ever inhabited the 
flesh. Poor Tom ! He was much wasted by the fell de- 
stroyer; yet he was the very soul of the camp, always full 



160 TOM, JOE, AM) THE DOCTOR. 

of fun and jollity, and, in all mud, in all miseries, kept our 
mess ever gay. Ah ! Tom, you Kebel, if anywhere in this 
wide world, or in Texas, you still live and joke and laugh, 
I shake your spiritual hand across this table ; but if, alas ! 
you sleep somewhere beneath the sod, I will say, dear Tom 
that no truer, manlier, and more joyous spirit ever fought 
in that sad, sad war, in either army. 

" Oh, looking from some heavenly hill, 
Or from the shade of saintly palms, 
Or silver reach of river calms, 
Do thy large eyes behold me still ?" 

His partner, Joe, was a tall young man, who always ate 
with his jack-knife. He had a Yankee closeness, singularly 
united to a Southern contempt for labor, but he was a good 
horseman, and a faithful herdsman. He was correct in his 
morals, never swore, and his talk was of steers. 

The Harlequin of the camp was the little Doctor. By 
birth, the only and petted heir of wealth ; by nature, a 
" huge feeder ;" by practice, a printer ; by after-thought, a 
physician ; he was the strangest genius I ever came across. 
He had a sharp nose, always sunburnt, and wonderfully 
cold, heartless, gray eyes. He was as cowardly as Falstaff, 
and almost as witty, and changed his shirt every other 
month. Xo matter how early he was called, he was glum 
and stolid as a log till about ten o'clock, when the piston 
of his intellect would begin to work. He would discourse 
volubly and with the Latinized pomposity and ponder- 
osity of Johnson, on medicine, or any other topic under 
heaven ; and I never saw another man who knew so much 
about every possible subject, and yet knew so much of it 
wrong. He carried a dictionary in his pocket, and studied 
"on herd" and "off herd/' Yet, when the humor was 
on him, he would sit cross-legged by the fire, rocking his 
body backward and forward like a dervish reading the 
Koran, and set the camp in a roar with his u whangdoodle 



THE YOUXG EMIGRANT. Id 

Dave was a broad-shouldered Ranger, with a blood-red 
face and a mighty, black beard. lie rolled up his blankets 
every morning with a peculiar soldier-twist, so that they 
would stay without being tied ; and he could always find a 
particular vagabondizing yoke of oxen when nobody else 
could. Dave was an exceedingly useful and good fellow, 
all of which he knew very well. 

San Antone was the heraldic name of the greatest ox- 
tamer I ever saw, a German from Western Texas. I never 
knew another man of such fierce and amazing energy in 
his wrestles with the hellish brutes, and with such appalling 
bursts of passion sometimes, who yet was so thoughtful of 
his oxen. He never killed an ox, while every other driver 
killed from four to a dozen. 

The Texans would often ride alongside a feeble calf and 
shoot it carelessly through with the revolver. One that 
strayed from the herd a few times seldom escaped being 
wounded or killed. In beautiful contrast with this cruelty 
was the tenderness of another Texan. He had a calf which 
could not follow the train, so he procured a green rawhide, 
swung it as a hammock under his wagon, and every morning 
the young emigrant was hoisted into it, and rocked all day 
in breezy comfort. The cow would stay to see the operation 
safely performed, then go off with the herd, but she would 
often come, and walk and moan beside it, and lick its little 
head, as if to be sure of its safety. 

One day two men from another train swam across the 
river, trans pilum aquce, invading Mexico, to steal melons. 
They were warned that it was at the peril of their lives, 
but they persisted in going. The river was at its summer 
flood, often half as wide as the Mississippi, and we stood 
on the shore and watched them. Now they would swim ; 
then they would flounder knee-deep across an island of silt, 
level with the water ; then swim again ; and at last we saw 
their white forms emerge upon the other bank. 



162 FATE OE THE MELOX-STEALERS. 

See now, the white-clad Mexicans swoop fiercely down 
npon them, swinging their lazos. Their infuriated yells 
are heard, the men run, they wildly throw up their arms 
to parry the lazos. But the fatal nooses catch them some- 
where, and the little mustangs gallop swiftly away into the 
mountains, dragging the victims brutally on the ground, 
as Achilles dragged the fallen Hector. 

"We never saw them after. They were ruffians for whom 
no one seemed concerned, and nobody cared to expose 
himself by swimming over that treacherous river for re- 
venge. Mexican retribution is more swift and summary 
than Schiller's justice in Yenice. 

The hot afternoons often brought little showers, which 
would hover about the tops of the Sierra Hueca, but never 
dampen our burning heads. JSext morning little fog-pellets, 
very dense and clean-cut, would nestle like pearls in the 
niches of the intensely azure mountains. And never, even 
on the Arno, or the " haunted Rhine," or on the magic 
shores of Lake Como, have I seen such a sunrise as on the 
Rio Grande, after a rain had softened the mountain atmos- 
phere with thin and mellow vapors. And I do herewith 
make humble confession that I gazed upon these glorious 
blue mountains, tipped with orange clouds, these enchanting 
poems of earth, in daintiest " blue and gold," lying lazily 
iu my blankets. Thereby I made a valuable discovery. 
If the reader, in beholding this sort of phenomena, will 
incline his head half over, he will be rewarded with a mar- 
velous enchantment of its beauty. 

For ninety miles along the Rio Grande there was no 
pasture, and the grass-eating Texans were in a state of 
distraction. But the animals soon learned to eat mesquite 
beans ravenously, as all things do here. 

See how Nature is just to all regions. Here is this de- 
testable cactus, worthless you will say. Pass the dropsical 



MEXICAN AGRICULTURISTS. 163 

leaves through the blaze, to singe off the prickles, and the 
oxen will devour them greedily, and fatten. Split some 
and drop them into a bucket of water, and they will clarify 
it as an egg does coffee. Clap a piece on your felon, and 
it will cure it like magic. 

This and the mesquite are almost the only flora vouch- 
safed to this region. But these long, and silvery, and 
scarlet-speckled pods, growing twice a year, nourish the 
goats, and yield the Mexican himself a sweetish succulence 
like apple pummice. There is no coal hereabout, but its 
pretty walnut wood makes such a fierce heat the smith can 
weld his tire with its coals alone. Where there is only the 
merest sprig above ground, just under the surface there are 
enormous roots, which burn well when freshly grubbed. 

As one approaches San Eleazario, the bottom expands 
into a goodly breadth of ranchos. Hoeing in the young corn 
were squat and swarthy fellows, cool in their umbrageous 
sombreros, with their white shirts pulled outside their 
trousers of immaculate white — it was Monday — which were 
rolled high above their knees. How I envied them, as 
they tramped through the freshly watered furrows, in the 
soft mud. 

The Mexican plow is simply a cotton-wood branch, which 
makes a scratch in the weeds that look like a black snake. 
It has a little straight peg of a handle, which the fellow 
leans lazily over upon with one hand — he walking on one 
side of the row of maize, the oxen and plow on the other 
— while with the other he cavalierly flourishes his goad 
and husk cigarrito. There are several teams in the same 
row, and every time they come out to the end, they stop a 
while, chat, and light fresh cigarritos. Then the oxen's 
heads are turned into the rows again, and away they go 
almost on a trot. With what elegant nonchalance for a 
plowman that fellow elevates his chin, to whiff out a wreath 



16i THE SHEEP-DOGS, AND THEIR CHARGE. 

of smoke. Now lie looks back over his shoulder, like that 
exceedingly unpractical and impossible husbandman, Jason, 
when he was plowing with the mythological balls. 

Here, too, are the calico flocks of goats, and the famous 
New Mexican sheep-dogs. Wolfish, shaggy curs are they, 
with sinister-looking eyes, set close together, like a cayote's, 
which probably assisted in their genealogy. It is very 
amusing to see the serious, business-like way in which he 
marches along beside the foremost goat, and the stern frown 
of reproof he casts upon him, if he halts to browse. If 
that does not suffice to keep him moving, he gently nibbles 
his knees, or tweaks his wattle. The goat-herd brings up 
the rear. 

We met carts on the road, taking wheat to market. 
These are deep boxes, woven of cane tight enough to 
hold wheat, and mounted on a pair of enormous wooden 
wheels, which go wabbling along as if they were ashamed 
of being yet on earth, when they ought to be in the grave 
with fourteen centuries. The Mexicans cruelly bind the 
yoke fast behind the oxen's horns with thongs, which 
destroys the free and majestic swing of their gait, and makes 
them travel with their heads down, as if they were running 
a tilt in a bull-fight. By this means, and the use of the 
remorseless goad, the Mexican teamster seldom travels less 
than twenty-five miles a day, while the Texan only goes 
fifteen. 

The common jacal of the peon is built of stakes set in 
the ground, and plastered with mud, and is just the same 
for shape as if one should set a sharp Gothic roof, with its 
gables, on the ground. The ranchero makes a flat-roofed 
adobe, on three sides of a square. 

None of their abodes are fenced, and all the ground about 
is perfectly bare, and hot, and dusty, unshaded by trees. 
Ropes are stretched across, and hung with long strips of 



SAN ELEAZARIO AT NOON.— A DROWSY VILLAGE. 165 

beef, and large quantities of red and green peppers and 
garlic. Here there is a mud coop, there a mud oven. Kids 
lambs, pups, and little swarthy brats tumble over each other 
in great jollity, right in the scorching glare of the sun. 
The merest little pod of a rascal had nothing on but a belt 
and a mighty dagger. 

The soil here is of an incredible fertility, as is shown by 
the yield of wheat, and the great number of people sup- 
ported on these narrow slices of bottoms. There were 
colossal pear-trees, bending under their puckering and mis- 
erable fruit, and plenty of vapid apples. But the black 
Socorro grapes have In them the brave Spanish blood, fiery 
and heady, though they lack that exquisite and indescribable 
French nothingness, which is the soul of champagne. But 
those incomparable El Paso onions — they atone for all 
lackings. Many a one, great and sweet, did we eat raw, 
in our ravenous hunger for vegetables, and thought them 
better than whitsours. 

The people were all asleep at noon when we passed 
through San Eleazario, and as I walked down that long 
street, between the low, mud-built walls, I thought again of 
my lonely and wondering stroll through the echoing solitudes 
of Pompii. Dreary and dismal were those blank walls, 
without window, or shutter, or shade, or awning, while the 
wonderfully white and pitiless sunshine of the Rio Grande 
shook and shimmered unrestrained. What a weird, ghostly, 
shuddering march was that of ours, through that sunken 
and fiery street, beneath the rain-spouts on the roofs, strain- 
ing far out, like imps on their bellies, to stare down upon 
the intruders. Not a soul was abroad in all the village, 
save here and there, one of those old shriveled women who 
never sleep, perched like a witch on the roof to watch her 
garden. 

We could peer through the tiny wooden gratings into 



106 MEXICAN BEAUTIES.— STREET SCENES. 

rooms cool, and silent, and dark. Like poor Steele in his 
cups, when he tore down the curtains at the Rose, these 
simple villagers " have no secrets here." The noise occa- 
sionally awakened a sleeper, and a pair of bewitching black 
eyes would peep through the grating, and then the white 
curtain would flash across. These absurd, mousing Amer- 
icans ! They have no more sense than to keep awake at 
noon, and go prowling about ! 

The very dogs, lying in the hot dust beneath the eaves, 
were true Mexicans, for if kicked aside, they only slunk 
away a little, then sneaked up and silently snapped the 
intruder's heels. Then a cur more cantankerous than the 
others would dash into the herd, and it would surge like a 
stupendous billow over some miserable jacal, or some 
ancient and evil-smelling corral of goats, and trample their 
venerable whiskers in the dust. 

Later in the day we passed through another village, and 
found the streets narrow as usual, but agog now with the 
slow and indolent stir of Mexican life. Pretty and graceful 
girls — there are none other — glided along in white bodices 
and the inevitable scarlet sashes, holding over their heads 
their bright-colored rebozos. They pinch them together 
so archly under their chins that their round faces and black 
eyes look like a picture in a frame. And they are so very 
numerous in the streets just now ! And they are so very 
pretty ! And they look upon these shaggy, and big-bearded, 
and savage Texans so very graciously ! 

A wrinkled and ancient hag, with her coarse hair trailing 
blackly down her shoulders, squatted under a bush-canopy 
in the plaza, with a basket of pears. 

"How much a dozen?" I asked. 

" Quatro reales, senor. Muy huenas perasP And she 
began rapidly to fumble them into my hands, as if the bar- 
gain were already clenched. But they were wretched 
knurly things, so I started away. 



FORT BLISS— FRANKLIN— EL PASO. 167 

" 0, senor, tres reales ! three bit. Good peareys. Come 
back." 

I turned and looked at them, then started again and 
went several steps, as if in good earnest. 

" 0, senor, you buy ; two bit. Yery good. Come back. 
Two bit, senor" 

I took the pears for that, not because they were worth 
anything whatever, for I fed most of them to the next pig, 
but because she had deigned at last to speak English. 

Weary and many were the days we journeyed up the 
Rio Grande. Every morning at sunrise the eastern sierra, 
beneath the sun, would be most intensely and brilliantly 
blue, and the western linten-colored. At sunset this would 
be reversed. 

Fort Bliss stands on a little crescent shelf of shore, nearly 
level with the river. What with the gravel walks, smooth 
as if dressed with a jackplane, the rows of whitewashed 
trees, the long white-stuccoed barracks, the grim, old, 
shining cannon, and the pacing sentinels, we seemed almost 
at home again. 

On both sides of the river the bottom narrows in to a 
point at the outlet of the pass, and on one point stands 
Franklin, on the other El Paso. We could see nothing of 
El Paso, though it is miles in length, except a few yellow 
moresque spires above the long wall of cottonwoods. In 
Franklin we found pretty stuccoed* houses, in American 
style, linen coats, wrangling lawyers with their legs on the 
tables, sherry cobblers (without ice), streets wide and shaded 
by great trees, and — better than all else — a post-office with 
letters from home. 

The sierras here round grandly in, to form the famous 
Pass of the North, and approach each other parallel within 
a mile, for a distance of about five miles. The sloping 
deserts of gravel on both sides of the river are compressed 



168 



THE PASS OF THE NORTH. 



into an elevated plain, through which, is trenched the Hio 
Grande. There is no sublimity of mountain grandeur at 
all, but the panorama is highly impressive and even impos- 
ing, by reason of its mighty vistas, its vast deserts, its 
blue-stretching sierras, and the cheerful greenery of the 
river region, like a flat-iron for shape, with its point shoved 
into the pass. 

From the haggard, and scarred, and ghastly heights of 
the plain you look down on the river, and feel that there 
is fertility yet left in the world somewhere. Over on the 
Mexican side you see pale straw-colored, or milky, or rich 
creamy cliffs of limestone, some of them wavy-streaked 
with yellowish amber, like gigantic agates. The exquis- 
itely tender green of the mountain mesquite, dotting with 
little clumps these mellow and milky cliffs, gives indescrib- 
ably beautiful effects of color. 

Thus, in more senses than one, the view I had of Texas 
in leaving it, as Dr. Johnson said of Scotland, was the 
finest I saw. 



W1WK 



m>$wm 




CHAPTER XIII. 
AMONG THE ENAMELED HILLS. 

,EFORE we entered New Mexico, we met a little 
shabby man, on a little shabby, mouse-colored mule. 
On his head he wore a Mexican sombrero, from 
under which peered out two small eyes, which evidently 
were not made for nothing. He never looked anybody 
in the face, but he asked a great many questions — not about 
cattle at all — and took a good many side squints at the 
herd. 

A day or two after, somehow or other — nobody could 
tell precisely — we met him again. Soon afterward it so 
happened that we overtook him, and we began to feel now 
that we were quite well acquainted, and that he was a very 
valuable person to us, he gave us so much useful informa- 
tion. Some shook their heads, but indeed I don't see how 
we could have dispensed with him at all. He seemed to 
know the entire country round about, and told us so kindly 
where the best grazing grounds were to be found. He 
staid with us in camp one night, " seeing it happened that 
he was belated," and amused us to a late hour with Indian 
stories, which were very harrowing and blood-curdling. 
In fact, the hair on one man's head stood up to such a de- 
gree that it hoisted his hat off. A night or two afterward 
we heard an unaccountable number of Indian yells around 
our camp, which were exceedingly hellish and terrific; 
and the next day we found many moccasin tracks in the 
road. 

8 



170 THE VALLEY OF THE RIO GRAXDE. 

After that we never saw our kind informant more ; but 
in the due lapse of timesw^ate bread which was fermented 
with his yeast. % 

Meanwhile, from the elevated sandy desert near Los 
Cruces, we will look down upon the valley of the Eio 
Grande in its noblest proportions. This desert stretches 
back to the Organ Mountains, which, with their silver pipes 
of pinnacles, stand so lordly up in the blue galleries of 
heaven. The old, adventurous Spaniards, if they did a 
little too often seek to square accounts with their neglected 
saints by giving their names to mountains, nevertheless 
had an eye to the resemblances of nature, and at least never 
perpetrated such hideous vulgarities as Ilog-eye and Shirt- 
tail Canyon. 

Looking toward the valley, we see an immeasurable con- 
tiguity of corn, just coming into floss and tassel, or a piece 
of a wheat field, full of shocks, or one of those fabulous 
meadows of alfalfa, mown five times a year, and yielding 
$1,200 per acre. Here at least laziness is sense, for it 
saves the scattered trees, which wade up to their knees in 
the corn, all along the distant river. On the Mexican 
side of the Rio Grande a huge section is knocked clean 
out of the sierra, and a singular, reddish-purple plain 
sweeps back through the gap, till it rounds down out of 
sight. Over it hang some " shadow-streaks of rain." 

Down in the valley, among the white encampments and 
the vast herds ; sleepily chewing the cud, or just toppling 
over into the afternoon siesta, a Mexican in a red gala shirt 
and a straw sombrero has just thrown the lazo over a 
steer. His little mustang buckles down to it mightily, and 
tugs the sullen brute along, while the assistant runs along 
behind, and twists his tail, or pricks his sides with the re- 
morseless goad. 

Here come a ranchero and his spouse, on a ridiculously 
little nag, hurrying home from Los Cruces before the rain. 



BREAKING A MUSTANG. 171 

The woman has the saddle, and sits facing to the right, 
but the man behind has both stirrups, the reins of the 
bridle, and the woman. He hugs her so tightly around 
the waist that she turns unmistakably red in her black face. 
Or is it because everybody in camp laughs, and this red- 
ness is a blush ? It was such a funny sight, like two well 
developed baboons on a galloping goat, with their feet 
almost dragging on the ground. 

The Mexicans are exceedingly keen in a barter, and sel- 
dom failed to overreach the Texans. "Whenever we were 
near a village, they would swarm around us, both men and 
women, apparently determined to get what little money 
there was in the train ; and our men seemed to lose their 
senses, and were, as they said, " bound to trade something 
anyhow." A good American horse, a little jaded perhaps, 
or two or three cattle, with some contemptible boot of 
onions or such things, were freely given for a mustang, an 
animal which I detest more than a mule. 

Yonder you see a crowd around a North Alabama giant, 
who is trying to break his new acquisition. The execra- 
ble beast, with a rag tied around his eyes, rears and 
plunges, then runs backward, then forward again, and 
" bucks." Then he stands still, and kicks up more than a 
score of times, while the crowd roars with laughter. Now 
he reaches round, in his raging hatred, and tries to masti-, 
cate his rider's knees ; now he lies down and rolls over ; 
now he gets up, and runs like a thief, and stops so sud- 
denly that the rider goes over his head, and alights upon 
his pate. Now he is up again, and has the beast down on 
the ground. He sits on his head, he tweaks his ears, he 
jounces himself up and down on his belly, he tickles him 
in certain spots reputed to possess a mysterious efficacy 
and connection with damnableness. 

Now he is up and astride of him again, and the beast 
behaves himself much better. He is conquered. " Ex- 



172 FRIGHTENED BY INDIANS. 

perientia does it." But you may ride a mustang once a 
week, and you will have to conquer him over again every 
time. 

Yonder in the chaparral a paysano runs swiftly along, 
trailing his long tail-feathers in the dust, in pursuit of a 
snake. One can almost accuse Nature of injustice here, 
for this bird has poor, dusty-looking plumage, cannot fly, 
and has no song but a sort of clucking or thrumming, like 
the noise of a bone castanet. It is a shy bird, and seems 
to feel as if it were treated unfairly, for there is in its poor 
cluck now and then a note of touching sadness, as if, with 
the soul of Procue imprisoned in its body, it were bewail- 
ing its hard destiny. If we had the wonderful ring of 
Canace, by wearing which, 

" There is no foule that fleeth under heven, 
That she we shalle understand his Steven," 

what should we hear ? Do birds ever really mourn ? To 
our ears, accustomed to sounds that express grief, they 
seem to at times. To my ear, the warble of the bluebird 
is the voice of deep melancholy trying to be cheerful, 
smiling through its tears, as it were ; but the cluck of the 
paysano seems to be the wail of utter and hopeless des- 
pair. 

When we reached Fort Selby, and were about to cross 
the river, there appeared among us a government beef-con- 
tractor for New Mexico and Arizona, and some were so 
malicious as to think we then had an explanation of the 
terrific Indian whoops with which we had been serenaded. 

There was one of the owners of the herd, who had a 
big, short body, and a big head. His face was like a small 
ham of bacon, but less expressive, rimmed with short, 
black whiskers. He was very conceited, and very silly, 
and very cowardly, and his name was Henry. The Indian 
stories of the cunning emissary had greatly frightened 



HENRY SELLS OUT— DIVIDING TIIE CATTLE. 173 

him, and he now sold his share to the contractor at a 
ridiculously low figure, and they at once set about the te- 
dious work of separating them. 

The scene is a vast, sandy desert, faintly greened with 
grass, sweeping back to the Organ Mountains, and in the 
front distance Fort Selden, miles away by the river. Here 
and there is a dead sage-bush, sprawling flat in a gray ro- 
sette upon the ground, or a little ccmutillo bush, with 
leaves like jointed knitting-needles. 

Every herdsman is on duty to-day, riding slowly around 
the monster herd. Half a dozen owners end their delib- 
erations in the Captain's marque, mount their superb 
steeds, and lope leisurely away across the plain to the cat- 
tle. The little stout man, Henry, with the red face, 
" tosses up " with his tall partner, George, for first choice. 
George wins. He surveys the herd a moment. 

" Cut out that black fellow with the lop-horn," he 
quietly orders one of the herdsmen. The man rides in 
and puts his well-trained horse behind the one designated. 
He works him slowly out to the periphery of the herd, 
then quickly spurs up, whereupon the horse hunts him 
swiftly out, following all the animal's dodges so closely 
that he finds himself irresistibly projected in a straight 
line. 

" Cut out that blue one, with a cross and an under-bit 
in the left," cries Henry, with much importance. 

Another herdsman hunts him out in the same manner. 
George orders out a third. Thus they alternate, the con- 
tractor keenly looking on the while, and occasionly con- 
sulting with Henry aside. So the work goes bravely on, 
until the herd of those parted off begins to assume consid- 
erable proportions, and the weary horses are relieved by a 
fresher relay. Then a dispute arises about a " maverick," 
that is, a stray they had picked up in Texas. 



174 AX INSULTED IIERDSMAX. 

" But I say, Henry," says George, riding a few steps 
closer to the herd, " that animal is my private property, 
not subject to choice." 

" But he haint got a ray-wheel on his gob." 

" But he's got a swallow-fork on his nipper." 

" I thought yourn had a bottle on the clod." 

"No, he didn't. " 

Contractor, (riding up with the virtuous deprecation of 
a mediator, and a cunningly feigned and slightly contempt- 
uous magnanimity,) "I'd rather give you the steer, sir, 
than quarrel about him this way." 

George, ( pretty tartly,) " Thank you, sir. I buy all my 
cattle." 

Henry, ( gesturing frantically, and spurring toward the 
man,) " Cut him out, will you! D'ye hear, you fool?" 
As the herdsman does not start, Henry rides furiously 
upon him, whereupon the herdsman quickly pulls out his 
revolver. At this, the blustering coward wheels his horse, 
which, with a Texan instinct, rears backward almost upon 
his haunches, as if knowing well what a revolver means 
in New Mexico. Both horses make a pirouette, flinging 
the sand in the air. The herdsman gives a fiendish yell. 
Henry spurs for dear life and bends low over the pommel 
of his saddle while the herdsman follows hard after, click- 
ing his revolver. The desert rings with laughter. They 
dash through the smaller herd, and scatter it to the four 
w T inds. When the herdsman has chased him long enough 
for his amusement, he wheels and returns. The other, as 
soon as that wicked revolver is out of sight, also comes 
back, much crest-fallen. The division proceeds. 

We crossed the Bio Grande at the lower end of the ter- 
rible Jaruada del Muerto. The river here bowls with 
great violence against a low rocky bluff, then turns away 
in a broad and quiet stream. In this bluff there is a singu- 



ACROSS THE RIO GRANDE— A SERENADE. 175 

lar crevasse or shute, sloping to tlie water's edge ; and in 
tins they would put a hundred cattle at a time, then run, 
and wring their arms, and scare them into the water. 

When we were encamped on the other side, there came 
another drove after us, the herdsman of which ranged 
themselves along the bank below the chute, with revolvers, 
to prevent the cattle from swimming back. They fired 
broadside after broadside into the water among them, and 
the bullets ricocheted right among our tents with a diabol- 
ical screech. I suddenly had occasion to examine a minute 
flower close to the ground, but our Texans stood about and 
never winked. At last one of them, an odd blunt genius, 
went to the edge of the bank, drew his revolver, and fired 
a ball into the water so that it howled among the offenders 
on the other side. "With a perfectly unmoved countenance, 
he called to them ; — 

" You didn't hear nothin' over thar ? Eow, when you 
want to do yer seranadin ', do it when you orter, at night." 

Forgetting that the river was now between us and the 
fort, we slept, as usual, without guards, and somebody stole 
nineteen horses, untying some halters from the very wagons 
men were sleeping under. It was believed that the Apaches 
did it; but it was not Apaches who ate our roast beef, for 
they only carried the spider away a rod or so, and there 
were unmistakable indications of tobacco-chewers around 
it on the ground. Whatever crimes the savages may do, 
in their natural state they do not chew tobacco. 

The mountains above the ferry are reddish with jasper 
conglomerate. We passed out through a mighty gorge of 
linten-gray. As we went farther out, the walls grew darker, 
and the clouds began to lower ominously. Then there 
burst upon us an awful tempest of wind and rain, wrapping 
us in Memphian and appalling blackness, so that in the 
very noonday we stood in darkness, and heard the moun- 



176 THE PICTUEE-GALLERIES OF NEW MEXICO. 

tains roar, and the rain seeth and hiss, and the waters rage 
in the gullies. 

We passed up now into the picture-galleries of New 
Mexico, which I shall never forget. As they remove all 
things whatsoever from a room in the Yatican, and hang 
in it, alone in their matchless beauty, the master-pieces of 
Raphael and Domenichino, so Nature clears these her gal- 
leries of all wheat, and corn, and trees, to paint upon the 
hills her peerless frescoes. Morning and evening and at 
noon, with varying shades more delicate than Correggio's, 
she plies her " sweet and cunning hand." 

The first morning after we left the river, we found our- 
selves in the middle of an immense grassy plain, in a circle 
of these enchanted hills. The reader, following my poor 
descriptions, will doubtless weary, but I beg him to have 
patience with me, while I attempt to enumerate some of 
these colors, for my own satisfaction, at least. 

The sun is an hour high above the river hills, which 
show no color but an intensely brilliant azure. But on top 
of them floats a frill or ruffle of fog, which the lazy breeze 
is rolling out round, like one of those slubs of wool spun 
by our grandmothers, and which, at the end of the sierra, 
it twists off in handfuls, which seem to be no common fog, 
but, in this wonderful sunlight, globes of molten silver. 

Farther round toward the south the hills straggle apart, 
and swoon away in the far dimness. Only a few tops of 
peaks are visible above the plain, as when, from a steady 
deck, one beholds the billows rolling on the uttermost rim 
of the Atlantic, against a beautiful sky. 

Still farther round there stand twin pinnacles alone, 
reaching a little higher above the plain. The sun bathes 
them in a soft dove-color. Another summit stands quite 
alone, in the mellowest and most tender lilac. 

Yonder is a long, grim looking fortress, with a brown 



A BEAUTIFUL LANDSCAPE PICTURE. 177 

ledge for its parapet wall. Its sloping scarp is covered, 
like the plain, with leaden grama grass, on which the rainy 
season has just combed np a nap of tender green. 

Toward the southwest, and nearer to us, is a chain of 
separate hills, round as Scioto mounds, and every one abso- 
lutely faultless, smooth and clean as a shaven lawn. No 
hills in vulgar atmospheres shine like these, as the sun and 
the clouds skim over them, in their pretty races. The 
greenest ripen with a sudden blush of gold, like a half- 
turned orange on the banks of the sunny Opelousas ; one 
that is paler green mellows in the sunlight like a jenneting, 
almost ripe. 

Far away to the west, through a gap, a low hill seems to 
be vomiting up the solar spectrum. No, it is one of those 
colored fountains, which they know how to make so fairy- 
like in Berlin. But see, there go up smoke and mist, and 
all the heavens above and around it are muffled in thick 
darkness, as of showers of ashes and lava. It is Vesuvius. 
No, it is only the end of this morning's rainbow grown fast 
there, and broken off. It seems almost a demonstration of 
the Pythagorean theory, as expounded by Ovid, that earth 
melts into mist, and mist into flame. 

North of the gap there is a long hill, which looks like a 
red-tiled roof, grown green with mold, and smirched with 
clumps of moss. 

Quite near us is an enormous rugged hill. Up its lower 
slopes the dull grass of the plain creeps with imperceptible 
steps of shades ; from the leaden-green to the gray of pop- 
lin, which a flaw ruffles with a sudden shiver of silver ; then 
to a fine russet ; an indescribably rich golden-russet ; ugly 
linten ; then a light indigo, tinged with purple. The 
majestic turret towers a thousand feet above the plain, in 
that soft rich brown I have seen in Perugino's pictures, in 
which, however innocent and doll-like may be his figures, 
8* 



178 CURIOUS APACHE SUPERSTITION. 

our eyes are sated with a quiet richness never surpassed by 
the moderns. 

Ah ! how shall I describe the dear delight and intoxica- 
tion that came over my eyes, as they gazed upon this 
wreath of hills, painted only with simple stones, and grass, 
and sunbeams ? Pitiful were his soul who would think an 
evil thought here; pitiful as that of Bunyan's man, who 
kept on raking with his muck-rake when the angel offered 
him a shining crown. 

At Cook's Canyon we had a singular illustration of 
Apache character. In this pass, which is a decidedly ugly 
one, a horde of these savages secreted themselves, a few 
days before we arrived, and pounced upon an emigrant 
train, which they thought they were strong enough to 
murder — for the dastardly villains will never attack, unless 
they are ten to one — but the Texans valorously stood their 
ground, and the Apaches finally ran away, howling lus- 
tily. As usual with them, they left their dead behind. 
The consequence was that we were perfectly safe, and all 
trains coming after us would be, till sometime late in that 
following autumn. 

Can the reader imagine why ? It was not so much be- 
cause they had been beaten there, as it was because the 
superstitious Apache will not fight again in a place where 
one of his tribe has been killed, until the grass grows again. 

It is a curious superstition. Lucan says the Druids be- 
lieved that the soul of the fallen warrior straightway entered 
the body of one of his comrades, there to renew the fight, 
which would be thoroughly characteristic of tkefuria Cel- 
tica, at least ; but the Apache seems to think the soul of 
the dead man climbs into some body that hasn't been hurt 
yet, and runs away as fast as Satan will let him. Or does 
the Apache, in his immeasurable haughtiness, believe that 
he, being a son of Mature, is protected or deserted, as the 



THE MIRAGE. 179 

ease may be, by some genius loci ; and that liis defeat in 
the place is a token of its displeasure, which he must wait 
for the growing grass to signify has become appeased ? I 
don't suppose he troubles himself much with any such 
philosophy. * 

In coming up from the Rio Grande, we crossed a succes- 
sion of noble tables, barred like a griddle with low parallel 
Cordilleras. Generally the wagons rolled right through on 
a grassy isthmus of plain, but there are a few savage 
gorges, bristling with agave, and the trenchant bear-grass, 
and palmilla. 

On one of these broad plains we passed an immense and 
beautiful lake of mirage, the most wonderful I ever beheld. 
Near us it had the grayish-brown and watery glimmer 
of ice, and the stout trunks of palmilla looked like soldiers, 
with their muskets at a shoulder, frozen to their knees in 
the ice-field. Far out in it were some knolls like islands, 
and there the tiny billows, in the purple and argent sheen 
of the sunlight, wimpled in lazy races along the utter- 
most edge of that delusive nothingness, dancing against 
the sky, and tumbled, wantonly dallying, on the bosom of 
hyacinthine, imaginary sands. O, that I had wings like 
yon swallow, that I might fly away to those Happy Isles, 
those— 

"Far-off isles enchanted 
Heaven has planted 
With the golden fruit of Truth ;" 

or a ship like the Argo, that I might sail in quest of their 
purple shores ! There might we learn of our hereafter ; 
might hear what Minos heard when he talked with Jove, 
and see what Tantalus saw in the circle of the immortal 
gods. 

On each of these plains, as we mounted slowly up, the 
grass grew thinner and more meager, and the last one be- 
fore we reached the valley of the Mimbres has nothing but 



180 A MEXICAN FANDANGO. 

bushes. It is the cockloft, where good Mother Nature 
keeps her dried herbs. In the freshness of the dewy morn- 
ing there came up a sweet savor from the bergamot-bush, 
and from some invisible source a most exquisite perfume 
like sassafras. 

For the valley of the Mimbres let the reader conceive 
of a book of prairie, opened out nearly flat, with a book- 
mark of willows aud cotton woods reaching down to the 
middle. It lies under the shadow of majestic green and 
piney mountains, worthy of Yermont. Out of these issues 
the Mimbres, a stout and noisy creek, wonderfully pure, 
cold, and clear, and rattles down a matter of a dozen miles, 
and then perishes in these remorseless plains. 

In the village of Rio Mimbres we went to a wretched 
jumping jig, which they called a fandango, wherein black- 
eyed maidens with scarlet sashes, and gaudy ruffians with 
their pistol-buts glinting in the yellow candle-light, skipped 
about in a low room. The guitar seemed to have the quin- 
sy. The women sat around the room on benches, and if you 
wanted a partner you only had to step out on the floor and 
wink at one of them. There were none but Mexican 
women present, but there were only two or three of the vil- 
est sort of Mexican men about, and even these appeared to 
regard the matter with contempt, and took no part in the 
dancing. 

Ah ! Brother Jonathan and Mr. John Bull, what be- 
comes of your proud theory of the " extirpating Saxon " 
in these frontier villages ? Whose language do these little 
mongrel jackanapes, these young Mexican Partheniae, 
speak — yours, or that of the renowned Sancho Panza? 
Perhaps you don't understand bad Spanish. Do these 
poor Mexican girls learn English ? or do their paramours 
rather learn Spanish ? It is wonderful how the language 
of those grand old hidalgos, even when spoken by these 



AX ENCHANTED DESERT. 181 

mongrels, holds its own against the sharp and thrifty incur- 
sions of Americans. Even so is it in Tyrol, where the in- 
dolent and sunny children of Italy, though almost incom- 
parably inferior in moral stamina and intellectual vigor to 
the Germans, see their language steadily gaining. My 
brave and "enterprising" countrymen, know you not that 
these wretched villagers, living in the Apache's land, are 
indebted for their very existence to the presence of less 
than a dozen of you ? and yet you learn their language, and 
not they yours ! 

We journeyed a great many miles up a sloping plain, to 
Cow Spring, and a long way beyond that we entered a 
mighty valley, or rather a slightly depressed plain, running 
east and west. The watershed between the Gulf and the 
Pacific does not consist of a single ridge, but is nearly fifty 
miles broad. On both sides of the watershed the mountain 
ranges run parallel north and south, but the two which in- 
close this valley are hauled round at right angles with the 
others. Hence there is an area fifty miles long and thirty 
wide, which has no drainage- into either ocean. Along the 
middle of this valley the water settles in winter half an 
inch deep on hundreds of thousands of acres, which are 
destitute of all vegetation whatsoever ; but when we passed, 
these vast spaces, called playas, were solid and yellow as 
beaten gold, except here and there, where the nitrous or 
saline efflorescence had electroplated them with silver. 

A strange and wonderful sight it was, here on the very 
top of the continent, to stand at a distance and watch our 
long caravan roll on across this enchanted desert, level as 
the sea, which at high noon-day was too glaringly bright 
to gaze upon. 

My mess-mates occasionally made themselves merry at my 
expense, on account of Black Bell, the wench I have spoken 
of before, so called to distinguish her from another Bell, 



182 THE BELLES OF THE TRAIX. 

the youthful belle of the train. I would saunter on a con- 
siderable distance ahead of the wagons, profoundly medi- 
tating on some 'trifles, totus in illis, or botanizing, and she 
would tag along after me, also botanizing, to wit ; extract- 
ing the thorns from her flesh. Poor thing ! in this journey 
she must have pulled out about thirteen hundred prickles 
from her feet, for they were so large that they hit all the 
chaparral within a limited number of rods. 

In all the Mexican villages we passed through I read but 
two words — yesterday, tomorrow. " Yesterday we did as 
our forefathers used to do ; to-morrow we will do likewise. 
Give me another cigarrito." 

San Eleazario, Socorro, Ysleta, Las Cruces, Dona Ana, 
Hio Mimbres — beautiful and sonorous names are they all, 
but how much abject squalor and wretchedness they cover ! 
One vulgar Texan Jonesville is worth them all. 

It is amusing to observe the Mexican alongside the lord- 
ly citizen of Texas. He is generally about four inches 
shorter. He wears shoes, like a slave, and not boots to 
tuck his trowsers into. He does not wear a revolver open- 
ly, in sight of all men, but a sneaking dagger, concealed. 
Approach and ask him questions. He does not answer 
roundly, but with a whipped softness of sj)eech, screwing 
his face to yours like a Neapolitan commissionaire. He 
comes into camp and speaks Spanish a little, but keeps his 
English ear open. He grins, and counts your cattle. Xext 
morning your favorite yoke of oxen is gone, and you race 
up and down in the chaparral all the forenoon, distracted, 
but about noon — remarkable coincidence ! — you meet that 
same Mexican. You tell him your troubles. You wipe 
your reeking forehead. You excite his compassion. For 
about five dollars he will agree to search ; " as he knows 
the country better than you do, perhaps he might succeed." 
In an hour he brings them. It is wonderful ! 



TIIE MEXICAN OF THE BORDER. 183 

All day long he sits cross-legged under a cottonwood, 
with two melons and seven very pale hen's-eggs. When 
you look that way, he grins ; when you botanize, he brushes 
away the mosquitoes. 

Last night your best horse was stolen by Mexicans. O, 
that is nothing. " Antonio, come here. I have lost my 
horse. He was bright bay, had a left fore-foot white, 
and roached mane." You show him a new gold eagle ; he 
nods, he understands. To-morrow night he sleeps in the 
same blanket with the thief, rises at midnight, sticks his 
dagger into his heart, and brings your horse. 

Owing partly to the scampish doings of many emigrants 
in their gardens, partly to their repugnance to the caras 
blancas, they seldom liked to have us encamp near their 
houses, though they were glad to have us remain at a con- 
venient distance for traffic. Hence they invariably lied to 
us, when they told us the distance to the next place, and to 
make their lies more gratuitous always added, when they 
mentioned the number of miles, no mas (no more). 

" Why do you Mexicans always lie VI I asked a clownish 
fellow with whom I was talking. 

" O, no senor," said he, looking at me with a dazed- ex- 
pression, as if he were not certain he had understood, " we 
always tell the truth." 

Now, I admire that fellow. He was consistent. The 
Cretan poet said that all Cretans were liars, whereby he 
told the truth for once, and disgraced his island ; but this 
poor fellow was consistent with himself and all his country- 
men, for he lied to the last. 

I hope it may not seem impertinent in a pedestrian to 
speak his little piece, in the very old and stale debate on 
Mexican annexation. 

Firstly, I think we had better not go down into that 
country, lest we might be assassinated. The Mexicans are 



184 SHALL WE AXXEX MEXICO ? 

not to be blamed for this proverbial tendency of theirs, 
because it comes from the atmosphere, as may be abundant- 
ly proven by the fact that an American, residing below 
the northern cactus line, in the second generation issues a 
pronunciamiento quarterly, and in the third generation has 
an irresistible inclination to dirk an alcalde. But the ef- 
fects of this tendency are very injurious, nevertheless, how- 
ever innocent may be its origin ; and the fewer victims we 
expose to its action, the more humanity will be benefited. 
In one of Bismarck's private letters he uses this expres- 
sion ; " I am grateful to God for every tie that binds me 
closer to myself." Whatever we may think of that senti- 
ment for an individual, for a nation, and above all for a re- 
public so vast and embracing so many races as does ours, it 
is supreme wisdom. It is the secret of strength. Can any 
man in the possession of a modicum of sense believe that 
the addition of Mexico will add anything to our strength, 
to our riches, or to any desirable element whatever ? What 
is Mexico ? It is the religion and laws of Spain, which in 
the eye of civilization and for the great uses of God are 
the most worthless of Christian Europe ; and the nature 
and vices of the Aztecs, which were the most contemptible 
of heathen America. Asa clever writer says, it is " a sla- 
very which is of the Church, and a liberty which is of the 
Devil." The sole redeeming thing in this medley of all 
that was worst in two continents was the old Spanish valor. 
But what was that worth when it had been corrupted 
through a few generations with Aztec blood ? When Mex- 
ico revolted at last, and became independent, all the Span- 
iards within her borders made haste to declare themselves 
the sons of Montezuma. In that sublime hour when the 
Declaration was proclaimed by the Fathers, what English- 
man bethought himself to claim the lineage and heirship 
of Powhatan? 



THE BLUEBEARD OF NATIONS. 1S5 

Mexico has the fatal gift of beauty. It is no superstition 
to recognize and start back before the strange and dark fa- 
tality which invests that weirdly beautiful but unhappy 
country. There is not on all the earth another land which 
has become the grave of so many empires of conquest and 
ambition. Mexico is the ancient Bluebeard of nations, in 
whose gorgeous palaces have ignominiously perished all 
brides who have wedded themselves to its inexorable genius 
of annihilation. 

Second, as to the Mexicans themselves. In the first place, 
of all things which are certain in American affairs, the most 
certain is that the Mexicans do not desire us as masters. 
The only thing which could possibly reconcile them to our 
rule would be the retention of Mexican officials throughout, 
in which case they would be no better governed than before. 
But this is utterly improbable. Nothing would do in Mex- 
ico but a standing army, which would create a government 
infinitely worse than the natural and inherent anarchy of 
the country. And then — to say nothing of the consistency 
of one republic dominating vi et armis over another — of 
all forms of human government, a republic is the most un- 
suitable for managing an army. 

If, by anything I have seen of the Mexicans, I have 
earned the right to say one earnest word of advice to my 
countrymen, I would say : Leave Mexico, wholly and in 
all its parts, to its own people. It will be a most melan- 
choly and disgusting spectacle to the patriot — if ever that 
day should come — to see our cherished and historic flag 
polluted, by being dragged through the infamous, bloody, 
and accursed politics of Mexico. 




CHAPTER XIV. 
UNDEE GOLDEN AND EOSY SKIES. 

NE of tlie most pitiable things in human nature 
is the selfishness which it develops under the 
strain of miseries and lack of water. As illustrat- 
ing this point, a little condensed history of our train will 
be in order, though petty in itself. 

First, a description of the Captain of our train. He was 
a little stout man, with his trousers always in his boots, and 
a feeble smile eternally on his face. His voice was soft and 
pleasant in conversation, and his quiet way of moving about 
and giving his orders in small affairs, but for that evergreen 
smile, would have impressed one with the idea of latent 
power. He had a way of holding his hands behind him 
when he talked, and he would continually rock forward on 
his toes, then come down heavily on his heels, and ever 
grin, grin, grin, and talk in that feeble voice, which seemed 
half-apologetic for his existence. At first he was immense- 
ly popular in camp, partly because of his renown as a ter- 
rible and dreaded partisan in the war of rebellion, partly 
because of his way of riding at times with a thunderous 
rush, leaping in his stirrups, swinging his hat and whoop- 
ing, as in the old, glorious days when he swooped down 
upon the pale aud terror-stricken Yankees like the Blast 
of the Desert. 

I sometimes thought, remembering the vindictiveness he 



SOMETHING ABOUT OUR CAPTAIN. 187 

was said to have shown towards his enemies, and the fren- 
zied energy with which he laid about him in battle, that he 
had become partly demented by excitement. More than 
that he had a wife of a surly and taciturn strength of char- 
acter, by whom he was grieviously hen-pecked. He began 
to become unpopular through several shabby actions he did 
against his men, and the dislike of a few became the secret 
contempt of all, when it was found that, if at any time 
matters came to a desperate pinch, and we needed above all 
things else a sharp and quick authority, he degenerated in- 
to a conspicuous booby. On such occasions he gave very 
few orders, and those were distinguished for their asinine 
absurdity. 

One day it happened, that we traveled long after nightfall 
in quest of water, and encamped at last without any. 
Orders were issued for everybody to start "at crack of 
day; but our cook, having had sense enough to bring 
along a supply of water, rose very early, and quietly set to 
work to get breakfast. In due time the Captain rose and 
went about camp, as usual, roaring out, u Rouse up, boys, 
rouse up, rouse up !" Then he came and squatted down by 
our fire, warmed and rubbed his hands, washing them in 
" imperceptible water," grinned, talked, and looked occa- 
sionally with great confidence and comfort at our coffee-pot. 
But matters had already come to such a pass that Tom did 
not invite him to take a cup, as he had often done. 

Before we were through breakfast, all the Captain's fam- 
ily were np, and grouped about, gazing with envious eyes 
toward our cheery fire, while the wind pro vokingly wafted 
the savory aroma of our coffee-pot straight towards them. 
From the number of cuffs she bestowed on little Sterling, 
it was evident the Mistress Captain was deeply chagrined, 
and would punish us at the first opportunity for having 
been so presumptuous as to have water when they had none. 



188 A FAMILY PLOT— DOUBTFUL CAXYOX. 

She had not long to wait. Again it happened that we 
were obliged to make a dry camp after nightfall. Strict 
orders were promulgated that every wagon should be on 
the road at daybreak. San Antonio had water, as usual, 
but it was only live miles to the well, so he prepared to 
obey with the others. But next morning ever watchful 
Dave, with his Indian ear, noticed an unusual stir around 
the marquee at head-quarters, and prowling about in the 
darkness, he discovered the Captain's kitchen in full blast, 
both the Mistress Captain, and Black Bell bestirring them- 
selves mightily — for the old lady, when she chose to be, was 
a notable housewife. Even the charming Bell was up, and 
had her toilet made — a thing never previously known to 
occur before breakfast. It was manifestly a family plot. 

At once our cook dropped every thing else, and plunged 
into the dough. "We all helped him, one starting the fire, 
another slicing the beef, another grinding the coffee ; and, 
thanks to the Spartan simplicity of our kitchen, we sat down 
around some very good steaks and biscuits only a minute 
or two after the Captain's family. 

Such were some of the petty and contemptible jealousies 
of emigrant life. Of the more disgraceful outbreaks, the 
downright and profane j anglings, I shall say nothing. 

We entered Arizona through the gateway of Doubtful 
Canyon, the gatepost of which is Steen's Peak. In the 
center of the Canyon there is a vast circular chamber, 
gloomily enclosed with sloping walls of galena. Clumps 
of bear-grass dot the sombre hillsides with silver, like the 
sunbursts on fine old Mexican dollars. Here and there a 
wild century-plant sends its branching scape towering thir- 
ty feet in the air, like a great candelabrum — some of its 
upright pods, like gas-burners, still flickering (in August) 
with hazel-yellow flames of flowers. On the hillsides are 
bunches of tasojo, like Pope Urban's budding wand, and 



CLIMBING A MOUNT AIX— BLACK-TAILED DEER. 189 

small mountain cedars, some of which are dead, and spread 
their arms abroad with a strange spectral whiteness, looking 
like those silvery arbores Diana of the chemical lecture- 
room. 

Sweeping halfway round this wall, on its summit, is a 
majestic balustrade of pale porphyry, sometimes in blocks 
as vast as a cathedral. At the ends of it there stand up 
two isolated columns, like mighty beacons; one barely 
spalted off the wall of balustrade, the other leaning threat- 
eningly over, with its huge head beetling a thousand feet 
above the road. The upright one I determined to climb, 
in hope of seeing a mountain sheep, which is seen so rarely 
that it is the subject of almost as much fable as was the an- 
cient hippogriff. 

Hundreds of feet I wriggled and twisted myself up, 
among all manner of scratching things, till I reached the 
top of a jutting spur, where I had the pleasure of seeing 
a black-tailed deer which, probably had never before seen 
a human being. It gazed at me with unmixed wonder and 
without fear, till I approached within a rod. Then it slow- 
ly walked away with a dainty and scornful strut, with its 
neck very stiff and straight up, and nodding a little at each 
step, as if to say, " What a contemptible animal that is ! 
It has no horns." 

Then I commenced scaling the main shaft of rock, now 
clinging in treacherous niches, and now wedging myself up 
in a rift like a chimney-sweep. Near the summit, sure 
enough, there was the nest of a mountain sheep, cosily 
rounded in a niche in the perpendicular wall, and there 
were evidences that the animal had left it only that morn- 
ing. But how on earth did he mount and descend ? There 
were precipitous and solid steeps of rock, six feet high. 
He could pitch down headforemost, and strike on his hard 
little pate, as is the popular fable, but how could he ascend ? 



190 ACROSS THE SAN SIMON PLAIN-APACHE PASS. 

"When he rounds up his little spine in the morning, with 
a long stretch and shiver of matutinal satisfaction, and steps 
upon the edge of his threshold, with his first doorstep hun- 
dreds of feet straight below him — so far, far below him 
that the sharp call of the quail is barely audible — and looks 
out over the infinite green plains of Arizona, what a regent 
of pinnacles is he ! Egad ! it were worth a thousand nights 
in a bed to sleep once where he sleeps, and see in the 
morning what he sees. To sleep within ten feet of the top 
of the Arizona ! 

Then I crawled up to the summit, but it was so very nar- 
row, and there was such wind splitting upon it, that I could 
only lie across the top on my chest. What I saw in that 
giddy moment is known to the gods. I only remember a 
formless world, spinning around beneath me on an upright 
axle, of which I was momentarily the linchpin. 

When I was descending, one of the herdsmen, unaware 
of my absence from the train, and looking out keenly for 
Apaches, drew up his Spencer rifle and fired. The bullet 
came up where I was with a long heart-rending squeal, and 
went spat against the wall a few feet from my head, while 
the great cleft bellowed as with an infant clap of thunder. 

We marched on two days across the San Simon plain, 
and then entered the Apache Pass. This is the most awful 
and stupendous piece of natural savagery on the whole 
route, sombre with its dark walls of granite, and thrusting 
the uppermost, black-looking bushes into the very faces of 
the clouds. But it is more sadly and more frightfully 
memorable for the butcheries that have been perpetrated 
in its hellish caverns by the Apaches. There are many 
hills in it, and the ponderous train dragged on like a 
wounded snake, so that the blackness of night gathered 
down thick upon us while we were yet in the very middle 
of this " horror of great darkness " and of massacre. 



A NIGIIT OF TERROR AND CONFUSION. 191 

Then occurred the most disgraceful exhibitions of cow- 
ardice, treachery, selfishness, and imbecility which happen- 
ed in the whole journey. The last hill was the mightiest 
of all, and on it the foremost teams balked. Then the 
vast herd, collecting in the rear, surged down in the dark- 
ness upon the train in the bottom of the gorge, plunging 
and crushing their weakest to death against the ledges, 
while the screams of frightened women, the yells of mad- 
dened teamsters, and a thousand jangling clamors came up 
from the gorge against the great sombre cliffs, and were 
hurled back into the seething abyss. Where was the Cap- 
tain ? Ah ! if the Apaches' savage eyes glared down upon 
us in that hour from some lofty eyrie, what a howling hell 
of the fiercest human passions they beheld ! If they had 
known their hour ! 

Wearily, wearily the jaded teams, being doubled, drag- 
ged the wagons up the hill, amid such a rain of yells and 
teamsters' oaths as made the place a hell indeed. As soon 
as a majority of them were on the summit, they hurried on 
with the herdsmen out of the pass, leaving the weaker por- 
tion in deadly peril. 

Neither was the comic element lacking. A German 
butcher and a negro were left alone with a wagon, while 
the driver went back with the most of the team to assist 
his neighbor. Though greatly concerned for their personal 
safety, they would not quit the wagon, for it contained 
most of their earthly substance. At last the fat butcher 
had a happy thought. 

" Cudjoe," said he, " I ties a rope on de nigh ox's horns, 
and you on toder, and we trive 'em aheat." 

" But dis hyur ox kick, boss." 

" Kick pe tarn ! Do you want to lose de hair off your 
heat ? You kick him den," replied the other, striking the 
air before his face, as if he were fighting a bumble-bee. 



192 CUDJOE AXD THE GERMAN. 

He proceeded to tie a rope on his ox, and the negro, in 
much trepidation and alarm, attempted to do the same. 
He approached very cautiously, rolling his eyes in the 
direction of the brute's heels, and leaning far forward with 
his hands stretched out toward his head. The wild ox 
turned his head around, and regarded these proceedings 
with unfeigned concern, then snorted and lashed out with 
his hind-leg furiously, whereupon, the negro jumped like a 
kangaroo. 

" Whoa !" 

His teeth were chattering so he could scarcely articulate 
the word. Then the fat butcher tried, but succeeded no 
better. The oxen were becoming alarmed by such unusual 
doings, and when the German gave the word to start, they 
moved off with alacrity. The negro walked on the off 
side, with a club in his hands, but, in watching the team, 
he failed to discover a stone there was in the road, over 
which he stumbled and fell sprawling. Thereupon the 
oxen broke into a gallop, and the last I saw of them, they 
were running down the hill at a great rate, with the little 
fat butcher dangling at the end of the rope. 

Looking down from the Chihuahua Mountains, one re- 
ceives an overpowering impression of the immensity and 
the richness of Arizona. O, the glory and the beauty of 
that fresh, bright world of grass, as I looked down uponit 
on that cloudless morning ! So spotless as was the concave 
of blue above, so spotless was the concave of tender green 
beneath, between those two sierras. 

The next plain is equally as vast, being more than two 
days' journeys in width ; but an immense hollow, hundreds 
of feet in depth and many miles in width, has been eaten 
out along the middle of it by the San Pedro. The broad 
lands along this stream are exceedingly fertile, yielding no- 
ble crops of cereals and vegetables, and will be, in the fu- 



AX ARIZOXIAN APACHE FIGIITER. 193 

tare, tlie seat of a great population. The formation of these 
bottom lands is singular. They are richly clothed all over 
with grama grass ; and on both sides of the river they pro- 
ject far up into the sandy plain in a series of scallops, con- 
stantly eating their way farther into it, by caving down the 
banks. 

There was a little colony a few miles below the crossing, 
and I went down to it to see one Seminole Myers. He 
was a bachelor, living in an adobe hut, in which there was 
a frying-pan, a row of Apache scalps along the wall, a pol- 
ished rifle, a couple of stools, and a goods-box, metamor- 
phosed into a table. He had just brought in an immense, 
cool, blood-hearted melon, into which he plunged his dag- 
ger — he also had two revolvers in his belt — while it cracked 
ahead of the blade, with a crisp and rimy sound, as he cleft 
it into halves. He was a gigantic fellow, dressed entirely 
in buckskin ; had a pair of little eyes, as keen as a hawk's, 
long black hair very much toused, and an immense mass 
of black whiskers and moustache, which reminded me of 
the chaparral in Apache Pass. 

He invited me to sit down, and we munched melon a 
while, and talked of various matters. Then I broached 
Indian affairs. 

" How is the Indian business managed in Arizona ?" I 
asked. 

" It's managed mighty ornary, stranger. Fact, tain't 
managed no way at all. It's jest big dog eat little dog, and 
save up the fur." 

" But which is the big dog ?" 

" Well," said he, cutting off another slice, " don't be 
bashful, stranger. You're no friend of mine ef you don't 
eat that half. Well, it jest depends. Now, I don't want 
to do no braggin' myself, but it kinder strikes me when the 
blood-colored devils gits after me, the fur gits saved the 



194 SEMINOLE MYERS OX IXDA1X AFFAIRS. 

way it orter be " — jerking his dagger over his shoulder at 
the scalps on the wall. " But the fellers ranchin' over on 
the Hassayanxp', an' roun' Wickenburg, an' thar', why, the 
redskins mostly lifts their har." 

" What ails the Government management in these parts, 
that it don't accomplish more ?" 

" Well now, stranger, when anybody's goin' fur to do 
anything, I like to see 'em do it. Xow, the officers hyur, 
they was a foolin' roun' a long time with ole Cochise thar, 
a wheedlin' of him an' a honeyfuglin' of him, tryin' to 
make treaties or some sich, an' promised him he'd be per- 
fectly safe, an' last they got him to come in, an' go into a 
tent. But their eyes was into their pockets, like them dan- 
dy officers allers has 'em, an'they never nabbed him at last. 
The minit ole Cochise see thar was a bug in the puddin', 
he out with his knife, ripped a hole in the tent, an' jumped 
out. I couldn't sleep fur two nights, a thinkin' of that 'ar 
circumstance. Lettin' him git away that way !" With 
that he drove his dagger half its length into the table, as 
if it were the escaping chief. 

" You seem to think there is no other way to get on with 
the Indians but to use force." 

" If you're goin' to kill 'em with kindness, you mout as 
well try to choke a oystrich to death by stuffin' melted 
butter down its throat with a peggiu-awl. It's plumb 
ridic'lous, the way they do out hyur. Marchin' eighteen 
miles a day, with lobsters, and gingerbread doins, an' apple- 
sass fur to eat onto it, in their wagons, to ketch 'Paches as 
rides eighty miles a day, and thinks nuffin' of it ! An' these 
hyur little caliker popinjays from 2s"ew York — a marchin' 
rigged up in paper collars, and blackin' onto their shoes — 
this hyur kind that's got the rooster onto the kiver — to 
ketch them bloody devils ! Thar aint no use doin' nuthin' 
'less you take along men as kin live on dry beef an' a little 



AN APACHE MASSACRE— WAYSIDE INSCRIPTION. 195 

\ 

sack of pinole, an' every man take his Injun, and ride till 
lie fetches him, or else rides his own hoase's tail off of him. 
All these hyur foolins an' straps the cavalry has is no 'count 
an' wuss nor nuthin'. You caan't ketch no 'Pache with a 
hoss that's got a bit onto both ends of him." 

After some further conversation I departed, but he would 
by no means let me go till he laid a ponderous melon on 
my shoulder. 

When we left the vast plain of the San Pedro, we passed 
through a gap so broad that an army might march through 
it abreast, and entered upon the great Tucson desert. This 
desert is some thirty miles wide, and runs up more than a 
hundred miles northwestward, between two parallel sierras, 
to the Gila. Three thousand square miles of detestable 
chapparal desert — that is the country which the metropolis, 
Tucson, has for its immediate vicinage. The little Cienaga 
runs diagonally across the eastern corner of it, and gradu- 
ally burrows deeper and deeper below the level of the 
ground, till it sinks and disappears. 

Farther down the creek brawls through a narrow sluice 
like a railroad cut, with steep walls which look like copperas ; 
and here the road winds along amid jungles of mighty sun- 
flowers, beneath aspens and cottonwoods which stretch 
across from wall to wall. "What is this written on this 
board ? An Apache massacre ? Thirty-nine negro soldiers 
horribly butchered in one hour by the bloody barbarians ! 
Who can help looking a little nervously about him, and 
peering sharply into the sunflowers? Ah ! how stupid and 
cruel a thing it was to send those "blameless Ethiopians," 
those simple, music-loving, rollicking, loamy-headed sons 
of Ham out here, to hunt on foot the wily and treacherous 
Apache, who, mounted on his fleet mustang, defies pursuit 
like the will-o-the-wisp, and in five minutes so secretes 
himself in the grass that none but another Apache can un- 
earth him. 



196 DEMORALIZED CONDITION OF THE CARAVAN. 

Between this defile and yon mountains there stretches a 
broad plain, as of copperas or verdigris, as if a mighty, 
green sea had been frozen stiff, when it was beating and 
chopping its waves up small. Nothing lives out there but 
the solemn pitahaya, the lonely Sentinel of the desert, 
sucking the pitiless rocks with its roots, and nourishing its 
great sappy core of coolness in this torrid blaze, without a 
sprig, without a leaf, without a flower. How the sun fierce- 
ly shakes those naked mountains in his hands ! They have 
bowels of cool silver, but their brows are hot and haggard. 
Their foreheads are freckled with oxides. They have that 
singular, silver-leaden, drossy appearance one sees often in 
the argentiferous galena of New Mexico and Arizona. 

In. traversing the hideous chaparral, just before we reach- 
ed Tucson, it occurred to me to compare the train with 
what it was when we set out, so great and so stout-hearted, 
from the Texan prairies. 

Nearly all the oxen with which we started dead, and 
their places partly filled by the unhappy cows ; more than 
half of the horses dead or stolen ; many a man down on 
shank's mare, with his big toes looking out of his shoes to 
see how much farther it was — I was having my gay revenges 
now ; the wagons all streaked with grease ; the women 
" looking like frights," as they said, often walking to rest 
the poor cows a little, with their back hair down, and gowns 
as limp as the ghost of Mrs. Gamp in the second-hand 
clothing stores ; the bacon all gone from the wagon-tails, 
and nothing but " petered" beef, fried in flour and water. 

But the most pitiable spectacle of all was the daily 
diminishing herd. One of the owners had been so unwise 
as to start with a large number of young cattle, and all of 
these that were yet alive were now massed in the rear of 
the herd, wabbling slowly along, often compelling the 
herdsmen to dismount to keep them moving. 



GRAND ENTRANCE INTO TUCSON. 197 

Such was the ragged, scarecrow and shirtless caravan 
that made a desperate and famishing stampede through the 
chaparral upon the ragged, scarecrow and shirtless city of 
Tucson. 

Arriving in advance of the train, I procured some water 
from a Mexican woman, and then went out to our camping- 
ground, about, a mile south of Tucson, to witness at leisure 
the magnificent entry of the Legion of the Flying Shirt. 

From the top of Pitahaya Hill I beheld it to my satis- 
faction. Eight at the foot of the hill the little Santa Cruz, 
which one can leap across, runs along, its beautiful waters 
purling, and bubbling, aud gurgling amid the grass. Into 
this surged, and scrambled, and crowded, and pushed, and 
tumbled the thirsty multitude, men, mules, cattle, women, 
horses, drinking till they sensibly lowered the water supply 
of Tucson. 

The Santa Cruz draws a streak of bright green, half-a- 
mile wide, diagonally across the desert parallelogram I have 
mentioned ; and, half on the green, half on the desert, is 
Tucson, without a tree in its streets, a wretched huddle of 
mud-houses, looking like children's works, all flattened atop 
as with a board. Away to the north, directly beyond the 
city, the Santa Catharina Mountains are scarped into forms 
which shame the miserable mud-builders. There is a ma- 
jestic reach of a city wall, with its nodes of battlemented 
turrets ; a noble cathedral, roofed with red tiles, with one 
of its towers half complete, like the Franenkirche of Mu- 
nich ; and farther along, a cluster of white bowlders high 
on the mountains, looking so much like roofs and spires 
that the children of the train were readily induced to be- 
lieve it was Tucson, long before we were in sight of that 
metropolis. 

I lingered on this little hill, and beheld the most impos- 
ing and gorgeous sunset of my recollection, one of those 



198 FATE OF EARLY TUCSON PIONEERS. 

poems of earth which readers will not suffer themselves to 
be troubled with, more eloquent of God than all preach- 
ments of puny men, and which always fill me with an in- 
expressibly sweet and pensive melancholy, till the tears 
come into my eyes and fall. As the sun was setting, the 
moon came up in the opposite quarter, and then the whole 
heavens were barred with brilliant streaks of alternate in- 
digo and crimson, which spanned magnificently across, in 
undiminished splendor, from the eastern to the western 
horizon. Sitting there on the summit of that pretty, taper 
cone till the darkness began to fall, I seemed to see, in the 
dwarfed pitahayas, a thousand soldiers straggling up to 
storm its heights. 

While we were encamped near this delectable city of 
Tucson, one John Hagerman died of a fever, and was buri- 
ed. It was said he was the second American who had ever 
died in that city with his trousers off. Mr. W. E. Denni- 
son, who was killed by the Apaches, was nearly the last man 
left of a colony of one hundred and thirty-five pioneers who 
settled at Tucson in 1857. Almost all the others had 
fallen, sooner or later, at the hand of the relentless 
Apache. 

A few miles south of Tucson the cathedral of San 
Xavier del Bac looms so strangely great and lonesome in 
the midst of this barbarous wilderness. All travelers 
whose accounts I have read mention it only in terms of 
praise, apparently because it seemed the proper thing to 
do, since it really is a wonderful edifice in a desert. But 
intrinsically — after all allowance is made for its unfinished 
tower — it is nothing but a great, heavy, sleepy, Spanish 
Dumb Ox. 

On the other hand, there is nothing more touching in 
history than the constancy with which those poor Papagos 
— deserted by the fathers, swept by the nomadic Apaches 



THE CHAPARRAL CITY OF THE UNION. J/jy 

with a hellish and relentless persecution, preyed upon by 
the sneaking and sponging Mexicans — have' defended its 
venerated walls, dwelling harmlessly beside its base, and 
looking up to it as the oracle and vestibule of Heaven. 
What a lesson of religion, of simple and childlike faith, 
and of devotion might this tribe read the proud paleface ! 

Tucson is the Chaparral City of the Union. The pay- 
sanb's humdrum cluck, like the chuckle of water from a 
bnng-hole, is heard almost in its suburbs ; the jackass rabbit, 
which here is white, throws up its heels at night, before 
the doors of merchandise; and the legislative and judicial 
linen is hung to dry on the chaparral in the back-yard 

I have described enough Mexican towns, with their low 
walls of houses which you might smite with a maul any- 
where without breaking a window ; their sunken streets, 
full of floury dust which is industriously comminuted by 
passengers, loaded asses, and skulking sneaks of dogs, all 
mingling together; and their goat-hurdles in the public 
squares. Toward the west, wdiere the city slopes easily 
down to the green creek-bottom — though they cannot spare 
much of this for municipal uses, and have economically 
used the chaparral for that purpose — there are little flour- 
ishing corn-flelds, and gardens, and pleasant crofts, all 
separated by willow hedges. Here under these old cotton- 
woods, some swarthy women are on their knees, bareheaded 
in the flerce heat, with their long raven hair trailing down 
their necks, washing their clothes on the knarred roots, or 
pestling them with clubs in the pools, or churning them 
up and down therein. 

Let us push aside the scarlet door-curtain which flaunts 
upon the street, and enter the low, cool room, where they 
are playing three-card monte. This man in. the hickory 
shirt, with the collar opened like barn-doors, top-boots, 
fustian trousers, and wide California hat, sweats great 



200 LIFE IN TUCSOX. 

drops, but says no word, as lie sees liis last quill of dust go 
over to his adversary. To-morrow he will return to the 
mines in Apache Pass, without a dollar. The other, 
cool and exquisite in Spanish linen and cuffs, a gaudy and 
sumptuous knave, will go next month to the Legislature. 

Your true American miner has no opinion which is not 
worth hard money, and would feel himself grieviously in- 
sulted by one who should say, " A penny for your thoughts." 
He will weigh you out in a moment the equivalent of his 
convictions in good clean dust. The terse Hudibrastic 
utterance, " Fools for arguments use wagers," is altogether 
too harsh and unjust toward the average miner of America. 
A fool will argue till the morning stars grow dim, that 
Jones will be elected president ; but the gruff gold digger, 
despising the twaddle, yet too proud too yield his opinion, 
says, " Here's §100 on Smith." At once the babbler is 
stilled, even if he go $200 on Jones. " Speech is silver, 
silence is gold ;" but your miner adds, " Argument won't 
go two cents to the panful." 

All this riotous living, this fierce gambling, buffoonery, 
staggering and beastly drunkenness, and this unmitigated 
farce of military protection, are enacted in a city, three 
miles distant from which a man hangs head downward 
from a mesquite, where the Apaches flayed him yesterday, 
and built a fire beneath his head. 

In the streets, soldiers wander vacantly up and down, 
with holes in their elbows and the seats of their breeches, 
but not worn by riding after Apaches. They throng in 
the saloons, and drink down warm cocktails ; two of them 
steady a limp-kneed one home. In the long mud-barracks 
some of them are reading the Bible, more are playing cards, 
betting, swearing, yelling according to the most approved 
precedents of alectoromachy. In the restaurant you can 
get bread and molasses, but the flies devour it before you 



FUNNY OLD MEXICANS. 



201 



can. Gilded officers in the billiard rooms punch the balls 
from morning to night, and every day a man is murdered 
by the Apaches, and his blood dries up in the desert. 

But these funny, old, round-faced, ape-whiskered Mexi- 
cans, living their ninety years and nine on pancakes, beans, 
and red pepper ! It takes three of them to drive a wooden- 
wheeled cart. One walks before the oxen, with his goad 
straight behind him, to poke them in the hips ; another, 
with his goad ready to punch them on the left ; another, 
to punch them on the right. But the Texan, with his rod- 
long whip, and his grand and lazy stride, will guide his 
six, eight, ten yoke majestically through the city, and 
seem to be unconscious of its very existence. 




9* 




CHAPTER XV. 
CAPTTTKED. 

F there be any human discomfort which is not com- 
prehended in being hauled across the continent by 
grass-fed oxen in fly-time, I have not rightly studied 
the wagons and their inmates. In a great company of emi- 
grants, gathered from the fiercely independent and willful 
South, there are at best many discordant elements ; to which 
add the janglings of teamsters and herdsmen, the break- 
downs, the mirings in Serbonian bogs, the sneaking rains, 
the starts and stops, the ox over the chain and the driver 
tugging at his tail to haul him back, the grease spilled over 
your coat, the tent leaking into your ear, the dog taking 
unwarrantable liberties with the frying-pan. 

Then, of all trains on the road, ours was notoriously the 
slowest, for reasons previously indicated in part. Before 
we had traveled a hundred miles, I was satisfied that the 
principal reason why Texans emigrate is to exercise them- 
selves in the following problem : Given grass, wood and wa- 
ter,to find the least amount of traveling that can be done. 

" Come to me, my son, and let me teach you Texan 
arithmetic. No wood is to no water as no grass is to — 
what?" 

" No traveling, sir." 

" Wrong. Traveling day and night. Try again. No 
grass multiplied by no water equals what ?" 

" Dont know, sir." 

„ Ah ! stupid boy ! No oxen, of course " 



WEARY OF CARAVAN LIFE. 203 

Still I staid with the train, because I was afraid of the 
Indians. Bat, as day after day went on, and we saw never 
a redskin, a kind of shame for my cowardice was added to 
my share of the universal disgust ; and in Tucson I deter- 
mined to venture on alone. 

Before I left, the Nothing-at-Steak killed the fatted heif- 
er, and we eat together a half-way supper. Behold us now 
squatted around, Papago-like, clasping our knees in our 
arms on the green sward, while Pitahaya Hill flings over 
us eastward its long mantle of lilac and orange shadows. 
San Antonio prepares the repast. He makes pancakes. 
Does he turn them over with a knife ? No ; he scorns an 
operation so devoid of genius, and, with a dextrous jerk 
of the frying-pan, he causes them to ride aloft, turn a neat 
somersault, and descend upon their backs. 

"We have no " rich puddings and big, and a barbecued 
pig ;" but we have such a roast — on the plains a man will 
eat roast beef any time in the day he can get it, and ask no 
questions for conscience's sake about etiquette — such a roast 
as can be fattened by grama grass alone, tender, well-brown- 
ed, sweet, and juicy with yellow gravy. The man is my 
friend who can make such gravy. 

And so, with a mellow pair of bottles of Cocomango's 
mellowest, pipes and cigars, and certain curious Papago 
hops, we made a night of it. I had resolved to start at 
night, to pass certain perilous points in the darkness, and 
the time was now at hand. Earnestly and unanimously 
they warned me, for the last time, not to make the attempt. 
To all their warnings I replied, substantially, as follows : — 

"You remember that when we left Waxahatchie, we 
were to be shot at on the Brazos ; were certainly to be at- 
tacked on the Concho ; most of us killed and scalped at 
Castle Gap; the reminder burnt alive in Olympia Canyon; 
in Apache Pass all dug up, killed over again and our skins 



204 RESOLVE TO PUSH AHEAD ALONE. 

taken for drums. But what have we seen ? Six of us haye 
seen moccasin-tracks ; one of us saw a palma that he thought 
was a Camanche ; one found a moccasin ; one dreamed, af- 
ter eating too much steak, that an Apache sat on his stom- 
ach. One night, when I laid my head on an ant-hill in 
the darkness, I dreamed, first, that I had the seven-year 
itch, next, that I was scalped. Nay more, my brave com- 
rades, at Fort Selden we saw a horse that the Apaches had 
shot at — and missed. 

" No, my valiant companions, mighty to eat beef, you 
and I respect each other too much to be mouthing these 
old wives' fables, and trying to scare each other. I know 
each of you would stand by me, at the pinch, till he lost 
the number of his mess. You certainly know that I also 
would stand by you — if there were a bush near enough — 
taking notes as hard as ever I could. Then let us have 
done with this cowardly flummery. 

" And now I give you my parting benediction : May 
the beloved partners of your bosoms never wear false hair, 
may your little boys never buy any whistles, and may no 
cactus grow upon your graves. If, as you journey on, you 
find a little heap of bones beside the road, for the remem- 
brance of the good days we have seen together I pray you 
sprinkle over them a handful of dust ; and on that book of 
memory wherein your comrade's faults are written, let a 
little dust gather too." 

Then we solemnly shook hands around our camp fire, and 
there was more than one voice so husky it could scarcely 
articulate " good-bye." As I walked rapidly away into the 
midnight darkness, there was probably not a man in camp 
who did not pity me for my folly, and believe that I never 
would see California alive, or even the banks of the Gila. 

From Tucson the Santa Cruz runs nearly west, and goes 
bobbing in and out, playing bo-peep with the outer world, 



THE SENTINEL OF THE DESERT. 205 

until it takes a final dive. It is supposed to run under the 
desert about ninety miles, and bubble up into the Gila at 
Maricopa Wells. From out its almost impenetrable chap- 
arral many a fatal arrow lias sped on its winged flight 
toward some unfortunate, and I ran the gauntlet with bated 
breath. 

In the morning I found myself up again on the level of 
the great parallelogram, traversing a gigantic forest of pit- 
ahayas, an evergreen colonade, some of them with their 
two arms opposite, rounding gracefully outward then up- 
ward, looking like branched candlesticks. Wherever the 
desert is barrenest, and on the mountains, they grow. 
They sentinel their very summits, standing out darkly 
distinct against the mighty moon which looks like a fire 
built by these watchmen, as they were kindled by the 
Greeks to telegraph home the news of the fall of Troy. 
Ah ! that we might make ourselves like this pitahaya ! 
In the barrenest wastes of life, if we would only go down 
to the springs of things, we might always have in us the 
plenteous sap of consolation. 

The parallel Santa Rita and Santa Catharina Mountains, 
which border this desert, are insignificant in height ; but 
they are of a granitic porphyry which, seen in this magic 
atmosphere, and mellowed by soft white-lilac haze, is won- 
derfully beautiful. 

But I must carry on my narrative to the adventure which 
overtook me, and promised to be rather serious. When I 
left the train, I brought along one of my blankets, a cala- 
bash of pinole, and some manchets made of Arizonian flour, 
as yellow and almost as solid as gold. Arms had I none, 
for, like Anacreon, I had no more sanguinary ambition than . 
to shed the blood of the grape. At first the blanket was as 
nothing, but under the heat of an Arizonian forenoon it be- 
came intolerable and I flung it away. 



206 A LANDMARK— AN EXHILARATING SLEEP. 

The Picacho was another point of danger, which it was 
advisable to pass in the night. This is a celebrated peak 
in Arizona, and, overtopping all others, serves as a landmark 
far and wide on the mighty desert. It is a vast clump of 
rock, standing isolated at one end of a cross-range through 
which the road passes ; and looks much like an unfinished 
church-tower. 

At night I slept under the boughs of a cat-claw, a very 
large and lordly sleep, with North America for my bed, for 
my pillow Arizona, and for my blanket the great blue 
heavens. Ah ! it is worth a century of dull, thick-crammed 
years to lie down alone in a mighty land, and at midnight 
look up to the shining myriads of heaven, where they roam 
in the measureless void ! To fling off one's airy counter- 
pane in the morning, to sit up on one's bed and behold the 
gorgeous East, and look face to face at the sun, as he too 
rises in the greatness of his glory from his couch in the 
mountains — this, this is liberty. Arizona is mine. Amer- 
ica is my house. The notched top of the Picacho is my fen- 
der. The universal atmosphere is my chimney. Bring 
me my coffee and cigars. 

Instead thereof I munched some buscuits and some red 
prickly pears, and washed it all down with dew, sipped 
from rocky goblets. Having slept till morning, I had no 
way but to go on through by daylight. 

The whole view of the pass seems done in miniature, and 
is as dainty in outline as any photograph. Yet one walks 
long mile after mile, up the easy swell of the plain, then 
between the noble and mighty walls of porphyry, but still 
on the plain, which is a mile in width. Being more copi- 
ously watered here by the showers that run along the sierra, 
saddle-like, it brings forth plenteous grass, and charming 
dots of bright-green groves, mesquites, greenwoods, cat- 
claws and pitahayas. Then down, by a descent as long and 



SURPRISED BY INDIANS— CAPTURED. 2 ") 7 

as easy, along a sandy avenue winding among the little 
trees. 

Once down on the level of the desert again, where the 
few stunted bushes needed no scanning, I plodded on in the 
deep sand, without looking much around. All at once — 
I cannot think to this day how they got so near — I saw a 
band of mounted Indians approaching. My blood turned 
pretty cold, and I felt a faint and dizzy sickness ; but it was 
worse than useless to attempt to escape, so I stopped and 
stood motionless. That pause probably saved my life, for 
it enabled me to collect my scattered senses a little, and 
thinly cloak my very genuine terror under a semblance of 
idiocy. They saw I was wholly in their clutch, and rode 
quietly forward. 

After a few moments, swallowing down my heart with 
a convulsive gulp, I advanced to meet the foremost, wreath- 
ing my face in what must have been a pretty ghastly hys- 
terical smile, for I dared not let my voice show how I trem- 
bled. I handed the chief my calabash, in which I purposely 
had some sprigs and sticks grotesquely arranged. He took 
it, surveyed it curiously and cautiously, smelled of it, found 
it was empty, then dashed it on the ground with a grunt 
of immeasurable contempt. 

Then there came to me a happy thought. All savages 
are vain. My mirror! my mirror! I handed it to the 
chief open. In the twinkling of an eye he saw before him 
that face which, to most mortals, is the dearest one on earth, 
his own, which for forty years had been to him a blank ; 
and his savage pride was kindled. He gazed at himself 
with much satisfaction for several moments, then handed 
it to another, or, rather, another one snatched it, then an- 
other, and so it went around. Some of them, like the 
chief, never relaxed a muscle, but most of them broadly 
grinned or laughed outright like children, when they beheld 



208 PLAYING THE FOOL. 

their countenances. Then the chief took it again, and 
looked at it long and steadfastly, with unmistakable and 
unabated admiration. 

All this gave me time and confidence. It gave me a sort 
of hold upon them. Now play for your sweet life, I said 
to myself, like a captured mouse. I began to execute a 
variety of absurd grimaces and gestures, as expressive of 
delight at the meeting. Ha ! old Copperhead, my lad, give 
me your hand ! I will give you a lock of my hair at parting, 
but I beseech you don't take it all. I seized and shook his 
hand, and clapped him on the thigh, as he sat before me on 
his horse. He was evidently not at all displeased at tins, 
for he smiled faintly, but did not take his eyes from the 
mirror. Then I stroked down my infant beard, and rubbed 
my hand over his smooth chin, and laughed like a maniac. 
This did not appear to please His Greasy Majesty so well, 
but he showed no resentment. 

Their curiosity over the mirror having abated somewhat, 
they began to plunder my traveling-bag. Some things I 
surrendered up without expostulation ; others I struggled 
for mildly, playing the lunatic as well as I could, and suc- 
ceeded in saving my precious note-book, though they tore it 
not a little before they could satisfy themselves that it was 
of no value. The chief seemed to be somewhat impressed 
in my favor, being dubious in his dark mind what kind of 
mortal I could be, and he presently muttered something, 
while looking at the glass, which made them desist. 

At last they turned to ride away, and one of them mo- 
tioned to me to mount behind him. I would have given a 
farm for the privilege of not doing it, but it might have 
been imprudent to refuse. So I climbed up behind him, 
but purposely got on wrong side before, with my face turn- 
ed toward the tail, skimmington fashion. At this my grim 
captors were not a little amused, but they rode briskly away. 



A DISAGREEABLE CAPTIVE— ESCAPE. 209 

Will they then cany me away captive after all ? I wondered, 
and my forebodings grew darker than before. 

But I made myself as disagreeable to my captor as I 
dared, by clapping my heels under the horse's belly, by 
swinging my arms wildly about and vociferating like a fool- 
ish man, and by bumping my back against his occasionally. 
The horse became restive under these proceedings, and 
kicked up a couple of times, whereupon the Indians laughed 
heartily. Then he stopped suddenly and executed a vig- 
orous estrapade, and with this the fellow made me dismount. 
To avert the consequences of the anger I feared might have 
been aroused, I ran to a horse, opened his mouth, and pulled 
out his tongue to look for his age, instead of inspecting his 
teeth. This again diverted the savages, and seemed to be 
the last link of evidence which convinced them I was an 
incurable fool, not worth the capture. They grunted to- 
gether, looking doubtfully at me, and when I shook hands 
with them, and with many ridiculous gestures turned to go 
away, to my great joy they made no opposition. Only 
once I turned to look back, and again they were gathered 
around the mirror. " And still they gazed, and still the 
wonder grew." 

These Indians were remarkably well-mounted, but most 
of them wore no clothing but a breech-cloth and long buck- 
skin leggings, to shield their legs from the chaparral. One 
of them had a scarlet cloth wrapped tight about his ' head, 
turban-like, shading his eyes a little, and the chief had a 
gaudy Mexican serape. From their small statue, I suppose 
they were Tonto Apaches, but their color was brassy, more 
like that of a Chinaman than that of an Indian. Their 
little bodies were scrawny and emaciated, and their faces 
bore, in addition to that stupidity which has gained them 
their appellation of Tonto(fool), more hideous ugliness and 
pure Asiatic cruelty than is seen in any other Indian. Let 



210 ANOTHER FRIGHT— ON A SAGE-BUSH. 

us be glad that America has borne but one such ghastly 
race, only one such perfect type of the hellish fiends. 

That morning soon after my escape, I had the rare pleas- 
ure of beholding the morning star in the zenith, though 
the sun was shining fiercely resplendent. I accepted it as 
a good omen, and the sequel will reveal how much it was 
worth. 

Yery soon afterward it began to rain, — the last fall of the 
summer rainy season — and it continued without a pause all 
that day and night and all the next day and night. Every 
voice in that vast desert was hushed, save the ceaseless, 
shrilling patter of the rain. 

All at once an enormous Indian dog came out of the 
dripping chaparral a few rods before me, and stopped mo- 
tionless. I was more scared than when I saw the Apaches, 
for I feared an ambuscade. But after he surveyed me for 
a moment, he gave one breathless, frightened bark, then 
turned and went tearing through the bushes. His precip- 
itate flight showed there was no ambush to be feared. 

The loose soil of these alkaline deserts when dry will 
yield such a cloud of dust as to conceal one horseman from 
another ten feet distant. But in this pouring rain it speed- 
ily became soft, and, in wading across the shallow seas of 
water, I would sometimes go knee-deep into the thin mud. 
It became dark, appallingly dark, and I lost the road. The 
light of Blue Water was nowhere to be seen, and there 
was nothing to do but to make a night on the desert. All 
night long I was perched in that warm rain, on a sage-bush, 
whose roots made a solid clump, and kept me from sinking, 
where I caught now and then a cat-wink of sleep. 

At Blue Water I found a large man and a small Mexican 
in a flat mud-house. The man had a red, sullen face, and 
he was continually muttering of neglect. " Here I am," 
said he — before I had been there ten minutes — " keeping 



A DISCONTENTED STATION-KEEPER. 211 

Lis station in a desert, and making money for him, and he 
let that wagon come out from Tucson, and never sent me 
nothin' to eat. I don't care nothin' for the concern ; it's 
him I'm making the money for. Here I am, liable to be 
killed, making money for him, and he don't send me nothin', 
and let that wagon come out without sending anything, 
and I'm living on mackerel, and wrote him three times." 
If he said this once, he said it forty times while I was there ; 
and yet he was taking as good care as he possibly could of 
his employer's affairs. 

Nothing convinced me more of the cowardice of the 
Apaches, when there is any manly fighting to do, than the 
fact that this man defended himself here alone. The Ca- 
manches would make short work with it, if it were in Texas. 





CHAPTER XVT. 
DOWN THE EIYER OF DESPAIE. 

OBODY who has not made the journey of the 
plains can understand the feeling of relief and 
satisfaction with which the weary emigrant, reaches 
the Pimo villages at Sacaton. Eor more than nine hun- 
dred miles he has lived in constant fear, for even in the 
valley of the Rio Grande lurk the most deadly enemies. 

But now he has arrived at last among the Pimos, of 
whom he has been hearing praises for some hundreds of 
miles. Now at least he is safe, and he feels almost at home. 
He can turn out his poor weary oxen and his jaded horses, 
to pasture all night wherever they will, and take sweet and 
large rest without being huddled about the wagon. He 
can spread his stock of blankets and beds under the balmy 
skies of Arizona, and lie down with his family beside the 
cool and plashing music of the Gila, and take his rest till 
morning, without fear and without peril. 

The fame and the dread of the Pimos are a tower of 
strength, and as a wall of defense about him ; he shall hear 
the horrid and heart-sickening yell of the Apaches no more. 
No more shall he shudder in his sleep, as to his dreaming 
eyes appears a horrible vision of his helpless infants mur- 
dered. All night he shall sleep in peaceful quietness, and 
awake to a sunrise made glorious with " the pomp of Per- 
sian mornings," for he reposes in the little empire of the 
Pimos, within which for the paleface there is only and for- 
ever peace. 

212 



MEETING WITH PIM03— A MAX OF FAMILY. 213 

Sacaton is the point where the traveler from Tucson first 
sees the Gila. The first human being on whom my eyes 
had rested for many a league was a Pimo, who wore no 
clothing to speak of save a ragged military blouse. Mounted 
on a beautiful, little bay jennet, he came tearing up the 
road, with his long Chinese queue, only a shade darker 
than his skin, whipping the air behind him, like a lash. 

Presently I overtook a numerous family of the tribe, 
journeying down the river with all their household sub- 
stance, in quest of another home. Whatever the wretched 
squaws could not carry was loaded on three scrawny, ham- 
mer-headed dobbins, which resembled animated saw-bucks. 
The gentleman, being a man of family, felt the necessity 
of complying with the proprieties sufficiently to wear a 
scarlet breech-cloth, deftly tied, with two ends dangling al- 
most to the ground. He also indulged in a scarlet shirt 
and a string of beads. He was about five and a half feet 
tall, stooping and sunken-breasted, with a broad black face, 
pleasant look, and very long arms. 

He talked with me half an hour, in grunts and Spanish, 
and smiled incessantly from first to last, so that I could 
have believed myself again in Mexico. He gave himself 
particular trouble to induce me to walk on this side of the 
road, because on that side there was a little mud, and then, 
with much blandness of aspect, asked a piece of to- 
bacco for his services, so that I could have believed myself 
again in la bella JVapoli. He had none of that shame-faced- 
ness which Homer says is a bad thing in a beggar. 

The squaws and pappooses also had long queues, and 
wore, first, beads, second, short cotton petticoats. Their 
household stuff they carried wearily along on their bended 
necks and shoulders, in shallow flaring baskets, woven of 
roots, hopper-shaped, on four rods, two of which, as they 
walked, projected far forward like great snail-horns. Their 



214 THE YALLEY OF THE GILA. 

serene lord unloaded and loaded them whenever they rested 
— an instance of devotion which was almost pathetic. 

The Gila like its great congener the Kio Grande, is highest 
in summer, from rains and melting snows. It writhes and 
wallows in its tortuous channel, and seems intent on devour- 
ing its own banks. Often while you are standing on the 
brink, a tall column of earth topples over, and strikes a 
mighty trough in the waters, with a stupendous thud, 
or carries over a proud and lofty cottonwood, whose 
green boughs the filthy waters straightway leap upon and 
drag and trample down. Here and there a long and shining 
bar of silt is thrust out, like a tongue, and has for its root, 
trees rent up as by Enceladus waning with Pallas, and 
heaped up high in masses, with their long roots sniffing 
the air in a vain quest for their wonted moisture. 

The river flats bear no grass — nothing but some ragged 
and forlorn shrubs, and some shriveled purslane, hardly 
recognizable as the weed whose dropsical stems are the pest 
of the Northern farmer's garden, and the terror of his 
children after school. The alluvium runs up by an ascent 
so easy, and knits its edge to the sandy plain by a suture 
so well concealed that one is not aware he has passed it, 
except by the change in the flora. 

The whole valley is drearily flat, and indescribably ragged 
and desolate, and the reddish burnt-looking hills are pig- 
mies compared with the lordly old mountains which look 
down in savage grandeur upon the Kio Grande ; surely, 
I cried, I am now in the back-yard of the Republic. But 
after all I really like the valley of the Gila for its unmiti- 
gated and thorough-going hideousness. These green and 
splendid pillars of pitahaya, and the exquisite little green- 
woods seem misplaced and wasted on these plains of an 
extinct hell. 

Yet the soil is surpassingly fertile in the Pimo Eeserva- 



THE FIMO VILLAGES— INSIDE A WIGWAM. 215 

tion, a tract about four miles wide and twenty-five in length, 
and lias yielded with Egyptian prodigality for a thousand 
years. The warm and turbid waters of the Gila, being 
spread upon it in irrigating ditches, maintain this fertility 
unimpaired. The Pimo wheat is beautifully sound and 
plump. 

One noon as I sat at lunch under a mesquite, there came 
an old Pimo, exceedingly wrinkled and withered, with scarce- 
ly a rag to his body, and sat down by me, and remained a 
long time motionless as a statue. At last he reached out 
his hand and remarked ; — 

"Ugh! Ugh! Ugh!" 

I gave him a lump, which he mumbled as solemnly as 
if he were chewing his last cud before being hanged. I 
don't wonder much, for it was about the most villainous 
bread that any dog ever took into his chops. After a long, 
motionless silence he ventured one eye on me again, and, 
seeing the last morsel about to disappear, he reached out 
his cadaverous hand again, and grunted. " Fish not with 
this melancholy bait for this fool gudgeon " of a biscuit, O 
Solomon Pimo ! I could give it to you with much better 
grace, if, like that other gentleman you would only grant 
me that inimitable and paternal smile. 

A Pimo village looks like a lot of enlarged ant-hills. 
Each wigwam is a low mound, resembling our gauze butter- 
covers, with a square bottom, and is composed of a wicker- 
work frame, thatched with straw and covered with a layer 
of common earth a foot thick. 

The Pimos live most of the year under mere shades or 
arbors of brush-wood, keeping these wigwams as store- 
houses. I crawled on all fours into one of them, and found 
it full of huge vessels, woven of bark and straw, demijohn- 
shaped, and filled with their beautiful wheat ; immense 
spherical ollas of red earthern-ware, garnished with black 



216 TRIBUTE TO THE PIMOS. 

streaks ; mats, pumpkins, wooden bowls, etc. I also found 
what I thought was a graven idol, and congratulated my- 
self on having discovered an indubitable evidence, against 
Mr. Bartlett, of their Aztec origin, in that the image bore 
the lineaments of Montezuma. But when I carried it out, 
the Pimos laughed heartily, and gave me to understand 
that dolls are not the exclusive possession of civilized babies. 

Among the Pimos, the women not only own and inherit 
all the land, (not in common, as among most savages, but 
in severalty,) but they perform all the labor. Some of them 
were winnowing wheat, by pouring it down in the wind ; 
some were rubbing parched wheat on a hollow stone; 
others cooking pancakes on the coals. The flat-breasted 
braves, however, condescended to make themselves useful 
by swinging the pappooses in their hammocks, which 
operation they performed with very commendable meekness 
and docility. 

The consequence of this is, that the squaws are hand- 
somer than the braves proportionately, as, indeed, the women 
seem to be in all southern latitudes. Is it because the men 
being more indolent than those of sterner climates, but 
having no less authority than they over the gentle sex, 
impose on them those very labors which alone can create 
the mulierformosa superne f 

Of course, the men are intensely worthless, but they are 
kind, and peaceable, and have been the steadfast and tradi- 
tional friends of the whites. Only when the squatters began 
to trespass on their ancient home and legal reservation, did 
they become somewhat thievish in certain instances. Mr. 
D. AYooster, who lived several years among them, speaks 
with the greatest enthusiam of their virtues : 

" Their village has been the sure city of refuge to people of our race for 
more than three hundred years. Pursued by savages, the white man has 
ever found them his friend and avenger. Women and children, naked and 



RELICS OF ANCIENT CIVILIZATION. 217 

hungry, with torn and bleeding feet, coming up from the Rio Grande, or 
from the Colorado, have there found friends, and home, and food, and shel- 
ter, and protection, and escort on their weary way. 
***** * * * 

" All travelers will bear testimony to their simple virtues and generous 
hearts. I have left my only child in their houses miles from my home for 
hours. They have divided their delicacies of food, their hulled wheat and 
sweet bread with me and mine when they had none to spare They have 
done this to Spaniards,to Mexicans, to all with white blood of whatever na- 
tion for centuries. 
****** ** 

" The Government of the United States should draw a zone in the heavens 
and the earth around the lands of this historic people, a league in breadth, 
and allow no white man to settle within it forever and forever. A monu- 
ment to charity should be built at the margin of the eastern and western 
deserts, at either extreme of their reservation, and it should be inscribed 
above with a few of the good deeds of this long-suffering people, the hum- 
blest of the poor forgotten children of God." 

Despite the surrounding hideousness, this one little oasis 
occupied by the Pimos is the home of more old cob-web- 
bed legends than any other spot of similar extent in the 
Union. This strangely-brilliant and tinted atmosphere is 
rich in suggested stories of those brave old Spaniards, 
whose wild, wide wanderings so long ago, put to shame 
our later achievement ; and far back beyond all these, be- 
yond even the mystical seven cities of Cibola, lie those 
perished empires, nourishing in unrecorded centuries, 
when, 

" All day this desert murmured with their toils 
Till twilight blushed, and lovers walked, and wooed 
In a forgotten language, and old tunes, 
From instruments of unremembered form, 
Gave the soft winds a voice." 

Here are miles upon miles of their irrigating ditches, dig- 
ged with incredible labor, or, perchance, with some strange 
and forgotten enginery ; the beautiful fragments of their 
pottery ; their pictured rocks ; their Casa Grande, already 
fallen into ruins when Torquemada played at school, and 
danced the gay Cachuca. Here, too, the Fontine fables 
10 



218 PICTURE OF A TEXAN EMIGRANT IN ARIZONA. 

teach, the Aztecs wandered long ago in quest of their 
Promised Land, looking for the sign of the eagle tearing 
the serpent, and guided, as Spanish bigotry believed, by 
the old Arch-enemy. 

Here, too, is the Texan emigrant, drawling, begrimed 
and tall, his dangling trousers of jeans ripped by many a 
mesquite, weary and worn to the last degree by his long, 
long search for his promised land. But he has neither 
lost or forgotten any of that glum, " I-reckon-so " hospi- 
tality which he brought with him from Western Texas. 
On a fire which looks strangely wan and weary beneath 
this flaming sun of Arizona, his thin, sallow wife fries 
steaks, which are very tough after walking a thousand 
miles. It makes one's heart sick with pity to see this 
poor, haggard woman, and the piteous eagerness of her 
sunken eyes, as she listens while her husband asks : — ■ 

" Stranger, how far mout it be to Californy yet, do you 
reckon ? You Darby ! will you get over that 'ar tongue 
thar, now ?" Upon that he shoulders the wretched beast 
over the tongue, and it staggers like a reed shaken in the 
wind. 

" It is about two hundred miles." 

" Well now, stranger, them thar oxens ca-an't stan' it 
much longer. Derned if I didn't hev to make a pot of 
lather this mornin' afore I could shave enough grass for 
'em." 

How many a family of emigrants, after dragging on 
their weary march for months across this great continent ; 
amid the parching thirst by day ; the perils, the alarms, the 
lonely vigils by night ; looking hopefully foward to rest 
within this valley — to fresh lush grass for their jaded oxen, 
and to cooling shade and gurgling waters for themselves — 
have arrived at last only to find their graves beside the 
dismal banks of the hideous, the treacherous Gila ! In our 



A SAD INCIDENT. 219 

train there was for a time a family of those people who are 
commonly said to "make their living hy moving," who had 
emigrated once from Texas to California, then returned, 
and were now crossing the continent for the third time. 
The problem of subsistence with this class is not so difficult 
as might be imagined. The Government stations have 
orders to distribute rations and ammunition to destitute 
emigrant families ; and the measureless ranges of wild grass 
support their cattle. 

The mother of this family had five children, of whom 
the youngest tw T o were seldom out of her arms, whether in 
camp or wagon. Without a murmur and without a com- 
plaint, seeming to know no other law than the will of her 
husband — worthless vagabond that he was — she had follow- 
ed him with that meek and piteous submissiveness which 
has in it more of heaven than of earth, but with that w T orn 
and saddened face so common to women living the lonely 
life of the Western frontier. 

But three pilgrimages in succession across this dreadful 
continent were more than even her patient nature could 
endure. It was painfully evident to all in the train that 
this poor woman would never behold California again ; and 
even her wretched husband was alarmed, and had left us, 
braving the perils of the Ninety-mile Desert alone, that he 
might hasten on more rapidly. At Maricopa Wells I over- 
took them, in company with several other wagons, where 
they were bogged down on an impassable peat, overflowed 
by the recent unparalleled rain-storms. The broad flat was 
literally gridironed with sudden creeks, running like fright- 
ened deer among the straggling sage-bushes. 

And here in this hideous and lonely wild, while we lay 
on beds of brushwood, spread to keep our blankets from 
sinking in the fathomless slush ; with the creeks on both 
sides of us roaring sullenly through the black and gusty 



220 PAINTED ROCKS AND SUN-PICTURES. 

night ; the dismal yelping of the cayotes, that were unable 
to reach us, floating across the dreary sodden desert ; while 
the pale thin flicker of a candle shone feebly out through 
the wagon-sheet, lighting up dimly the surface of the surg- 
ing creeks ; with the wailing babes around her, the spirit 
of the weary woman took its flight. 

The Painted Rocks near Maricopa "Wells, are an object 
of interest and speculation to every traveler. They stand 
quite alone, grouped together on a broad plain. The prin- 
cipal matter of speculation is the rude pictures of four- 
footed animals on them. We know from the investigations 
of Oregon scientists, in the John Day Valley, that the 
horse existed on the Pacific coast before the creation of man ; 
but whether any horses ever existed among the Pimos or 
Aztecs before their introduction to the continent by Carter, 
is something doubtful. Probably these pictures are intend- 
ed for nothing but antelopes or other wild animals, rudely 
scrawled by the Pimos. But the representation of the sun, 
with its surrounding halo, plainly points to the ancient Az- 
tec influence. These sun-pictures, taken together with the 
dark skins of the Pimos, their Mexican pudginess of stat- 
ure, and the fact that they always build their doors opening 
eastward, in anticipation of the second coming of Monte- 
zuma, hint strongly towards an Aztec origin. They them- 
selves firmly believe they are of Aztec descent. Tor- 
quemada asserted that they were ; Pedro Font believed it ; 
so did Coronado ; but Mr. Bartlett rejects the theory on 
linguistic grounds. lie thinks they were taught by the 
Mexicans to believe they are sons of Montezuma. But it 
is difficult to understand how the proud and exclusive 
Mexicans could have felt sufficient pride in this lowly race 
to desire to establish community of origin with them. 

I could not distinguish the Maricopas from the Pi- 
mos, except by the difference in their bread. In the sub- 



A LUXCII WITH TUE MARICOPAS. 221 

urbs of a village, hidden away in a great mesquite brake, 
I came upon a merry circle of squat braves — the squaws 
eat by themselves — seated around a basket of wheaten 
cakes, of which they gave me one to taste. They were 
different from the Pimo tortillas, being as thick as a bis- 
cuit ; and they were evidently boiled, and were unleavened 
and clammy, but very sweet. They masticated them with- 
out salt, water, or anything else whatever, except the 
abundant butter, apple-sauce, and honey of laughter. I 
confess I seldom felt so much moved to laughter myself 
as when I saw these gentle savages laughing so gaily over 
such an unutterably dry repast. 

Everywhere along the river flats were visible the disas- 
trous doings of the late unprecedented rain. The roofs of 
adobes (not the Pimo wigwams) had become soaked, and 
run down through the layer of brush-wood like mush, or 
crushed everything down by their weight. Walls were 
melted half-way down, or had toppled over in masses. 
Chimneys had dissolved like a candy-horse at Christmas. 

At Maricopa Wells the Gila turns squarely to the north, 
and then rims around three sides of a quadrangle which 
is a desert forty miles wide, with a mountain rim on the 
three sides. Looking down across the vast margin of 
plain, before he enters the pass, being now away from the 
hideousness of the Gila, the traveler beholds again the 
strange and wizzard beauty, and the magnificent lawless- 
ness of Arizona. The Gila really has no valley, and no 
river ranges. Spread out before you the tawny and 
mighty desert of Arizona; draw down through it the 
straggling greenery of the river's cottonwoods ; mark a 
parallel line here, another there, some ten, some thirty, 
some forty miles from the river, and fling down on each a 
fragment of a reddish mountain. That is the valley of 
the Gila. Far out, in magnificent prospect of lilac dis- 



222 GRAND AND BEAUTIFUL SCENERY- 

tance, this tawny desert sweeps back to these fragments 
of ranges, and ponrs through, as between chubby fingers, 
into the vastness of the outer plateau. 

This is grandeur, but in the pass, which is merely an 
isthmus of plain, there is surpassing beauty. All the 
ground is covered with autumn-gilded grass, as fine as eider- 
down ; there are pretty bunches of silver-gray mint ; and 
then there is the biznaga, thistle-rigged with spindles of 
prickles, like long amber teazels, glistening crisp and fresh, 
when sprinkled with dew, like cans of prickly honey. A 
wise little architect called the cactus wren, as if knowing 
that snakes cannot climb this most exquisite but most dia- 
bolical bush, builds its nest in its branches. But how on 
earth can it alight ? 

Then there is that most dainty little tree of Arizona, 
the greenwood, with leaves as big as squirrel's ears, and a 
trunk as smooth and as green as a water-melon. It often 
grows close beside the lordly pitahaya, their trunks touch- 
ing ; and you may see the giant reaching up fifteen feet 
above his pretty neighbor, like some green old bachelor 
vainly struggling, with both arms uplifted, to escape from 
the toils of some bewitching maiden. Half a mile away 
the rich red walls of porphyry tower above these splendid 
columns of emerald, heaped up, stone on stone, like some 
fine old English mansion in the Elizabethan style. 

Sunset came soon after I emerged from the pass, and 
then all the walls of that great quadrangle of desert were 
illuminated and glorified with lilac, and amethyst, and 
orange, like that magnificent coronal of hills which encir- 
cles the City of the Yiolet Crown. 

Though far from human habitation, I lay down without 
fear ; but that night sleep was gone from my eyes, and 
slumber from my eyelids. The heavens so gorgeously 
pavilioned with one of those matchless Arizona sunsets ; 



TWILIGHT ON TIIE DESERT— SCARED BY QUAILS. 223 

the bewitching glamour of the fading, infinite plain ; the 
pitahayas, like the earth-born giants of Apollonius, keep- 
ing solemn watch and ward about me in the soft desert 
twilight — all these kept a multitude of inchoate fancies, 
flowery imaginings, the first flush and breathings of an 
over-florid eloquence of description, trooping through my 
brain, and banishing slumber. A bright particular star 
came up, and sailed far up through the pass, and still I 
would be vagabondizing. 

But at last, all this my glorious Oriental heaven of 
phantasmagoria revolved on its axis, and brought up the 
clear, calm firmament of sleep. One soft slumberous wave 
after another came drifting over me, and I was slowly 
drowning, drowning, drowning — lost — 

What was that ? 

It was only some Arizona quails, bickering and quarrel- 
ing about their shares of the roost. But this silly noise, 
only half-awakening me, filled me with a confused and 
sudden terror. There was no moon ; the sky had clouded 
over, and I was — 

" Shut up as in a crumbling tomb, girt round 
With blackness as a solid wall." 

In that awful moment, with a faint and sickening sense 
of despair, I jerked my hand frantically before my face, 
thinking I was blind, because I saw nothing. . The appall- 
ing blackness of darkness sat upon me like a ghoul. Ah ! 
for one pleasant voice, for one word to cast into this yawn- 
ing grave of silence ! I whispered, but shuddered at the 
thought of speaking aloud. 

By chance I established a sort of communication with a 
prairie-dog or squirrel. I would strike with my heel on 
the ground, and he would respond by beating a quick tat- 
too on the side of his burrow — the dearest sound that ever 
entered mortal ears. Words cannot describe the sweet- 



224 A LOXELY AND SLEEPLESS NIGHT. 

ness of the sense of companionship, even of the meanest 
animal, in that frightful darkness. But presently he got 
sleepy, or waxed lazy, and he would answer me never a 
word. 

Then again, " those thoughts that wander through eter- 
nity," began to go out, ranging through infinite space ; 
groping, groping, flying, creeping in the black and form- 
less air ; and my very self, the " imperishable ego" was 
far away from that lonely desert. There passed before me 
men in long black robes, mysteriously beckoning and nod- 
ding— 

That terrible yell ! 

Is it a lion, or a jaguar? There is another! They 
fight. The raging, the clutching, the gurgling and choking 
growls, and the screaming, the tearing of bushes — heavens ! 
they are coming this way. I sit up, benumbed with ter- 
ror ; leap up ; run blindly into the darkness ; stumble over 
a bush; fall headlong. The yelling beasts surge along 
very near. I see nothing in the blackness but the fiery 
glare of their eyes, circling in mad whirls and lunges. 
Now one flees, and the other pursues. They are gone. 
The noise of the swift snapping and crash of bushes dies 
away, and all is silent. 

For that night there was no more sleep, neither any 
dreams. All the remainder of it I lay pretty still where I 
fell, for a single movement might crack a sage-bush, and 
bring back the dreadful brutes. If they were California 
lions, there was probably little danger, for they are arrant 
cowards ; but the jaguar will grip a man without hesita- 
tion. 

It is a weary and a dreary walk across the Jornada 
of Gila Bend. Half way across I flung myself under one 
of the dainty little greenwoods, on the margin of a dry 
arroyo, glistening too bright for any eye but the eagle's, 



THE ESTRELLA MOUNTAINS— SUNSET. 225 

with its golden sands, and gazed languidly out on the plain 
in its thin, pale September green, over which the pitahaya 
. — sleepless Sentinel of the Desert — keeps his vigils, blink- 
ing drowsily at the far-off mountains of porphyry, till I 
fell asleep. Then I dreamed again — dreamed of my 
Northern home, odorous with the breath of honeysuckles 
and fresh butter ; dreamed, too, in my thirst, of angling 
in the shining brook which babbled to my piscatorial boy- 
hood ; and to my dreaming soul the sweet old music of its 
ripples was crisp and cool as heart of melons, or draught 
from its bright waves. 

As one emerges from the savage and gloomy gorge in 
the Estrella Mountains, his eye ranges over the vast 
stretch of the Gila Yalley, until it rounds down 
beneath the horizon ; and in the middle of it the azure 
summit of Chimney Peak is visible, a hundred and forty 
miles away. Distance, mere blue naked distance, and 
nothing else. And that is all to be passed over afoot ! 
From that hour I loathed the Gila, and called it the River 
of Despair. 

They told me I should overtake trains on the desert, well 
supplied with water ; but I found none, and began to be 
grieviously athirst. Beneath the naming glare of the sun 
on an Arizona desert, the pedestrian without water weakens 
with alarming rapidity. Deceived, as many have been be- 
fore, and thinking it was the faintness of hunger — there is 
not a little truthfulness in that "Western phrase, " starving 
for water " — with infinite dry mumbling and munching, 
I ate half a biscuit. My mouth was as dry as a barrel of 
flour. 

At last the sun went down, with all the fiercely resplen- 
dent pageantry of an Arizona desert ; but, instead of 
bringing any relief of coolness, for a half-hour the evening 
was worse than the noon-day, for there came up from the 
10* 



226 DREAMING OF WATER— GILA BEND STATION. 

heated plain, lately rained upon, a sweltering earth-reek, 
which, mingling with the warm and sickening stench of 
cheriondia, was almost stiffling. 

Far off, at the bottom of the road, there gleamed now 
and then through the cottonwoods a silvery wink of the 
Gila ; but it perversely kept at the same distance. Ifile 
after mile, mile after mile — and it came no nearer. The 
pitahaya never grows near water, and as one towering col- 
umn of it after another slowly loomed above the horizon, 
and spread its great arms dimly out against the heavens, 
bitter was my disappointment. 

It was all in vain. Weary and faint, I flung myself at 
last beneath a green wood shrub, and thought to sleep away 
my misery. But one who is acutely suffering from thirst 
cannot sleep, for he cannot inhale a satisfactory breath, but 
feels as if crushed by an intolerable weight, and fetches 
many a quick sigh, never more than a half-breath, and tosses 
restless as a Corybant. Probably fifty times during that 
miserable night, I toppled just over the sweet, delusive 
brink of slumber ; but the instant I was unconscious, I 
would dream of water, clutch frantically at it, and straight- 
way awaken. The oddest of these dreams was, that I saw 
a smith with a golden rod, from which, with a cold-chisel, 
he was slitting off gold dollars ; and every time he sliced 
off the shining coin, he dipped the rod into a basin of 
sparkling water. Like the poor beggar of Bagdad, reaching 
out his hands for invisible potations, I snatched wildly at 
the basin, and awoke with a handful of grass. 

In the morning, the cock at Gila Bend Station crowed 
almost over my head. Staggering down to the great olla, 
hanging by its neck in its swathing of cool and moistened 
gunny, I quaffed the arrears of thirty-six hours. 



CHAPTER XVII. . 
IN THE HOME OF THE HEAT. 

/^§£w|AILY, as I journey down the Gila, it broadens out 

^Sp^ before me, and its current grows less turbulent. 

~l£^ The banks are lower, and often there comes up 

through the cottonwoods the long gleam of its waters, as 

they go on their quiet way to the All-mother of Oceans. 

Though the late rains had somewhat cooled the season, 
the steaming heat of the valley was intolerable. At 
noon I would lie under a mesquite, vast as an ancient 
appletree, and beat the faint air into motion. Sleep was 
impossible. It was good to lie on the uttermost verge of 
the shade, for the tree itself seemed, by its ceaseless inhala- 
tions, to exhaust all the air beneath it, and to seek in vain, 
by the listless, drooping tremor of its leaflets, to winnow 
a fresh breath to itself. 

The endless chattering Arizona quails alone seem to be 
unconscious of heat. Not another bird is stirring. Hark 
where they come now ! How much loquacity and cheery 
prattle of contentment there is, as they scud with infinites- 
imal steps between bush and bush, laughing and racing 
like children just from school. Now the whole covey 
come in sight under a sage-bush, with their tiny crests 
curling forward ; the leader utters a sharp cry, every neck 
is stretched up, then all whiz away, with every crest stream- 
ing back. 

Yonder an impertinent pup of a cayote sits on his 
haunches under a bush, panting and lolling. He eyes my 



228 DOWN THE GILA. 

every motion, and stretches his neck in eveiy direction, 
sniffing for something eatable. Now he scrapes his ear 
with his paw, to free it from the myriads of mosquitoes 
which suck his blood. When I rise up from my notes, and 
toss a stick at him, he impudently trots over to another 
bush, squats, and begins to loll again. 

Even the mosquitoes stop a moment to hang out their 
tongues, before they commence their labors. Z-z-z-z-zip ! 
One pauses a moment to wipe the perspiration from his 
brow. Slap ! Aha ! gringo, you announced your arrival 
with too loud a trumpet. 

At Kenyon a veteran hunter and myself, to avoid the 
mosquitoes, slept on the naked sand, close beside the river. 
We were lulled to sleep by the rippling river, pouring 
around us a sweet mist of music, as Pindar says of Apollo's 
lyre ; but I was soon awakened by a cold clammy nose 
touching my face, followed by a sniff, sniff, sniff, and a 
warm breath. Flinging out my hand suddenly, I struck 
the soft fur of a cayote. The animal ran away with a low 
startled growl, but stopped a few rods away, and' commenced 
barking. 

Who that is an American has not owned a youthful and 
adventurous hound, and seen him snuffing eagerly through 
the high grass on a fancied trail, with tail valorously erect, 
until, beholding a white stump, he gave one long, frightened 
bark, followed by several short ones, and ran away with his 
tail between his legs ? Just so begins the leader of a pack 
of cayotes. One after another joins in, till the whole cry 
is in full chorus. " Oft in the stilly night," when I was 
not sleepy, especially in the early morning, I have lain in 
my blankets, and listened to their thin, puppy chattering, 
with a most delicious and lazy happiness. 

The noise of this one attracted many others, and they 
seemed to agree together to split the ears of all owls, and 



A SHOT IN THE DARK. 229 

of all other proper animals of night. Like Hogarth's mu- 
sician, the hunter presently became enraged, snatched his 
revolver, and fired into the populous darkness. An appall- 
ing squall, coming apparently from a whelp, told that his 
dark shot had not been in vain. 

In consequence of the tumbled and slung topography of 
the Gila, there are many bits of mountains at right angles 
to the river. Some poke it on this side, some on that side, 
and sometimes the string reaches quite across the valley, 
with a gap in the middle that the river may creep through. 

The Burnt Hills, below Kenyon, are such a fragment of 
a range. On either side of it there is a long, elevated, 
narrow plain, like an awning along a house, perfectly nude, 
and laid with stones as black as pitch. This fearful plain 
is chasmed and rent with ravines, " depe diches and darke 
and dredfulle of sighte," along whose borders the scorching 
heat runs and wriggles on the black bowlders like serpents. 

In the awful solitude of this scathed and blackened 
waste, here and there stands up a pitahaya, like a column 
marking the site of a buried city ; and, to make the illusion 
more complete, it sometimes stands on a little monticle, 
like a heap of ruins. 

Passing through the gap, I beheld from the exit of it a 
landscape which Dante could have studied with advantage, 
before he made out the topography of the orthodox medieval 
hell. On three sides are low mountains, lurking in savage 
gloom on the horizon, and burnt to redness ; at my feet, 
the racked and battered blackness of the gorges ; farther 
west, the grisly waste of the desert, through which, in its 
hideous chasm, the Gila wallows away, like that stream 
over which Charon ferries the shuddering ghosts. It was 
nearly sunset, and away to the west a shower was falling. 
As the sun went down, it peered through a crevice in the 
clouds, and turned the rain into falling blood : and in that 



230 MASSACRE OF AN EMIGRANT FAMILY. 

instant all the concave of heaven, and the air, and the des- 
olate earth were red-lighted with a fierce and sullen kind- 
ness, as if it were indeed the very abode of the damned, 
horribly yawning with its quenchless fires. 
v Let right down into the middle of this blackened waste 
of plain is a singular basin, about a mile in diameter, across 
which runs the Gila. A ghastly massacre of a family by 
the Apaches has made this spot forever memorable as Oat- 
man Flat. There is not in American history a tragedy 
more appalling than that which crowned the saddening 
history of this family of emigrants ; and there is not on 
earth a resting-place so hideous as that which holds their 
bones. 

On the burning, black plain I hoped to escape the cursed 
mosquitoes ; but they no sooner grew hot and tired, than 
they calmly sat on my hat in myriads, and rested themselves. 
If I stood still, they jumped off, and my head became en- 
veloped in a churning cloud, a singing nimbus ; if I ran, it 
was the middle, bobbing nucleus to a train like that of 
Eucke's comet. Once I took off my hat and coat, laid 
them softly down, then rose and fled like the wind. Then 
I stopped, and looked back with a grim smile of triumph, 
but in ten seconds, they all arrived with cheerful counte- 
nances. 

Presently I saw an object at a little distance, which 
looked like a mule. Approaching me, the object suddenly 
cried out, with a voice that seemed to issue from under a 
feather-bed, " Whoa, Mike !" Making a desperate effort, 
I brushed away my cloud sufficiently to see that there was 
a man in the other cloud, with his head muffled in a silk 
handkerchief, and his hands in his pockets. We laughed, 
and then he explained that he was hunting stray mules, 
and had also mistaken me for one of those animals. 

The river lurks now no longer in a tortuous trough, 



DENIZENS OF THE RIVER. 231 

over-arched by cottonwoods, but spreads out its waters in a 
vain semblance of Mississippi majesty. Sometimes it rolls 
broadly down through long and silvery leagues, again it 
creeps in two shrunken and pitiful rannels around some 
mighty island of shining ooze. Here countless regiments 
of ducks hold their noisy musters, while they flounce and 
puddle in the water, or stand and prune their sunny feath- 
ers, and with their broad bills ladle the water up over their 
backs. Great white cranes, and herons with crooked necks, 
lazily winnow the vast waters between snag and snag, and 
emit at times, a solemn " kouk I" In the watches of the 
night, you shall hear an uncertain and unearthly croak, 
like the sneeze of a hippopotamus. The lazy flapping of 
some huge fish, wallowing in the fertile waves, is followed 
by the sudden stoop and flutter of the kingfisher, as he 
struggles lubberly up with a scaled Gila trout. 

The old Andalusian or rather Moorish adobe will prob- 
ably remain long in these treeless countries, especially 
among these nerveless people. And the Texans who live 
in a Mexican climate seem to acquire very soon the Mexi- 
can nostrils, and retain the unsavory quadrangle for the 
horses and goats at the rear of the house. The dwelling 
is, therefore, like the Mississippi double log-cabins in shape, 
having a broad passage through the middle, leading back 
to the corral, of which the house forms one side. 

But the Texan still has enough energy left to improve 
the Mexican pattern, by fronting it with a bush-canopy so 
broad and so thick that the space under it is almost like a 
cellar. This alone keeps his brains from being fried into 
a Mexican condition. Under this hangs the great olla, full 
of water, and everything that he eats, in little bags, to keep 
them from the ubiquitous and omnivorous ants. All among 
these pendant eatables, they trundle their beds about, 
wherever any one can find the coolest corner. 



232 LOVE IX A DESERT. 

One of the characters who interested me, was one of those 
grand and serene Germans, with a floating gait, who are 
apt to have been crack swordsmen at the Universities, and 
who look at you with a level eye, as if to measure how 
little you know. He was distant to strangers, but exceed- 
ingly jolly with his friends, though always talking of him- 
self, fluent in five languages, and polished in all the 
refinements of Europe. He had been a rake in his day, 
but was tamed at last by a great love, by a simple peasant 
girl, kind, sweet, lady-like by nature, with her dear little 
white apron, and pink cheeks — 

" Two lovers in the desert vast, 
Two lovers loving well at last." 

Though I was burning with curiosity to learn his history, 
he was studiously reticent on all but his American life ; but 
I think he was a nobleman, exiled with his little peasant 
girl, and finding his reward in a love whose depth and 
tenderness no words of mine could picture. 

But the oddest genius was a huge old Agouistes, who, 
in this dreadful heat, seemed to be always wishing with 
Hamlet, " O that this too, too solid flesh would melt !" 
His shape was about like that of a wedge, standing on its 
small end. He had a long face, nearly concealed by a 
patriarchal beard, touched with gray ; he always went bare- 
headed and barefooted, and wore his shirt outside his 
trousers, which were made of striped bedticks. 

His cookery was miscellaneous to distraction. On a 
single stove he kept up such an amount of frying, fizzing, 
stewing, sputtering and singing as would have been cred- 
itable to a metropolitan restaurant. For four eaters, he 
absolutely covered a table ten feet long, with all manner 
of onions, stews, jams, pickles, preserves, canned stuff, veg- 
etables, beans, tripe, molasses, and indescribable and unre- 
solvable gallimaufries. 



ARIZONA CIVILIZATION. 233' 

In the midst of all this frying, he would glance out of 
the window, and then shoot out of the house as suddenly 
as if he were trying to elude the fall of some crockery. 
There was a predaceous cow which kept making incursions 
into his corral, because he was too indolent to put up the 
bars staunchly. He would chase her around the inclosure, 
with his long hair flying, jump up three or four feet high, 
and strike at her with his toes, but invariably miss. Yet 
he was a kind-hearted old man, and those who knew him 
said he was compelled to rip up a bedtick for trousers, 
because he gave away so much clothing to vagabonds. 

What kind of a civilization w T ill ever grow up on these 
steaming, frying banks of the Gila? I wonder. Arizona is 
rapidly becoming as notorious as Louisiana for misgovern- 
ment. The isothermal line, which ought to bound the 
Union on the south, bows up above most of Arizona. It 
is too hot here for any good growth of republicanism. 

If we had desired natural boundaries, the Gila and the 
Rio Grande form our proper western arch, just as the Gulf 
of Mexico forms the eastern ; and Florida and Lower Cali- 
fornia are the natural outside abutments. All that part of 
New Mexico and Arizona which lies south of those two 
rivers is worse than useless to the Republic. If we had 
halted on their banks, they might have stayed up the 
pressure forever ; but, now that we have crossed over them, 
there is no means of holding to the Union that fragment 
which lies below them, except by running a railroad through 
it, and tying the ends to New York and San Francisco. 
It must be kept vigorous by constant infusions of American 
blood, coming from colder latitudes. 

One thing which surprised me was the health of the 
valley. Tucson has fresh, limpid water, and stands on an 
open desert, but it is infested with fever ; while the inhab- 
itants of this moldy valley protested they were always 



234: APACHE SLATES— A WOMAN'S CAMP. 

healthy. It is possible the salt and alkali have a kind of 
an antiseptic effect. 

The arm of the Constitution plies laggardly in this far- 
off region. At Maricopa Wells I saw Apache captives who 
had been offered by the Pimos at forty dollars a head, 
while no American rebuked them, or hid it under a bushel. 
But they did not sell them. Why % The Americans 
wanted them for twenty-five dollars ! 

One evening I stopped in the camp of a little train of 
emigrants presided over by a woman. She was a vigorous 
matron, of about forty, fair and fresh, with a slightly aqui- 
line nose, and a quiet, dignified manner of speaking to her 
teamsters, which made them know their mistress, and yet 
was the farthest removed from the tone of a virago. 

Her life began in far Yermont, whence she followed a 
roving husband to Canada, to Kansas, to Texas. In San 
Antonio he died, and, after managing his affairs for a little 
while, to fill her cup of bitterness, she lost everything by 
fire. Everything, did I write ? No ; she had left five 
little children, and an indomitable will. By the aid of a 
few friends and her own heroic exertions, she collected to- 
gether enough to start for California, which was now 
at last, to her unspeakable relief, almost in sight. She had 
only five armed retainers in her train, and alone with this 
little band she had made the journey across that great and 
howling wilderness. 

She was a woman of culture and of ideas. Everything 
was tidy and ship-shape about her camp. Her mules were 
fat and sleek, unlike most of the emigrant teams, for, as 
one of her teamsters told me, she had sternly prohibited 
them from abusing the animals. 

Thus she was emigrating to California, to give to her 
children, let us hope, that prosperity hitherto denied. Such 
a woman will be worth more to that State, than any dozen 



ARIZONA CITY— EXPERIENCES. 



235 



of the sick-faced counter-jumpers, broken-backed adventur- 
ers, and swaggering, bullying swashbucklers who swarm 
thither. 

What kind of a town Arizona City may be, is known to 
the gods. I only remember a batch of mud-houses, among 
which were moving about some ghostly umbrellas, with a 
faint suspicion of whey beneath them. The staple articles 
of clothing worn by the inhabitants, are very broad umbrel- 
las and very capacious boots. As soon as the sun sets, they 
fold their umbrellas, " like the Arabs, and as silently steal 
away " to certain moulds they have for that purpose, in the 
cool sand along the river, into which they pour themselves 
out of their boots, and in the morning emerge, solidified 
into the human form again. 

My first experience in Arizona was in seeing firewood 
gathered with a crowbar ; my second, in seeing hay cut 
with a hoe ; my last, in eating butter with a spoon. Turn- 
ing my back upon such a land, I looked over upon that 
fabled country, winch rims all round with a golden and 
purple halo the dreams of our ardent boyhood. And it 
was a sight as uninviting as can be imagined. 





CHAPTER XVIIL 
WALKS OK THE DESEKT. 

Mk EEPING cool is one of the principal concerns of 
life at Fort Yuma. The Ytimas have a method of 
doing so peculiar to themselves. They fill their 
long black hair with mud, which crushes the inhabitants 
thereof as effectually as Mount JEtna does the wicked 
Enceladus. Then they take a log into the river, and 
float tranquilly down with the current, with nothing but a 
shining orb of mud visible above the waters. Jeeheebay, 
the Parsee, says, the highest conception of Heaven is of a 
place where there is nothing to do. Doubtless the Yuma 
Indian could conceive no more ecstatic existence, than one 
wherein he might float down unwearied, through long 
summer days, lapped in the soft, warm waves of the Eiver 
of Paradise. "What wonder is it that the Pimos fix the 
locality of Heaven on the Colorado ? 

The banks of this river are very flat, and it is worth 
more than a drink ot its seething porridge to venture over 
them. They are perfect man-traps. Across the desert 
there stretches a rocky ridge, through which the river 
rifts a shallow canyon. Thus the frail mud-walls of 
Arizona City are protected by a natural breakwater, 
and, across the river, Port Yuma perches on the break- 
water itself. , 

From the lofty walls of the fort I looked out over the 
haggard and sullen desert, and my soul exulted in the 
very greatness and savagery of its desolation. Ah ! it will 
236 



VIEW FROM FORT YUMA. 237 

be worth a century of babbling in green fields and fiddling 
among flowers, to grapple once more, as on tlie Staked 
Plain, hand to hand with Old Hideous ! 

"Who that has seen, can ever forget the last of the four 
pictures of Cole's " Voyage of Life?" In it an old man is 
seen, with his boat just entering upon the verge of the 
ocean, over which and all around him lowers the heavy 
murk of death, while his face, though most touchingly 
saddened and furrowed by the bitter conflicts of life, is 
radiant now with peace, as he goes tranquilly up towards 
the dim and shadowy walls of Paradise. My mind was 
carried back to that picture, more eloquent than all poetry, 
as I looked over on the mountains of the Colorado, ninety 
miles away, heaped up ridge behind ridge, with their 
wonderful semblance of walls, and towers, and domes, and 
spires, and minarets. 

See, Nature is no bigot in building her imaginary 
"Walhalla. The Mandarin shall find yonder his pagoda ; 
the Norman, his massive hall ; the Roman, his basilica ; 
the Mohammedan, his mosque. 

Then I went on down the Colorado towards Pilot Knob. 
Not far below the fort, an emigrant wagon had turned 
aside into the bushes, where a very happy event had 
occurred. There were some haggard squaws about with 
melons for sale, and one of them, who appeared to have 
no children of her own, was exceedingly interested in the 
affair. 

A mile or two below Pilot Knob I ascended a few feet 
to the great plateau of Colorado Desert. For forty miles 
the road ran along a higher plateau of sand, which the 
f jarful simoons are constantly shifting, and which some- 
times surges over the trains like a fiery rain. League 
upon league I could look across it, as over an upheaved 
sea of liquid butter, not glaring to gaze upon, but very 



238 FATE OF A DESERTING SOLDIER. 

mellow, and most daintily crimped and crinkled with 
wind-marks. 

And now the road begins to wade in white sand. O 
this abhorred winter, with its waste of dead limbs, and its 
perennial snows — wearily, wearily I tramp in their drifts 
— thrust into this arid middle and heat of autumn, with 
its gaunt and hungry air, its blinding white-hot shimmer, 
and its stifling winds ! Sometimes I hear the faint chirrup 
of a cicala, and think, with Antipater, that it is sweeter 
than the swan. Occasionally a gad-fly buzzes past me, on 
its wide and lonesome flight. Even the crow, which labors 
heavily along with a strangely sharp, metalic winnowing 
of the air, holds a moody and solemn stillness, as if it were 
the last crow of time, flapping over the charnel-house of 
all the centuries. 

Like Adam in Holbein's Dance of Death when he 
goes forth from Paradise, the traveler on this abhorred 
desert journeys ever side by side with the King of Terrors. 
That his fear and his dread may not be abated or forgot- 
ten by the shuddering pilgrim, the ghostly skeletons along 
the road grin horridly upon him. All the ground is 
whitened, as with hoar-frost, by the minute shells of 
myriads of periwinkles, which have perished in the old 
cataclysms that surged over this surface, and in the raging 
winds that burned over the waters, and have cheated the 
very sea of its rightful dominion here. I seemed to walk 
constantly in the center of a small circle of naked earth, 
but all else was frozen over with mystic ice. 

But the ghastliest of all forms of death was the body of 
a deserter, who, avoiding the water stations in his dread 
of detection, perished miserably here, where his blackened 
corpse was scratched again from the sand by the cayotes. 
O, sad it were to lie down to die alone in this hideous 
wild, with the beasts of prey already ravening near in 



GLADDEXED BY BEES. 239 

their impatience, and have the starting eve-balls seared, 
and the last hot and feeble breath snatched away by the 
hotter blast of the desert ! The fiery sand creeps insidi- 
ously upon him, inch by inch, like drifting snow, sweeps 
in a hallowed space around his head, but eddies thick 
upon his glaring eyes, and burns his last glance to an in- 
distinguishable blur. 

What are those strange sounds ? At first it is a discor- 
dant and rasping noise, as when one files a saw ; then it 
changes to a sharp, tinkling jangle, like a chime of little 
tea-bells, only there is that strange half-clang produced by 
ringing bells under water. Approaching closer, and 
listening intently, I find that it is the buzzing of bees, 
and am gladdened, 

M As some lone man who in a desert hears 
The music of his home." 

It is said that bees often perish in their long wanderings 
on the central plains of California. How, then, could 
these wing their w T eary way seventy miles through this 
dreadful weather, and return % Or did they, like. Sam- 
son's swarms, hide their meat in the eater, and their 
sweetness in the strong ? 

New River, has a river for its source, and empties no- 
where. Branching from the Colorado near its mouth, it 
slides easily down across the desert, in a little mesquite- 
dotted swale, and is swallowed up on a level seventy-five 
feet below the Pacific. 

And on this desert, which is one of the hottest places 
on earth, whom of all men should I find as station-keepers 
but Yankees ! Six of them in all, and among them a 
father and three sons from New Hampshire. The old 
gentleman, whose fame for stinginess met me ninety 
miles from his station, was ministering to the necessities 
of some disbanded soldiers. On the shelves in his most 



240 A NIGHT WALK. 

wretched and dilapidated mud-house there were cans of 
fruit, the inevitable sardines, pocket handkerchiefs, little 
cloth packages of cut tobacco, and a vast array of California 
wines, gorgeous in labels of brass and of scarlet. 

From New Kiver westward thirty-six miles without a 
drop of water. With a canteen full slung over my shoulder, 
I started at sunset. All through a long September night, 
by the soft desert light, in the soft desert coolness, I plod- 
ded through the brooding solitude, till moonset ; then slept 
a little, waiting for daylight ; then forward again, till the 
middle of the afternoon. Crunch, crunch, crunch, forever 
through the gravel. When the moon went down, it 
disappeared before it reached the level of the desert, and 
then I knew, by the ragged outline of that which crept 
over it in ghostly eclipse, that it had found the Sierra 
Nevada. Could I repress a shudder when I saw my sole 
companion of the night sink into the ray less blackness ? 
Alone, all alone, in the darkness of the desert ! As I 
watched the slowly sinking moon, leaving no star behind, 
there came to me something of that feeling of sadness 
which breaths through the message of the dying Ajax, when 
he bids farewell forever to the beautiful light. 

In the morning I found I was approaching the Sierra 
Nevada between two long, low, dusty-looking Cordilleras. 
Between these mountain spurs lies the valley of the 
Carriza, which is nothing but a stretched-out arm of the 
desert. In summer the Carriza has neither beginning of 
springs nor end of ponds. Mysteriously it sweats up from 
the sand, whose smooth broad face tells no tale of its 
origin ; trickles down one summer's day, clear, cold and 
swift ; then as mysteriously filters away. How beautifully 
it sinks, like the wounded dolphin tinging each dying 
moment with a new alkaline or pearly stain of exquisite 
brilliance ! 



SUNRISE AT CARRIZA STATION. 24?! 

A little above Carriza Station, I was rewarded for my 
early rising by an almost fairy spectacle, worthy of the 
" golden prime of good Ilaroun Alraschid." The tips of 
the mountains were just reddening with sunrise. Before 
me lay the white sand floor of the valley, sprinkled over 
with the cheriondia, of a bright sea green, little dead 
greenwoods, of a peculiarly crisp, cool, gray ; and sage- 
bushes, yellowish-green. All the higher slopes of the 
mountains were thinly draped with a lilac haze, than 
which — 

" Never a flake 
That the vapor can make 
With the moon-tints of purple and pearl" 

could be more daintily tinted. "When the sun like a blood- 
red globe had arisen above the mountains, all this haze 
seemed to forsake the western slopes and gather about 
it, shrouding its beams in a cold pallor. The sickly light 
falling into the white valley upon the weird, spectral, Arc- 
tic foot-hills, those tropical icebergs, wrought a ghostly 
transformation. All the shrubbery was blanched in this 
mildew of sunshine, and the whole valley seemed to leer 
with blight, as if at the approach of the haggard King of 
Terrors. Not on the final morning of Time shall the sun 
fling his wan and pallid glare so cold through the stagnant 
air upon the Last Man. 

There was a detachment of discharged soldiers on the 
road, marching down to Wilmington. I walked and 
talked many hours with a little blue-eyed boy, with a 
downless face, but a plenty of sunny curls on his head, 
who was a three year's veteran, a corporal, honorably dis- 
charged from the army of the Republic. Through all the 
unutterable abominations of garrison life on the frontier, , 
he had " kept the whiteness of his soul." 

"Why," said he, with such artless innocence, that I 
could not but smile, "I am very glad, after being three 



212 A DISGUSTED SOLDIER BOY. 

years in such horrid ways, to talk with somebody whose 
conversation is instructive, and not sprinkled, every other 
word, with oaths." 

We sat down by a spring of greasy water, filled our 
canteens, then walked on again. 

" I was brought up in New York," he continued, swing- 
ing his canteen over his shoulder, " but I never see or 
heard of such dreadful wickedness as there is in the Uni- 
ted States Regulars. I was in a mess with a rowdy set, a 
lot of real bloody scamps ; and they had a regular con- 
spiracy to make me stand treat, and spend all my money, 
as they did. I have some hundreds saved up, but there 
isn't a man in my mess, and only two in the whole com- 
pany, besides me, that have a cent to their names, on the 
face of the living earth." 

" They badgered you a good deal, then." 

" Why, this very morning, when you came and warmed 
yourself by our bivouac fire, as soon as you were gone, they 
crowded around me, a dozen at once, and asked me ' What 
did you say to that citizen V ' What business had that 
citizen in camp, talking with you V They were perfect 
spies on everything I did. There is one man in my mess, 
I am certain, who, if he could get a chance, wouldn't hesi- 
tate to murder me, not so much to get my money, but 
because I wouldn't spend it. And to spend it in such a 
way, too ! As if it were not enough to make one spend it 
for grog, I must bet on their chicken-fights, their lice-fights, 
their toad-fights, and such brutal things. 

" But you could appeal to the officers ?" 

" O, precious little they cared, most of them. I tell you 
anybody who will go into the United States Regulars in 
time of peace, is a thief; or else a fool, like me ; or else he 
is poor and has to do it. My Captain was good to the boys, 
because he wanted to be popular; the Major was a real 



VALLECITO— AN OASIS IX THE DESERT. 243 

good man anyhow ; but the rest of 'em " — here he signifi- 
cantly held up his hand, and executed a filip with his fore- 
finger and thumb. " They made us give them a part of 
our pay for a ' company fund,' to buy luxuries for the boys 
that were sick in hospital ; and then, while we were living 
on hard-tack, they bought wine and canned fruit for them- 
selves. Why, I have seen the boys many a time, when 
we were in garrison, and there was no excuse under the 
sun for the commissary not having enough grub, so near 
starved, that they would dig up these Adam's-needles, and 
cook the roots, just like the Apaches." 

" Our venerated Uncle Sam never hears of such things." 

" Indeed he don't." But it was good enough for us, for 
being such big fools. If ever I go into the United States 
Regulars again, I hope I may have to eat baked roots all 
my life." 

Pleasant to my eyes beyond description, was a white 
frame-house, after those thousand miles of mud-huts. This 
solitary house, neat as a "New England cottage, was Yalle- 
cito. We had wandered up nearly fifty miles between the 
haggard Cordilleras, till they were now only a half-mile 
apart ; and right down into this valley, here all hoary-gray 
with stunted century-plants, and reeking beneath the ava- 
lanches of heat which roll and quiver down the mountains, 
the fifty green acres of the Vallecito oasis are flung 
together. 

It is a perfect Paradise, a Garden of Adonis in the wil- 
derness. The pretty cottage, embowered in vines and 
peach-trees, in an atmosphere redolent with mellow peaches 
in the grass, and with cool milk in the spring-house ; the 
bright-green foliage of the ever-welcome cottonwoods, and 
the willows bending tenderly over infant rills ; the Arca- 
dian and pastoral simplicity of the Diegeno brushwood 
huts, stacked about with golden fodder, and floored with 



24 i INVITED TO RIDE. 

creamy pumpkins, over which little swarthy babies tum- 
bled and cackled with the kids and the dogs ; and, above 
all else, the sweet music of summer birds, silent for a thou- 
sand miles — all this in the very middle of the horrible 
desert ! 

Beyond Yallecito I was overtaken by a little man in a 
very little spring-wagon. He had a face as round as a 
button, and very red eyes, and he was all the while drink- 
ing something from a coffee-pot. When he came up, he 
slackened his pace a little. 

" Warm day," said I. 

" You bet," said he. A slight pause. Another drink 
from the spout of the coffee-pot. 

" Come from the States?" said he. 

" I am recently from the Eastern States ; yes." 

" Get in," said he, motioning with his elbow toward the 
vacant space on the seat. 

" No ; I thank you," said I. Up goes the coffee-pot 
again. 

" Want to work ?" he asked, changing his lines into his 
right hand, and twisting round in his seat to look at me. 

" I thought people didn't have to work in California." 

" You bet your life they do," said he. Then presently, 
"Better get in." 

" ~No ; I am walking for a living." 

" You bet," said he ; and then he drove on again. Al- 
most the last thing I saw of him before he vanished from 
sight, was his white Chinese hat tipped back, and the new 
coffee-pot on a level with the same, brightly glinting in 
the sunlight. 

You can classify half the Calif ornians you meet, by the 
manner in which they speak that phrase. A great major, 
ity of them pronounce it in the headlong, careless way, 
" You bet" which accentation indicates about the largest 



YOU BET— SAN FELIPE PASS. 245 

amount of personal indifference toward yourself and all 
other human beings that you can easily imagine. The 
man who says " You bet," is somewhat reflective, and does 
not spend Ins money freely. Beware of him; he is a sub- 
jective man ; one of those, 

" Whose visages 
Do cream and mantle like a standing pond ; M 

he reads you through and through. The man newly 
arrived from the East timidly says, " You bet." Your 
portly men, sportsmen, and carriers of canes, who know 
their words are rather empty, and always need to be boiled 
down, have it, " You bet your life" or " You bet your 
sweet life" 

Pretty soon after this I reached the top of this long 
arm of desert, which is thrust thus into the mountains, 
and turned abruptly aside into the famous San Felipe 
pass. Mile after mile the road wanders up into the moun- 
tains, on a natural railroad grade, along the bed of an 
arroyo ; sweeps gracefully around many a jagged headland 
of greenish or bird's-eye granite ; threads a labyrinth of 
wanderings, which have in one corner a savage cat-claw^ 
in another, a delicate mimbre ; ever up, and up, so long 
and so easy. 

Then all at once, the road wedges itself in between two 
mighty walls, a thousand feet high, perhaps, so near 
together that a very wide vehicle would with difficulty 
pass between. Ah ! if there should come an earthquake 
now, and bump these walls together! Presently there 
stands straight before us a perpendicular, water-chiseled 
precipice, and the road surges away upward and eastward, 
climbs around by wild and dizzy ways, pitches at a break- 
neck rate down a steep hill, then mounts another, and so 
at last tramps steadily up through a vast and flaring gorge 
into the mighty pass. 



246 



FAREWELL TO THE CHAPARRAL. 



On top of a huge gray bowlder I sat down to rest, and 
to bid farewell, as I supposed, to the desert. But no ; for, 
like that " lean fellow" whose dwelling place it is, the hun- 
gry desert will have its rounded dues. It clutches in its 
lean fingers the granite heart of the mountains ; and, 
sitting on their very summits, laughs in scorn over the 
valleys on which it has spread its shroud of dearth. 

Then I ascended the highest mountain there was in 
sight, and from the summit beheld nothing but a herd of 
stubby humps, which looked as if they had been mauled 
back when they tried to rise. They are like the moun- 
tains of Texas, bald, hot, gray, stupid ; without trees, or 
cataracts, or any yawning chasms; not shooting up any 
pinnacles gloriously into high heaven ; bastard mountains, 
inexpressible lonesomeness, of ancient desolation. 

The Sierra Nevada and the Coast Eange interlock here 
in a confused, tumbling system of hills ; but, as you look 
toward the Pacific, you can easily recognize the summits 
of the Coast Eange proper, by the Alpine freshness of 
their greenness. Great joy is that to the weary pedes- 
trian. From this hour he bids farewell to the chaparral. 
The thickets of the Coast Kange are not thorny. 




CHAPTEB XIX. 
HONEY m GREEN HILLSJ 

* T last I was really in California. It was the valley 
|p^ of San Felipe. Californian-like, there was a flow- 
\^i<iyl ing bar in the station, but of things to eat, not so 
much as a cracker, for the soldiers had eaten out everything. 
Going over the creek to the Indian village, I came first to 
a Diegeno squaw, whose numerous babies, scared by the 
Paleface, all ran and clutched her by the petticoat. 
Pointing to a basket of pan-cakes on the roof of the 
hut, then at a great heap of peaches, I made a significant 
gesture, gave her a silver quarter, and said, " Sobez /" 

Then she said, " Ugh ! ugh !" 

Then I said " Ugh !" 

Then she gave me a hatful of juicy peaches, and two 
pan-cakes, and seemed well content. 

A wondrous valley was that of San Felipe, in that yellow 
month of September, as it stretched out between the 
sierras its long and sunny reaches, mile after mile, thickly 
clad as a sheep's back with the rich and odorous rowen. 
On this sweet-smelling couch, beneath a clump of whisper- 
ing cottonwoods, I flung myself down for an afternoon of 
dreamy pencilings. Behind me lay Sahara; before me, 
the fabulous richness and ripeness of California in Autumn, 
to traverse which there still remained a golden remnant of 
days, which should be mine to enjoy, before the rainy 
season, without a freak of thunder or withering simoom. 

And so I scribbled on and on across that dusty desert, 
2±7 



2i8 IN THE VALLEY OF SAX FELIPE. 

and all those torments came back to me— torments — and 
then — and — dusty — the desert — my pencil dropped from 
my drowsy grasp, and I lay " face downward to the quiet 
grass," paying the unconscious best tribute of respect to 
the subtile resuscitations of California. 

If any man understands the valley system of Southern 
California, it is a gift of Nature; let him not boast himself 
thereof above others. Most of the valleys appear to trend 
about K W. by K half K ; but if it isn't that way, it's 
some other way, which is just as good. What is certain 
is, that this lovely valley of San Felipe is swung down 
.among the mountains like a huge hammock, one end 
being beautifully green in the Coast Range, the other a 
desert in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Another certain 
thing is, that a September morning in this valley is one 
of the finest possible in any climate, because, after sleeping 
with profound soundness, not enfeebled by any sultriness, 
you slowly warm out from the chill of a Swiss morning 
into the most exquisite of Italian forenoons, with its violet 
haze on the mountains. 

Then, too, sueh is the admirable salubrity and attraction 
of this almost changeless climate, that, away in these dry 
days of September, 

" Smale fowles maken melodis, that slepen all the night with open yhe," 

as cheerily as in the East alone in April. Words cannot 
express the delight with which I listened to the sweet 
jangle of that never-to-be-forgotten morning, the first after 
the desert, the first really in California. That pretty scold 
with beak of gold, the magpie, was saying as snappishly 
as possible, " You shan't ! you shan't !" Then there was 
the bluejay. 

" Jaybird, jaybird, what'll you take for your tail ?" 

" Sixpence ! sixpence !" 



CALIFORNIA BIRDS. 249 

"Cut'toff! cut' toff!" 

"Pay! pay!" 

The strutting and important quail was always tittering 
his imperious family call " Come right home ! come right 
home!" Once in a while the lonesome bachelor paysano 
chimed timidly in, " Ukle, ukle, ukle !" Then there was 
the melodious warble of the oriole, and the blue-bird, and 
the sweet small chirrup of the yellow-bird, with a song as 
wavy as its seesaw line of flight, and the crows, gabbling, 
and chuckling, and cawing. 

If California has no mocking-bird, like that of the South, 
and no bobolink like that of New England, it has more 
than a compensation in its own variety of lark. Its song 
is more rapturous than the bobolink's, though almost as 
brief, but is irregular and wild, yet soft and wonderfully 
thrilling, and has none of the New England angularity of 
the bobolink's tune. It is the wild and resistless abandon 
of genius. But the lark is modest, and needs no arts of 
coquetry, no flitting and swinging on bushes, and flashing 
plumage — which it has not — to trick forth its peerless 
carol, as the bobolink does. 

Then for the bass, there came up from afar the appalling 
and mighty blast of the donkey. There never was made 
on earth such another concentrated and double-breasted 
roar as some of those animals vented in the San Felipe 
valley. But, after all, say what you like, his music is 
incomparably more respectable than that of half the piano- 
players, because it is natural, and has at its foundation the 
root of all music that is worth hearing, this feeling, to wit : 
" I do but sing because I must." Besides that, his charac- 
ter is laudable ; he is so thoroughly honest and sincere, 
and speaks his mind so freely. 

Along the edge of the valley were the huts of theDiege- 
nos, built of poles and flat-thatched with straw. All over 

11* 



250 DIEGENOS VILLAGES. 

and around them were mats and cloths of drying peaches, 
with their little cups of amber juice ; baskets of pan-cakes 
on the roofs, etc. Inside, the converted braves, mighty to 
do nothing, endlessly chaffering and giggling, stretched 
themselves at ease on a collection of vegetables more 
motly than a booth of paschal eggs in Cologne. Heaps of 
red and yellow maize, melons, peaches, prickly pears, cat- 
claw and mesquite pods, and pumpkins with their fat necks 
ridged with whelks. 

I have spoken before of the inferiority of these Pacific 
tribes to the Eastern Indians. They were weaker in body, 
because the latter found plenty of good meat in their 
forests, while the Pacific tribes ate principally grasshoppers 
and grubs. 

What tribes of Eastern Indians ever submitted to be 
named anew by the English ? But the Jesuits called these 
after their missions, Diegenos, Miguelenoa, etc., names 
which they keep to-day. But then there was something 
wonderfully magnetic about these old Spaniards, not found 
in Saxons. And when the "magnetism" failed, they 
pieced it out with the lazo. According to Kotsebue, La 
Perouse, and others, this was found a most potent spiritual 
weapon in subduing the carnal desires of the heathen to 
breathe God's pure air. The Indians had very wicked 
and profane "sweat houses," for keeping themselves 
healthy. The Jesuits immured them in religious dun- 
geons, or in huts so outrageous that they burned them 
periodically to suppress the vermin.* 

So I wandered on up the valley, between the brown- 
and-green-mottled mountains, spiked atop with pines, 

*Kotsebue, as quoted by Dr. Stillman, says, " These dungeons are opened 
two or three times a day, but only to allow the prisoners to pass to and from 
the church. I have occasionally seen the poor girls rushing out eagerly to 
breathe the fresh air, and driven immediately into the church like a flock of 
sheep by an old ragged Spaniard armed with a stick." This was in 1824. 



ENCOUNTER WITH A DIEGENO. 251 

through the furzy luxuriance of the dappled prairie. Sprin- 
kled in the grass were patches of dwarf sunflowers, here 
and there a milky morning-glory, and the white flowers of 
the jimson. 

At the upper end of the valley there were groves of vast 
live-oaks, shutting out all the heavens. Lying at the base 
of one of their amazingly large trunks, close beside the 
bank, where " the babbling runnel crispeth," I fell asleep 
again, in this sunny weather, and was awakened by a good- 
sized spider which trotted across my face. 

Here a rift in the leafy canopy suddenly reveals the 
mountains, now beetling close overhead. It is Italy ! It 
is Italy ! This splendid, shining, black-green oak is the 
ilex ; up yonder the huge white bowlders stand out so won- 
drously cool and clean-looking in the Alpine green of the 
chamizal, just as in Italian Tyrol ; and there, too, is the 
same delicious, dreamy haze. Verily it is Italy, for here 
is the house of Signor Tutti-Frutti, charmingly snug and 
neat in this land of slatternly habitations ; and in his field 
the Italian " triple culture " — wheat between rows of apples 
and vines. 

Just then a Diegeno, hideous in his army rags, came 
down the road on a beautiful Spanish pony, which was 
single-footed. As soon as he espied me, he started on a 
gallop, reeling in his saddle, and yelling like a demon. He 
rode straight at me, and stopped astonishingly short, just 
before the pony's head knocked against my head. He 
wanted tobacco, and evidently believed in the motto, "Qui 
timide rogat, docet negare" for he stretched out his hand, 
and grunted vigorously. Having none, I tried to get away, 
but I could by no means escape, for he managed the horse 
with such extraordinary dexterity and quickness that, turn 
what way I would, the animal confronted me face to face 
in an instant. It seemed to be a part of the rascal's body, 



252 A FEARFUL ADVENTURE. 

and to move by his will. Such wheeling, running, turn- 
ing, pursuing, overtaking and facing as were executed 
there for a moment, would have constituted a great attrac- 
tion in a circus. I had to pick up a branch, and thwack 
him lustily and a good many times, before he would go 
away. Not Thersites himself could have made a face more 
kinked with disgust, fear, pleading, and craven supplication. 

All one long afternoon I walked up, through the pass, 
then down among the great and quiet hills, through a soli- 
tude as deep and peaceful as the Truce of God. Even 
little Bunny himself, weaned two days ago, though play 
he must, jumped about and threw up his heels as softly as 
he could, so as not to waken his father. 

On the great plain of Warner's Rancho I had an adven- 
ture that threatened to be pretty serious. There was a 
great herd of Spanish cattle at pasture, which seemed never 
to have seen a pedestrian, for they ran after me in multi- 
tudes, with their necks stretched up, and their eyes stand- 
ing out, as if they had seen a ghost. 

The first thing I know I am completely surrounded, and 
they are not by any means to be scared away. Really, 
this is rather alarming. They surge up toward me, despite 
all I can do, and their long and shining horns stand up 
around me like a forest. They snort, they sniff, they scrape 
the ground. And now the space around me is hardly a 
rod wide. Still the mighty mass crowds closer and closer 
together. As a last desperate resort I resolve, as soon as 
they come quite close, to leap, if possible, on one's back. 
The result certainly could not be worse than to remain on 
the ground. 

But now, to my infinite relief, I see a Mexican galloping 
to the rescue. Hold ! If he rushes on them, they will 
stampede over me, and death is certain. Ah ! he under- 
stands that. He approaches slowly, he yells, he swings 



RESCUED BY A VAQUERO. 253 

his arms. The attention of the brutes is drawn, and they 
cease crowding. They look at him, they begin to disperse, 
he rides to my side, I am saved ! 

Thanks ! my friend, many thanks ! 

Seeing he was a common vaquero, I thought he would 
accept money, and offered him silver, but he refused it 
with a shake of the head, abstractedly. In the whole time 
he was with me, he did not open his lips, but continued to 
survey me with undisguised amazement. A footman 
appeared to be as strange an apparition to him as to the 
cattle. 

Again I tramped on fifteen miles over another pass, nor 
heard a human voice. Neither was there one good splash 
of water over rocks, nor even a healthy chance of an acci- 
dent, nor any other thing whatever, save an easy, endless 
roll of hills, clad in " this vivid incessant green " of cham- 
izal. 

Yet many of these hills were veiy beautiful in those soft 
September days. Away up on the mountains, where the 
gauzy haze in the morning frosted the brown and cuir-col- 
ored panicles of the chamizal, I have seen little sunny 
slopes glow with a warm and liquid flush of purple, delicious 
as any damson, or touch of Claude Lorraine. 

Oak Grove describes itself, being a little wooded basin, 
beside the brook, among these unfading hills. Here I 
found a thoroughly representative Californian, of the class 
one degree higher than the average retired miner. He 
was lying in luxurious ease in an elegant hammock, beneath 
a vast oak tree, close beside the long ranks of bee-hives. 
He had plenty of novels and magazines scattered about ? 
and, after a few words exchanged, I sat down and read an 
hour in a newspaper. In all that time he did not once even 
smile over his Martin Chuzlewit. Think of that ! He 
was not above twenty-five,, and seemed to be a sort of won- 



254 A REPRESENTATIVE CALIFORNIA^. 

derful boy Beckford, with all his heart of laughter eaten 
out, listless, ineffably wearied and disgusted with everything 
on earth. At dinner he plumped a spoonful of squash on 
his plate in a kind of dissatisfied, dyspeptic way, as if he 
despised himself for being obliged to eat squash, or any- 
thing else, and thrust it mechanically and rapidly into his 
mouth, without vouchsafing a single word, though his two 
charming sisters were prattling gaily to him and to each 
other all the while. 

There was plenty of silver on his table, and the daintiest 
of all possible linen, but his house was made of poles stuck 
into the ground, and daubed with mud, though it had a 
shingled roof. His fence was like unto himself. It was 
made of the crookedest stakes anybody can think of, set in 
a most unneighborly way, back to back, like a row of peo- 
ple bowing to each other, leaving a lot of holes, where the 
dogs popped nimbly through. 

A trifling but amusing incident happened in this fence. 
A terrier and a cat were gnawing a bone in the road, and 
for some time appeared to dine together harmoniously. 
But at length some manner of contention sprung up, and 
they fell to quarreling. Pussy sat on her haunches for a 
moment, and clawed the dog's nose ; but she was upset 
backward in a twinkling, and took to her heels. She ran 
through a chink which was too small for the terrier, but he 
was so furious that he did not observe that fact. His head 
went through, but his shoulders caught fast, and his hind 
parts flew up against the stick, where his tail snapped like 
a whip-lash. 

From this pleasant grove and these sweet pastures of 
kine and of bees, again long miles downward, over this 
green and hilly wold. The clean white boulders every- 
where stand up in the green thickets, trooping along the 
hillsides like walls, or perched in nests on the shoulders of 



A GERMAN SETTLEMENT. 255 

hillocks, where they are the very counterpart of the white- 
walled villas which nestle around the fadeless shores of 
Lake Como. 

And here on the San Luis Rey is another little cove, and 
a whitewashed German cottage. The vast live-oak, with 
the hives on the ground beneath, is the universal feature 
here. Add to this mighty pumpkins, great-bellied, tran- 
quil cows, waddling home from the hillsides, willow-hedged 
gardens, and a wattled corrol, full of all manner of fowls, 
every one vociferously talking in some dialect of German. 

In descending from the tops of the Coast Eange to the 
valley of the Margarita, nearly on a level with the Pacific, 
I crossed various belts of vegetation, which paled contin- 
ually as I went lower. The mountains are everywhere 
greenest on top, then come brown and sepia tints, hazel, 
cuir, sage-color, and lastly the odious, dust-colored plain. 

Crouise says the flowers of California are notably scent- 
less. But this is not true, at least of the herbs which grow 
in these little brook valleys, for the very atmosphere is 
odorous as anise and fennel, and sweet as old nepenthe. 
Thrust your hand at random into the raggedest stems by 
the roadside, and pluck, and you shall have all the old de- 
lightful aromas of the garret, where mother used to go to 
get herbs for your youthful quinsies. The varieties of 
sage, mint, and rosemary are wonderful for their multitude. 
The mountain air, where in spring all sweet things bud 
with sap of green delights, in September is full of the mu- 
sic of b^s and of dulcet medicines. 

Begging the reader's pardon for its animal grossness, I 
will make the following observation. O the bread and 
butter that I have eaten in these hills, with the honey 
poured thereon, lucid, and long, and luscious ! And the 
milk also. 

California seems to be much like Greece in scenery mid 



256 CALIFORNIAN SCENERY AND LITERATURE. 

inspiration. It is a country something too theatrical. The 
glorious brilliance of late winter and spring is like an 
actor fired by the applause of his house ; then comes the 
lassitude, the deadness of summer, when all the tendrils 
which bind the soul to Nature are wilted, and the poet is 
driven in upon his own imagination. It seems as if the 
ultimate literature of California would be, like that of 
Greece, rather subjective and introspective than interpre- 
tative of Nature. The Greeks believed themselves pay- 
ing homage to Nature, but it was not the real ; it was 
only the stage scenery, invented and peopled by their own 
exuberant fancies. They had no rivers but what rolled down 
flowers and gold ; no forests but what were full of caper- 
ing Dryads. They did not give themselves up to Nature, 
but, rather, invested everything with human attributes. 

California may rear edifices of enchantment, like Moore's, 
perfumed all through with cinnamon and sandal wood ; or 
dream the mystic pictures of a Longfellow ; or yield some 
miracles of phrasing, like Tennyson ; but she will hardly 
hear the noble organ-tones of a Bryant, or produce such 
an hierophant of Nature as Wordsworth. Burns says : 

'The Muse nae Poet ever faud her, 
Till by himsel' he learned to wander 
Adown some trotting burn's meander 
And no think lang." 

The habitations both of native Californians and of 
Americans in these parts are the most forlorn that can be 
imagined. A mud-house all alone in the middle of a dusty 
looking plain, surrounded by various horse-sheds, corrols, 
styes, etc., but never a tree planted, nor any fence erected. 
There lived in Temecula a little bullet-headed American, 
whom I chanced to find several miles from his house, and 
thereupon, with the hospitality of his class, he offered me 
a ride, and when he found I could not accept, he positively 



Ml' HOST AT TEMECULA. ,257 

insisted on hauling my little stuff. So I put it in — about 
three pounds in weight — and was not a little amused at 
the absurdity of the thing. 

Arrived at his home, I found it such as I have described. 
He had been forty years in California, was married to a 
charming, little, round-faced, black-eyed Spanish woman, 
and was strongly Spanish in his sympathies. She was a 
great botanist, he told me, so I brought a large handful of 
sprigs along. She was in a peck of flutters over them, 
turned them this way and that, smelt them very daintily, 
chewed the leaves, pursed up her little mouth like a bottle- 
cork, whipped away every other minute to stir something 
in the pot, and — told me three-fourths of the names incor- 
rectly. 

In the morning we sat down to the everlasting bread and 
coffee of the native breakfast ; strong coffee, without milk 
or sugar, and bread without butter. There were two 
brothers of the hostess present, men who spoke very cor- 
rect Spanish, with a slight Asturian accent, and with the 
Gothic blue blood in their fine faces, which were almost 
w T hite. But they were thoroughly Celtic in their gayety 
and in their merry laughter, wherein they appeared to 
great advantage beside my impassive countryman. He 
toiled hard after them with his laborious Spanish, but his 
tongue w T as very thick, compared with theirs, and his ges- 
tures very mechanical, and he smiled like a horse. In 
everything which he could control he had made himself 
as Spanish as he could. 

From Temecula I passed up through a vast valley, or 
strip of plain, to La Laguna. The fading grass on the 
western line of its foothills had covered them as with 
Gobelin tapestries. The brightness of their colors passes 
all description. 

The lake at the top of this valley is beautiful in itself as 



258 J A SILENT MEXICAN. 

Lake Lucerne, but it has mean settings. All the gorgeous 
calico foothills are snipped off, and leave the beautiful lake 
surrounded bj dusty-red hills, which are glassed in its pale 
green rim. On one side were many large willows, and it 
was very curious to see some of them growing thriftily 
many rods out in the water. 

There lived here a huge, corpulent Mexican, who was 
distinguished for saying nothing. He received me with a 
shake of the hand, a nod, and a pleasant smile. He went 
away, then presently returned, nudged me on the shoul- 
der, and nodded his head up, to signify that I should fol- 
low. At the end of the veranda, whose floor was the 
ground, there was a little closet, and in it a counter, a 
shelf, and one lone bottle of whiskey. He poured out a 
thimbleful, and handed it to me without a word. Then 
he took some himself, looked at me, smiled, and said noth- 
ing. He had a shingled roof, an American plow and a 
harrow, and he seemed to think that, to sustain the dignity 
of these things, it was necessary he should " treat " with 
an American drink. In the twelve hours I was there he 
did not utter an audible word to his family. 

In the evening I lay down on a dried ox-hide. The 
moon rose on the opposite side of the lake, and, shining 
down from the hills upon the water, suffused all the air 
with a pale pea-green radiance, as if the lake, as Catullus 
says of his beloved Benaens, had drunk down the daylight 
and was giving it forth again, tinged with its own won- 
derful hues. Then somebody twitched my shoulder and 
said, " Senor, senor, get up to coffee." 

A whole night had that mild-eyed thief purloined ! 

I will end this chapter with a visit to an old Californian, 
one of the " Forty-niners," as they call themselves, who 
has retired from mining, taken up a quarter section of 
land, and gone to " ranching." He may stay on this farm 



VISIT TO A FORTY-NINER. 259 

ten years ; lie will probably stay on it ten months, then 
sell it at four dollars an acre, "and the improvements at a 
valuation." It shall be in Temescal Canyon, which is a 
deep, narrow valley among green mountains. 

He has one little field, half hedged with willows, half 
fenced with poles, which is full of maize, dried so rigidly 
stiff that it hangs down its blades like swords, and hardly 
flickers at all in the wind, though its three, four, five ears 
stand stoutly up on every stalk. A little irrigating ditch 
runs along the roadside a mile, and creeps through the wil- 
low hedge. A great sycamore stands over his cabin, and 
is, in these days, sadly letting go leaf after leaf to rock 
and wheel in many a melancholy circle to the ground. 
There is no fence about his house ; no shrubbery ; nothing 
but the forlorn wood-yard in front, with a few gnarly bil- 
lets of oak, which he and his Mexican wife have pecked at a 
hundred times in the vain attempt to split, to the great 
peril of her bare toes, and a rusty ax half buried in the 
chips ; and in the rear of the house jungles of sunflowers, 
all ripped and twisted by the pestered cattle. 

The whole valley is now utterly parched and dry, ragged 
with flaunting skeletons of gigantic weeds and mustard, 
odiously dusty, with nothing green to look upon, except 
the tops of the mountains, and the live oaks here and 
there, which look so strangely and darkly lustrous amid 
this hideousness. 

All around his house, within Hve rods of it, and every- 
where in the valley where there is a piece of ground as 
wide as your hat, a ground squirrel has his hole and his 
little mound. The whole earth is honey-combed by them. 
"Whenever I approach an oak, they hustle and tumble out 
of it in myriads, with their cheeks full of acorns, and the 
ground swarms with them, as with rats. 

He has shingles on his adobe hut, and that is a great 



260 PETER QUARTZ'S ADVENTURES.] 

deal in this country. Underneath these shingles — for we 
can look right up to them — we sit between the cool, bare 
mud- walls, on some stools. Peter Quartz is his name ; an 
oldish man, with a long face, and exceedingly round-shoul- 
dered, from sitting so much in camps without a chair. He 
wears his hat in the house. After some circumlocution, 
he begins the story of his California mining experiences. 

" I come to Californy from Pike County in old Missouri, 
in '49. When I got to the Timber Toes Diggins, I hadn't 
nary cent left. The first night I hadn't no blanket and no 
tent, and my har froze fast in the mud, and in the mornin' 
I jumped up sorter quick, and jerked out a handful of har. 

" I went to work in them diggings first fur another man, 
at ten dollars a day, an' found. I worked hard all winter, 
and lived on promissory beef and knuckle grease ; and in 
the spring it all fizzled plumb out, and I never got nary 
cent of my wages. 

" Howsomedever, I had my pick, shovel, and pan left, 
so I went sluicin' up to Catnip Creek. In eight months I 
had my stake made ; nigh onto $7,000 clean dust. ' Well,' 
says I to myself, says I, mow you'd better just cut tracks, 
Pete Quartz, and leave hyur, while you've got the robin 
by the tail, least it slips away, and you never gits a chance 
to put salt onto't again.' But I see a feller, just the night 
I was packin' up fur to leave, as had a mighty smart chance 
of maps, and a claim, which he said was a payin' one 
thousand dollars a week clur. He had to hurry home to 
his dyin' mother, he said, and he offered, seein' it was me, 
an' he had to sacrifice every thin', to take my pile fur it, 
though he vowed 'twas worth ten thousand dollars clur. I 
paid him the pile, kinder pityin' him like, but thinkin to 
myself 'twas a good trade, and went to work, and in four 
weeks it busted the riffle onto me agin. 'Twasn't worth 
nothin', and the feller knowed it. 



A MINER'S STORY. 261 

" But I lied a shanty and a lot of grub left, and I traded 
them fur a mule, aimin' fur to go up to Hard Scrabble 
Gulch, whar I heerd thar was a right smart lay-out. But 
that very night the cussed, wall-eyed mule fell down a 
gulch, and broke its neck. 

Then I started fur to walk thar, 'long with Jake Cum- 
away. Jake was mighty down-hearted 'bout his children 
he hed left, and he jest poked along all the time behind 
me, with his head in the dust. Says I, ' Jake, don't crawl 
along behind me like a dog all the time, but come up hy ur 
'longside, and hold up yer head like a man. But he paid 
no 'tention, and kept pokin' along in the dust. He was 
clean broke down, thinkin' 'bout his children ; and one 
night, when we laid rolled up together, I heerd Jake moan, 
and I shuk him, but he never answered me agin. 'Pears 
like 'twas the gloomiest night I ever see, settin' up thar 
alone with Jake, in them dismal roarin' pines. In the 
mornin' soon as 'twas light, and I felt safe like, I jest broke 
clean down, and wanted to lay down and die. But I dug 
a hole in the sand, and give poor Jake the best buryin' I 
could. 

" I seed Jake's little children, when I had made a stake 
agin, and I gin 'em enough, and put it in bank, fur to keep 
'em till they was of age. 

"After Jake died, I hedn't no heart to do nothin' fur 
nigh about a year. Last I went to figgerin' roun' agin, 
workin' day's-works, and got me a hoss, fur to go up to 
Idaho. I traded him fur a claim up thar, worked it ten 
days, and didn't strike nothin', and then sole it for a month's 
grub. In less than a week the fellar that bought it struck 
pay-dirt, and sole out fur $17,000 ! 

"I eat up all my grub, prospectin' round, doin' nothin' ; 
then I set out agin, and footed it back to Californy. Thar 
I fell in with Bill Migler, an ole friend of mine. 



A MINER'S STORY. 

""We was clean down to the bottom, an' flat on our 
backs. We bad to patch our pantaloons with these self- 
risin' flour-sacks, that makes the people over in Utah call 
the Calif ornians ' self-risers ;' and Bill an' me hed only 
three shirts betwixt us, but we kept the odd one clean, so 
we could wash and change once in a while. After a spell 
me and him tuk up a claim, and that summer we tuk out 
$23,000 apiece. 

" I was a gettin' mighty tired of prospectin' about and 
livin' hard ; so I jest bought fourteen sheers in the Consol, 
idated Toukaway Quartz Crushing Company, and then sot 
into the hotel, and picked my teeth as large as life. But 
things went agin me, as usual, and in four months the Con- 
solidated Toukaway went clean up the spout. Then I 
jest throwed up, and come down hyur, plumb disgusted, 
and poorer than I was when I begun, for now I've lost all 
my har, with worritin' and frettin'. 

" But I kinder hanker all the time to go back agin, and 
I would ef I wasn't mahried. Them miners was the best 
men I ever see, anyhow. Many's the time I've seed a po' 
fellar, with a woolen shirt onto him, asked in and got a 
good square meal give to him ; but the feller with a biled 
shirt, he was let go along. A feller with his breeches 
patched with flour-sacks, he was never turned away." 

There is a story told by Californians which is illustrative 
of early mining times. It is said that a certain preacher 
found his way to a mining camp, and began to labor for 
the salvation of immortal souls. But mammon, women, 
wine, and gaming held control over the minds of men in 
those wicked parts, and the unfortunate minister not only 
failed to reap any spiritual harvest of his labors, but carnal 
things also began soon to be sadly lacking. In short he 
got entirely out of money. Then the miners, with true 
Californian generosity, made him up a purse of $600, to 
enable him to reach some more favorable region. 



A PREACHER'S EXPERIENCES. 



2G3 



But, alas ! for human nature, the unfortunate minister 
had departed from the ways that are right, through the 
force of bad example, and in an evil hour he yielded to 
the seductions of the monte bank, and staked his money. 
As a matter of course, in about an hour and a half, he 
saw the last dollar of it slide from his hands. At this 
stage of the procedings, the heart of the monte-dealer re- 
lented within him. He proposed to the unhappy man of 
God that he should offer up prayers in his behalf, to the 
value of $600. He consented, a bargain was forthwith 
struck, the first installment of the money was promptly 
deposited, and the minister engaged in prayer. Not more 
earnestly and eloquently did Parson Sampson wrestle before 
the throne of grace, when he was in the presence of the 
Countess Yarmouth-Walmoden, who, he hoped, would 
procure him a benefice from the king. In fine, the prayer 
was so protracted, earnest, and, doubtless, so thoroughly 
repentant, that the monte-dealer said he would consider it 
an equivalent for the entire sum, which he at once turned 
over to the contrite minister. 





CHAPTER XX. 
WINE IN DKY YALLETS. 

may journey seven hundred miles west of the 
Mississippi, across the majestic rivers of Louisiana 
and Texas, and still the people, when they speak of 
" the river," mean the Father of Waters. So in California, 
in regard to the Colorado. The Santa Ana is the largest 
of all the streams of Southern California, but it is only a 
few inches of water, spread evenly over an eighth of a mile 
of sand — shining like a girdle of silver in a weary land. 

After crossing this river, and entering upon the vast 
Chino plains, the traveler sees an amusing spectacle. The 
dust-colored earth is covered with the tiny mounds of the 
ground squirrel. This animal is gray, about the size of 
the Eastern tree-squirrel, and has a long bush. He forms 
a partnership with a little owl, smaller than that which 
thrusts himself on the prairie-dog, will-he, nill-he, and with 
far more honorable ideas of business transactions. You 
can often see one standing sentry at a hole, while the squir- 
rel roams far abroad, foraging ; now scudding through the 
vast white brakes of the dead mustard, with his tail whip- 
ping among the stalks ; now backing along, drawing after 
him with his fore paws one of the little yellow gourds of 
the calabacilla ; now sitting pertly up on his haunches, with 
a clover-burr in his hands, nibbling it with such bewitching 
cunning in his countenance. 

This owl can see well in daylight, but he does not sound 
the alarm till you approach pretty near. Then awav whips 

26i 



ABOUT BLACKBIRDS. 265 

little Bunny, carrying Lis tail along, for the most part on 
a horizontal ; but every rod or so it flies up straight, and 
he is certain to erect it with a gay flourish just as he dives 
into his hole. 

Sometimes the owl stands by, and superintends the la- 
bor of digging. The squirrel works away, scraping and 
dredging out his hole, backing up and hauling up the earth 
with his fore-paws ; then he stands erect, and flings it out 
in a constant shower between his hind-legs. The owl looks 
on approvingly, and sustains him in the arduous labor by 
the smiles of his countenance. Once in a while he stoops, 
and brings his gizzard, or his crop rather, clear down to 
the ground, as if to take in a very long breath ; then he 
straightens up quick, with a sharp screech, " Go it !" 

These squirrels are the pest of farms. They eat up 
everything. The farmer has to surround his barley-fields 
with a cordon of strychnine-pots, or he gets no good of 
his labor. 

What myriads of blackbirds circle and sweep in the 
dusty flelds, or perch in the little willows by the tules. I 
think our common blackbird is the most thoroughly rep- 
resentative American bird we have ; he is so practical, so 
straight-forward, so business-like, so intent upon the " main 
chance." It has a better right to fly over the armies and 
navies of the Republic than the ravenous thief which now 
perches there. "What does the eagle know of purchase or 
of peaceable annexation ? It has served every nation of 
robbers and plunderers of provinces, from Rome down 
to Austria, and flaunts itself to-day at the head of modern 
European Chanvinism, and has its image stamped on that 
assassin of liberty, the needle-gun. The flight and the 
robberies of the eagle are almost world-wide, and such did 
Rome and Austria seek to make their empires. Rut let 
us, for the boundaries of our commercial Republic — for we 
12 



20(5 A NIGHT WITH A MEXICAN. 

are neither the Komans, nor yet the Greeks of the modern 
world, but the Phenieians — take the practical blackbird 
for our guide. He does not fly widely over Mexico, but 
likes Canada pretty well. It might be well, perhaps, for 
single races of men to spread themselves no wider across 
the track of the sun than do the races of birds, for with 
the sun runs the course of strong and homogeneous 
empire. 

One night I staid with a Mexican, who had a great heap 
of maize ears beside his house, and several Indians husking 
it. In the night they slept on the husks, in a kind of shed 
under my window, and one of them was taken violently 
ill, and about daybreak he died. It was one of the saddest 
sights I ever witnessed. Converted from the faith of his 
ancestors, he was not well-grounded in the new religion, 
and in his dying agony he seemed to doubt them both, 
and gather consolation from neither. In the anguish of 
his uncertainty and of his delirium, he continually tossed 
from side to side, and moaned, "Ay, Dlos mio /" "Ay, 
Senor sacramental /" " Ay, Dlos mio /" and then again 
he would mutter something in his native tongue. All 
night long his piteous wailing came up ; but toward morn- 
ing it grew rapidly feebler, and, as I looked out of my 
window at the first streak of dawn, I saw his comrades, in 
the feeble light of the shed, bending over him in stricken 
silence. 

In the upper part of the Chino plains there were some 
of those wonderfully brilliant foothills of Southern Cali- 
fornia, which well-nigh drive me to despair when I attempt 
a description. 

"Nature dies hard in California. She does not linger 
in the hectic beauty of an Eastern autumn, but fights, inch 
by inch, as she withers upward, in the long, dry summer, 
retreating from the plain to the foothills." In that great 



CALIFORNIA SCENEBY IX AUTUMN. 267 

ebb and flow of colors which distinguishes California above 
most other countries, the green of the mountains settles 
down over all the land, like a heaven of clouds, in Novem- 
ber ; but in May the color begins to desert the plains, and 
leaves them utterly odious, but changes in the foothills, 
like a dying dolphin, into more splendors than can be 
described. 

It is a strange, foreign-looking region, is this valley of 
the San Jose. You can see no mountains ; nothing but 
the treeless valley, of vast extent, bounded by round, burly 
knolls. Here and there one has a bright dwarf-walnut on 
its slope, or covers its head with a patch of cactus, which, 
at a distance, looks like a green velvet skull-cap on the 
crown of some old Franciscan friar. 

What a world of fatness yearly runs to waste in this 
almost fathomless brown adobe! The vine roots pene- 
trate it eighteen feet, and even at that depth are surfeited 
and palled with richness. A farmer showed me a well, 
twenty-six feet deep, to the very bottom of which a peach- 
tree, of only six years growth, had already sent a tap-root 
as large as one's thumb ! 

California has not the slightest material for an Indian 
summer, as Hawthorne describes it, with "its pensive 
glory in the far golden gleams among the long shadows of 
the trees." But this tender lilac haze is its tropical equiv- 
alent, and breathes over the land an influence, not dreamy, 
tranquil and pensive, like that beautiful summer of our 
East, but has in it a suggestiveness of Grecian genius, as 
it were an exquisitely tender and subtle spirit of earth, 
which gave breath to the old autochthones. When her 
gorgeous summer slowly fade's into nothingness, and the 
beauty of California turns to the hideous pallor of death, 
there seems yet to linger over her face an aureola, like the 
soul of a d} 7 ing saint, or some sweet breath of resignation, 



268 COURTING A TEXAN GIRL. 

which makes those sunken features still dearer to the be- 
holders. And in the years of her anguish and trembling, 
as in 1868, this presence is still more plainly felt, as if 
California piteously pleaded with her children for sympa- 
thy. 

On this great plain, brown- colored with the thick 
carpeting of dead clover, droves of horses, sleek, and glossy, 
and round, roam up and down, and gather the clover-burrs. 
At the unwonted sight of a footman, they scour away, 
with heads and tails gayly aloft, stop at a distance and 
reconnoiter, and snort, and prance, bending their limber 
legs so lighty that they seem to bounce on a spring 
mattrass. Ha ! the colts, how they caper and frolic, and 
stand up on their hind legs, fencing and cuffing each other ! 
They could turn somersaults on this soft bed, like country 
boys in a hay-mow, and never crack their necks. 

Near El Monte I passed a house, in front of which there 
were thirteen horses tied to the rack. I went in to get a 
drink, and saw so great a solemnity upon the visages, that 
I thought there must be a funeral in progress. But when 
I asked the boy, he told me, with much giggling and 
ducking of his head into his shoulders, that they were all 
courting his sister Eoxy. Then I became amused, and, 
prowling about the crack of the door, contrived to get a 
glimpse of the lady. She was a Texan girl, with one of 
those snow-white puffy faces, which look as if they would 
collapse if kissed ardently, but which, when they marry 
and leave off their silly skittislmess, soon wrinkle, and 
often develop an energy like a tiger's, upon occasions. 
She sat in one of the two rooms of the house, with one of 
her suitors. 

One of the " outs'' was intent on the crack of the door. 
JJe would squint through at her with one eye, then with 
the other. Then he would try to look through with both 




ROXY'S SUITORS. 



ROXY" AND HER SUITORS. 269 

eyes at once, dodging backward and forward, and looking 
ludicrously cross-eyed. At last a happy thought struck 
him. He bcmt his head to one side, aligned his two eyes 
with the crack, and got such an overwhelming impression 
of her charms that he sighed deeply, and dropped a tear 
from one of his eyes. Then another pulled him away, and 
looked in. They all waited patiently for their turns at 
the crack, and I took mine also. 

" Are you a settler in these parts, stranger ? " asked one, 
after he had surveyed me from head to foot. 

" No ; but I intend to take up a quarter-section.'' 

" "Well, sir, 'less you're pre-empted already, you haint got 
no right to look through that 'ar crack, interruptin' actual 
settlers." 

Poor fellow ! he viewed with great disfavor the prospect 
of his thirteenth chance being reduced to a fourteenth. 

In autumn El Monte is an oasis in the mighty desert of 
dead clover. There was a little circle of farms around it, 
creeping timidly out upon the plain, and I seemed to be, 
after so many hundreds of miles in semi-barbarism, once 
more in a scene of civilized life, with, 

" Allemanere of men, the mene and theriche, 
Werchynge and wandrynge ;" 

but chiefly wandering. I was surprised at the number of 
lusty tramps whom I met, moping doggedly along in the 
road, with a roll of blankets on their shoulders. They 
always had one and the same story to tell, which I listened 
to at first for information, but I soon grew weary of it. 
But now at last I approached the great goal of my 
desires — Los Angeles. As I stood upon the San Gabriel 
terrace, the steeples and tops of the little city barely 
loomed above the orchards ; and not all the fabulous 
glories and the gardens of Damascus, " Pearl of the East," 
could have been sweeter to the eyes of Mohammed, just 



270 THE CITY OF THE ANGELS. 

emerging from the desert, than were those of the river 
and city of the Angels to mine. 

First, before I plunge in medias res, I am going to give 
a brief description of the surroundings ; and then, if, in 
that week I spent with Jim, among all the dips and dives 
we made into the gardens, the orchards the wine-vaults, 
and the other tropical glories, we wander out at times into 
daylight and a state of consciousness, I will chronicle the 
circumstances, and the impressions received. 

The valley of the Los Angeles proper is scarcely more 
than half a mile in width, and meanders down from the 
Santa Susana mountains, hazy and dim thirty miles away, 
through a plain which is shivered into knobs. Sahara 
itself could not be more a desert in October, and not on 
earth could a streak of orange groves and vineyards shine 
more brilliantly green adown the middle. 

I entered the city near the little, old, mean, Spanish 
quarter, with its red-tiled adobes, and straightway fled 
out of it to avoid the horrible dust. I wist not where 
to go. I strolled down little alleys, fenced with gigantic 
canes, or with willows which hid the heavens, or with 
queer, old, Spanish hedges of cactus ; through gates left 
in Eden-like simplicity unguarded ; across frowsy gardens, 
where all manner of weeds twisted themselves in their 
riotous rankness, and castor-oil plants shook out their 
leaves in every hedge-row ; and through orchards, whose 
yellow and fragrant fruits of every variety that grows 
above the tropics, smirked upon green boughs, or wasted 
their quality in the rank and tangled grass. 

At last I got somewhere, — I don't know where it 
was — and found plenty of pears under a tree, of which 
the owner invited me to partake. We ate them under the 
tree, where they should be eaten, and not amid the cold 
glitter of silver knives and clink of dessert plates. After 



A VISIT TO THE WINE CELLARS. 271 

living for fire months on bread and beef I could only cat 
oii3, it was so big, so pulpy and so luscious. 

In company with Jim, I visited one of the wine cellars 
of Los Angeles. We wandered about through a cavern- 
ous gloom, along mouldering alleys brooded over by 
eternal solitude, among the tuns, whose huge circumfer- 
ence, in the light of the candle, smiled at us a solemn 
smile, and dapper barrels atop, whose little cheeks were 
full of smirks and grimaces. 

Clink ! A bottle bursting on the rack, in its swelling 
rage spits the shords across the alley. Here and there a 
hoary cobweb streamer, like the beard of some ancient 
monk at prayer, swayed with a gentle motion as Ave passed, 
as if muttering at our intrusion; and the light of the 
candle glistened on spots of dampness, which seemed to be 
great eyes, glowering at us wrathfully from the walls. 

When we returned to the pleasant light of day, there stood 
a row of bumpers, beaming in moist expectancy. 

" Quem Yenus arbitrum 
Dicet bibendi?" 

Who brings the myrtle, and the cliaplets of celery, and 
the roast peacock ? Where are the conchs of perfumes, 
and the vases of roses around the room, and the cool ver- 
milion frescoes? Where the reclining guests, whose 
flowing locks glisten with Syrian unguents ? Where the 
fountain, and the splendid lilies, out in the court ? 

But we have here no longer immortal Fabruian, or com- 
mon Sabine. Bring Angelica, the golden liquor, and 
silvery Paderon Blanco, and rosy Cocomaugo, and Sono- 
ma's sunny wine, and sweet juice of Anaheim I 

Which will you take? Angelica or Sonoma? The 
Sonoma has a false and delusive sparkle, as it lies there in 
its crisp and tender pallor ; and as you lift it before you, 
within the frosted rim, a cool and delicious shiver creeps 
around your heart-strings ; but Angelica flows with an 



272 LIFE IX LOS ANGELES. 

indescribably smooth, creamy and mellifluous mellowness, 
which, beginning about the porches of your intellect, pours 
down through all your marrow a serene mesmerism of peace. 
The former is an icy and heartless blonde, brilliant, fragile, 
sweetly tremulous in her ethereal beauty ; but Angelica is 
your ripe beauty of the South, with her soft " brown hair 
just lighted with gold," through whose languishing eyes 
you can look into a soul full of all gracious tenderness. 
You choose the latter. It is well. Leave the Sonoma to 
boys, and to eaters of cheese and mustard ; Angelica is for 
finer souls. 

To California ; — land of golden sunsets, of golden hills, 
and of golden mines ; land of the ardent dreams of our 
youth, and of the perfection of our American manhood ; — 
we drink this golden wine. 

If anything unusual happened in Los Angeles while I 
was there, I am not aware thereof. Indeed, I am not 
certain whether I staid a week, or two weeks. All the 
people are such nice people, so frank, so free, so generous, 
and all the while riding up and down in gorgeous buggies, 
bowing and smiling. You can buy lots on every street 
corner for nothing, and sell them for never so much money 
and get rich in an hour, or — the other thing. Everybody 
is so glad to see you, and jumps' over the counter to shake 
hands, and wants to sell you some lots. 

It is true, there is a great deal of dust in the streets ; 
but that helps to suppress the flies. The flies are very 
numerous in the restaurants — very numerous indeed ; but 
then you can -keep them out of your wine by drinking it. 
The waiter with the very imposing mustache, and hair 
parted in the middle, sitting in his shirt-sleeves and slippers 
with his feet high above his head on the counter, may wait 
on you, or may not ; but you can help yourself. There 
are some rows of low dens, with continuous awmngs all 



SOCRATES HYACINTH IN TROUBLE. 273 

along, Southern fashion, filled with Mexicans, and with 
Ah See, Hop Lee, Sum Bung and Jim Long ; but they 
turn out pretty clean shirts. There is a huge kettle of 
pitch boiling on every other street corner, the stench of 
which is only a little worse than that on the roofs ; but this 
also assists in suppressing the flies. 

"When I arrived in Los Angeles, I had just one silver 
dollar left. At the earliest hour of business I hastened to 
the office of Wells, Fargo & Co., where I expected to find 
a check. Inside the railing there was a keen-eyed, thin- 
faced, little clerk, with his remarkably small hat set a 
little on one side of his head. 

" Have you a letter for Socrates Hyacinth ?" 

He looked the letters over in a manner which seemed 
to me most unnecessarily and provokingly leisurely, put 
them back, turned round, plucked out one of his eyelashes 
and looked at it, and then said, in a perfunctory tone : 

"Nothing." 

I stood transfixed and dumb. Confound the man ! I 
gave him such explicit directions, and now there is nothing 
for it but to go and hire myself to a farmer. After a few 
moments I started with the utmost reluctance to go 
away, but lingered along, and dropped some fragmentary 
remark which indicated, I fear, a very sanguinary disgust. 

" There is one for Solymus Hyacinth," he said, casting his 
eyes languidly toward me, as he turned over his ledger. 

"Solymus Hyacinth ! There it is again ! The identical 
blunder they made once before," I said, impulsively and 
somewhat disconnectedly. I then named the firm from 
whom the draft should come, whereupon he raised his 
eyebrows very high. He walked to the box, took out 
the letter, looked at it again, raised his evebrows higher 
than before, but said nothing, then came and sat down 
to his ledger. Then I explained to him at considerable 
12* 



274 CALIFORNIA VINEYARDS. 

length, and very earnestly, the whole affair, how the money 
was earned, by whom sent, etc. He was manifestly 
becoming interested in my case, told me the letter was 
from the firm named, and admitted it was quite a hard- 
ship. But such was the iron inflexibility of the rules 
they were obliged to observe, he could do nothing. 
Finally he asked me to come again in an hour, when 
there would be present a gentleman acquainted with the 
parties sending the draft. 

It would be a long history to relate all the circumlocu- 
tions and tuggings at the red tape by which I finally got 
possession of that needed draft. Suffice it to say, I return- 
ed in an hour, was closely questioned, and at last allowed 
to open the letter of advice. Then, after much higgling 
and chaffering, and by affixing my name to a statement 
of facts, I obtained the draft. 

The prettiest things in Los Angeles are the prinientas, 
with their dainty fringe-like foliage, and their scarlet pods. 
Then there is an occasional fan-palm, with its immense 
vanes, broad enough for fans in Brobdingnag; and the 
lofty date-palm, with its thatched trunk looking like the 
side of a Suabian peasant's hut, and hoisting out aloft its 
crest of yellow-stemmed leaves, like gigantic ostrich 
plumes. 

In regard to California wines, I have space for only a 
few general remarks. It is admitted by a Hungarian, 
probably the largest wine-grower in the State, that Amer- 
icans are already the best vineyardists in California. They 
are not only more intelligent and scientific than the great 
body of French and Hungarian peasants, but they are more 
careful in growing and preparing the grapes, and more 
cleanly in their processes of manufacture. The best wine- 
makers prefer to buy their supply of juice from Americans. 
Then, too, European methods were found not to be 



WINE MAKING. 275 

adapted to California in many instances, and Americans 
were more ingenious in suiting themselves to new condi- 
tions than were men who had grown up amid Old World 
traditions. Americans often acquired the whole art and 
mystery of making good wine before these disciples of 
routine could get out of their European grooves. Among 
other particulars wherein wine-making in California differs 
from that of France may be mentioned the fact that, owing 
to the dry, warm climate of this State, especially in Los 
Angeles, the concern of the vinej^ardist is to prevent the 
grapes from getting too ripe, and therefore too strong in 
alcohol, while in Europe the difficulty is to get the berries 
ripe enough. 

The average California wine, in its pure state, contains 
about twelve per cent of alcohol, and to the American 
taste, educated on whisky, this is not enough. Hence 
even the most reputable manufacturers add to Angelica 
and Los Angeles Port, which are very sweet wines, a 
sufficient quantity of pure grape brandy, made by them- 
selves, to increase the percentage of alcohol to about 
seventeen. This is not necessary in order to enable these 
wines to keep, but to overcome the excessive sweetness 
which, to the American palate, is insipid. In Los Angeles 
the grapes sometimes parboil slightly on one side, and thus 
become sugary ; but the most experienced vineyardists 
remedy this to some extent by irrigating with cold 
mountain water, keeping back the growth of the vines in 
the spring. 

But, if the Californian is slightly at a disadvantage in 
regard of the sweeter wines, he is able to distance the 
European with his light table wines, in that his generous 
and cloudless sunshine imparts to them sufficient body 
without the addition of any of those pernicious decoctions 
smuggled in by Europeans. Indeed, grape-juice is so 



276 WINE .VS. WHISKY. 

abundant and so excellent that the price at which wine 
sells would not justify the expense of sugar and spirit. 
The light wines of California are probably the purest in 
the world, though the vineyardists must not assume too 
much credit for that fact, inasmuch as their pecuniary 
interest at present forbids adulteration. 

There are many Frenchmen and Italians in Los Angeles 
and their example has been contagious. One must be 
surprised to observe the number of Americans who drink 
wine regularly at dinner. A saloon keeper of long expe- 
rience told me that, in ten years, the consumption of whisky 
had very sensibly decreased, while that of wine and grape- 
brandy had increased. The result was, a decrease of 
drunkenness. 

The oranges of Los Angeles are the best in the world, 
with one exception. In Matamoras, Mexico, the oranges 
brought to market, though small, are sweeter than these. 

Most of the apples are nearly worthless. They are 

yapid and insipid. The grafted varieties of pears grow to 

an almost fabulous size, and are very good. 
****** 

And so at last I tore myself away from beautiful Los 
Angeles, and went on my journey. While in the city I 
bought a new coat, and I had not gone five miles before I 
met a man who wanted to sell me a rancho. Before that, 
while I had the old coat, everybody wanted to hire me to 
work. Thought I to myself, when I reach San Francisco, 
I will purchase an elegant pair of shoes, and then some- 
body will want to lend me some money. Said the man to 
me — he was a fine-looking man, with the universal, 
Calif ornian, brown beard, and mounted^ on a saddle with 
bear-skin housings — said he, 

" Perhaps you may be looking for Government land, 
my friend ?" 



ON THE MUSTARD PLAINS. 277 

" No, sir ; if you had the swiftest horse in Los Angeles, 
yon could not ride fast enough to put any Government 
land into my pocket." 

" All right, sir. ]STo offence meant. There are so many 
people on that errand nowadays." 

Let the reader understand that it is a heinous offence in 
Southern California to ask a knowing one if he is looking 
for that description of land, for the reason that so many 
slouching fellows make that pretense, while they are really 
squatters or " coyotes." As soon as this man saw I under- 
stood the situation, and used the common phrase of the 
country in repelling the insinuation, he apologized as 
above, and then offered me some of his own land, and then 
chaffered a long time trying to sell me a horse. This was 
the only offer of land I received, but the new coat brought 
me many proffers of horses. The intolerable nuisance of 
Southern California is, that everybody either wants to 
hire yon, or sell you something. 

On the vast mustard plains which stretch from Los 
Angeles to the sea there is nothing to break the glaring 
white monotony, except here and there a patch of cactus, 
overrun with wild gourds. In places this wide waste is of 
a dusty or coffee-green, with the little poleo. You may 
meet a scarecrow Mexican, with his rags fluttering in the 
breeze, and his wolfish dog between his legs, as he sits by 
the roadside. He has a thousand sheep, but you cannot 
see one, though you can hear the multitudinous surging 
and crackling in the mustard. What on earth do the 
sheep eat here ? Seeds, nothing but seeds. Yet they are 
lusty fat fellows. 

I went out to an appointed rendezvous in the Santa 
Susana Mountains, where I found Jim, and a veteran 
whom he had brought for a bear-hunt. 

Early next morning we started into the mountains. 



278 STARTING FOR A BEAR HUNT. 

Reed advised me to carry a shot-gun, for lie said with a 
rifle I would probably only wound the bear, but with a 
shot-gun I might, at short range, blind him and do some 
good. We went out along the foot of the range, waiting 
for the dense ocean fog to lift. At first Reed chatted 
glibly, but presently he began to be silent and look about 
him, and Jim and I naturally began to imitate his manner. 
We stretched out our necks, and gazed about like turkeys 
when it is time to go to roost, looking up into the hills 
with a very knowing air, and screwing our faces into the 
ravines as if we saw something. We stumbled over a 
great many bushes, but Reed glided noiselessly among 
them, without looking down. 

The mountains here are much like a shed-roof in shape. 
There is a mighty canyon in the slope, with steep sand- 
stone walls, and thickets at the bottom which Reed said 
the grizzlies haunted, making their dens in caves in the 
bottom of the wall. We approached, stepped out upon 
the edge, and peered anxiously down into the yawning 
and awful solitude. 

Nothing moving. 

Reed said they had probably returned already from the 
plains, whither they resort early in the morning to gather 
prickly-pears, and we should not see them astir again till 
evening. So we spent the day in hunting deer, wander- 
ing about by wild and fearful ways, through savage gorges, 
and among stupendous bowlders. 

Reed soon brought down a pricket, and we roasted some 
choice cuts with sticks, and ate them with wild honey — 
Calif ornian squatter fare. The hunter showed us a steep 
wall, in which the bees had deposited honey in a great 
cavity thirty feet from the ground, and, for lack of room, 
plastered on the outside wall a sweet bushel of juice. 
They placed it in the holes in the trees, and rocky caves, 



THE GAME DISCOVERED. 279 

and every wooded ravine smelled sweet with the dripping 
nectar. Was Yirgil predicting California when he says 
that, in the new golden age, 

" Et durae quercus sudabunt roscida mclla ?" 

That evening and the next morning we visited the great 
canyon in vain. Again we spent the day in a desultory 
manner, and another morning we were disappointed. 

Then we went to a deep ravine, where Reed thought 
they might possibly be out yet, eating acorns. He walked 
slowly down one side of the ravine, and we on the other, 
concealed from him by the trees. Suddenly we saw an 
enormous "meal -nose," sitting erect on his haunches, 
nearly eight feet high, a few rods in advance. He had 
evidently heard Reed, and not us, for he was sniffing the 
air in that direction. 

Presently he rubbed one nostril with one paw, and the 
other with the other, as if to improve, his scent. Jim and 
I stood motionless for a few moments, but our hearts kept 
up a lively thumping. Presently Jim whispered : — 

" The bloody old humbug ! I'll put a button-hole in his 
jacket. If his shoulder was only turned this way a little." 

" Don't try it, Jim !" I whispered. " You might only 
wound him, and then he'd make us into mince-meat." 

In that moment of suspense and grave-like stillness we 
heard the click of Reed's rifle, and we knew that long 
black barrel was leveled somewhere, and not in vain. A 
sharp crack leaped among the rocks, followed by a moan, 
while Jim fired wildly after him. 

Heavens ! he has shot another bear, and this one is upon 
him before he can reload ! 

" Load for your life, Reed ; load for your life ! There 
is another/' cried Jim. 

"Mount your tree! mount your tree!" came back the 
gruff response. 



280 END OF THE HUNT. 

With incredible quickness he rammed home his balls, 
slung out the rammer, while the bear was examining his 
mate, and fired without aiming, as the brute rushed upon 
him. He only wounded him in the paw. He jumped 
into a small live-oak, followed by the grizzly, which clutched 
his boot. A ball from Reed's revolver ripped a long 
scratch in his face, though it did him no great injury. But 
he tumbled down all in a heap, dragging off the boot, ran 
to his mate, turned her over with his unhurt foot, and 
uttered an appalling cry of rage and distress. Again he 
plunged into the tree, where he could almost reach the 
hunter, and again a glancing shot hurled him back, and 
again he ran to his mate, turned her over and wailed. 

Thus he ran backward and forward. The fourth shot 
pierced his windpipe. He ran and lay down beside his 
mate, breathing with a gurgling sound. Heed slipped 
down, loaded his rifle, took deliberate aim, and sent a ball 
crashing through his head. 

But even then, such is the tenacity of the animal, he 
continued to moan and to struggle. And thus together 
they lay, those fiercest brutes we know, and yet so constant 
in their death. 





CHAPTER XXL 

COAST-WALKS. 

EAR Las Pasitas, I stopped one afternoon at an 
adobe hut, the sole house on an immense, wealthy 
rancho. It might have been a bandit den, it was 
so hideously naked and desolate. In the middle of a great 
desert plain ; nothing around it but the sheep-corrals ; the 
ground all strewn with bones and woolly skeletons ; no 
windows in the dead, bleak walls; no beds, no carpets, no 
chairs ; nothing but rolls of blankets, sheepskins, billets of 
wood, guns and pistols, smashed hats, boots and mildewed 
ponchos, scattered over the earthen floor, which was ground 
to powder and never swept. There were blotches of blood 
on the walls, as if a sheep's head had been flung against 
them, and long stains, where the hot jets might have 
spirted from some murdered man ; the corners were full 
from top to bottom with many-storied webs, where fat, old, 
lazy spiders drowsed the livelong day, sniffing the dark 
odors of murder, which never for a moment were cleansed 
by the blessed beams of the sun. 

The house was built in the usual native fashion, with 
three rooms in a row, no doors between them, and no win- 
dows. In one end slept the proprietor, in the middle the 
shepherds, and the other end was a black and grimy 
kitchen. 

It was dark when the shepherds came in, and there was 
nothing cooked. They killed a sheep in the cruel Spanish 
fashion. They hung it up right before the door, and cut 

281 



282 A NIGHT WITH THE SHEPHERDS. 

its throat ; stripped off the pelt ; tore out some ribs ; burned 
them black on the fire ; then gnawed them like wolves. 

One of them was an American, but spoke Spanish better 
than English. He had the most brutally savage face I 
ever saw, and as we sat around the fire on the ground, and 
I looked upon them, lighted by the ruddy glare, tearing 
the bloody ribs in their teeth, I shuddered for my safety. 
But the proprietor spread some sheepskins in his room, and 
then a roll of gorgeous, many-colored blankets, as if he 
were some luxurious brigand, rolling them out for his cap. 
tive ; and I got what sleep I could from them. In the 
morning I was thoroughly ashamed, for he was very kind, 
gave me half of his pocket of peaches, chatted glibly, and 
bowed when I left with the courtliness of an old Castilian 
grandee. 

The thing which one notices here is the manner in 
which the Americans have undermined the natives, and 
set them loose, by marrying their women away from them. 
The Californian girl seems to say, with Jessica, 

" A daughter to his blood, 
I am not to his manners." 

She likes the American better, perhaps not for any qualities 
of heart, but because he is a better average bread-winner. 
And it is not these Yahoos alone who find themselves 
without wives, for the best old Spanish blood goes a beg- 
ging. But as soon as the capture is effected, the Californian 
wife begins another kind of conquest. She soon reduces 
her husband to bread and coffee for breakfast, always com- 
pels him to speak Spanish with her, and teaches their 
children only Spanish. They learn English later, but 
seldom speak it with correctness. These children are 
often remarkably pretty, being handsomer than pure 
American children, but, so far as I have observed, they 



EARLY DAYS IN CALIFORNIA. 283 

inherit more of the Californian idleness and love of silly 
ostentation than they do of American energy. 

The native Californians have a reputation for lavish 
hospitality, but they are outliving it bravely. My host in 
Temecula said to me, regretfully : — 

" Thirty years ago you could ride anywhere in the coun- 
try, and at any rancho exchange your horse for a fresh one. 
But that is no longer possible. The Californians are 
becoming selfish, gold-hunting, business men, like us 
Americans." 

At the conclusion of a "private party" which was given 
by a respectable Spanish family about the time I was 
passing, the host amazed the guests by collecting two 
dollars from every gentleman. But then the Spanish have 
many queer notions. Several times I have heard one, 
after eating in the house of an intimate friend and neighbor 
say " thank you." In Los Angeles I have seen a cigarrito 
offered as a compensation for lighting one. 

And the rapacity of Californian mistresses is equaled 
only by that of the Parisian grisettes. The picture of the 
miner, turned wool-grower or farmer, bringing home 
jewelry, dry goods and coffee on his quarterly pilgrimage 
to Los Angeles or San Luis Obispo, as an offering to his 
dark- eyed neighbor, is one less elegant in its details, but 
not less humiliating in its significance than that of the 
English or Kussian nobleman laying millions in necklaces 
at the feet of his Parisian mistress. More than one good 
wife did I hear storming and clapperclawing these "squaws" 
in a manner which was quite unaccountable. More than 
on 3 family of proud and ancient lineage did I find, who 
were once the lords of some great rancho, but were 
wheedled out of it by Americans, and had now no visible 
means of subsistence, who yet arrayed their daughters in 
unaccountable splendor. 



284 THE NATIVE INHABITANTS. 

These Californian girls are wonderfully graceful and 
fascinating, but they have no minds, and as soon as they 
catch an American husband, they are indolent, and let the 
hens get on the table, and the cat lick the cream. Many 
a poor fellow has cursed the day he married one of them. 

Perhaps never since Adam fell from Eden has there 
been a sadder realization of Paradise Lost than is afforded 
by these native Californians. Before the discovery of 
the tree of knowledge of good and evil, whose root is the 
root of all evil, they lived here in an Abrahamic simplicity, 
amid their flocks and herds, which roamed over ranches 
so vast that a nimble horseman might gallop across them 
all a summer day. So artless and so unsuspecting was 
their hospitality, that they asked the stranger no questions, 
but gladly offered him their simple cheer, and their rich 
red wine, and, at his departure, gave him the choice of 
their cahalladas to replace his jaded steed. With none of 
that wealth which, when gotten at last, may turn to bitter 
ashes upon the tongue ; and far from the miserable ambi- 
tions and janglings of mankind, they had found that place 
sighed for by Cowper, 

" Where rumor of oppression and deceit, 
Of unsuccessful or successful war 
Might never reach." 

In a climate without heat and without cold, where they 
might sleep half the year long beneath a tree; living 
lives without labor, except the dreamy vigils over their 
herds; — the pen fails to reach or words to picture the 
happiness which came to them in those long, sunny years 
which rolled over the violet hills and the tawny valleys of 
California. 

Then came the fatal discovery, and all this Paradise 
became a great, roaring Pandemonium, a hell on earth. 
Every canyon and every foothill swarmed with greedy 



CHANGES PRODUCED BY THE GOLD-DISCOVERY. 285 

gold-liunters, who squandered their money like water. 
These rancheros suddenly saw every bullock in their 
countless herds become a skinful of silver, and all the 
yellow marrow of his bones was like fat gold. "Wealth 
was poured upon them as never on a whole people before. 

They would have been more or less than human if they 
had not fallen before such temptation. These simple 
Arcadian shepherds became the most prodigal spendthrifts. 
Kecklessly they gambled away their princely ranches, or 
sold them for a song to the " insidious Yankee." The 
attachment of the American sheriff became the " flaming 
sword," which turned every way, to keep the way of the 
tree of life." They saw their fairest daughters taken by 
the Americans to wife, and their sons sitting in the seat 
of the gambler and the drunkard. 

]STo more do their gallant wedding-trains of fair women 
and brave men, brilliant with their rude ornaments, their 
boots of Cordovan leather, and their luxurious ponchos, 
bordered with purple and wolfs fur, and spotted like a 
pard, sweep along the valleys from mission to mission. 
No more do the gay young cavaliers, sons of the ranche- 
ros, canter merrily in bands, to serenade beneath the win- 
dows of their dark-eyed maidens, or spur in breathless 
terror through the darkness, before the horrid phantom of 
the " Spectre Bull of Salinas." No more are their soft 
thrilling waltzes, and the tinkle of the light guitar, heard 
within their rude walls of adobe, undisturbed by the 
presence of the prying trader, while the rich, red wine of 
Los Angeles, passed around to all the guests in the simple 
gourd. 

They are aliens and strangers now. Some of the sons 
of the proudest of the old rancheros, now wander as 
wretched squatters over the ancestral domain, or earn a 
precarious and miserable subsistence as common vaqueros. 



286 FIRST YIEW 0F THE pacific. 

Meditating on these topics one afternoon, I observed, at 
a great distance before me, a beautifully sheeny spot, di- 
rectly beneath the sun. Mirage \ Ko ; it is too brilliant, 
and too brassy in color for that. It slowly gained in size 
and in brightness, and changed its tint to a richly mellow 
and slightly coppery lustre, like that of California gold. 
Then crossing a wide ravine, I lost sight of it for a time, 
and coming in view of it again, I plainly saw the tremu- 
lous filmy shimmer of water. 

Oh, it is the Pacific ! It is the Pacific ! 

On the foothills of the Santa Jues mountains, close at 
hand, there had lately been one of those terrible autumnal 
conflagrations which sometimes sweep over the dried 
plains and lower mountains of California, and they stood 
up all bared and blackened by the savage heat. The smoke 
still hung thick over the arid plain for miles around, and 
this was what caused the sun to shine with that strange 
glare upon the hidden ocean. 

But what words could picture my delight ! After so 
many a weary, weary month of trudging westward with 
the sun, to be walking down at last my three thousandth 
mile to the old, old sea! 

Presently I could see the long white sea-parapets of 
drifted dunes, and the whiter surf, where the billows flap- 
ped their crystal wings upon the beach. Then came the 
murmuring of the breakers afar, and this deepened slowly 
into the grand and solemn sound of Ocean, whose every 
pulsation I could count, as he dealt stalwart blow on blow 
upon the ground. 

Just where the mountains and the sea slit the terrace 
into a sharp angle, the little town of San Buenaventure 
straggles among the oranges and the walnuts, close beside 
the sea, which glosses its tiny commerce and its clam- 
shops. The smoke gathered over it at sunset, and in 



THE MUSIC OF THE SEA. 237 

twenty minutes there was not a sound in its intensely- 
dark streets, save the ceaseless, stupendous hammering of 
the waves. 

Next morning I went down through a breach in the 
dunes, and laid my hand on the mane of the ancient brine. 
My task was done. But, to compare small things to 
great, I felt like Gibbon on the night when he completed 
his immortal history, and I determined to walk on to San 
Francisco. 

The sun crawled drowsily up in the east, through the 
nearest approach to an Indian-summer day California ever 
gives, seeming to be sleep-enamored, as Onomacritus says 
of the moon. After crossing that great and weary conti- 
nent of dust, I sat and dreamed and listened, and watch- 
ed the cool, fresh play of the waves, lulled by the hum of 
their eternal restlessness into a deep and unspeakably rest- 
ful peace. 

Is it not quite as probable that Ctesibius learned the 
secret of the organ from the ocean, as that Pythagoras 
deduced the iEolian lyre from a blacksmith's anvil? 
Oceanus has an ear for harmony. He sings his long song 
through the centuries, not only pitched on many keys — 
the keys of the winds and the seasons, ranging through 
stupendous octaves — but with the parts as well in chorus as 
in the organ of St. Cecilia. There is the ponderous bass 
of the ship-breaker, bellowing as through a throat of 
mightiest brass, as it plunges on the strand ; and the ear 
that listens lovingly to Ocean's song, can catch tenor, alto 
and soprano in succession, as it bowls upward its revolving 
edge on the clear-strung sand, with a metallic resonance, 
which trills each second clearer and higher. "Within the 
hearing of an attentive listener, a score of billows are 
striking in unison the sounding chords. With my ear 
held close upon the beach, I could catch the multitudinous 



288 MY FIRST CHINAMAN. 

lmm of the surf, old Ocean's solemn diapason in an an- 
them to the Eternal. Listen, ye murmurers and indolent, 
to the sea ; the opulent, the generous, the strong ; how yet 
he bows himself, and sings all at his toil I 

Walking along this magnificent beach mile after mile, I 
presently met the first Chinaman I had seen on the road. 
He was hurrying along in a funny kind of teetering dog- 
trot, bending his knees very much under an enormous 
weight, which he had in two bamboo baskets on a pole,- 
slung across his shoulder. He had a straw hat broad 
enough to cover a California pumpkin, with only a knob 
on top big enough to take hold of, and a coat of blue gla- 
zed stuff, made like a shirt. The skin of his head was 
pulled back so tight by his tail that he could hardly wink 
his eyes, but he screwed tbem round toward me, and 
answered my salutation with, " hello ! " as if he had 
dropped a flat-iron on his toes. 

I thought that was pretty pert for a yellow boy ; but I 
soon found the poor fellows knew no better, because white 
men had never condescended to address them with any 
more dignified word. 

Afterward I often found them journeying up and down 
in the same patient, weary way, and tried to make friends 
of them, to see what manner of stuff they were made of. 
But I never could like them as well as the negroes. How 
often Cuffee has gladly gone out of his way to show 
me the road, or hastened, unasked, to throw a pole for me 
across the slough ! But these fellows, even if they under- 
stood English, would plod doggedly along, and say as lit- 
tle as possible. They were very merry among themselves, 
but they seemed to fear that I would fall upon and beat 
them, as so many gentlemen of the road have done. 

Santa Barbara is notable for the crookedness of its old 
Spanish streets. I started one morning to walk through 



A DAY IN ST.BARBARA. 289 

it, traveled cheerfully on all the forenoon, among mean, 
little, brick and mud houses, where there was more of 
dust than of anything else, then walked briskly on till 
sunset, and stopped for supper at the same place I did the 
night before. There is a wonderful number of pretty 
school-children in the city, and many Mexican children 
not so pretty ; also a very creditable number of school- 
houses. But the streets are so crooked that no child goes 
to the same school on two consecutive days, whereby they 
acquire an unusual breadth of knowledge. There was a 
lean and dusty pig trotting up and down the streets, which 
once had a very thrifty tail, but it had turned so many 
corners that that organ had become kinked into an inex- 
tricable knot. 

Beyond Santa Barbara the coast-belt becomes a valley, 
with a ridge along the ocean, and all along the evergreen 
verdure of the oak alternates with the golden and russet 
ripeness of farms. The very mountains are fruitful with 
the fatness of the valley, and at their summits display 
their yellow cores, bursting through rinds of green. All 
that is celebrated in song or story of Grecian Tempe, is 
equaled in this valley of Santa Barbara. Here the hand 
of Winter often forgets, through all the months, to strew 
his frost. Here the roots which yield food to man may be 
planted and digged in any month of the twelve ; and here 
a fig-slip without root, planted in the ground in spring, and 
watered, has borne and ripened a fig in autumn. 

Yet, even here, the Eastern farmer finds much at first 
to dissatisfy him. His good wife is distressed in summer 
with a plague of dust, which gets into her eyes, gets into 
the beds, gets even into the pots on the stove ; and the 
farmer himself is distressed by a plague of mud in winter. 
He can hardly get lumber enough to make his two- 
board fence, and his neighbor's swine slip under and vex 
13 



290 CALIFORNIA FARMERS. 

his soul. He cannot afford to fence a pasture for the cow, 
and she roams at large, and conies home when she pleases. 
He lias no stove-wood but the most gnarly billets of live- 
oak that ever tried the temper of the splitter. 

And I am bound to say that the farmers of California 
are the most shiftless, thriftless men of the class that can 
be found in the Union, except, perhaps, in Texas. Every 
Saturday, and on many other days, they mount their 
horses and hie to the saloons, there to drink, gamble, and 
carouse. Not all, of course, but a great number. Many 
of them have no wives to keep them at home ; there is 
no shade about the house, no shrubbery, nothing beautiful, 
nothing moist, nothing green ; nothing but the paintless 
board-house, the hideous board-fence, the wagon, heaps of 
barley and bean straw, and everywhere dust, dust, dust. 

Then there is such a quantity of gratuitous wagoning 
done. There seem to be no farmers at all, but teamsters. 
A man will hitch two, often four horses, into a magnifi- 
cent high-seated wagon, and haul three boards this way 
and a cock of beans back. You may often see two mighty 
wagons, nearly twelve feet high, hitched together, and 

drawn by eight, ten, twelve horses. 

* * • * ■* * ■* 

James W. Marshall, the original gold-finder, came to 
California in 1846, was with the Bear Flag party, and 
in several of the fights which took place between the set- 
tlers and the native Calif ornians. He afterward became a 
partner of John A. Sutter in the mill at Coloma, and was 
at work at the mill business in 1848, when gold was found. 

The narrative of the finding of the gold, as given by an 
eye-witness, is as follows : — They were at work at a saw- 
mill. One evening, after the day's work was done, Mar- 
shall went into the shanty where were Henry Bigler and 
James Brown, two of the laborers, told them he believed 



STORY OF THE FIRST GOLD-DISCOVERY. 291 

he had found gold, and directed them to shut down the 
liead-gate early in the morning, and throw in earth and 
leaves to stop the water. 

This they did, and Marshall went down alone into the 
tail-race, and presently returned, smiling, with the remark : 

" Boys, by , I believe I've found a gold mine." 

He had his old white hat in his hands, with the top of 
the crown knocked in a little, and in this receptacle was 
about an ounce of the metal, almost pure. The men 
crowded about him, and inspected the precious stuff, and 
one Azariah Smith pulled out a five-dollar piece, to com- 
pare it with the dust. As that was Carolina gold, how- 
ever, the color was not the same, but they supposed it was 
due to the alloy, for they were determined to believe it 
w T as gold. 

Three or four days afterward, Marshall went down to 
see his partner at the post, and was gone four days ; when 
he came back, he was asked what they had made of the 
metal, and he answered with childish enthusiasm : — 

" O, boys, by , it is the pure stuff. I and the old 

Captain locked ourselves up and was half a day trying it ; 

and the outsiders wondered what in was up, and 

surmised that I had found a quicksilver mine, for you see 
there is a quicksilver mine found by a woman down to- 
wards Monterey ; but we let them sweat. We found it 
agreed with the encyclopedia, and we applied aquafortis, 
and it had nothing to do with it. "We then weighed it in 
water by balancing the dust against silver on a pair of 
scales, in the air, having a basin of water. We let the 
scales down, and when it came in contact with the water, 

by , the gold went down and the silver up, and that 

told the story, that it was the clear stuff." 

A few days afterward, Captain (now called General) 
Sutter, came up to the mill, and Marshall went into the 
shanty to tell the boys of it, and said to them : — 



292 STORY OF THE FIRST GOLD-DISCOVERY. 

" And now, boys, we've all got some gold dust. I mo- 
tion we give Henry Bigler some, and in the morning when 
yon shut off* the water, let him take it down and sprinkle 
it all over the base rock. Not let on to the old gentleman, 
and it will so excite him that he will set out his bottle and 
treat, for he always carries his bottle with him." 

This was done. Just as the mill-hands were finishing 
breakfast, they saw Captain Sutter coming along, (a well- 
dressed old gentleman he was, the narrator naively adds,) 
with his cane in his hand, with Marshall on one side of 
him, and "Weimer on the other. They all went out to 
meet him, and, after hand-shakings and salutations, they 
started together down to the tail-race. 

Just then one of "Weimer' s little boys, who had inno- 
cently been down and scraped up the dust which Bigler 
had so carefully scattered as a bait for the Captain, came 
running with his hands full, out of breath, and cried out : 
" See here, how much I've found ! " That nearly let the 
cat out of the bag, but they all kept still, and the Captain 
never suspected anything. Indeed, the ruse was all the 
better thus, for the old Captain, seeing how much a little 
boy could collect, thrust his cane into the ground, and 
cried out ; — 

" By Jo, it's rich ! " 

From that day forth the discovery was assured, and the 
news thereof was carried to the uttermost ends of the 
earth. 

But from that day began Marshall's tribulations and cal- 
amities. About March, 184:9, gold-seekers began to arrive. 
They squatted on Marshall's ground, and although warned 
off, refused to leave. Soon afterward some of the miners 
at Murderer's Bar, on the Middle Fork of the American 
Biver, ill-treated some Indians, and the Indians in revenge 
killed four or five white men. Only two of the white 



RESULTS OF FINDING A GOLD MINE. 293 

men escaped, and these went to Coloma and raised a com- 
pany of whites in order to go to Murderer's Bar, to kill 
Indians. Instead, however, of going to the Bar, these 
men began to kill Marshall's friendly Indians. Marshall 
protected his Indians, risking his life in so doing, and was 
obliged to leave Coloma soon afterward to save himself 
from a mob. After remaining away awhile he returned 
to find his location surveyed off into town lots and in the 
possession of others. Soon after his return, men there, 
believing that Marshall knew more about the places in 
which gold could be found than he chose to tell, threat- 
ened to hang him to a tree if he did not go with them and 
point out the rich placers. Mr. Winters secretly furnished 
a horse, on which he escaped from this second mob. After- 
ward he was engaged in expensive litigation, and became 
financially ruined. The vandals took the timbers of the 
mill from which to make canes, and the miners destroyed 
the dam. Neither Marshall, Winters nor Bayley ever 
received a dollar for their property. 

Hardly less complete was the ruin of Sutter, but he, 
being a man of influence, recovered enough to make his 
latter days comfortable. A California Legislature voted 
him a pension of three hundred dollars a month, but, to 
their great disgrace, refused Marshall one of one hundred 
dollars. 

To save the hapless old man from absolute humiliation 
and the poor-house, G. F. Parsons, an Englishman of Cal- 
ifornia, kindly wrote out his biography, the proceeds of 
which smoothed his way a little to the grave. Thus the 
charity which was denied by his own countrymen, was 
received from a foreigner. 




CHAPTER XXII. 

WITH THE SHEPHERDS. 

HEN that American Xerxes, John C. Fremont, 
invaded and conquered California with his little 
band, he found his Thermopylae in Gaviota Pass. 
But he was lead around by a friendly guide, through a 
secret and precipitous pathway in the mountains, whence 
he emerged and fell upon Santa Barbara, like a thunder- 
bolt from a clear heaven. 

That guide was an Englishman. What is stranger still, 
he was the owner of a vast rancho, was identified with the 
country, and, by turning against the native Californians, 
had his rancho swept by fire and bullet, barely escaping 
with his life. But his Saxon blood was true to its kindred. 
I afterwards saw this remarkable man, and found him old 
and haggard, with maniac eyes — a man of such appalling 
outbursts of passion at times, that his sons were compelled 
to grip him like a madman. 

Gaviota Pass is one of the most stupendous in California. 
Far up its majestic sand-stone walls tower perpendicularly 
into the heavens, carved and scarped into wonderous forms 
of beauty, semblance of honeycomb, foliations, corbels, 
triglyphos, moldings, and all those stony blossoms of old 
religions. 

From the highest top of the mountains I looked down 
upon a great valley full of hills, covered with ripened wild 
oats, and sprinkled with evergreen oaks. It was a charm- 
ing prospect. The oats were not glaringlv vellow, but 

29± 



EXPERIENCES WITH TEAMSTERS AND TRAMPS. 295 

had faded in the dewless summer to a creamy tint, so that 
the hills seemed to be poured all over with milk of gold, 
and studded with emerald gems. 

Along the middle of the valley wound one of those 
enchanting fugs, which are white before sunrise, but after 
it blush with a tender roseate purple, faintly suffused with 
a flush of gold. They are the rich autumnal winding- 
sheets in which California mourns her dead rivers. 

I have spoken before of the number of wagoners in this 
country. Indeed, in these " cow-counties" there seems to 
be almost nobody but teamsters and tramps. I occasionally 
amused myself by watching the developments of human 
nature in the former. The latter are so numerous that 
they become a plague, and the wagoners would almost 
always whip up, cover me with dust, and go past at a 
great rate. "When they were a few rods ahead, they would 
slacken their pace a little, look around, and, seeing that I 
was not running after them for a ride, w^ould be a little 
astonished. Then they would slacken a little, more, till I 
almost overtook them, and lag along for some time, to test 
me, and finally drive on again. 

Other drivers would pass me at their usual gait, and I 
would quicken my pace a little, to keep alongside for my 
amusement. The driver would take an occasional squint 
at me from the corner of his eye, but I would make it a 
point not to seem to be aware of his existence. By and 
by his respect for me would increase to such a degree that 
he would say, 

" How d'ye do?" 

" Quite well, I thank you." 

Then I would walk on a considerable time, wrapt in a 
brown study, his respect increasing rapidly all the while. 
At last he would look at me, and say, " Get in ;" very 
seldom, " Get in ?" Of course, I would be obliged to 



296 AN OLD MEXICAN CHURCH. 

refuse, whereupon his respect would turn to astonishment, 
and he would be satisfied with nothing less than my whole 
little history. 

On the npper side of the stream there is a narrow belt 
of champaign, and here, right in the parched and crispy 
middle of the grass, is the Mission Santa Ines. You see 
here the old Mexican terror of volcanoes, for all these 
" Tents of Grace" in California are pitched on plains which 
for seven months in the year are of an odious dust-color, 
though there are delightful groves of live-oak, at the foot 
of the mountains. 

These missions generally stand in a mazy web of arcades, 
sacristies, dormitories, cells, and the like, all mud-built and 
roofed with red tiles ; but the church itself is full of flaunt- 
ing splendor. There are garish moresques, streaked in 
flaming yellow and scarlet along the tops of the walls ; 
saints brilliantly frescoed on the walls, robed with gambage, 
and with halos of brass around their heads, but so exceed- 
ingly lean and skinny-looking that they must have given 
these fat California Indians rather an alarming conception 
of future felicity; besides blue and white draperies of 
coarse glazed stuff,rude candlesticks, images, tinsel stars, etc. 

There were some very black low-browed Indian vergers 
moving reverently about the church, placing a pall-covered 
coffin on an elevated catafalque, high above their heads. 
One of the most remarkable evidences of the superiority 
of the " extirpating Saxon" is exhibited in many ot these 
missions, as in this one, in the shape of a grog-shop next 
door to the church, in a wing of the same building. On a 
Sunday morning you shall see forty or fifty Indians ride 
up, tie their horses to the rack, step into the grog-shop, 
then into the church — they can generally go from the shop 
directly in, through a side-door — then come out, and spend 
the remainder of the day lounging in the grog-shop. 



TALKS WITH A STAGE-DRIVER. 297 

I talked with one of these keepers of country grocerys, 
who had a great deal of Indian and native Californian 
custom. 

" They are mighty sharp," said he. " They'll come in, 
and lounge round till they git acquainted a little, then 
they'll want seventy-five cents' worth on tick. Next day 
they'll come back and pay that, and buy perhaps two 
dollars worth on tick. Three or four days afterwards 
they'll come and pay that, and then want five dollars. 
So it keeps goin' till they git twenty dollars into you, then 
— ," here he gave his finger a significant snap, " You bet 
your life you don't see 'em agin." 

I went over a long way among the creamy hills, through 
the parks of oaks ; and then emerged into the level valley 
of the Santa Maria, which is so vast that I could barely 
see the foothills in the haze. In October this valley is so 
dead and dried up that it is like the plains of Acheron, and 
odious as the valley of the son of Hinnom. Not a tree in 
sight. Nearly a whole day I was walking down this 
valley of dry bones of grass, bunch-grass, dead in white, 
plumy tufts, with a little wire-grass between. Even the 
squirrels were dried up, and I saw nothing but two Mexi- 
cans, wandering vacantly about, afar off on their horses. 

That night I staid in a most forlorn hut, and talked with 
a rather intelligent stage-driver. 

" Most all of these people in Southern California," said 
he, " except these big sheep-men and stock-ranchers, is the 
meanest and mangiest people I know of — ' regular poor 
white trash.' And they're stuffy accordin', for you ask 
one of them galloots to git down on a heavy pull, and 
he'll act the pork, and grumble, and fight to the last inch. 
Now you ask one of these Calif ornians to walk a little, or 
ride on top and he'll do it without a word. They're gen- 
tlemen, they are, you bet your life." 



298 SAN LUIS OBISPO. 

The jet-black and waxy adobe which is spread over the 
broad valley of the lipoma produces the sweet, rich alfile- 
ria, a running grass greatly prized by farmers. This ebony 
ground is slit deep by the summer heats. Still the surface 
is very pliable ; and lazy farmers sometimes harrow it to 
fill the crevices, " dry sow " the seed, harrow again,and so 
catch the earliest November rains. And they get barly 
enough. Indeed, the system of summer fallowing, followed 
by " sowing in the dust," is coming greatly into favor in 
the wheat districts, because it insures the crop whatever 
rain may fall. 

Then I crossed again over one of those arid and dried-up 
champaigns, approaching San Luis Obispo. There is no 
turf in this country, even in spring, for the bunch-grass 
alone can live through that weary and dreadful summer, 
and all the grasses between come from the seeds. 

San Luis Obispo has one street, and that street has a 
broad shoulder in the middle, and on the corner of that 
shoulder there is a restaurant, wherein a pretty girl brings 
you a tough mutton chop, then sits in the window, while a 
clerk tosses yellow apples to her across the very narrow 
street. It is about the meanest and the dingiest town in 
California. It is a monastical place, a kind of sacred wool- 
barn, being nearly equally divided between great wooden 
wool-houses and little red-tiled mud-huts. On the little 
low front of the old mission, just above the door, there is 
inscribed in Latin : 

" How dreadful is this place ! this is none other but the 
house of God, and this is the gate of heaven." 

Then I went on into the mountains, and beheld a spec- 
tacle of which I expect never to see the equal on earth. 
Before me there was a great sunny mountain, with a thou- 
sand indentations and dainty crinklings, like rumpled 
velvet, mottled with colors of whose richness only the pencil 



THE GREAT WOOL-GROWING REGIONS. 299 

of Nahl or Bierstadt could fitly discourse. Here, there 
was a pale maroon or wine-color, or a cinnamon, or a cuir, 
or a gamboge, or that surpassingly rich and noble hue I 
have seen so often in California and nowhere else, which 
resembles nothing so much as a delicately frosted damson ; 
and there, the ripened wild oats had faded in the rainless 
summer days, from their golden color to a subdued, tender, 
creamy tint, which seemed to float over the slope, lambent 
in a kind of flickering mellowness, now creeping a little in 
the breeze, and now dying in a lazy and delicious shudder. 

On the other side of the mountains I descended to the 
valley of the Salinas, passing many miles through a noble 
and magnificent stretch of white-oaks, which names the 
famous hot sulphur springs, Paso de Robles. This place 
of course, had fallen a victim to the American mania for 
speculation. Not being much subject yet to the incursions 
of the fair sex, it was a favorite resort for peculiarly afflicted 
miners ; and here one might glean such a notion of the 
morality of the " revolver-echoing canyon, the embattled 
diggings, the lawless flat, and the immoral bar," as no- 
where else. 

This is the heart of the great wool-growing region. Far 
in among the mountains, by the brink of some sequestered 
pool, you shall find the shepherd's little chalet of " shakes," 
and his corral of loose brushwood. The impudent coyotes 
nightly inspect the corners of his habitation ; he hears at 
midnight the coarse, rough hairs of the grizzly brush against 
his cabin door, and the long and hungry howl of the cougar 
floats athwart his dreams. There is no ministering angel 
to cook his mutton and beans. He leads his flock abroad 
on the hills, aromatic with sage, and mint, and rosemary, 
and purple tar-weed. Thus he lives, and all through the 
glorious cloudless summer of California he lounges " mony 
a canty day " over the ripe and sunny mountains, and 
envies no soul. 



300 A CHILD OF NATURE. 

Here he is, sitting by his flock. Ah ! child of poetry 
and of Nature, how my soul goes out to thee ! How my 
heart envies thee ! See, he looks up ; he smiles. 

" Stranger, you couldn't give a feller a chaw of tobacker, 
could you? Dern my skin if I've hed a chaw fer a coon's 
age." 

The great sheep-runs of California, like those of Austra- 
lia, are a kind of mild form of Botany Bay for the respec- 
tive mother countries, where are gathered all sorts of 
eccentric and unfortunate characters, from a bishop's son or 
an editor, down to a runaway sailor. Among these I found 
a most comical genius. He was an Englishman, the son 
of great wealth, well educated and well read, but self-exiled 
for some reason or other, and wandering over the earth. 
He had a facile face, and, in the midst of a story, with 
a single grimace he would set the camp in convulsions. 

He took a fancy to me, and set out to travel with me^ 
abandoning his situation and good will, though he had 
hardly enough money left to buy a sheep. "We set out at 
noon, and that afternoon we talked incessantly, though 
toward evening he began to complain bitterly of his boots, 
which galled his kibes. Next day, under this smart, he 
developed a most infantile peevishness and petulancy, and 
protested a score of times that, if he had some strychnine, 
he would swallow it, and so make an end. After three or 
four days I got his consent to go on more rapidly than he 
could travel. 

I was astonished at the atrocity and bloodthirstiness 
which this class of men exhibited toward the Chinese. One 
day I came up to a party of a dozen of them, squatted 
around a fire by the shearing-camp, and fell to talking with 
them. Presently one of them, who had a flat nose, sleepy 
eyes, and a face like a satyr's, said, probably to draw out 
my sentiments: 



NEW SENSATIONS. 301 

" I wish I had here to-night every Chinaman in 

California, and every white man as stands up fur 'em, and 
they all had one neck, so as I could wring it off." 

It requires a great deal of land in California to maintain 
sheep. For long month after month they nip and tweak 
the same tufts over and over again, without any fresh 
growth. The rains which commence falling in November 
sometimes destroy the old grass before they give new ; then 
the sheep stand under the oaks, and stretch their necks up 
toward the long festoons of pea-green moss. These grow 
heavy with the falling rain, swing and swing and drop, 
and the sheep munch them greedily, running from tree to 
tree, and scattering widely ; and then the hills resound with 
the sanguinary remarks of the shepherds respecting the 
nature of sheep in general, and the atmosphere is blue with 
their cursing. 

In the valley of the Nascimiento I herded sheep several 
days myself, for a new sensation, and was rewarded with 
some delightful experiences. 

Among other things, I heard a humming-bird sing. Af- 
ter whizzing all the morning about the champagne — aro- 
matic with the purple tar-weed — a certain one would 
invariably perch on an oak limb, and chirrup continuously 
for nearly half an hour. Its song is that cool, metallic 
piping of the cricket — that " modulated shade " which Tho- 
reau heard — but infinitely finer and subtler. Not in all my 
life, not even from the violin ot Carlo Patti, have I heard 
such an exquisitely fine, yet clear, crisp melody, as issued, 
scarcely audible, from the throat of that little singer. 

Then I saw the little California woodpecker drill a circle 
of holes in the body of a tree, and fill them with acorns, 
hammering them in with his hard, tough head. Then 
there were the bluejays, which bear a very opprobrious 
reputation in the East, but which here are a model of indus- 



302 OLD JOHN AND THE INDIAN BOY. 

try and foresight. For several days together I saw a colony 
of them work from morning till night, carrying acorns 
down to the river bank, where they secreted them in the 
sand. An old Migueleno told me this presaged a winter 
of want, and so it proved. 

There was a little Migueleno boy, old enough to be a 
shepherd, with a face as round as a pot-lid, and black eyes 
which absolutely danced with mischief. He was shy as a 
partridge, and would seldom come to the house, much less 
come in, even for his meals, until they called him ; and 
when they called him, he would never answer, but start 
and run to his employer. One day the latter grew weary 
of being obliged to call him always, and he went out and 
took him by the ear, and led him to the table. The boy 
burst into an agony of crying, and seemed heart-broken, 
and it took him a whole day to recover his cheerfulness. 

He had that " school-boy passion of giving pain to others,'* 
and, having run down a rabbit and pulled it from its hole, 
he hanged it by the neck till it was dead. There was an 
old Irishman, one of those wandering souls of California, 
who are never at rest till they drop into the grave. He 
was shattered by drink, and could not run fast, and the 
boy would poke him with a stick, then run and climb into 
a tree. One day old John came to the house, trembling 
and puffing after a chase, and said he : — 

" Why, I believe that blamed Injun is trying to make 
fun of me." 

He was very merry, and would even whistle a little at 
times, which I never heard an Indian do before. Out in 
the hills he would pull moss, then sit and feed it to his 
pets. He imitated perfectly every bird or animal he heard, 
and repeated over, and over, and over again, in his childish 
treble, little phrases in that most musical of all tongues, the 
Spanish. 



JACK TOWERS THE FAMOUS BRIGAND. 3Q3 

Tlie easy indolence with which he conducted his affairs 
was enviable indeed. O for the divine art of taking your 
time for it ! for the inimitable and indescribable felicity of 
limberness and of laziness with which that Indian boy 
piloted his flock amid the hills ! 

Near the old Mission San Antonio, is the cavern which 
was formerly the refuge of the famous brigand, Jack Pow- 
ers, one of the most magnificent and princely robbers w T ho 
ever lived, even in California. He would ride on horse- 
back, openly, through the streets of San Francisco ; learn 
when a band of drovers were going down to Los Angeles 
with their gold ; then spur hard day and night, rally his 
bandits, and swoop down upon their prey in camp. 

A wealthy ranchero — an American — who began in pov- 
erty, and used to herd sheep, narrated to me some of his 
experiences with Powers. He and his men " drew " their 
groceries almost entirely from shepherd's huts in the vicin- 
ity. But they never took anything, even to the smallest 
sack of flour, without laying down for it a double-eagle. 
They never deposited a smaller coin for their stealings. 
The ranchero said he had come in at night many a time, 
wearied with running after his restless sheep, and found 
his potatoes, or his flour, or his flitch of Oregon bacon gone, 
greatly to his disgust ; but there was always a shining 
" slug," fresh from the San Francisco mint, laid scrupulous- 
ly in the place of each article. 

For these reasons, the few settlers about were friends of 
the brigands, and even threatened and drove away officers 
who came to arrest them. This ranchero himself acknowl- 
edged that he had once recognized Jack Powers in San 
Francisco, when a word from him would have cost the 
brigand his life ; but he did not " divulge." 

To one who loves his country, and has studied the South, 
it is saddening to see California following so nearly in her 



304 THE INFLUENCE OF THE MINES. 

footsteps. There is no slavery here, nor will there ever 
be ; but there is here, superadded to the presence of a ser- 
vile race, a vitiating influence worse than any the South 
ever contained. It is the mines. They create the slavery 
of fortune, which is followed, on the part of a large number, 
by the slavery of recklessness, restlessness, and despair. 
The towns are filled with the unfortunate and the wicked, 
and the country with unhappy wanderers, seeking the 
labor they will not remain to perform when found. 

In going up the little valley of the San Antonio I saw 
many indications of the growth of a " poor white trash."* 
Mean huts of cottonwood logs, barely high enough for a 
man to stand erect therein ; a can of wild honey, inside ; 
a half-eaten carcass of venison hanging from a mighty oak, 
outside ; a gaunt and sallow woman, with some almost na- 
ked children — that is the picture. 

On the other hand, behold a man owning 60,000 acres 
of sheep-runs, so selected with reference to springs, streams, 
ranges, etc., that he has full control of 40,000 acres of 
Government land. On 1,000 acres of this land his poor 
neighbor could earn an honest living with sheep, if he 
could have the use of a certain spring just within the line 
of the bloated rancho. Is he permitted to use that spring ? 
Ah ! the other has " floated " his claim for the precise 
object of covering that spring and several others ; and is 
he such a fool as to yield it now ? 

In the upper part of this valley I saw, for the first time, 
sycamores and cottonwoods clothed in that "green and 
yellow melancholy" which is the peculiar glory of Eastern 
forests, and which is so rare in California. 

Who can measure the sweet influences of the Eastern 
autumn upon our better life ! If this favored country has 

*I beg the reader to permit me to use this phrase, for none other will ex- 
press to Americans so much and that so truthfully. 



THE VALLEY OF THE SALINAS. 305 

any great natural deficiency, it is one of trees. And a 
great part of what it has are exempt from that alternation 
of decay, which brings round those yearly lessons so whole- 
some to busy man, to remind him of that which shall be 
hereafter. The unfruitful, hard, intractable nature of the 
ancient Israelites and the Spaniards — who knows how it 
might have been mollified by forests, on which the ever- 
returning autumn might have painted its sweet, saddening 
lessons ? The autumn, or rather summer, of California, if 
the people look away upon the hills, reads them much 
of the poetry of earth ; but there is not in it that " most 
musical, most melancholy " rhythm of » decay, which so 
ripens all that is divinest in the heart. 

Every Californian should plant his new-born son a row 
of trees, like Laertes ; and every bevy of maidens, like the 
companions of Helen in their epithalamium, should conse- 
crate to the bride a sycamore. It should be deciduous, 
just for the effect of the falling leaves. 

Entering upon the mighty plains which form the valley 
of the Salinas, there is a spring from which it is twenty 
miles to water. This valley is an execrable place at best. 
Every day for seven months there rises, about ten o'clock, 
a wind which blows at a furious rate till nearly midnight. 
The dry bed of the river yields so much sand that it con- 
stitutes what is called the " dry fog." The live-oaks which 
creep out a little way from the foot of the hills are perma- 
nently bent over, and look like old men leaning on their 
hands, with their coat-tails blown over their heads. Such 
a blast I had to face for fifty miles. 

The life of a vaquero on the great Salinas plains is emi- 
nently free and easy. The naked and cheerless adobe 
generally stands under the lee of the river bank, to hide 
from the fierce winds of summer afternoons, or else back 
between two foot-hills. At daybreak he is in the saddle, 



306 THE LIFE OF A VAQUERO. 

with his riata coiled on the pommel and his blanket 
strapped behind the cantel, and off like the wind to herd 
the cattle together. 

Toward noon the Chinese cook may be seen, with his 
bare pate glistening in the sun, and his pigtail flapping 
gayly, sweeping the horizon with his telescope. If the 
black dots are moving toward the house, he goes in and 
hangs on the dinner-pot. He has no special need of hurry, 
for they may ride their swiftest, and not arrive for a half- 
hour. 

At last they gallop up, their horses puffing and their 
flanks bleeding from the cruel, monstrous spurs. A stran- 
ger arrives, perhaps, and with a simple buenos dias, enters 
the house. They sit up to the rude table, the stranger, as 
he is expected to do, taking a place without waiting for an 
invitation. Stewed mutton, brown beans, and strong cof- 
fee without milk, are the staples. Scarcely a word is 
spoken, for these vaqueros, being always with their cattle, 
are men of silence, especially if a stranger is near. Then 
the cigaritos are rolled and whiffed with that exquisite 
languor of motion native to the race, while the Chinaman 
helps himself. 

After an hour of this dolce far nie?ite, the saddle girths 
are tightened — for the poor horses owned by Mexicans get 
nothing from morning to night — and away they go again. 

The afternoon is like the forenoon. After a supper 
which is generally pretty heavy, the white sheep-skins, the 
calico ox-hides, and all the store of gray and scarlet blank- 
ets are spread on the hard earthen floor, and the vaqueros 
lie down on their backs, for another hour of cigaritos, and, 
perhaps, some stories of grizzly bears, brigands, and the 
like. Then they roll over, and soon the room is full of 
snoring. The only door is shut tight, there is not a win- 
dow in the room, and presently the atmosphere bears a 



THE BLANKET MEN— EARTHQUAKE. 307 

resemblance to that said to have prevailed in the Black 
Hole. 

The stranger finds himself strongly tempted to gather 
up his soft, thick, fleecy California blankets, and go out, 
and bivonac under a live-oak beside the river. The pecu- 
liar circumstances of California have developed that blanket, 
unequaled in the world, which, to the poor farm-hand 
wandering about in search of "jobs," is house, bed, stove, 
chair, cushion, all at once. During five months every year 
I venture to say there are ten thousand men in California, 
the so-called " blanket men," who do not sleep ten nights 
in a house. Lumber is dear, and houses are small, but 
the blanket is all he needs. 

In the valley of the Salinas I felt my first earthquake. 
I must confess it disturbs one's notions of safety sadly, to 
have the solid ground shaken beneath him. If the earth 
is not safe, what more have we left? 

It was not quite what I had expected. I thought there 
would be a sudden and sharp concussion, followed by a 
rattling of glass things ; but, instead of that, the house set 
out good-naturedly on a kind of majestic, elephantine jig. 
But it is a kind of jig that takes the marrow out of a man's 
bones mightily. It scares a nervous man dreadfully, and 
makes him feel as limp as a cloth. 

In the northern end of the valley I found the true and 
typical Calif ornian, the American miner turned farmer. 
And such a farmer ! 

First, there is his " shanty," a little shell of unpainted, 
unplaned, redwood boards set on end, looking like a cedar 
goods-box, and so little that a man might steal it away at 
sunset. It stands in the middle of a vast arid plain, with- 
out a fence, or a bush, or anything whatever in sight. 
This style of house is the real equivalent of the Eastern 
log-cabin. 



308 THE TALE OF A^ OX-TAIL. 

There is one room before, and one behind. In the front 
room there is nothing but a trunk and a roll of blankets ; 
in the rear room is the stove and our bachelors M things/' 
which consist of a sack of " spuds," another of that won- 
derfully white California flour, a side of " States' bacon," 
a bottle of cognac for his coffee, and dishes. He uses a 
fresh set every meal, and washes them all in the night. 

Upon looking around for his farming implements, I dis- 
cover a pile of redwood lumber, and a promising terrier 
pup, which waggles its tail with great joy, for it sees no- 
body from morning till night. In due time, however, 
posts are set a little way into the ground, a single board 
atop is nailed around a field, a crop of wheat sown and 
harvested, and gathered into a barn, now built, The mania 
of these farmers for wheat is carried to a pitch of absurdity. 
He came here only and solely for wheat, he talks of wheat, 
he dreams of wheat, he thinks only of wheat, and he means 
to go away as soon as he gets enough wheat ; but, unfortu- 
nately for him, — or fortunately, perhaps — he is entrapped 
by some wheat-colored Spanish maiden. 

Presently a bedstead appears in the corner, and some 
wheat straw is stuffed into a tick and laid thereon. The 
room is now ceiled with newspapers, and chairs are intro- 
duced. The maiden arrives, and takes possession. The 
man came for ,vheat, and remains for domestic felicity, 
which consists of beans and mutton twice a day. 

I shall finish this tale of mine with an ox-tail. It hunor 
in a little hotel, right over the wash-stand. It was none 
of your dainty switches, but an original and undiminished 
tail. I thought perhaps it was to be swung over the sup- 
per table, as a terror to all flies, but I watched diligently, 
and at last discovered its proper function. It was used to 
clean combs. 




CHAPTER XXIIL 
DOWN THE VALLEY OF GARDENS. 

NE of the notable phenomena of California is the 
multitude of its tramps, the so-called " blanket 
men." I seldom met less than a dozen or fifteen 
a day, and they all wanted to talk about an hour apiece, 
and narrate their grievances, so that they became an intol- 
erable nuisance. 

While I am yet a great way oft, sighting me, he says to 
himself, " Well, there's another man peddling gab out of a 
boot-leg," and then he slings down his roll of blanket, sits 
down on the same, and pulls out his vile clay-pipe. His 
toused hair is full of wheat-straw, and some of it sticks out 
of the top of his hat. 

"Ain't you goin' to sit down, Cap?" 

" Really, I haven't time." 

" Why, set down ! What's the use of rushin' about the 
country that way, like a green monkey a-beatin' tan-bark ? 
Set down, and let's have a little chin-music. Don't I look 
like your uncle !" With that he begins to whiff. 

" I am not aware that I discover any marked resemblance 
between yourself and any of my avuncular relatives." 

With that he gives me a look. 

" You'd better set down." 

" How do you like California ?" 

" California is a bilk ! I'm goin' down to Arizona, and 
if I ever get out of this country once, and come back again, 
you may have my head for a foot-ball. I'm a carpenter by 

309 



310 INTERVIEW WITH A BLANKET-MAX. 

trade, and a man back here the other day, by , he of- 
fered me three dollars a day ! Sho ! I hope that man may 
have to keep tavern after everybody else is dead. Three 
dollars a day !" 

If wheat is to be grown forever, and almost exclusively 
on the great body of the arable land of California, then 
these immense ranches, and the consequent hireling sys- 
tem, so baleful to California hitherto, will be perpetuated. 
But if the old Spanish belief, of the absolute necessity of 
irrigation for all green crops, can be exploded, and it can 
be shown that a farmer can produce almost anywhere on 
good land the variety of little crops, which all farmers 
have in the East, then California will have a future — it 
will have a population. A great number of little farms 
will absorb this vagabond element continually drifting 
down out of the mines ; whereas, if the land remains in 
vast ranches, these men will always continue hirelings 
and tramps. 

In this view of the matter, it becomes of momentous 
importance to demonstrate that common land will produce 
green crops without irrigation. I will give here, in his 
own words, the result of an experiment made by a notable 
agriculturist : 

As an illustration of what sub-soiling will do for vegetation after one of 
our dry winters, I will mention an experiment of my own made after the 
winter of 1863-64. when but ten inches of rain fell. On the first day of July, 
1864, I selected, on the highest part of my land at San Mateo upon hilly 
ground, a smooth, hard piece of sod ground, a rod square, that had never 
been plowed, and which was to all appearance as dry as the peak of Mount 
Diablo. I had it dug out with pick and spade to a depth of twenty jnches, 
throwing all the earth out of the excavation, and then putting it back again. 
I thus had a good mellow bed. The earth for the first six inches was as dry 
and hard as if it had been in an oven. Below that depth it contained only 
dampness sufficient to distinguish it from being dry. In this rod square of 
loosened earth I planted about thirty pieces of potato, and raked the ground 
over smoothly, and left the experiment to its results. Not a drop of water 
was put upon it. Of course no rain fell on it that season, and nothing what- 



REDWOOD VILLAGES— STANDING TREAT. 3H 

ever was done but to leave nature to its course. For five weeks there was 
no sign of vegetation apparent. Not a weed nor potato top was to be seen ; 
and after daily inspecting my dry dust bed for that period, and I had begun 
to consider the experiment a failure, I found the green buds of my potatoes 
just peeping through the surface. From this time they grew marvelously, 
and before the 1st day of October the whole rod square was one thick bed 
of potato tops, of the deepest green color, an inch in diameter, two feet in 
height, and covering the ground so that the soil was not visible. On the 1st 
day of November I had the crop dug up, and got 125 pounds of potatoes as 
large as my double fist, and as fine as any I ever saw. 

Such an experiment is worth more to California than 
the discovery of a gold-mine. 

From the Gabilan Mountains I looked down on the lit- 
tle town of San Juan, glaring so nakedly white and red in 
the hideous desert. Descending to it by the numerous 
windings by which the road pitches down to the plain, I 
found it only another redwood town. 

One wearies of them, these redwood towns. Every- 
where a great clatter of lumber, and rattle of hammers, 
and savory smell of cedar. A man builds a habitation of 
redwood boards in five days, at a cost of forty-five dollars. 
Then he lives in it, and calls it a house, and his business 
waxes mighty on the face of the earth. 

The drinking-saloons, flashing with cut-glass and gilded 
labels, are thicker than in Mississippi. Here, at whatever 
time of day, you shall see a fine-looking, broad-shouldered, 
bronzed-faced man, wearing a white Chinese hat, enter and 
invite everybody, friends and strangers, to assist him in 
drinking. They all collect together in a group, and it is 
characteristic that, while the liquors are mixing, the giver 
does most of the talking, the others only smiling. 

" Here we go !" says some one. 

Then everybody nods and smiles more than he was smi- 
ling before ; there is a suggestive silence ; the bottoms of 
the glasses all wink at each other, as if to say, " what did 
I tell you 1" then everybody looks cheerful. Everybody 



312 THE WINDMILLS AND GARDENS. 

understands himself, and keeps well within bounds, because 
the ceremony has to be repeated so often during the day ; 
and it is only occasionally that you see one who is Id dis- 
creet, and, with his hat on the side of his head, he insists 
on shaking hands all round, and congratulates everybody 
on his good health, and the salubrity of matters in general. 

Around San Juan there are vast wheat-fields, and here, 
in the season, you may hear for weeks together the clatter 
of the reapers and the headers. Then all night long you 
may see John Chinaman binding sheaves by the light of 
the stars or the moon, and sleeping by day in his blanket 
under a tree. It is not that he is trying to labor in the 
same hours they do in the Central Flowery Kingdom, but 
because the straw is too brittle by day. 

One begins now to note the windmills, which stud the 
valley everywhere, not swinging four great arms around 
in a drowsy way, like the Dutchmen, as if they were 
going to sleep, but smirk and dapper wheels, which whistle 
round on a breezy day like a flax-wheel. This wooden 
Aquarius stands on four legs right over the well, and holds 
on his shoulder, twenty or thirty feet high, a prodigious 
tank, which it is his business to keep constantly full. Be- 
ing painted white, he looks very neat and clean, and he 
makes the piston-rod fly up and down at a great rate, while 
the water runs far out in troughs, and spills out over the 
gardens. 

And it is the gardens thus watered which produce the 
vegetables that have made the Californians seem to the 
East to be great liars. Great are the products of California. 
All night long, when I looked from my little window in 
Gilroy, I saw the yellow moonstones shooting from the 
sky ; and in the morning I found them all in a neighboring 
field — a pumpkin, every one. The carrots are like Chinese 
babies, as if the earth had been plugged full of them on 



AT SAX JOSE— A NOBLE VALLEY. 313 

the other side, and they had slipped up through ; while the 
beets, on the other hand, like genuine Californians, are 
sinking shafts in the other direction. The strawberries 
declare a monthly dividend throughout the year, at the 
rate of five berries to the pound. 

It is a noble and magnificent valley which leads down 
to San Francisco Bay. On either side, some miles away, 
are the reddish-purple and hazy sierras, and all down be- 
tween them pours the broad sheet of golden grain, islanded 
with live-oak clumps and groves. Ah ! these wide and 
tranquil farms, hazy in their autumn rest, so rich and so 
ripe in their glory of shining ricks, and of fattened bul- 
locks, and of pumpkins ! Countless barns, too great before) 
stretch out still more their wings of sheds, like a hen-moth- 
er hoisted up and shoved about by her growing brood, 
vainly seeking to cover these yellow chicks of the harvest- 
A miracle of wheat is this Santa Clara wheat, so white, and 
so sound, and so flinty. 

It is a pleasure indeed to enter San Jose after a tedious 
journey. In all this white and weary land, here is one 
green town. San Jose looks as neat, . as sprinkled, as 
swept-up, as any Jersey village. There is too much glitter 
and whiz in its wooden streets, but they have a way of 
throwing water around, and washing the shrubbery, and 
spurting it against the windows, wdiich gives a delightful 
coolness. 

Precious in my memory is San Jose, brightest of Cali- 
fornian towns. Eo words can express how sweet to my 
eyes was this first Northern town, after crossing a frowsy 
South, and a continent of dust. Long did I linger in the 
suburbs, in the multitudinous orchards, and let my eyes 
swim and splatter in this cool water of greenery, while I 
washed my dusty throat with pears, and my soul was com- 
forted exceedingly. 
14 



31 tt SUBURBAN RESIDENCES. 

White suburban residences are tolerable here, if any- 
where in California, by reason of the moors or everglades 
and the plantain-covered flats, which keep green through 
all the summer. These and the orchards conceal the arid 
champaign, and justify the color. 

Then I went on down through the classic Santa Clara, 
and Mayfield, and Eedwood City, and San Mateo. How 
oddly these dreamy old names of Spain are jumbled with 
our American lumber ! In the city of Eedwood I took a 
drink, but I slept in the city of St. Matthew. 

All the way from Mayfield to San Mateo it is only a 
summer suburb of farms for San Francisco. These noble 
natural groves of oaks, all swept clean of undergrowth, 
with here and there the turret of a villa peering among or 
above them, and an occasional hedge-row, remind one 
continually of England. But the drought kills all lawns, 
and now and then there is an extremely garish residence, 
with a board-fence, which recalls one to America. 

But the eye is never sated with these groves and these 
villas, the distant violet hills, the wide and tranquil farms, 
and all the beauty of mellowing orchards, and of wheat- 
fields, and of shining ricks. And now, at last, you can 
look far down across the brown sea-marsh, and see the 
dream-ships dimly come and go in the haze upon the view- 
less estuary, sailing right among the cattle. 

It may be well in this place to say something briefly of 
country life in California. And the thing first to be said 
is, that there is not another State in the Union where 
everything outside of city limits is so unrural, so contrac- 
tor-like, so temporizing, so devoid of whatever is poetical, 
romantic and snug in the old farmer-life of our East. I 
did not see ten honest, hard-fisted farmers in my whole 
journey. There are plenty of city-haunting old bachelors 



RURAL LIFE IX CALIFORNIA. 315 

and libertines, who own great ranchos and lease them ; and 
there are enough crammers of wheat, crammers of beans, 
crammers of mulberries, crammers of anything that will 
make their fortune in a year or two, and permit them to 
go and live and die in " Frisco." Then, for laborers, there 
are runaway sailors; reformed street thieves; bankrupt 
German scene-painters, who carry sixty pounds of blankets ; 
old soldiers, who drink their employer's whiskey in his 
absence, and then fall into the ditch which they dug for a 
fence-row; all looking for "jobs," or " little jobs," but 
never for steady work. 

California always will, in my opinion, be abnormally 
and unhealthily active in its cities, while its rural life will 
be suffered to fall into contempt. There is something dry, 
something dusty, something windy about the country, 
which drives men into the cities. It is not unlikely that 
within two centuries California will have a division of pop- 
ulation something like that of ancient Greece, to wit : mer- 
chants, artisans, and many great lords of the soil, in the 
cities ; and in the country a kind of peasantry of goatherds, 
shepherds, tough, little, black-haired, lazy farmers, and the 
like, to whom the cities will be unwelcome resorts. 

It is fashionable with men who know practically little 
of what they affirm, to call California the workingman's 
paradise. The time has already passed when it was a par- 
adise for workingmen, and it never was, and never could 
be, so long as the mines existed, a paradise of working- 
men. The comparatively small number of laboring men 
who have been persevering have been so amazingly pros- 
perous, and deposited so much in the savings banks, that 
tourists have been deceived, and have overlooked the 
multitudes who have nothing in the banks. 

It is saddening to see California attracting to itself so 
many butterflies — men who are not so much beggars in 



316 THE LABORING CLASSES. 

body as in soul. Most of these in the northern part of 
the State are single, and their influence will ^perish with 
them ; but Southern California, as I have already noted, is 
gathering to itself poor and worthless families, who will 
perpetuate that wretched sort of population. 

I have found fault enough, certainly, with the laboring 
classes, but it is because I have their welfare most earnestly 
at heart, and because they, by their own vagabondism 
and debaucheries, are bringing down upon themselves 
the distrust of employers, and consequent griefs. But I 
have a bone to pick with the employers, particularly with 
the great wool-growers and rancheros of the South, with 
whose habits I am better acquainted. 

In the first place, there are many rich men among 
them who treat any kind of laborer, white or yellow, good 
or bad, like a dog. JSTot in the Southern States even are 
white men so pitifully fed and lodged. 

In the second place, there are many who have been 
made so distrustful by the outrageous conduct of laborers, 
that they insult every new one who approaches, and thus 
repel deserving men, between whom and themselves, with 
a little forbearance, there might grow up mutual kindness 
and respect. 

In the third place, and worst of all, there is in Southern 

California a feeling of caste, which seems almost to have 

been shaped in the old Spanish molds, and is deplorably 

un-American. 

# # # * * * 

The story of Commodore Sloat's seizure of California, 
in 1864, on behalf of our Government, as related to a 
friend by the venerable Commodore himself, is as follows : 

The Commodore was lying at Mazatlan with a frigate 
and a sloop-of-war — while Admiral Seymour, of the British 
navy, was there with the line-of-battle ship Collingwood. 



STORY OF THE CAPTURE OF MONTEREY. 317 

Sloat had orders to take Monterey whenever he heard of 
actual hostilities between the United States and Mexico. 
Circumstances led him to believe that Admiral Seymour 
had similar orders, or that there was an understanding be- 
tween England and Mexico that the former should take 
California and hold it from the United States. A courier 
arrived from the City of Mexico bringing despatches to 
Seymour, but none to Sloat. Seymour was, after the 
arrival of the courier, " all in all " with the leading Mexi- 
cans, while they looked daggers at Sloat. 

The Commodore watched the movements of the Admiral. 
The English ship hove her cables short and made ready 
for a voyage ; the two little American vessels (little in com- 
parison) did the same. The Collingwood weighed an- 
chor, and, with clouds of canvas spread, moved majestically 
out of the harbor. Within a half-hour the Savannah and 
the Preble were plowing the bosom of the deep, while the 
mind of the gallant old Commodore was made up to take 
California, or have the American Navy number two ships. 
of-war and one Commodore less. On the 7th of July, he 
arrived at Monterey, without having seen anything of the 
Collingwood, and lost no time in demanding the surrender 
of the town, and soon, without firing a gun, the Stars and 
Stripes floated over the fort and the custom-house. 

Shortly after the surrender, the Collingwood hove in 
sight. The decks of the two American vessels were clear- 
ed, the matches were lighted, the gunners stood by loaded 
cannon, and the yard-arms were full of men ready to drop 
the sails on the instant of a signal. " In fact," said the 
Commodore, "we did everything but show our teeth" — 
run the guns out at the port holes. 

On came the Collingwood, and dropped her anchor 
within a stone's throw of the flag-ship. The Commodore 
instantly lowered a boat and sent an officer with his res- 



318 STORY OF THE CAPTURE OF MONTEREY. 

pects to the Admiral. The Admiral came in person to 
return the compliment. His practiced eye could not help 
but observe the preparations for immediate action. 

" You seem to be about to give your men some practice 
in the art of gunning," said the Admiral, as he shook hands 
with the Commodore. 

The American commander pointed to the flag on shore, 
and remarked that he did not know but it would take 
some practice to keep it there. 

"Will you answer me candidly one question?" asked 
the Admiral. " Did you get any dispatches through Mex- 
ico just before you left Mazatlan I" 

" I did not," was the prompt answer. 

After a few moments study, the Admiral said : " You 
did right, perhaps, and your Government will no doubt 
sustain you ; but there is not an officer in the British ISavy 
who would have dared to take the responsibility you have 
taken. You doubtless had orders to take Monterey in case 
of war, but when you left Mazatlan there were only a few 
leading Mexicans and myself who knew of the existence 
of hostilities. It is all over now," he continued, "but tell 
me, Commodore, what you would have done had there 
been, when you reached here, the flag of another national- 
ity floating where yours now floats, and that flag guarded 
by a ship-of-the-line ?" 

"I would," said the Commodore, "have fired at least 
one shot at it ; perhaps have gone to the bottom, and left 
my Government to settle the matter as it thought best. " 

Thus was won for the Republic this peerless California, 
" the beloved Benjamin of American States, whose Au- 
tumn sack is stuffed with grain, while the mouth of it con- 
tains a cup of gold," as Starr King has it. 




CHAPTER XXIV. 
OUR ULTIMATE CITY. 



N September, 1846, three transport-ships were mer- 
rily bowling down the Atlantic, bound for California. 
They were bearing from New York to San Francis- 
co, the famous Stevenson Regiment, whose roster subse- 
quently furnished an imposing roll of pioneers, legislators, 
and millionaires to the Golden State — the darlings of 
Fortune, who not only " achieved greatness," but had it 
" thrust upon them." 

Between New York and Rio Janeiro, on board the 
Thomas H. Perkins, there was born a child, whose father 
was a corporal, and whose mother was a sister of that 
sometime most dreaded brigand of California, Jack Pow- 
ers. He was christened at Rio Janeiro, at the American 
Embassy, and named in honor of the vessel and her com- 
mander, Arthur Perkins Heffernan. Before the voyage 
was ended a girl was born, and the parents of the two in- 
fants made a romantic agreement that, at the proper time, 
if the children were so inclined, they should be married. 

The vessel reached San Francisco in safety, and the reg- 
iment was presently dissolved. The father of young Hef- 
fernan kept store in Tuolumne in that red-letter year, 1849, 
and, with the assistance of his notable wife, accumulated 
large substance. In those days Tuolumne had no more 
worthy and respected citizens than Charles Heffernan and 
his kindhearted wife, while young Heffernan and his 

319 



320 THE VICTIM OF A VIGILANCE COMMITTEE. 

brothers and sisters frisked over the red foot-hills as 
wild as mountain deer. 

About 1852 the family returned to New York, with a 
fortune of $100,000, but they frittered it all away in a sin- 
gle winter in Wall Street. Then they came to California 
a second time, and paid diligent court to the " fickle jade," 
whom they found no longer in a mood to shower golden 
fortunes into the laps of men, but exacting now hard tug- 
ging and sweat of their brows, Charles Heffernan, like 
so many old Californians, had become unsettled and unfit- 
ted for labor, and he made essays in politics, being several 
times elected a delegate from Tuolumne to Democratic 
State Conventions. Meantime, his boy was going his own 
wild ways. His betrothed of destiny is said to have been 
inclined to the match, but he had breathed too long the 
restless air of California, and he scorned the noose. 

The sequel is soon told. In the winter of 1870-71, 
crime increased to such an alarming extent in Virginia 
City, Nevada, that a Vigilance Committee was organized, 
and among the death-warrants signed by the mysterious 
" Secretary 601 " was that of Arthur Perkins Heffernan. 
Silently, at dead of night a certain block was surrounded, 
sentinels were stationed at the four corners, and the few 
late passers were bewildered to find themselves quietly 
taken by the arm by masked men, led home by circuitous 
routes, and dismissed with the advice to ask no questions. 
Surely and swiftly they gripped the doomed block in their 
enveloping cordon. When the morning sun came up in 
the east, and looked down through the thin, white air of 
Nevada upon that poor bauble of a town, flaring garish as 
a painted courtesan amid the cold gray chaparral at the 
foot of the hard, bold mountain, in a little dismal back-yard, 
among the smashed goods-boxes, the sawdust, the shords 
of bottles, and the faded gauds of their silenced orgies, his 



VIEW FROM POINT AVISADERO. 321 

rays lighted upon Arthur Heffernan and others of his kind, 
hanging by the neck. 

This for the story of a wayside inn. But we are now 
approaching San Francisco. 

From the bluff of Point Avisadero we may look now, 
in these last days of October, on one of those strange and 
subtile landscapes of California which link it to the mystic 
Orient. On the dark blue inlet and the darker bay — so 
richly, lustrously blue that the artists dare not give it 
wholly to canvas for Eastern eyes — the white-winged ships 
lie fast-fixed as in a picture. There is not a sign of life, 
save where the heavy brant fly low along the blue, with a 
sound as clear and ringing as rapid strokes of a hammer on 
ice ; or where the uncouth sledge-headed pelican lazily cir- 
cles around awhile, then tumbles straight down upon his 
head. The farther part of this inlet and all the bay with- 
out are lapped in the warm and delicious white-lilac halo 
of the Bay of Naples, which mellows the opposite shore to 
a thing of the merest seeming. 

At the head of the inlet there is a crescent rim of gar- 
dens, running a little way up on the slope, where the neat 
white windmills sleep and dream in the Sabbath morning 
stillness. These gardens carry us away from Italy to Ger- 
many, for they are a perfect checker-board of tiny squares ; 
— one beryl-blue with colewort, or purple-red with cab- 
bage ; another yellow, or green, or' white. 

These huge and treeless hills, far off, seem clad in doe- 
skin, smooth and soft as velvet ; or when they stand in a 
peculiar slant beneath the sun, take on a damson-purple, 
all rimy-crisp with a soft and sunny flush of haze. Where 
they thrust out their bold promontories on the deep-blue 
bosom of the bay, they seem to float upon its surface. 
Look now across yon distant slope, where each unsightly, 
naked, wooden house seems to sleep as light as a thought 
U* 



322 AUTUMN LANDSCAPES. 

on its broad and tawny-velvet bosom, as if it scarcely 
touched. Approach these Californian autumn landscapes, 
and they move your scorn, but seen at a distance, you can- 
not resist their secret power. There is that strange, desert 
glory, that wild and wizard something of transparency, 
of breath, of halo, which has for me an inexpressible fas- 
cination. Nowhere else on earth have I seen the light of 
the sun rest down on this beautiful world so tender as it 
streams down through this white-lilac autumn haze of 
California — such a light alone as could have inspired the 
passionate laments which Euripides puts into the mouths 
of Alcestis and Iphigenia, as they close their dying eyes. 
Hard was it for the ancient Greek to leave his beloved 
light ; and to go down from this witching breath of Califor- 
nia to the cold, bleak grave — that were the saddest and yet 
the sweetest death that earth could give. 

And then, when we think of those lurking fires beneath, 
the sudden trembling and the moaning, the midnight ter- 
ror, and the grim darkness, it causes us a deep pang of re- 
gret. Strangely and weirdly beautiful as Egypt's gifted 
but unhappy queen, California is yet cruel as Medea. Sis- 
ter of Death, bride of Mystery, California robes herself in 
pallid garments to meet her spouse ; and her white form 
gleams across to the mystic Orient. 

California will be, like Greece, the home of genius, a 
land of light, of love, and of song. Its present sardonic, 
" Grizzly " humor will be mellowed down. It is not diffi- 
cult to perceive one very fruitful source of that intensity 
of devotion with which even her adopted children cling to 
her already. 

Then I went over where all these ponderous hills leap 
together in their nude, dithyrambic revels, and climbed 
upon the largest, Mission Hill. As I reached the summit, 
there stretched out far and long beneath me that which I 



LONE MOUNTAIN IN EARLY TIMES. 323 

have ventured to call " Our Ultimate City." The city it- 
self and all that part of the peninsula east of the central 
ridge looks drearily sandy and dust-colored ; while in the 
valley on the right the wooden suburbs come straggling 
out, all around the little, old, red-tiled Mission Dolores, 
which they rudely jostle out of its sleepy antiquity. 

The western half the peninsula looks freshly green in 
its stubby encinal, which the sea-fog dusts and sprinkles. 
In the midst of it looms a little knoll, scarcely higher than 
the lofty crucifix which surmounts it, and hard by the white 
columns reared above Starr King and Broderick lift them- 
selves high above the squat greenery, and look out over 
the wide Pacific. Lone Mountain ! It is a dreary name 
for a most dreary grave-yard. Hard work have the scrub- 
by and knurly bushes to keep the ocean winds from sweep- 
ing away the dismal waste of sand. When in those earlier 
years, one miner after another wandered wearily down 
from the place of his perished expectations, to die in his 
beloved " Frisco," and a little band of comrades brought 
him and buried him here, in sight of the coming ships, 
and planted at his head a piece of cracker-box — perhaps the 
only memorial of their native East, which he had so yearn- 
ed to see — how lonesome then was this name — Lone 

Mountain ! 

* * * * * * 

Although a metropolis oi a region which produces silver 
up to the very clouds, and wheat down to the edge of the 
ocean waves, San Francisco has the most hideous site of all 
great American cities. During the winter, in the intervals 
between the weeping rains, there are snatches of weather 
which are paradisiacal ; but in the summer afternoons the 
wind is forever combing the sand over the hills, and sprink- 
ling it with a whistling swirl into every crevice and 
cranny. In the evening comes the rushing fog, and 



324: THE CHINESE. 

all the next forenoon it is sour enough to give the very 
weather-cocks the influenza. 

Yet the health of the place is good enough, and one 
gees aplenty of faces which are fresh, and ruddy, and round. 
The local appetite is keen. The suavity and complacency 
of these well-fed, golden-bellied bankers are refreshing to 
contemplate. 

It amused me to see people whisk their houses through 
the streets at such a rate. I have seen a three-story 
house trundle majestically along behind many horses, 
while a man bestrode the roof, and cried out, " Clear the 
track !" 

One quickly notes that California children are almost 
as insufferable in their petulance as those of great South- 
ern planters. This is a result for which there is cause 
enough, aside from other things, in the meekness of Chi- 
nese servants. It is most unfortunate for these children to 
be brought in contact with these pitiful and craven souls. 
The Chinese are too willing. They do too much ; they 
are pampering a generation in indolence. They bear too 
much. I confess that when I see them set upon and pelted 
by these little jackanapes, I wish in my soul they would 
cuff them soundly. They need it, if ever children did. 

As might be expected in a country where gold occurs in 
wedges, California has a strong tendency to split society in- 
to high and low extremes. There is some swift and resist- 
less power of King Gold which greatly strengthens the 
strong, but crushes down the weak and the unfortunate in- 
to hopeless, dumb despair. This darling and sunny child of 
our young Republic is already old as Europe in suicide. 
The proud-hearted Californians learn very slowly to beg 
outright in the streets, and tourists who flit about a few 
weeks in the buggies of friends are easily deceived by the 
superficial tranquillity. But ah ! the Lombards and the 



"GRASS WIDOWS" AKD "SPIRITUAL WIDOWERS." 325 

suicides! You shall see a man, utterly and crushingly 
ruined, calmly smoking at evening on the quays the cigar 
for which he paid his last dime-; in the morning the 
blue waters of the bay flow above him. 

Ah ! heavy is my heart with sorrow and with pity, when 
I look back and remember the sad, fallen humanity I have 
encountered in this sunny clime, and with whom I have 
sat or wandered, listening to their broken stories, and be- 
holding the bitter tears they wept in the anguish of a 
wasted and ruined life. O California, the peerless, so 
young, so beautiful, yet so old in sorrow and remorse ! 

As to the local love of scandal and backbiting, I can only 
add my testimony to that of Mr. Brace. But there is one 
prolific source of it which he does not develop. 

A good many of the first women who came to these 
shores were energetic and adventurous servant girls, who 
earned fabulous wages, and were petted till they- were 
spoiled. Many of them became rich, and, in the great scar- 
city of women, married quite above their station. But 
these marriages generally produced an amazing crop of 
incompatibility, scandal, and connubial clapper-clawing, 
and the wives, feeling very independent, often left home, 
and joined themselves unto others, like Tennessee's part- 
ner's wife. There are also a considerable number of them 
" ladies living in San Francisco for the education of their 
children, while their husbands linger a little longer in Ne- 
vada, to complete their fortunes." The gorgeous robes 
and jewels of this class will deceive you for a time, but 
you will presently be set aghast by the remark, " You bet 
your life." 

More men marry here for wealth or convenience than 
anywhere else in the Union, and they suffer accordingly. 
That queer Americanism " grass widow," is here supple- 
mented by the other one, " spiritual widower." A poor 



326 LOCAL CHARACTERISTICS. 

man once remarked to me, with a most comically dolorous 
face, " Like so many other people, I thought I had a wife, 
but one morning I found I hadn't." 

There is a wonderful aggressiveness and magnetism in 
the life of San Francisco, which is not easily explainable. 
A German scholar informs me that his countrymen yield 
up their language and their national distinctiveness here 
faster than anywhere else in Christendom, except among 
that most splendid of the races of humanity, the Magyars. 

At the same time, there is a kind of subtility or conserv- 
atism of culture which is remarkable in so young a city. 
But this conservatism is prejudicial to business. Probably 
there never was another city of 170,000 inhabitants, of 
whom so great a proportion had traveled so widely and 
seen so much as had those of San Francisco. Yet in wide- 
reaching business enterprise the great city was put to 
shame by little Sacramento. Does intellectual expansion 
then give financial caution ? 

It cannot be explained that this monetary provincialism 
was taught by previous bitter experience in the mines, for 
Sacramento merchants had also had that lesson. Is it then 
that seaports are more cautious than inland cities '? 

But this sort of provincialism has not impaired their true 
and hearty loyalty toward our common country. To the 
Americans of this far-off coast the Union is as dear as to 
the millions of the populous East. Here, as yonder, the 
patriot soldier's grave beside the sea is watered by a moth- 
er's tears. In the words of their poet who is more racily 
and more truly Calif ornian than any other, these people 
call across to us : 

" brothers by the farther sea, 
Think still our faith is warm ; 
The same bright flag above us waves 
That swathed our baby form." 4 



AT THE GOLDEN GATE. 



327 



And now, on that November day, I go out to com- 
plete my walk, wading over mighty dimes of yellow sand, 
heaped np by the wind and the ocean through ages. 

Then, sitting there till the setting sun turned that 
narrow strait into a veritable Golden Gate, gorgeously 
overarched with lilac, and amethyst, and orange, I clam- 
bered down the cliffs to the beach. There I beheld the 
hand of old Ocean, with a prodigious flourish of his 
spray-wrought stylus, grave for me, in cuneiform char- 
acters upon the tablet of the strand, the exultant colo- 
phon of my long toil ended. Stooping, and dipping my 
hand into the brine, I said, The Sunrise to the Sunset 
Sea, through a weary footman, Greeting. 




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wishing honorable, pleasant and lucrative employment we offer 
great inducements. Young men who engage in this business 
will gain a knowledge of the country, and of men and things 
which will be of great benefit to them. 

Agents who canvass for our Works in the Western and South- 
ern sections of the country, will be supplied with books from 
the offices of the Western and Southern Publishers of our 
Works, thus saving time and expense. 

Circulars with full information are sent promptly to any one 
Wishing an agency. ' Address, 

COLUMBIAN BOOK COMPANY, 

JjTa?-tford> Conn. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 





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