THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES $ THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS STATE NORMAL SCHOOL, I. OS AKGKLEB. ■•- ' 'Ai BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON AUTHOR OF "travels WITH A DONKEY," " AN INLAND BOAT VOYAGE," " TREASURE ISLAND," ETC BOSTON ROBERTS BROTHERS 189s " Vixerunt nonuUi in agris, delectati re sua familiari. His idem propositura fuit quod regibus, ut ne qua re agerent, ne cui parerent, libertate uterentur: cujus proprium est sic vivere ut velis." Cic, De Off., I. XX. JEnifafrsitp Press : John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. i •\ ^■' TO VIRGIL WILLIAMS AND DORA NORTON WILLIAMS Sfjesc Sfectcl)cs ARE AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED BY THEIR FRIEND THE AUTHOR. CONTENTS. In the Valley : PAGE. I. Calistoga 23 II. The Petrified Forest 35 III. Napa Wine 46 IV. The Scot Abroad 61 With the Children of Israel: I. To Introduce Mr. Kelmar .... 73 II. First Impressions of Silverado . . 83 III. The Return 109 The Act of Squatting 123 The Hunter's Family 149 The Sea Fogs 177 The Toll House 195 A Starry Drive 211 Episodes in the Story of a Mine . . . 225 Toils and Pleasures 255 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS. 4- — * The scene of this little book is on a high mountain. There are, indeed, many higher; there are many of a no- bler outline. It is no place of pilgrim- age for the summary globe-trotter; but to one who lives upon its sides, Mount Saint Helena soon becomes a centre of interest. It is the Mont Blanc of one section of the Californian Coast Range, none of its near neighbors risins; to one- half its altitude. It looks down on much green, intricate country. It feeds in lo The Silverado Squatters, the spring-time many splashing brooks. From its summit you must have an excellent lesson of geography ; seeing, to the south, San Francisco Bay, with Tamalpais on the one hand and Monte Diablo on the other ; to the west and thirty miles away, the open ocean ; east- ward, across the corn-lands and thick tule swamps of Sacramento Valley, to where the Central Pacific railroad begins to climb the sides of the Sierras ; and rtorthward, for what I know, the white head of Shasta looking down on Ore- gon. Three counties, Napa County, Lake County, and Sonoma County, march across its cliffy shoulders. Its naked peak stands nearly four thousand five hundred feet above the sea ; its sides are fringed with forest; and the TJie Silverado Squatters. 1 1 soil, where it is bare, glows warm with cinnabar. Life in its shadow goes rustically for- ward. Bucks, and bears, and rattle- snakes, and former mining operations, are the staple of men's talk. Agricul- ture has only begun to mount above the valley. And though in a few years from now tl>e whole district may be smiling with farms, passing trains shaking the mountain to the heart, many- windowed hotels lighting up the night like factories, and a prosperous city occupying the site of sleepy Calistoga; yet in the mean time, around the foot of that mountain the silence of nature reigns in a great measure unbroken, and the people of hill and valley go sauntering about their business as in the days before the flood. 12 The Silverado Squatters. To reach Mount Saint Helena from San Francisco, the traveller has twice to cross the bay : once by the busy Oakland Ferry, and again, after an hour or so of the railway, from Vallejo junc- tion to Vallejo. Thence he takes rail once more to mount the long green strath of Napa Valley. In all the contractions and expan- sions of that inland sea, the Bay of San Francisco, there can be few drearier scenes than the Vallejo Ferry. Bald shores and a low, bald islet enclose the sea ; through the narrows the tide bub- bles, muddy like a river. When we made the passage (bound, although yet we knew it not, for Silverado) the steamer jumped, and the black buoys were dancing in the jabble ; the ocean The Silverado Squatters. 13 breeze blew killing chill ; and, although the upper sky was still unflecked with vapor, the sea fogs were pouring in from seaward, over the hill-tops of Marin County, in ©r^e great, shapeless, silver cloud. South Vallejo is typical of many Cal- ifornian towns. It was a blunder ; the site has proved untenable ; and, al- though it is still such a young place by the scale of Europe, it has already begun to be deserted for its neighbor and namesake. North Vallejo. A long pier, a number of drinking saloons, a hotel of a great . size, marshy pools where the frogs keep up their croaking, and even at high noon the entire ab- sence of any human face or voice — these are the marks of South Vallejo. 14 The Silverado Sqtiatters. Yet there was a tall building beside the pier, labelled the Star Flour Mills ; and sea-going, full-rigged ships lay close along shore, waiting for their cargo. Soon these would be plunging round the Horn, soon the flour from the Star Flour Mills would be landed on the wharves of Liverpool. For that, too, is one of England's outposts ; thither, to this gaunt mill, across the Atlantic and Pacific deeps and round about the icy Horn, this crowd of great, three- masted, deep-sea ships come, bringing nothing, and return with bread. The Frisby House, for that was the name of the hotel, was a place of fallen fortunes, like the town. It was now given up to laborers, and partly ruin- ous. At dinner there was the ordinary The Silverado Squatters. 15 display of what is called in the West a two-bit hotise: the tablecloth checked red and white, the plague of flies, the wire hencoops over the dishes, the great variety and invariable vileness of the food, and the rough coatless men de- vouring it in silence. In our bedroom, the stove would not burn, though it would smoke ; and while one window would not open, the other would not shut. There was a view on a bit of empty road, a few dark houses, a don- key wandering with its shadow on a slope, and a blink of sea, with a tall ship lying anchored in the moonlight. Ail about that dreary inn frogs sang their ungainly chorus. Early the next morning we mounted the hill along a wooden footway, bridg- 1 6 The Silverado Squatters. ing one marish spot after another. Here and there, as we ascended, we passed a house embowered in white roses. More of the bay became appar- ent, and soon the blue peak of Tamal- pais rose above the green level of the island opposite. It told us we were still but a little way from the city of the Golden Gate, already, at that hour, beginning to awake among the sand- hills. It called to us over the waters as with the voice of a bird. Its stately head, blue as a sapphire on the paler azure of the sky, spoke to us of wider outlooks and the bright Pacific. For Tamalpais stands sentry, like a light- house, over the Golden Gate, between the bay and the open ocean, and looks down indi£ferently on both. Even as The Silverado Squatters. 17 we saw and hailed it from Vallejo, sea- men, far out at sea, were scanning it with shaded eyes ; and, as if to answer to the thought, one of the great ships below be- gan silently to clothe herself with white sails, homeward bound for England. For some way beyond Vallejo the railway led us through bald green pastures. On the west the rough high- lands of Marin shut off the ocean; in the midst, in long, straggling, gleaming arms, the bay died out among the grass ; there were few trees and few enclosures ; the sun shone wide over open uplands, the displumed hills stood clear against the sky. But by and by these hills beo^an to draw nearer on either hand, and first thicket and then wood began to clothe their sides ; and 1 8 The Silverado Squatters. soon we were away from ail signs of the sea's neighborhood, mounting an inland, irrigated valley. A great va- riety of oaks stood, now severally, now in a becoming grove, among the fields and vineyards. The towns were com- pact, in about equal proportions, of bright, new wooden houses, and great and growing forest trees ; and the chapel bell on the engine sounded most festally that sunny Sunday, as we drew up at one green town after another, with the townsfolk trooping in their Sunday's best to see the strangers, with the sun sparkling on the clean houses, and great domes of foliage humming overhead in the breeze. This pleasant Napa Valley is, at its north end, blockaded by our mountain. The Silverado Squatters. 19 There, at Calistoga, the railroad ceases, and the traveller who intends faring farther, to the Geysers or to the springs in Lake -County, must cross the spurs of the mountain by stage. Thus, Mount Saint Helena is not only a sum- mit, but a frontier; and, up to the time of writing, it has stayed the progress of the iron horse. IN THE VALLEY. IN THE VALLEY. I. CALISTOGA. It is difficult for a European to imag- ine Calistoga, the whole place is so new, and of such an occidental pattern ; the very name, I hear, was invented at a supper-party by the man who found the springs. The railroad and the highway come up the valley about parallel to one an- other. The street of Calistoga joins them, perpendicular to both — a wide street, with bright, clean, low houses,. 24 The Silverado Squatters. here and there a veranda over the side- walk, here and there a horse-post, here and there lounging townsfolk. Other streets are marked out, and most likely named ; for these towns in the New World begin with a firm resolve to grow larger, Washington and Broadway, and then First and Second, and so forth, being boldly plotted out as soon as the community indulges in a plan. But, in the meanwhile, all the life and most of the houses of Calistoga are con- centrated upon that street between the railway station and the road. I never heard it called by any name, but I will hazard a guess that it is either Washington or Broadway. Here are the blacksmith's, the chemist's, the general merchant's, and Kong Sam Kee, the In the Valley. 25 Chinese laundryman's ; here, probably, is the office of the local paper (for the place has a paper — they all have papers) ; and here certainly is one of the hotels, Cheeseborough's, whence the daring Foss, a man dear to legend, starts his horses for the Geysers. It must be remembered that we are here in a land of stage-drivers and high- waymen — a land, in that sense, like England a hundred years ago. The highway robber — road-agent, he is quaintly called — is still busy in these parts. The fame of Vasquez is still young. Only a few years ago, the Lakeport stage was robbed a mile or two from Calistoga. In 1879, the den- tist of Mendocino City, fifty miles away upon the coast, suddenly threw off the 26 The Silverado Squatters. garments of his trade, like Grindoff in "The Miller and his Men," and flamed forth in his second dress as a captain of banditti. A great robbery was fol- lowed by a long chase, a chase of days if not of weeks, among the intricate hill-country ; and the chase was followed by much desultory fighting, in which several — and the dentist, I believe, amongst the number — bit the dust. The grass was springing for the first time, nourished upon their blood, when I arrived in Calistosfa. I am reminded of another highwayman of that same year. "He had been unwell," so ran his humorous defence, "and the doctor told him to take something, so he took the express-box." The cultus of the stage-coachman Ill the Valley. 2"/ always flourishes highest where there are thieves on the road, and where the guard travels armed, and the stage is not only a link between country and city, and the vehicle of news, but has a faint warfaring aroma, like a man who should be brother to a soldier. California boasts her famous stage- drivers, and among the famous Foss is not forgotten. Along the unfenced, abominable mountain roads, he launches his team with small reo^ard to human life or the doctrine of probabilities. Flinching travellers, who behold them- selves coasting eternity at every cor- ner, look with natural admiration at their driver's huge, impassive, fleshy countenance. He has the very face for the driver in Sam Weller's anec- 28 The Silverado Squatters. dote, who upset the election party at the required point. Wonderful tales are current of his readiness and skill. One in particular, of how one of his horses fell at a ticklish passage of the road, and how Foss let slip the reins, and, driving over the fallen animal, arrived at the next stage with only three. This I relate as I heard it, without guarantee. I only saw Foss once, though, strange as it may sound, I have twice talked with him. He lives out of Calistoga, at a ranch called Foss- ville. One evening, after he was long gone home, I dropped into Cheese- borough's, and was asked if I should like to speak with Mr. Foss. Suppos- ing that the interview was impossible, hi the Valley. 29 and that I was merely called upon to subscribe the general sentiment, I boldly- answered "Yes." Next moment, I had one instrument at my ear, another at my mouth, and found myself, with nothing in the world to say, conversing with a man several miles off among desolate hills. Foss rapidly and some- what plaintively brought the conver- sation to an end ; and he returned to his night's grog at Fossville, while I strolled forth asrain on Calistoga hii^h street. But it was an odd thing that here, on what we are accustomed to consider the very skirts of civilization, I should have used the telephone for the first time in my civilized career. So it goes in these young countries ; telephones, and telegraphs, and news- 30 The Silverado Squatters. papers, and advertisements running far ahead among the Indians and the grizzly bears. Alone, on the other side of the rail- way, stands the Springs Hotel, with its attendant cottages. The floor of the valley is extremely level to the very roots of the hills ; only here and there a hillock, crowned with pines, rises like the barrow of some chieftain famed in war ; and right against one of these hillocks is the Springs Hotel — is or was; for since I was there the place has been destroyed by fire, and has risen again from its ashes. A lawn runs about the house, and the lawn is in its turn surrounded by a system of little five-roomed cottages, each with a veranda and a weedy palm before the hi tJie Valley. 31 door. Some of the cottages are let to residents, and these are wreathed in flowers. The rest are occupied by or- dinary visitors to the hotel ; and a very pleasant way this is, by which you have a little country cotta*ge of your own, without domestic burdens, and by the day or week. The whole neighborhood of Mount Saint Helena is full of sulphur and of boiling springs. The Geysers are fa- mous ; they were the great health re- sort of the Indians before the coming of the whites. Lake County is dotted with spas; Hot Springs and White Sulphur Springs are the names of two stations on the Napa Valley railroad ; and Calistoga itself seems to repose on a mere film above a boiling, subter- 32 The Silverado Squatters. ranean lake. At one end of the hotel enclosure are the springs from which it takes its name, hot enough to scald a child seriously while I was there. At the other end, the tenant of a cottage sank a well, and there also the water came up boiling. It keeps this end of the valley as warm as toast. I have gone across to the hotel a little after five in the morning, when a sea fog from the Pacific was hanging thick and gray, and dark and dirty over- head, and found the thermometer had been up before me, and had already climbed among the nineties ; and in the stress of the day it was sometimes too hot to move about. But in spite of this heat from above and below, doing one on both sides, In I lie Valley. 33 Calistoga was a pleasant place to dwell in ; beautifully green, for it was then that favored moment in the Californian year, when the rains are over and the dusty summer has not yet set in ; often visited by fresh airs, now from the mountain, now across Sonoma from the sea; very quiet, very idle, very silent but for the breezes and the cattle bells afield ; and there was something satis- factory in the sight of that great moun- tain that enclosed us to the north, whether it stood, robed in sunshine, quaking to its topmost pinnacle with the heat and brightness of the day, or whether it set itself to weaving vapors, wisp after wisp growing, trembling, fleet- ing, and fading in the blue. The tangled, woody, and almost 34 The Silverado Squatters. trackless foot-hills that enclose the val- ley, shutting it off from Sonoma on the west, and from Yolo on the east — rough as they were in outline, dug out by winter streams, crowned by cliffy bluffs and nodding pine trees — were dwarfed into satellites by the bulk and bearino^ of Mount Saint Helena. She over-towered them by two-thirds of her own stature. She excelled them by the boldness of her profile. Her great bald summit, clear of trees and pasture, a cairn of quartz and cinnabar, rejected kinship with the dark and shaggy wil- derness of lesser hill-tops. In the Valley. 35 II. THE PETRIFIED FOREST. We drove off from the Springs Hotel about three in the afternoon. The sun warmed me to the heart. A broad, cool wind streamed pauselessly down the val- ley, laden with perfume. Up at the top stood Mount Saint Helena, a bulk of mountain, bare atop, with tree-fringed spurs, and radiating warmth. Once we saw it framed in a grove of tall and exquisitely graceful white oaks, in line and color a finished composition. We passed a cow stretched by the roadside, her bell slowly beating time to the movement of her ruminating jaws, her 36 The Silverado Squatters. big red face crawled over by half a dozen flies, a monument of content. A little farther, and we struck to the left up a mountain road, and for two hours threaded one valley after another, green, tangled, full of noble timber, giv- ing us every now and again a sight of Mount Saint Helena and the blue hilly distance, and crossed by many streams, through which we splashed to the car- riage-step. To the right or tlie left, there was scarce any trace of man but the road we followed ; I think we passed but one rancheros house in the whole distance, and that was closed and smokeless. But we had the society of these bright streams — dazzlingly clear, as is their wont, splashing from the wheels in diamonds, and striking a lively cool- In the Valley. t^J ness throuGfh the sunshine. And what with the innumerable variety of greens, the masses of fohage tossing in the breeze, the glimpses of distance, the descents into seemingly impenetrable thickets, the continual dodging of the road which made haste to plunge again into the covert, we had a fine sense of woods, and spring-time, and the open air. Our driver gave me a lecture by the way on Californian trees — a thing I was much in need of, having fallen among painters who know the name of nothing, and Mexicans who know the name of nothing in English. He taught me the madrona, the manzanita, the buckeye, the maple ; he showed me the crested mountain quail ; he showed 38 The Silverado Squatters. me where some young redwoods were already spiring heavenwards from the ruins of the old ; for in this district all had already perished : redwoods and redskins, the two noblest indigenous living things, alike condemned. At length, in a lonely dell, we came on a huge wooden gate with a sign upon it like an inn. " The Petrified Forest. Proprietor: C. Evans," ran the legend. Within, on a knoll of sward, was the house of the proprietor, and another smaller house hard by to serve as a museum, where photographs and petrifactions were retailed. It was a pure little isle of touristry among these solitary hills. The proprietor was a brave old white- faced Swede. He had wandered this In tJie Valley. 39 way, Heaven knows how, and taken up his acres — I forget how many years ago — all alone, bent double with sci- atica, and with six bits in his pocket and an axe upon his shoulder. Long, useless years of seafaring had thus discharged him at the end, penniless and sick. Without doubt he had tried his luck at the diggings, and got no good from that ; without doubt he had loved the bottle, and lived the life of Jack ashore. But at the end of these adventures, here he came ; and, the place hitting his fancy, down he sat to make a new life of it, far from crimps and the salt sea. And the very sight of his ranch had done him good. It was " the handsomest spot in the Californy mountains." " Is n't 40 The Silverado Sqiiatiers. it handsome, now ? " he said. Every penny he makes goes into that ranch to make it handsomer. Then the cH- mate, with the sea-breeze every after- noon in the hottest summer weather, had gradually cured the sciatica; and his sister and niece were now domes- ticated with him for company — or, rather, the niece came only once in the two days, teaching music the mean- while in the valley. And then, for a last piece of luck, " the handsomest spot in the Californy mountains" had produced a petrified forest, which Mr. Evans now shows at the modest figure of half a dollar a head, or two-thirds of his capital when he first came there with an axe and a sciatica. This tardy favorite of fortune — In the Valley. 41 hobbling a little, I think, as if in memory of the sciatica, but with not a trace that I can remember of the sea — thoroughly ruralized from head to foot, proceeded to escort us up the hill behind his house. " Who first found the forest ? " asked my wife. " The first ? I was that man," said he. " I was cleaning up the pasture for my beasts, when I found this'' — kicking a great redwood, seven feet in diameter, that lay there on its side, hollow heart, clinging lumps of bark, all changed into gray stone, with veins of quartz between what had been the layers of the wood. " Were you surprised t " "Surprised? No! What would I 42 The Silverado Squatters. be surprised about ? What did I know about petrifactions — following the sea ? Petrifaction ! There was no such word in my language ! I knew about putre- faction, though ! I thought it was a stone ; so would you, if you was cleaning up pasture." And now he had a theory of his own, which I did not quite grasp, except that the trees had not " grewed " there. But he mentioned, with evi- dent pride, that he differed from all the scientific people who had visited the spot; and he flung about such words as " tufa " and " siHca " with careless freedom. When I mentioned I was from Scot- land, " My old country," he said ; " my old country " — with a smiling In the Valley. 43 look and a tone of real affection in his voice. I was mightily surprised, for he was obviously Scandinavian, and begged him to explain. It seemed he had learned his English and done nearly all his sailing in Scotch ships. " Out of Glasgow," said he, " or Greenock ; but that's all the same — they all hail from Glasgow." And he was so pleased with me for being a Scotsman, and his adopted compatriot, that he made me a present of a very beautiful piece of petrifaction — I believe the most beautiful and portable he had. Here was a man, at least, who was a Swede, a Scot, and an American, acknowledo^inor some kind alleo^iance to three lands. Mr. Wallace's Scoto- Circassian will not fail to come before 44 The Silverado Squatters. the reader. I have myself met and spoken with a Fifeshire German, whose combination of abominable ac- cents struck me dumb. But, indeed, I think we all belong to many coun- tries. And perhaps this habit of much travel, and the engendering of scat- tered friendships, may prepare the euthanasia of ancient nations. , And the forest itself.? Well, on a tangled, briery hillside — for the pasture would bear a little further cleaning up, to my eyes — there lie scattered thickly various lengths of petrified trunk, such as the one already mentioned. It is very curious, of course, and ancient enough, if that were all. Doubtless, the heart of the geologist beats quicker at the sight ; hi the Valley. 45 but, for my part, I was mightily un- moved. Sight-seeing is the art of disappointment. " There 's nothing under heaven so blue, That 's fairly worth the travelHng to." But, fortunately, Heaven rewards us with many agreeable prospects and ad- ventures by the way ; and sometimes, when we go out to see a petrified for- est, prepares a far more delightful cu- riosity in the form of Mr. Evans, whom may all prosperity attend throughout a long and green old age. 46 The Silverado Squatters, III. NAPA WINE. I WAS interested in Californian wine. Indeed, I am interested in all wines, and have been all my life, from the raisin wine that a schoolfellow kept secreted in his play-box up to my last discov- ery, those notable Valtellines, that once shone upon the board of Csesar. Some of us, kind old Pagans, watch with dread the shadows falling on the age ; how the unconquerable worm invades the sunny terraces of France, and Bordeaux is no more, and the Rhone a mere Arabia Petrasa. Chateau Neuf is dead, and I have never tasted In the Valley. 47 it ; Hermitage — a hermitage indeed from all life's sorrows — lies expiring by the river. And in the place of these imperial elixirs, beautiful to every sense, gem-hued, flower-scented, dream-compel- lers, behold upon the quays at Cette the chemicals arranged ; behold the analyst at Marseilles, raising hands in obsecra- tion, attesting god Lyoeus, and the vats staved in, and the dishonest wines poured forth among the sea. It is not Pan only ; Bacchus, too, is dead. If wine is to withdraw its most poetic countenance, the sun of the white din- ner-cloth, a deity to be invoked by two* or three, all fervent, hushing their talk, degusting tenderly, and storing reminis- cences — for a bottle of good wine, like a good act, shines ever in the retro* 48 The Silverado Squatters. spect. If wine is to desert us, go thy ways, old Jack ! Now we begin to have compunctions, and look back at the brave bottles squandered upon dinner- parties, where the guests drank grossly, discussing politics the while, and even the schoolboy " took his whack," like liquorice water. And at the same time, we look timidly forward, with a spark of hope, to where the new lands, already weary of producing gold, begin to green with vineyards. A nice point in human history falls to be decided by Californian and Australian wines. Wine in California is still in the ex- perimental stage ; and when you taste a vintage, grave economical questions are involved. The beginning of vine-plant- ing is like the beginning of mining for In the Valley. 49 the precious metals : the wine-grower also " prospects." One corner of land after another is tried with one kind of grape after another. This is a failure ; that is better ; a third best. So, bit by- bit, they grope about for their Clos Vougeot and Lafite. Those lodes and pockets of earth, more precious than the precious ores, that yield inimitable fra- grance and soft fire ; those virtuous Conanzas, where the soil has sublimated under sun and stars to something finer, and the wine is bottled poetry ; these still lie undiscovered ; chaparral con- ceals, thicket embowers them ; the miner chips the rock and wanders farther, and the grizzly muses undis- turbed. But there they bide their hour, awaitmg their Columbus ; and nature )/V-, 50 The Silverado Squatters, nurses and prepares them. The smack of Californian earth shall linger on the palate of your grandson. Meanwhile the wine is merely a good wine ; the best that I have tasted better than a Beaujolais, and not unlike. But the trade is poor; it lives from hand to mouth, putting its all into experiments, and forced to sell its vintages. To find one properly matured, and bearing its own name, is to be fortune's favorite. Bearing its own name, I say, and dwell upon the innuendo. " You want to know why California wine is not drunk in the States? " a San Francisco wine merchant said to me, after he had shown me through his premises. " Well, here 's the reason." And opening a large cupboard, fitted hi the Valley. 51 with many little drawers, he proceeded to shower me all over with a great vari- ety of gorgeously tinted labels, blue, red, or yellow, stamped with crown or coro^ net, and hailing from such a profusion of clos and chateaux, that a single de- partment could scarce have furnished forth the names. But it was strange that all looked unfamiliar. " Chateau X } " said I ; " I never heard of that." " I dare say not," said he. " I had been reading one of X 's novels." They were all castles in Spain ! But that sure enough is the reason why California wine is not drunk in the States. Napa valley has been long a seat of the wine-growing industry. It did not 52 The Silverado Squatters. here begin, as it does too often, in the low valley lands along the river, but took at once to the rough foot-hills, where alone it can expect to prosper. A bask- ing inclination, and stones, to be a reser- voir of the day's heat, seem necessary to the soil for wine ; the grossness of the earth must be evaporated, its marrow daily melted and refined for ages ; until at length these clods that break below our footing, and to the eye appear but common earth, are truly and to the per- ceiving mind a masterpiece of nature. The dust of Richebourg, which the wind carries away, what an apotheosis of the dust ! Not man himself can seem a stranger child of that brown, friable powder, than the blood and sun in that old flask behind the fagots. In the Valley. 53 A Californian vineyard, one of man's outposts in the wilderness, has features of its own. There is nothing here to remind you of the Rhine or Rhone, of the low cote d'ar^ or the infamous and scabby deserts of Champagne ; but all is green, solitary, covert. We visited two of them, Mr. Schram's and Mr. M'Eck- ron's, sharing the same glen. Some way down the valley below Calistoga, we turned sharply to the south and plunged into the thick of the wood. A rude trail rapidly mount- ing ; a little stream tinkling by on the one hand, big enough perhaps after the rains, but already yielding up its life ; overhead and on all sides a bower of green and tangled thicket, still fragrant and still flower-bespangled by 54 The Silverado Squatters. the early season, where thimbleberry played the part of our English haw- thorn, and the buckeyes were putting forth their twisted horns of blossom : through all this, we struggled toughly upwards, canted to and fro by the roughness of the trail, and continually switched across the face by sprays of leaf or blossom. The last is no great inconvenience at home; but here in California it is a matter of some mo- ment. For in all woods and by every wayside there prospers an abomina- ble shrub or weed, called poison-oak, whose very neighborhood is venomous to some, and whose actual touch is avoided by the most impervious. The two houses, with their vine- yards, stood each in a green niche of hi the Valley. 55 its own in this steep and narrow forest dell. Though they were so near, there was already a good difference in level ; and Mr. M'Eckron's head must be a long way under the feet of Mr. Schram. No more had been cleared than was necessary for cultivation ; close around each oasis ran the tangled wood ; the glen enfolds them ; thei^e they lie bask- ing in sun and silence, concealed from all but the clouds and the mountain birds. Mr. M'Eckron's is a bachelor estab- lishment ; a little bit of a wooden house, a small cellar hard by in the hillside, and a patch of vines planted and tended single-handed by himself. He had but recently begun ; his vines were young, his business young also; 56 The Silverado Squatters. but I thought he had the look of the man who succeeds. He hailed from Greenock : he remembered his father putting him inside Mons Meg, and that touched me home ; and we ex- changed a word or two of Scotcli, which pleased me more than you would fancy. Mr. Schram's, on the other hand, is the oldest vineyard in the valley, eighteen years old, I think; yet he began a penniless barber, and even after he had broken ground up here with his black malvoisies, continued for long to tramp the valley with his razor. Now, his place is the picture of prosperity : stuffed birds in the veranda, cellars far dug into the hillside, and resting on pillars like a bandit's cave : — all In the Valley. 57 trimness, varnish, flowers, and sunshine, among the tangled wildwood. Stout, smiling Mrs. Schram, who has been to Europe and apparently all about the States for pleasure, entertained Fanny in the veranda, while I was tasting wines in the cellar. To Mr. Schram this was a solemn office; his serious gusto warmed my heart; pros- perity had not yet wholly banished a certain neophite and girlish trepidation, and he followed every sip and read my face with proud anxiety. I tasted all. I tasted every variety and shade of Schram- berger, red and white Schramberger, Burgundy Schramberger, Schramberger Hock, Schramberger Golden Chasse- las, the latter with a notable bouquet, and I fear to think how many more. 58 The Silverado Squatters. Much of It goes to London — most, I think ; and Mr. Schram has a great notion of the English taste. In this wild spot, I did not feel the sacredness of ancient cultivation. It was still raw, it was no Marathon, and no Johannisberg; yet the stirring sun- light, and the growing vines, and the vats and bottles in the cavern, made a pleasant music for the wind. Here, also, earth's cream was being skimmed and garnered ; and the London cus- tomers can taste, such as it is, the tang of the earth in this green valley. So local, so quintessential is a wine, that it seems the very birds in the veranda might communicate a flavor, and that romantic cellar influence the bottle next to be uncorked in London, In the Valley. 59 and the smile of jolly Mr. Schram might mantle in the glass. But these are but experiments. All thino^s in this new land are movinof fur- ther on : the wine-vats and the miner's blasting tools but picket for a night, like Bedouin pavilions; and to-morrow, to fresh woods ! This stir of change and these perpetual echoes of the moving footfall, haunt the land. Men move eternally, still chasing Fortune ; and, Fortune found, still wander. As we drove back to Calistoga, the road lay empty of mere passengers, but its green side was dotted with the camps of travelling families : one cumbered with a great wagonful of household stuff, settlers going to occupy a ranch they had taken up in Mendocino, or 6o The Silverado Squatters. perhaps Tehama County ; another, a party in dust coats, men and women, whom we found camped in a grove on the roadside, all on pleasure bent, with a Chinaman to cook for them, and who waved their hands to us as we drove by. In the Valley. 6i IV. THE SCOT ABROAD. A FEW pages back, I wrote that a man belonged, in these days, to a variety ,of countries ; but the old land is still the true love, the others are but pleas- ant infidelities. Scotland is indefin- y able ; it has no unity except upon the map. Two languages, many dialects, innumerable forms of piety, and count- less local patriotisms and prejudices, part us among ourselves more widely than the extreme east and west of that great continent of America. When I am at home, I feel a man from Glas- gow to be something like a rival, a 62 The Silverado Sqitatters. man from Barra to be more than half a foreigner. Yet let us meet in some far country, and, whether we hail from the braes of Manor or the braes of Mar, some ready-made affection joins us on the instant. It is not race. Look at us. One is Norse, one Celtic, and another Saxon. It is not community of tonorue. We have it not amono^ ourselves ; and we have it almost to perfection, with English, or Irish, or American. It is no tie of faith, for we detest each other's errors. And yet somewhere, deep down in the heart of each one of us, something yearns for the old land, and the old kindly people. Of all mysteries of the human heart, this is perhaps the most inscrut- In the Valley. 63 able. There is no special loveliness in that gray country, with its rainy, sea-beat archipelago ; its fields of dark mountains; its unsightly places, black with coal ; its treeless, sour, unfriendly looking corn-lands ; its quaint, gray, castled city, where the bells clash of a Sunday, and the wind squalls, and the salt showers fly and beat. I do not even know if I desire to live there; but let me hear, in some far land, a kindred voice sing out, " Oh, why left I my hame ? " and it seems at once as if no beauty under the kind heavens, and no society of the wise and good, can repay me for my absence from my country. And though, I think, I would rather die elsewhere, yet in my heart of hearts I long to be buried 64 The Silverado Squatters. among good Scots clods. I will say it fairly, it grows on me with every year: there are no stars so lovely as Edinburgh street-lamps. When I for- get thee, auld Reekie, may my right hand forget its cunning! The happiest lot on earth is to be born a Scotchman. You must pay for it in many ways, as for all other advan- tages on earth. You have to learn the paraphrases and the shorter cate- chism ; you generally take to drink; your youth, as far as I can find out, is a time of louder war against society, of more outcry and tears and turmoil, than if you had been born, for instance, in England. (But somehow life is warmer and closer; the hearth burns more redly ; the lights of home shine In the Valley. 65 softer on the rainy street; the very names, endeared in verse and music, cHng nearer round our hearts./ An Englishman may meet an EngHsh- man to-morrow, upon Chimborazo, and neither of them care ; but when the Scotch wine-grower told me of Mons Meg, it was like magic. ** From the dim shieling on the misty island Mountains divide us, and a world of seas ; Yet still our hearts are true, our hearts are High- land, And we, in dreams, behold the Hebrides." And, Highland and Lowland, all our hearts are Scotch. Only a few days after I had seen M'Eckron, a message reached me in my cottage. It was a Scotchman who had come down a long way from the hills to market. He had heard there s 66 The Silverado Squatters. was a countryman in Calistoga, and came round to the hotel to see him. We said a few words to each other; we had not much to say — should never have seen each other had we stayed at home, separated alike in space and in society ; and then we shook hands, and he went his way again to his ranch among the hills, and that was all. Another Scotchman there was, a resi- dent, who for the mere love of the com- mon country, douce, serious, religious man, drove me all about the valley, and took as much interest in me as if I had been his son : more, perhaps ; for the son has faults too keenly felt, while the abstract countryman is perfect — like a whiff of peats. In the Valley. 67 And there was yet another. Upon him I came suddenly, as he was calmly entering my cottage, his mind quite evidently bent on plunder : a man of about fifty, filthy, ragged, roguish, with a chimney-pot hat and a tail coat, and a pursing of his mouth that might have been envied by an elder of the kirk. He had just such a face as I have seen a dozen times behind the plate. "Hullo, sir!" I cried. "Where are you going ? " He turned round without a quiver. " You 're a Scotchman, sir ? " he said gravely. " So am I ; I come from Aberdeen. This is my card," present- ing me with a piece of pasteboard which he had raked out of some gutter in the period of the rains. " I was just ex- 68 The Silverado Squatters. amining this palm," he continued, indi- cating the misbegotten plant before our door, " which is the largest specimen I have yet observed in Califoarnia." There were four or five larger within sight. But where was the use of argu- ment ? He produced a tape-line, made me help him to measure the tree at the level of the ground, and entered the fig- ures in a large and filthy pocket-book, all with the gravity of Solomon. He then thanked me profusely, remarking that such little services were due be- tween countrymen ; shook hands with me, " for auld lang syne," as he said ; and took himself solemnly away, radiat- ing dirt and humbug as he went. A more impudent rascal I have never seen ; and had he been an American, I In the Valley. 69 should have raged. But then he came from Aberdeen. A month or two after this encounter of mine, there came a Scot to Sacra- mento — perhaps from Aberdeen. Any- way, there never was any one more Scotch in this wide world. He could sing and dance, and drink, I presume ; and he played the pipes with vigor and success. All the Scotch in Sacramento became infatuated with him, and spent their spare time and money, driving him about in an open cab, between drinks, while he blew himself scarlet at the pipes. This is a very sad story. After he had borrowed money from every one, he and his pipes suddenly disappeared from Sacramento, and when I last heard, the police were looking for him. 70 The Silverado Squatters. I cannot say how this story amused me, when I felt myself so thoroughly ripe on both sides to be duped in the same way. It is at least a curious thing, to con- clude, that the races which wander widest, Jews and Scotch, should be the most clannish in the world. But per- haps these two are cause and effect: " For ye were strangers in the land of Egypt." WITH THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL. WITH THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL. TO INTRODUCE MR. KELMAR. One thing in this new country very particularly strikes a stranger, and that is the number of antiquities. Already there have been many cycles of pop- ulation succeeding each other, and passing away and leaving behind them relics. These, standing on into changed times, strike the imagination as forcibly as any pyramid or feudal tower. The towns, like the vineyards, are experi- 74 The Silverado Squatters. mentally founded : they grow great and prosper by passing occasions ; and when the lode comes to an end, and the miners move elsewhere, the town remains behind them, like Palmyra in the desert. I suppose there are, in no country in the world, so many deserted towns as here in California. The whole neighborhood of Mount Saint Helena, now so quiet and rural, was once alive with mining camps and villages. Here there would be two thousand souls under canvas ; there one thousand or fifteen hundred ensconced, as if for ever, in a town of comfortable houses. But the luck had failed, the mines petered out ; the army of miners had departed, and left this quarter of the world to the rattlesnakes With the Children of Israel. 75 and deer and grizzlies, and to the slower but steadier advance of husbandry. It was with an eye on one of these deserted places, Pine Flat, on the Geysers road, that we had come first to Calistoga. There is something sin- gularly enticing in the idea of going, rent-free, into a ready-made house. And to the British merchant, sitting at home at ease, it may appear that, with such a roof over your head and a spring of clear water hard by, the whole problem of the squatter's exist- ence would be solved. Food, however, has yet to be considered. I will go as far as most people on tinned meats ; some of the brighest moments of my life were passed over tinned mulliga- tawney in the cabin of a sixteen-ton 76 The Silverado Squatters. schooner, storm-stayed in Portree Bay; but after suitable experiments, I pro- nounce authoritatively that man can- not live by tins alone. Fresh meat must be had on an occasion. It is true that the great Foss, driving by along the Geysers road, wooden-faced, but glorified with legend, might have been induced to bring us meat, but the great Foss could hardly bring us milk. To take a cow would have in- volved taking a field of grass and a milkmaid ; after which it would have been hardly worth while to pause, and we might have added to our colony a flock of sheep and an experienced butcher. It is really very disheartening how we depend on other people in this life. Wiih the Children of Israel. jy " Mihi est propositum," as you may- see by the motto, " id quod regibus ; " and behold it cannot be carried out, unless I find a neighbor rolling in cattle. Now, my principal adviser in this matter was one whom I will call Kel- mar. That was not what he called himself, but as soon as I set eyes on him, I knew it was or ought to be his name ; I am sure it will be his name among the angels. Kelmar was the storekeeper, a Russian Jew, good- natured, in a very thriving way of business, and, on equal terms, one of the most serviceable of men. He also had something of the expression of a Scotch country elder, who, by some peculiarity, should chance to 78 The Silverado Squatters. be a Hebrew. He had a projecting under lip, with which he continually smiled, or rather smirked. Mrs. Kel- mar was a singularly kind woman ; and the oldest son had quite a dark and romantic bearing, and might be heard on summer evenings playing sentimental airs on the violin. I had no idea, at the time I made his acquaintance, what an important person Kelmar was. But the Jew storekeepers of California, profiting at once by the needs and habits of the people, have made themselves in too many cases the tyrants of the rural population. Credit is offered, is pressed on the new customer, and when once he is beyond his depth, the tune changes, and he is from thenceforth With the Children of Israel. 79 a white slave. I believe, even from the little I saw, that Kelmar, if he chose to put on the screw, could send half the farmers packing in a radius of seven or eight miles round Calistoga. These are continually pay- ing him, but are never suffered to get out of debt. He palms dull goods upon them, for they dare not refuse to buy; he goes and dines with them when he is on an outing, and no man is loudlier welcomed ; he is their fam- ily friend, the director of their business, and, to a degree elsewhere unknown in modern days, their king. For some reason, Kelmar always shook his head at the mention of Pine Flat, and for some days I thought he disapproved of the whole scheme and 8o The Silverado Squatters. was proportionately sad. One fine morn- ing, however, he met me, wreathed in smiles. He had found the very place for me — Silverado, another old mining town, right up the mountain. Rufe Han- son, the hunter, could take care of us — fine people the Hansons; we should be close to the Toll House, where the Lakeport stage called daily ; it was the best place for my health, besides. Rufe had been consumptive, and was now quite a strong man, ain't it? In short, the place and all its accom- paniments seemed made for us on purpose. He took me to his back door, whence, as from every point of Calis- toga. Mount Saint Helena could be seen towering in the air. There, in ■ With the Children of Israel. 8 1 the nick, just where the eastern foot- hills joined the mountain, and she herself began to rise above the zone of forest — there was Silverado. ' The name had already pleased me ; the high station pleased me still more. I began to inquire with some eagerness. It was but a little while ago that Sil- verado was a great place. The mine — a silver mine, of course — had prom- ised great things. There was quite a lively population, with several hotels and boarding-houses ; and Kelmar him- self had opened a branch store, and done extremely well — "Ain't it?" he said, •appealing to his wife. And she said, " Yes ; extremely well." Now there was no one living in the town but Rufe the hunter ; and once more I 6 82 The Silverado Squatters. heard Rufe's praises by the yard, and this time sung in chorus. I could not help perceiving at the time that there was something under- neath ; that no unmixed desire to have us comfortably settled had inspired the Kelmars with this flow of words. But I was impatient to be gone, to be about my kingly project ; and when we were offered seats in Kelmar's wagon, I accepted on the spot. The plan of their next Sunday's outing took them, by good fortune, over the border into Lake County. They would carry us so far, drop us at the Toll House, present us to the Hansons, and call for us again on Monday morning early. With the Children of Israel. 83 II. FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF SILVERADO. We were to leave by six precisely ; that was solemnly pledged on both sides ; and a messenger came to us the last thing at night, to remind us of the hour. But it was eight before we got clear of Calistoga ; Kelmar, Mrs. Kelmar, a friend of theirs whom we named Abra- mina, her little daughter, my wife, my- self, and, stowed away behind us, a clus- ter of ship's coffee-kettles. These last were highly ornamental in the sheen of their bright tin, but I could invent no reason for their presence. Our car- riageful reckoned up, as near as we could 84 The Silverado Squatters, get at it, some three hundred years to the six of us. Four of the six, besides, were Hebrews. But I never, in all my life, was conscious of so strong an at- mosphere of holiday. No word was spoken but of pleasure ; and even when we drove in silence, nods and smiles went round the party like refreshments. The sun shone out of a cloudless sky. Close at the zenith rode the belated moon, still clearly visible, and, along one margin, even bright. The wind blew a gale from the north ; the trees roared ; the corn and the deep grass in the val- ley fled in whitening surges ; the dust towered into the air along the road and dispersed like the smoke of battle. It was clear in our teeth from the first, and for all the windings of the road it With the Children of Israel. 85 managed to keep clear in our teeth until the end. For some two miles we rattled through the valley, skirting the eastern foot-hills ; then we struck off to the right, through haugh-land, and pres- ently, crossing a dry watercourse, en- tered the Toll road, or, to be more local, entered on " the grade." The road mounts the near shoulder of Mount Saint Helena, bound northward into Lake County. In one place it skirts along the edge of a narrow and deep canyon, filled with trees, and I was glad, indeed, not to be driven at this point by the dashing Foss. Kelmar, with his unvarying smile, jogging to the motion of the trap, drove for all the world like a good, plain, country clergy- 86 The Silverado Squatters. man at home ; and I profess I blessed him unawares for his timidity. Vineyards and deep meadows, islanded and framed with thicket, gave place more and more as we ascended to woods of oak and madrona, dotted with enor- mous pines. It was these pines, as they shot above the lower wood, that pro- duced that pencilling of single trees I had so often remarked from the valley. Thence, looking up and from however far, each fir stands separate against the sky no bigger than an eyelash ; and all together lend a quaint, fringed aspect to the hills. The o*ak is no baby; even the madrona, upon these spurs of Mount Saint Helena, comes to a fine bulk and ranks with forest trees ; but the pines look down upon the rest for Wt^k tJie CJiiLciren of Israel. 8y underwood. As Mount Saint Helena among her foot-hills, so these dark giants out-top their fellow-vegetables. Alas ! if they had left the redwoods, the pines, in turn, would have been dwarfed. But the redwoods, fallen from their high estate, are serving as family bedsteads, or yet more humbly as field fences, along all Napa Valley. A rough smack of resin was in the air, and a crystal mountain purity. It came pouring over these green slopes by the oceanful. The woods sang aloud, and gave largely of their health- ful breath. Gladness seemed to inhabit these upper zones, and we had left in- difference behind us in the valley. " I to the hills will lift mine eyes ! " ^here are days in a life when thus to climb 88 \ The Silverado Squatters. out of the lowlands, seems like scaling heaven. As we continued to ascend, the wind fell upon us with increasing strength. It was a wonder how the two stout horses managed to pull us up that steep incline and still face the athletic opposi- tion of the wind, or how their great eyes were able to endure the dust. Ten min- utes after we went by, a tree fell, block- ing the road ; and even before us leaves were thickly strewn, and boughs had fallen, large enough to make the passage difficult. But now we were hard by the summit. The road crosses the ridge, just in the nick that Kelmar showed me from below, and then, without pause, plunges down a deep, thickly wooded glen on the farther side. At the high- Witk the Children of Israel. 89 est point a trail strikes up the main hill to the leftward ; and that leads to Silver- ado. A hundred yards beyond, and in a kind of elbow of the glen, stands the Toll House Hotel. We came up the one side, were caught upon the summit by the whole weight of the wind as it poured over into Napa Valley, and a minute after had drawn up in shelter, but all buffeted and breathless, at the Toll House door. A water-tank, and stables, and a gray house of two stories, with gable ends and a veranda, are jammed hard against the hillside, just where a stream has cut for itself a narrow canyon, filled with pines. The pines go right up overhead ; a little more and the stream might have played, like a fire-hose, on f I 90 The Silverado Squatters. the Toll House roof. In front the ground drops as sharply as it rises behind. There is just room for the road and a sort of promontory of cro- quet ground, and then you can lean over the edge and look deep below you through the wood. I said cro- quet ground, not green; for the surface was of brown, beaten earth. The toll- bar itself was the only other note of originality : a long beam, turning on a post, and kept slightly horizontal by a counterweight of stones. Regularly about sundown this rude barrier was swung, like a derrick, across the road and made fast, I think, to a tree upon the farther side. On our arrival there followed a gay scene in the bar. I was presented to IViik the Children of Israel. 91 Mr. Corwin, the landlord ; to Mr. Jennings, the engineer, who lives there for his health ; to Mr. Hoddy, a most pleasant little gentleman, once a mem- ber of the Ohio Legislature, again the editor of a local paper, and now, with undiminished dignity, keeping the Toll House bar. I had a number of drinks and cigars bestowed on me, and enjoyed a famous opportunity of seeing Kelmar in his glory, friendly, radiant, smiling, steadily edging one of the ship's ket- tles on the reluctant Corwin. Corwin, plainly aghast, resisted gallantly, and for that bout victory crowned his arms. At last we set forth for Silverado on foot. Kelmar and his jolly Jew girls were full of the sentiment of 92 The Silverado Squatters. Sunday outings, breathed geniality and vagueness, and suffered a little vile boy from the hotel to lead them here and there about the woods. For three people all so old, so bulky in body, and belonging to a race so venerable, they could not but surprise us by their extreme and almost imbecile youthful- ness of spirit. They were only going to stay ten minutes at the Toll House ; had they not twenty long miles of road before them on the other side } Stay to dinner? Not they! Put up the horses ? Never. Let us attach them to the veranda by a wisp of straw rope, such as would not have held a person's hat on that blustering day. And with all these protestations of hurry, they proved irresponsible like With the Children of Israel. 93 children. Kelmar himself, shrewd old Russian Jew, with a smirk, that seemed just to have concluded a bargain to its satisfaction, intrusted himself and us devoutly to that boy. Yet the boy was patently fallacious ; and for that matter a most unsympathetic urchin, raised apparently on gingerbread. He was bent on his own pleasure, nothing else ; and Kelmar followed him to his ruin, with the same shrewd smirk. If the boy said there was " a hole there in the hill " — a hole, pure and simple, neither more nor less — Kelmar and his Jew girls would follow him a hun- dred yards to look complacently down that hole. For two hours we looked for houses ; and for two hours they followed us, smelling trees, picking 94 The Silverado Squatters. flowers, foisting false botany on the unwary. Had we taken five, with that vile lad to head them off on idle divagations, for five they would have smiled and stumbled through the woods. However, we came forth at length, and as by accident, upon a lawn, sparse planted like an orchard, but with forest instead of fruit trees. That was the site of Silverado mining town. A piece of ground was levelled up, where Kelmar's store had been ; and facing that we saw Rufe Hanson's house, still bearing on its front the legend Silver- ado Hotel. Not another sign of habi- tation. Silverado town had all been carted from the scene; one of the houses was now tlie scliool-house far With the Children of Israel. 95 down the road ; one was gone here, one there, but all were gone away. It was now a sylvan solitude, and the silence was unbroken but by the great, vague voice of the wind. Some days before our visit, a grizzly bear had been sporting round the Hansons' chicken-house. Mrs. Hanson was at home alone, we found. Rufe had been out late after a "bar," had risen late, and was now gone, it did not clearly appear whither. Perhaps he had had wind of Kel- mar's coming, and was now ensconced among the underwood, or watching us from the shoulder of the mountain. We, hearing there were no houses to be had, were for immediately giving up all hopes of Silverado. But this-, g6 The Silverado Squatters. somehow, was not to Kelmar's fancy. He first proposed that we should " camp someveres around, ain't it ? " waving his hand cheerily as though to weave a spell ; and when that was firmly re- jected, he decided that we must take up house with the Hansons. Mrs. Hanson had been, from the first, flus- tered, subdued, and a little pale ; but from this proposition she recoiled with haggard indignation. So did we, who would have preferred, in a manner of speaking, death. But Kelmar was not to be put by. He edged Mrs. Hanson into a corner, where for a long time he threatened her with his forefinger, like a character in Dickens; and the poor woman, driven to her intrench- ments, at last remembered with a Wil/i I he Children of Israel. 97 shriek that there were still some houses at the tunnel. Thither we went; the Jews, who should already have been miles into Lake County, still cheerily accompany- in2[ us. For about a furlons^ we fol- lowed a good road along the hillside through the forest, until suddenly that road widened out and came abruptly to an end. A canyon, woody below, red, rocky, and naked overhead, was here walled across by a dump of rolling stones, dangerously steep, and from twenty to thirty feet in height. A rusty iron chute on wooden legs came flying, like a monstrous gargoyle, across the parapet. It was down this that they poured the precious ore ; and below here the carts stood to wait 98 The Silverado Squatters. their lading, and carry it mill-ward down the mountain. The whole canyon was so entirely blocked, as if by some rude guerilla fortification, that we could only mount by lengths of wooden ladder, fixed in the hillside. These led us round the further corner of the dump ; and when they were at an end, we still perse- vered over loose rubble and wading deep in poison-oak, till we struck a triangular platform, filling up the whole glen, and shut in on either hand by bold projections of the mountain. Only in front the place was open like the proscenium of a theatre, and we looked forth into a threat realm of air, and down upon tree-tops and hill-tops and far and near on wild and varied With the Children of Israel. 99 country. The place still stood as on the day it was deserted : a line of iron rails with a bifurcation ; a truck in working order; a world of lumber, old wood, old iron ; a blacksmith's forge on one side, half buried in the leaves of dwarf madronas ; and on the other, an old brown wooden house. Fanny and I dashed at the house. It consisted of three rooms, and was so plastered against the hill, that one room was right atop of another, that the upper floor was more than twice as large as the lower, and that all three apartments must be entered from a different side and level. Not a window-sash remained. The door of the lower room was smashed, and one panel hung in splinters. We TOO The Silverado Squatters. entered that, and found a fair amount of rubbish : sand and gravel that had been sifted in there by the mountain winds ; straw, sticks, and stones ; a table, a barrel ; a plate-rack on the wall ; two home-made bootjacks, signs of miners and their boots ; and a pair of papers pinned on the boarding, headed respectively "Funnel No. i," and " Funnel No. 2," but with the tails torn away. The window, sashless of course, was choked with the green and sweetly smelling foliage of a bay ; and through a chink in the floor, a spray of poison-oak had shot up and was handsomely prospering in the interior. It was my first care to cut away that poison-oak, Fanny standing by at a respectful distance. With the Children of Israel. loi That was our first improvement by which we took possession. The room immediately above could only be entered by a plank propped against the threshold, along: which the intruder must foot it gingerly, clutching for support to sprays of poison-oak, the proper product of the country. Herein was, on either hand, a triple tier of beds, where miners had once lain ; and the other gable was pierced by a sashless window and a doorless doorway opening on the air of heaven, five feet above the ground. As for the third room, which entered squarely from the ground-level, but higher up the hill and further up the canyon, it contained only rubbish and the uprights for another triple tier of beds. I02 The Silverado Squatters, The whole building was overhung by a bold, lion-like, red rock. Poison-oak, sweet bay trees, calcanthus, brush, and chaparral, grew freely but sparsely all about it. In front, in the strong sun- shine, the platform lay overstrewn with busy litter, as though the labors of the mine might begin again to-morrow in the morning. Following back into the canyon, among the mass of rotting plant and through the flowering bushes, we came to a great crazy staging, with a wry windlass on the top; and clambering up, we could look into an open shaft, lead- ing edgeways down into the bowels of the mountain, trickling with water, and Ht by some stray sun-gleams, whence I know not. Wiik the Children of Israel. 103 In that quiet place the still, far-away tinkle of the water-drops was loudly audible. Close by, another shaft led edgeways up into the superincumbent shoulder of the hill. It lay partly open ; and sixty or a hundred feet above our head, we could see the strata propped apart by solid wooden wedges, and a pine, half undermined, precariously nod- ding on the verge. Here also a rugged, horizontal tunnel ran straight into the unsunned bowels of the rock. This secure angle in the mountain's flank v/as, even on this wild day, as still as my lady's chamber. But in the tunnel a cold, wet draught tempestuously blew. Nor have I ever known that place other- wise than cold and windy. Such was our first prospect of Juan I04 The Silverado Squatters. Silverado. I own I had looked for some- thing different : a clique of neighborly houses on a village green, we shall say, all empty to be sure, but swept and var- nished ; a trout stream brawling by ; great elms or chestnuts, humming with bees and nested in by song birds ; and the mountains standing round about, as at Jerusalem. Here, mountain and house and the old tools of industry were all alike rusty and downfalling. The hill was here wedged up, and there poured forth its bowels in a spout of broken mineral ; man with his picks and powder, and Nature with her own great blasting tools of sun and rain, laboring together at the ruin of that proud moun- tain. The view up the canyon was a glimpse of devastation ; dry red minerals Wiih the Children of Israel 105 sliding together, here and there a crag, here and there dwarf thicket clinging in the general glissade, and over all a bro- ken outline trenching on the blue of heaven. Downwards indeed, from our rock eyrie, we beheld the greener side of nature ; and the bearing of the pines and the sweet smell of bays and nutmegs commended themselves gratefully to our senses. One way and another, now the die was cast. Silverado be it ! After we had got back to the Toll House, the Jews were not long of strik- ing forward. But I observed that one of the Hanson lads came down, before their departure, and returned with a ship's kettle. Happy Hansons! Nor was it until after Kelmar was gone, if I remember rightly, that Rufe put in an io6 The Silverado Squatters. appearance to arrange the details of our installation. The latter part of the day, Fanny and I sat in the veranda of the Toll House, utterly stunned by the uproar of the wind among the trees on the other side of the valley. Sometimes, we would have it it was like a sea, but it was not various enough for that ; and again, we thought it like the roar of a cataract, but it was too changeful for the cataract ; and then we would decide, speaking in sleepy voices, that it could be compared with nothing but itself. My mind was entirely preoccupied by the noise. I hearkened to it by the hour, gapingly hearkened, and let my cigarette go out. Sometimes the wind would make a sally nearer hand, and send a shrill, whistling Wiik the Children of Israel. 107 crash among the foliage on our side of the glen ; and sometimes a back-draught would strike into the elbow where we sat, and cast the gravel and torn leaves into our faces. But for the most part, this great, streaming gale passed un- weariedly by us into Napa Valley, not two hundred yards away, visible by the tossing boughs, stunningly audible, and yet not moving a hair upon our heads. So it blew all night long while I was writing up my journal, and after we were in bed, under a cloudless, starset heaven ; and so it was blowing still next morning when we rose. It was a laughable thought to us, what had become of our cheerful, wan- dering Hebrews. We could not sup- pose they had reached a destination. io8 The Silverado Squatters. The meanest boy could lead them miles out of their way to see a gopher-hole. Boys, we felt to be their special danger ; none others were of that exact pitch of cheerful irrelevancy to exercise a kin- dred sway upon their minds : but before the attractions of a boy their most set- tled resolutions would be as wax. We thought we could follow in fancy these three aged Hebrew truants wandering in and out on hill-top and in thicket, a demon boy trotting far ahead, their will- o'-the-wisp conductor ; and at last about midnight, the wind still roaring in the darkness, we had a vision of all three on their knees upon a mountain-top around a glow-worm. With the Children of Israel. 109 III. THE RETURN. Next morning we were up by half-past five, according to agreement, and it was ten by the clock before our Jew boys returned to pick us up : Kelmar, Mrs. Kelmar, and Abramina, all smil- inor from ear to ear, and full of tales of the hospitality they had found on the other side. It had not gone un- rewarded ; for I observed with inter- est that the ship's kettles, all but one, had been " placed." Three Lake County families, at least, endowed for life with a ship's kettle. Come, this was no misspent Sunday. The absence 1 1 o The Silverado Squatters. of the kettles told its own story : our Jews said nothing about them ; but, on the other hand, they said many kind and comely things about the people they had met. The two women, in particular, had been charmed out of themselves by the sight of a young girl surrounded by her admirers ; all evening, it appeared, they had been triumphing together in the girl's in- nocent successes, and to this natural and unselfish joy they gave expression in language that was beautiful by its simplicity and truth. Take them for all in all, few people have done my heart more good ; they iseemed so thoroughly entitled to hap- \ biness, and to enjoy it in so large a ymeasure and so free from after-thought; With the Children of Israel. 1 1 1 almost they persuaded me to be a Jew. There was, indeed, a chink of money in their talk. They particu- larly commended people who were well to do. "//