Days of '49/Chapter 11

The miners, wherever they paused to dig, gave the place a name; and though often credited to Bret Harte's imagination, Red Dog and Poker Flat were real camps; as were Jackass Gulch, Chuckle-Head Diggings, Bogus Thunder, Git-You-Up-and-Git, Puppytown, and Shirttail Cañon.

Ragtown was appropriately so called, every shelter in it being made from abandoned wagon covers or scraps of tents. Hangtown, Murderer's Bar, Dead Man's Bar were names that held the authentic echo of tragedy.

One very rich camp got its name of Nigger Hill characteristically: A greenhorn negro appeared one day in a river camp and began digging. "Get to hell out of here," a miner told him. "You're on my claim." He tried another spot and was again warned off. "But, boss, where can I dig?" "See the top o' that hill? Go up there, you black rascal, and dig all you want." The negro went; and, to the amazement of the river miners who soon hurried up after him, there was gold on that remote hilltop.

Each camp made its own laws, regulating the size of the claims and the amount of work needful to hold possession. The discoverer was always given first choice—being the discoverer he usually had already taken it—and sometimes two or more claims. A pick or shovel left on a claim was an inviolable symbol of authority. Men were whipped for moving such tools, hanged for stealing them.

When a miner sold a claim the verbal conveyance was sufficient, for men were honest and their word was good.

Theft was punished more readily and as severely as murder, for property could not defend itself; and in '51 the law of the State permitted the death penalty for grand larceny.

A sympathetic historian of the miners has written:

A stormy life ebbed through the typical camps of '49. Each man carried a buckskin bag of gold dust; it passed as currency at a dollar a pinch. Each went armed and felt able to protect himself. They mined, traded, gambled, fought, discussed camp affairs; they paid fifty cents a drink for their whisky, and fifty dollars a barrel for their flour, and, at times, thirty dollars apiece for butcher knives with which to pick gold from rock crevices. Saloons and gambling houses lined the streets.

The mining camps were more amazing than even San Francisco; for here they were, pitched in the utter wilderness, reached by roads little better than foot trails, filled with men who appeared bursting with lusty life.

They were not unlike Titans, or at least the sons of Titans; all were young, for only youth could fight its way over the plains, deserts, mountains, or endure the hardships of a miner's life; all were shaggy and bearded, for the razor was almost unknown among them; they were full of robust mischief, reckless, generous, indomitable and dangerously short-tempered if anything wasn't "just right."

It seemed that there was no moderation, no shading, in their qualities or fortune; men who got sick, got well quickly, died or slunk off to cities; men were lucky or wretched—and store-keepers gave such bountiful credit to strangers that no man went hungry; they seemed very drunk or grimly sober, for their work was serious and hard, and when they relaxed into good-humored mischief they played with the recklessness of drunken men whether or not they had been drinking.

The real character came to view in that rough-and-tumble life; all worked hard; all had equal rights; weaklings died and rascals were hanged, so for a short time the mining camps were the most honest, robust and hardworking communities any where in the world. But the saloonkeepers, the loafers, called bummers, the blackleg gamblers that crept in, were, many of them, from the very first of the vulturous type that, as much as they dared, aroused the worst passions of the miners at their weakest moments and gratified them with low women and carousal.

Nothing could check the blows of the miners to get at gold; they burrowed into hills like gophers—coyoting, they called it then, gophering it is called now; they dug pits sixty feet deep to get at the bed rock; and flood came before they scraped the rock; they lifted rivers, and with only pick and shovel, no explosives, tore down the faces of mountains.

Some men worked for days without finding even color, though other men almost at their elbows were growing rich; some washed out $1,500 in one panful of dirt; others pulled bunches of grass from gulches and hillsides, shaking the gold from the roots into buckets, and one miner gathered $16,000 thus in five weeks, another, with pick and pan, took out $18,000 in one day.

A persistently lucky man of that day was one Clarke, who discovered Rich Diggings, from which millions were taken. He knew nothing of mining, but would get drunk, and while drunk he wandered off to the places where a sober man would least expect to find gold. Truck gardeners discovered gold at the roots of their cabbages; a drunken sailor fell at night into a ravine and awakened the next morning with his hand on a nugget; a man digging a grave uncovered a nugget; and near Sonora the funeral was interrupted by a man who, kneeling in the midst of prayer, idly examined the fresh earth at the grave's edge, then cried, "Gold!" The body was moved aside and the mourners staked out claims.

Nothing was sacred. All rights were subject to the claims of the miner. Entire towns were moved aside and every inch of soil on which the towns had stood, from grass roots to bed rock, was sluiced away. The very streets of Placerville were mined. A wag once "salted" the streets of Yreka and part of the town was overturned and staked off before the joke was discovered.

The early mining camps had hardly more stability than a shadow on the ground. At the faintest echo of "Gold!" men came as if the wind had carried the word, often leaving their own rich diggings for those that echo said were richer. At times as many as five thousand miners stampeded almost overnight from one section to another.

Large numbers of miners sought the phantom of the mother lode, refusing to stay long in any of the diggings, but pushed off where Indians were most dangerous and nature most bleak, searching for what they believed would be the source of all this scattered gold, and believing that if they found it they would find gold in chunks. Years later this mother lode was found, and is still being worked, in some places over a mile deep; but the gold is in the seams of quartz and only costly machinery can put it into a pocket.

The California miner was cursed, not with evilness but with restlessness; he abandoned ounce and two ounce diggings to look for pound diggings. The stories of rich discoveries just over the ridge or around the bend sent him hurrying off pell-mell, just as the original stories of gold had brought him from the States.

Almost the same day that men began carrying gold over the trails, bandits appeared; it was one thing to catch native horsemen who knew the country, and another to seize suspected fellow miners; and the camps themselves were for a long time kept free of thieves, largely because men were honest, but partly because punishment was inflicted with the same liberal off-hand manner that characterized everything Californian. Sometimes the most trivial incidents would determine whether a man was to be whipped or hanged; and, unpleasant as it is to say so, a criminal affair was often made a sort of pastime, which might be prolonged or shortened according to the mood of the crowd.

But—and this is important—there is reason to believe that most of what has been recorded as humor in their meetings and trials was unconscious, and appeared as humor only to people who now know, and then knew, more of courts and law formality than those grim earnest men, who, as free Americans, talked as they pleased in any meeting. In trying to get at facts and justice they were sometimes absurd in their deductions, and their procedure was often very like what would now be considered burlesque; but it was not so intended or regarded by them.

At times, when exasperated or drunken, they were brutal, sudden, devoid of the least sense of justice; though even at these times there were usually some who protested. In such moments of wrathful contempt for any sort of justice, they might kill the bystander who denounced the punishment as an outrage; but mostly there was an honest effort at justice, though the mountain life, so very like a throwback to robust barbarism, made them contemptuous of other people's lives and of their own. A married man was hanged for horse-stealing; further information coming to light, a miner was appointed to make such apologies as he could to the widow.

"Madam," he said, "we took John out about an hour ago and hung him for stealing a horse, and we just found out that we got the wrong man—so the joke's on us!"

"I do not vouch for the truth of this story," says the pioneer who relates it, "but I think it does give a fair illustration of the value that early California pioneers put upon the life of a man suspected of theft."

These miners were mostly Americans; Americans then were mostly Anglo-Saxons; and, though in every camp there was almost certainly a sprinkling of educated men, with what appears to have been an unconscious racial impulse they all, for a time, reverted to the manner of the Saxon folk-meet. Anybody might call a meeting; and anybody who swung a pick, as in ancient times any who bore a spear, whether sixteen or sixty, might lift his voice and cast his vote. The minority made no protest.

If a man was accused of crime, sometimes a jury was selected, a judge appointed; but often witnesses told their stories to the crowd, and all the miners voted "aye" or "nay " as to whether he lived or died. But if punishment was attempted without some semblance of deliberation there were nearly always men who opposed, defied, and even fought the mob.

Later, Vigilante Committees appeared in the camps to oppose the civil officers, for with the coming of formal law, its delays, tricks and corruptions, crime increased, and the miners, not wholly understanding the change in conditions, put the entire blame on the law itself. Thieves were branded upon hip or cheek, as well as whipped or hanged.

The average cost of food for a thrifty miner was about four dollars per day; but there were few thrifty miners. Weatherbeaten sailors, men from Pike County, wiry Irishmen, all sorts of miners, drank champagne and warmed in their smoky camp kettles turtle soup and lobster salad.

Knives and forks, if a miner hankered for such things, were twenty-five dollars a pair.

As a usual thing, sickness was expensive. The early doctors were mostly extortionate quacks. One such charged one hundred dollars a dose for quinine; but but another young physician, fit to be among Californians, finished building a sick man's cabin for him, cooked his dinner and charged only only half an ounce, or $8.

All reports agree that a large number of the miners were appallingly. blasphemous; they used reckless oaths as casually and no more profanely than many good people say "Gosh" and "Golly." And if they were at times brutal, they were at other times, though perhaps awkwardly, as tender as women and often as sentimental as children.

The miners usually rested on Sundays, not so much out of usually respect for the day as because because they were tired. For recreation and relaxation they washed clothes, baked beans and bread enough to last the week, gambled, drank, sang, held a miners' meeting and often hanged somebody.

At times they would hold a dance, and each who had a patch on the seat of his trousers was a "lady"; and, as such, enjoyed the advantage of the fiddler's call: "Promenade to the bar an' treat yore pardners!"

Sometimes the entire camp would go on a spree that lasted for days. Sometimes men would tramp miles just to look at a woman and hear her voice. At other times procurers who brought in lewd women to a camp would have to depart simply because the miners would not go near them. For the most part they were extravagantly gallant toward all women, yet one of the biggest camps by popular vote hanged a pretty Mexican girl who had killed a man that broke into her room. The miners that clamored for her death drove off the men that protested; they ran one doctor out of camp and struck down other men who argued against them. And the little Mexican girl smiled as she fitted the noose to her own neck; she made a short speech saying she had no regret and would readily do the same thing over again, then with a cheerful "Adios, señores!" died.

The miners regarded their "partnerships" as something binding; it was a bond of brotherhood; when one partner owned something it belonged to the other; they nursed each other in sickness, stood together when lucky or unlucky. "Pard" was as nearly a sacred word as any among them, and the man who wronged his partner was often hanged, not so much for the deed as because that sort of man wasn't fit to live.

They were profoundly moved by the sight of children in that womanless region; and their respect for women at times took form in willfully ludicrous and extravagant antics.

At a certain spot in the mountains a woman's hat was found; no one knew how it got there, but the miners decided to celebrate. Three hundred miners, each in a red flannel shirt and with a bottle of brandy, assembled. In the exact spot where the hat was found a stake was driven, five feet high; on this the hat was placed. A blanket was draped around the stake. A miner's cradle was placed at the foot of the stake, and in the cradle was put a smoked ham, wrapped in a blanket.

The miners danced about their emblem of womanhood, frequently pausing to rock the cradle and pour brandy down the lady's neck and their own throats.

For two days the celebration lasted; then the ground was divided into town lots and became—and still is—Auburn, a beautiful and prosperous camp.

Such, in rough outline, were the rough, robust miners of '49. They were at times grotesque, and at times brutal; they worked hard; they played hard; they told the truth, and they were honest men. They ruled themselves with lash and noose, and had no law but their own will.