The Life of Bret Harte Part 12

These California pets had their little day, perished, and are forgotten,--all save one. Who can forget the bear cub that Bret Harte immortalized under the name of Baby Sylvester! "He was as free from angles as one of Leda's offspring. Your caressing hand sank away in his fur with dreamy languor. To look at him long was an intoxication of the senses; to pat him was a wild delirium; to embrace him an utter demoralization of the intellectual faculties.... He takes the only milk that comes to the settlement--brought up by Adams' Express at seven o'clock every morning."

CHAPTER IX

FRIENDs.h.i.+P AMONG THE PIONEERS

In Bret Harte's stories woman is subordinated to man, and love is subordinated to friends.h.i.+p. This is a strange reversal of modern notions, but it was the reflection of his California experience,--reinforced, possibly, by some predilection of his own. There is a significant remark in a letter written by him from a town in Kansas where he once delivered a lecture: "Of course, as in all such places, the women contrast poorly with the men--even in feminine qualities. Somehow, a man here may wear fustian and glaring colors, and paper collars, and yet keep his gentleness and delicacy, but a woman in glaring 'Dolly-Vardens,' and artificial flowers, changes natures with him at once."

Friends.h.i.+p between one man and another would seem to be the most unselfish feeling of which a human being is capable. The only sentiment that can be compared with it in this respect is that of patriotism, and even in patriotism there is an instinct of self-preservation, or at least of race-preservation. In modern times the place which the friend held in cla.s.sic times is taken by the wife; but in California, owing to the absence of women and the exigencies of mining, friends.h.i.+p for a brief and brilliant period, never probably to recur, became once more an heroic pa.s.sion.

That there was no exaggeration in Bret Harte's pictures of Pioneer friends.h.i.+p might be shown by many extracts from contemporary observers, but one such will suffice:--"Two men who lived together, slept in the same cabin, ate together, took turns cooking and was.h.i.+ng, tended on each other in sickness, and toiled day in and day out side by side, and made an equal division of their losses and gains, were regarded and generally regarded themselves as having entered into a very intimate tie, a sort of band of brotherhood, almost as sacred as that of marriage. The word 'partner,' or 'pard' as it was usually contracted, became the most intimate and confidential term that could be used."[68]

Even in the cities friends.h.i.+p between men a.s.sumed a character which it had nowhere except in California. Partners in business were partners in all social and often in all domestic matters. They took their meals and their pleasures together, and showed that interest in each other's welfare which, at home, they would have expended upon wives and children. The withdrawal of one member from a firm seemed like the breaking up of a family. The citizens of San Francisco and Sacramento were all newcomers, they were mostly strangers to one another; and every partners.h.i.+p, though established primarily for business purposes, became a union of persons bound together by a sense of almost feudal loyalty, confident of one another's sympathy and support under all circ.u.mstances, and forming a coherent group in a chaotic community.

In the mines the partners.h.i.+p relation was even more idyllic. Gold was sought at first by the primitive method of pan-mining. The miners travelled singly sometimes, but much more often in pairs, with knapsacks, guns and frying-pans; and they used a wooden bowl, or a metal pan, and sometimes an Indian wicker basket for was.h.i.+ng the gravel or sand which was supposed to contain gold. Even a family bread-pan might be made to serve this purpose, and that was the article which the youthful miner, Jack Fleming, borrowed from beautiful Tinka Gallinger, and so became possessed in the end, not indeed of gold, but of something infinitely more valuable,--Tinka herself, the Treasure of the Redwoods.

The operation of was.h.i.+ng was thus described by a Pioneer: "The bowl is held in both hands, whirled violently back and forth through a half circle, and pitched this way and that sufficiently to throw off the earth and water, while the gold mixed with black sand settles to the bottom. The process is extremely tiresome, and involves all the muscles of the frame.

In its effect it is more like swinging a scythe than any other labor I ever attempted."

This work was much less laborious when the miner had access to a current of water, and in later times it was a.s.sisted by the use of a magnet to draw away the iron of which the black sand was largely composed.

The bowl or pan stage was the first stage, and its tendency was to arrange the miners in couples like that of Tennessee and his Partner. Next came the use of the rocker or cradle,--the "golden canoe," as the Indians called it. The rocker was an oblong box, open at the lower end, the upper end being protected by a screen or grating. The screen intercepted all pebbles and gravel, and the finer material, earth and sand, was swept through the screen by the action of water thrown or directed against it.

The same water carried the earth through the box, and out at the lower end; but the heavy sand, containing the gold, sank and was intercepted by cleats nailed across the inside of the box. A rough cradle, formed from a hollow log, would sell at one time for two hundred dollars.

This process required the services of four or five men, and in pursuing it the miner ceased to be a vagrant. He acquired a habitation, more or less permanent, and entered into various relations.h.i.+ps with his fellows, which finally included the lynching of a small portion of them. This is the life described by Bret Harte in _The Luck of Roaring Camp_, _Left Out on Lone Star Mountain_, and many other stories.

The rocker period lasted only about a year, and was succeeded by that of the sluice, a sort of magnified rocker, fifty or even a hundred feet long.

The necessary stream of water was diverted from some river, or was supplied by an artificial reservoir. It was the bursting of such a reservoir, as the Reader may remember, that precipitated the romance in the life of the Youngest Miss Piper.

But the evolution of the industry was not yet complete. The next step was to explore the bed of a river by laboriously turning the stream aside.

This was accomplished by constructing a dam across the river, and directing the water into a ca.n.a.l or flume prepared for it, thus leaving the bed of the river bare, perhaps for miles. These operations required the labor of many hands, and were extremely arduous and difficult. The dam could be built, of course, only in the dry season, and the first autumnal rains would be sure to send the stream back to its old channel. The coming of the rainy season in California is extremely uncertain, and river-bed mining was correspondingly precarious. Sometimes, great perseverance in these attempts was rewarded by great success. In November, 1849, the Swett's Bar Company, composed of seventy miners, succeeded in damming and diverting the Sonora River after fifteen days of extreme exertion. Five hours later the dam was swept away by a flood. The following summer the same company, reduced to sixty members, constructed a second and larger dam, which required sixty-nine days' labor. This also was swept away on the very day of its completion. But the miners did not give up. The next morning they began anew, the directors leading the way into the now ice-cold water, and the rest of the company following, some fairly shrieking with the contact. The dam was rebuilt as quickly as possible,--and, again, the river brushed it aside. The third year, a remnant of the company, some twenty-seven stubborn souls, for the fourth time completed a dam. This time it stood fast, and before the rains set in the persevering miners had obtained gold enough to make them all rich.

Men who had struggled, side by side, through such difficulties and disappointments were bound by no common tie,--and the tie was a still closer one when, as in the first idyllic days, the partners.h.i.+p consisted of two members only.

Bret Harte has devoted to friends.h.i.+p four of his best stories, namely, _Tennessee's Partner_, _Captain Jim's Friend_, _In the Tules_, _Uncle Jim and Uncle Billy_. The subject is touched upon also in the story called _Under the Eaves_.

Unquestionably the best of these stories is the first one, and if we should also set this down as the best of all Bret Harte's stories, we could not go far wrong. The author himself is said to have preferred it.

It is a complete tale and a dramatic one, and yet it has the simplicity of an incident. There is not, one makes bold to say, a superfluous word in it, and perhaps only one word which an exacting reader could wish to change. The background of scenery that the story requires is touched in with that deep but restrained feeling for nature, with that realization of its awful beauty, when contrasted with the life of man, which is a peculiar trait of modern literature. The Reader will remember that rough, mean, kerosene-lighted, upper room in which the trial took place. "And above all this, etched on the dark firmament, rose the Sierra, remote and pa.s.sionless, crowned with remoter, pa.s.sionless stars."

The pathos of _Tennessee's Partner_ consists chiefly in the fact that Tennessee, so far as we can judge him, was unworthy of his partner's devotion. He was courageous and good-humored, to be sure, but he was a robber, something of a drunkard, and inconsiderate enough to have run off with his partner's wife. Had Tennessee been a model of all the virtues, his partner's affection for him would have been a bestowal only of what was due. It would not have been, as it was in fact, the spontaneous outpouring of a generous and affectionate character. Whether we consider that the partner saw in Tennessee something which was really there, some divine spark or quality, known only to the G.o.d who created and to the friend who loved him, or that in Tennessee he beheld an ideal of his own creation, something different from the real man,--in either case his affection is equally disinterested and n.o.ble.

Those who do not give the first place to _Tennessee's Partner_ would probably a.s.sign it either to _The Luck of Roaring Camp_ or _The Outcasts of Poker Flat_; but in both of those stories the element of accident is utilized, though not improbably. It was more or less an accident that the Luck was swept away by a flood; it was an accident that the Outcasts were banished on the eve of a storm. But in _Tennessee's Partner_, there is no accident. Given the characters, all the rest followed inevitably.

An acute, if somewhat degenerate critic, Mr. James Douglas, writing in the "Bookman,"[69] presents the case against the _Luck_ and the _Outcasts_ in its most extreme form: "There is no doubt that we have outgrown the art which relies on picturesque lay figures grouped against a romantic background.... In Bret Harte's best stories the presence of the scene painter, the stage carpenter and the stage manager jars on our consciousness.... Bret Harte takes Cherokee Sal, an Indian prost.i.tute, puts her in a degraded mining settlement, and sanctifies her by motherhood. That is good art. He lets her die, while her child survives.

That is not so good. It is the pathos of accident. He sends the miners in to see the child. That is good art. He makes the presence of the child work a revolution in the camp. Strong men wash their faces and wear clean s.h.i.+rts in order to be worthy of the child. That is not good art."

But here let us interrupt Mr. Douglas for a moment. It should be remembered that the clean faces and clean s.h.i.+rts were not spontaneous improvements. "Stumpy imposed a kind of quarantine upon those who aspired to the honor and privilege of holding the Luck." Moreover, the miners of Roaring Camp, like the miners generally in California, were no strangers to clean s.h.i.+rts or clean faces. With few exceptions, they had been brought up to observe the decencies of life, and if, in the wild freedom of the mining camp, some of those decencies had been cast off, it was not difficult to reclaim them.

However, let us hear Mr. Douglas out: "Finally he drowns the child and his readers in a deluge of melodramatic sentiment. That is bad art.... The _Outcasts_ might be a.n.a.lyzed in the same way. The whole tableau is arranged with a barefaced resolution to draw your tears. You feel that there is nothing inevitable in the isolation of the Outcasts, in the snow-storm, in the suicide of the card-sharper, or in the in-death-they-were-not-divided pathos of vice and virtue. And even Miggles, I fear, will hardly bear a close examination. The a.s.sault and battery on our emotions is too direct, too deliberate. We like to be outflanked nowadays, and the old-fas.h.i.+oned frontal attack melts away before our indulgent smiles with their high velocity and flat trajectory.

M'liss, alas! no longer moves us. We prefer 'What Maisie Knew' to what M'liss didn't know."

But at this point the Reader may become a little impatient. What attention should be paid to a critic who prefers the effeminate subtleties of Henry James to the wholesome pathos of Bret Harte! And the man himself seems to be conscious of his degeneracy, for he concludes by saying, with admirable frankness, "Perhaps, after all, the fault is ours, not Bret Harte's, and we ought to apologize for the sophisticated insidiousness of our nerves."

One or two obvious remarks are suggested by Mr. Douglas's canon of romance against realism. If it were adopted without qualification, sad havoc would be made with established reputations. All the great tragedians from aeschylus to Shakspere, and almost all the great story-tellers from Haroun al Raschid to Daniel Defoe would suffer. Antigone, Juliet and Robinson Crusoe were all the victims of accident. Moreover, without the element of accident, or romance as Mr. Douglas calls it, life could not truly be represented. What might conceivably happen, and what occasionally does happen, are as much a part of life as is the thing which always happens.

Many a "Kentuck" was swept away by floods in California. To perish in a snow-storm was by no means an unheard-of event. It was on the twenty-third of November, 1850, that the Outcasts were exiled, and on that very day, as the newspapers recorded soon afterward, a young man was frozen to death in the snow while endeavoring to walk from Poor Man's Creek to Gra.s.s Valley.

One week later a miner from Virginia was frozen to death a few miles north of Downieville; and Poker Flat and Downieville are in the same county.[70]

To know a man, we must know how he acts in the face of death as well as how he appears in his shop or parlor; and therefore, unusual and tragic events, as well as commonplace events, have their place in good art.

But the substratum of truth in Mr. Douglas's view seems to be this, that a tragedy which results from the character of the hero or heroine is, other things being equal, a higher form of art than the tragedy which results wholly, or in part, from accident. If human pa.s.sion can work out the destiny desired by the author, without the intervention of fire, flood or disease, without the help of any catastrophe quaintly known in the common law as "the act of G.o.d," why so much the better. From this point of view, we may fairly place _Tennessee's Partner_ even above _The Luck of Roaring Camp_ and _The Outcasts of Poker Flat_.

It only remains to add that like most of Bret Harte's stories, as we have seen, _Tennessee's Partner_ was suggested by a real incident, which, however, ended happily; and the last chapter of the true story may be gathered from a paragraph which appeared in the California newspapers in June, 1903:--

"J. A. Chaffee, famous as the original of _Tennessee's Partner_, has been brought to an Oakland Sanatorium. He has been living since 1849 in a small Tuolumne county mining camp with his partner, Chamberlain. In the early days he saved Chamberlain from the vigilance committee by a plea to Judge Lynch when the vigilantes had a rope around the victim's throat. It was the only instance on record in the county where the vigilantes gave way in such a case. Chamberlain was accused of stealing the miners' gold, but Chaffee cleared him, as every one believed Chaffee. The two men settled down to live where they have remained ever since, was.h.i.+ng out enough placer gold to maintain them. Professor Magee of the University of California found Chaffee sick in his cabin last week, and induced him to come to Oakland for treatment. Chamberlain was left behind. Both men are over eighty."

One who witnessed Chaffee's rescue of his partner gives some details of the affair, which show how closely Bret Harte kept to the facts until he saw occasion to depart from them. Chaffee had a donkey and a cart--the only vehicle in the settlement, and he is described as standing before the vigilance committee, "hat in hand, his bald head bare, his big bandanna handkerchief hanging loosely about his neck."

Of the four stories especially devoted to friends.h.i.+p, the second is _Captain Jim's Friend_, published in the year 1887. This is almost a _reductio ad absurdum_ of _Tennessee's Partner_, for Captain Jim's friend, Lacy Ba.s.sett, is a coward, a liar, and an impostor. In the end, Captain Jim discovers this, and he endeavors to wipe out the disgrace which, he thinks, Ba.s.sett has brought upon him by forcing the latter, at the point of his pistol, to a more manly course of conduct. And yet, when Ba.s.sett commits the dastardly act of firing at his life-long friend and benefactor, the heroic Captain Jim feels not only that his own reputation for "foolishness" is redeemed, but also, in his dying moments, he recurs to his old affection for the man who shot him; and thus the tinge of cynicism which the story would otherwise wear is removed.

The third story, _In the Tules_, is a recurrence to the theme of _Tennessee's Partner_, the two leading characters being almost a repet.i.tion of those in the earlier story. _In the Tules_ has not the spontaneousness of its predecessor, not quite the same tragic reality; but it is a n.o.ble story, nevertheless, and the climax forms one of those rare episodes which raise one's idea of human nature.

In the fourth story, _Uncle Jim and Uncle Billy_, published much later, Bret Harte takes the subject in a lighter vein. The sacrifice made to friends.h.i.+p is not of life, but of fortune; and though, unquestionably, some men would lay down their lives more easily than they would give up their property, yet the sacrifice does not wear so tragic an aspect.

In _Left Out on Lone Star Mountain_, among the very best of the later stories, we have a little group of miners held together, inspired, and redeemed from selfishness by the youngest of their number, affectionately spoken of as "The Old Man," one of those brilliant, fine, lovable natures, rare but not unknown in real life, to which all the virtues seem to come as easily as vice and weakness come to the generality of men.[71]

[Ill.u.s.tration: HE LOOKED CURIOUSLY AT HIS REFLECTION

From "Left Out on Lone Star Mountain"

E. Boyd Smith, del.]

The hero of this story plays a part much resembling that of the late James G. Fair, United States Senator from California, and a leading man in the State. Mr. Fair, who was of Scotch-Irish descent, crossed the Plains in 1850 with a company of men who were demoralized by their privations and misfortunes. Though the youngest of the party, being but eighteen years old, Fair, by mere force of natural fitness, became their leader; and it was owing to his determined good nature, energy and high spirits that they finally reached the Pacific Slope. A member of the band afterward wrote: "My comrades became so peevish from the wear upon the system, and ... the absence of accustomed comforts, that they were more like children than men, and at times it was as much as the boy could do to keep them from killing one another."[72]

The moral of Bret Harte's stories, it has often been said, is that even bad men have a good side, and are frequently capable of performing n.o.ble acts. But this, surely, is only a small part of the lesson, or rather of the inspiration to be derived from his works. In fact most of his heroes are not bad men, but good men. Would it not be far more true to say that the moral of Bret Harte's stories is very nearly the same as the moral of the New Testament, namely, that the best thing a man can do with his life or anything else that he has, is to give it up,--for love, for honor, for a child, for a friend!

CHAPTER X

GAMBLING IN PIONEER TIMES