The Life of Bret Harte Part 5

Bad as the journey across the Isthmus was or might be, the enforced delay at Panama was worse. The number of pa.s.sengers far exceeded the capacity of the vessels sailing from that port to San Francisco, and those who waited at Panama were in constant danger of cholera, of the equally dreaded Panama fever, and sometimes of smallpox. The heat was almost unbearable, and the blacks were a source of annoyance, and even of danger. "There is not in the whole world," remarked a contemporary San Francisco paper, "a more infamous collection of villains than the Jamaica negroes who are congregated at Panama and Chagres."

In their eagerness to get away from Panama, some Pioneers paid in advance for transportation in old rotten hulks which were never expected or intended to reach San Francisco, but which, springing a leak or being otherwise disabled, would put into some port in Lower California where the pa.s.sengers would be left without the means of continuing their journey, and frequently without money.

Both on the voyage from Panama and also on the long route around Cape Horn, s.h.i.+p-captains often saved their good provisions for the California market, and fed their pa.s.sengers on nauseous "lobscouse" and "dunderfunk."

Scurvy and other diseases resulted. An appeal to the United States consul at Rio Janeiro, when the s.h.i.+p touched there, was sometimes effectual, and in other cases the pa.s.sengers took matters into their own hands and disciplined a rapacious captain or deposed a drunken one. In view of these uprisings, some New York skippers declined to take command of s.h.i.+ps about to sail for California, supposing that pa.s.sengers who could do such an unheard-of thing as to rebel against the master of a vessel must be a race of pirates. Great pains were taken to secure a crew of determined men for these s.h.i.+ps, and a plentiful supply of muskets, handcuffs and shackles was always put on board. But such precautions proved to be ridiculously unnecessary. There was no case in which the Pioneers usurped authority on s.h.i.+pboard without sufficient cause; and in no case was an emigrant brought to trial on reaching San Francisco.

In the various ports at which they stopped much was to be seen of foreign peoples and customs; and not infrequently the Pioneers had an opportunity to show their mettle. At Santa Catharina, for example, a port on the lower coast of Brazil, a young American was murdered by a Spaniard. The authorities were inclined to treat the matter with great indifference; but there happened to be in the harbor two s.h.i.+p-loads of pa.s.sengers en route for San Francisco, and these men threatened to seize the fortress and demolish it if justice was not done. Thereupon the murderer was tried and hung. Many South Americans in the various ports along the coast got their first correct notion of the people of the United States from these chance encounters with sea-going Pioneers.

Still more, of course, was the overland journey an education in self-reliance, in that resourcefulness which distinguishes the American, and in that courage which was so often needed and so abundantly displayed in the early mining days. Independence in the State of Missouri was a favorite starting-point, and from this place there were two routes, the southern one being by way of Santa Fe, and the northern route following the Oregon Trail to Fort Hall, and thence ascending the course of the Humboldt River to its rise in the Sierra Nevadas.

At Fort Hall some large companies which had travelled from the Mississippi River, and even from States east of that, separated, one half going to Oregon, the other turning westward to California; and thus were broken many ties of love and friends.h.i.+p which had been formed in the close intimacy of the long journey, especially between the younger members of the company. Old diaries and letters reveal suggestions of romance if not of tragedy in these separations, and in the choice which the emigrant maiden was sometimes forced to make between the conflicting claims of her lover and her parents.

In the year 1850 fifty thousand crossed the Plains. In 1851 immigration fell off because even at that early date there was a business "depression," almost a "panic" in California, but in 1852 it increased again, and the Plains became a thoroughfare, dotted so far as the eye could see with long trains of white-covered wagons, moving slowly through the dust. In one day a party from Virginia pa.s.sed thirty-two wagons, and during a stop in the afternoon five hundred overtook them. In after years the course of these wagons could easily be traced by the alien vegetation which marked it. Wherever the heavy wheels had broken the tough prairie sod there sprang up, from the Missouri to the Sierras, a narrow belt of flowering plants and familiar door-yard weeds,--silent witnesses of the great migration which had pa.s.sed that way. Mult.i.tudes of hors.e.m.e.n accompanied the wagons, and other mult.i.tudes plodded along on foot.

Banners were flying here and there, and the whole appearance was that of an army on the march. At night camp-fires gleamed for miles through the darkness, and if the company were not exhausted the music of a violin or a banjo floated out on the still air of the prairies. But the fatigue of the march, supplemented by the arduous labors of camping out, was usually sufficient to send the travellers to bed at the earliest possible moment.

The food consisted chiefly of salt pork or bacon,--varied when that was possible with buffalo meat or venison,--beans, baked dough called bread, and flapjacks. The last, always a.s.sociated with mining life in California, were made by mixing flour and water into a sort of batter, seasoning with salt, adding a little saleratus or cooking soda, and frying the mixture in a pan greased with fat. Men ate enormously on these journeys. Four hundred pounds of sugar lasted four Pioneers only ninety days. This inordinate appet.i.te and the quant.i.ty of salt meat eaten frequently resulted in scurvy, from which there were some deaths. Another cause of illness was the use of milk from cows driven along with the wagon-trains, and made feverish by heat and fatigue.

Many of the emigrants, especially those who undertook the journey in '49 or '50, were insufficiently equipped, and little aware of the difficulties and dangers which awaited them. Death in many forms hovered over those heavy, creaking, canvas-covered wagons--the "prairie-schooners," which, drawn sometimes by horses, sometimes by oxen, sometimes by mules, jolted slowly and laboriously over two thousand miles and more of plain and mountain,--death from disease, from want of water, from starvation, from Indians, and, in crossing the Sierras, from raging snow-storms and intense cold. Rivers had to be forded, deserts crossed and a thousand accidents and annoyances encountered.

Some men made the long journey on foot, even from points east of the Mississippi River. One gray-haired Pioneer walked all the way from Michigan with a pack on his back. Another enthusiast obtained some notoriety among the emigrants of 1850 by trundling a wheelbarrow, laden with his goods, from Illinois to Salt Lake City.

Bret Harte, as we have seen, reached California by sea, and there is no record of any journey by ox-cart that he made; and yet in _A Waif of the Plains_ he describes such a journey with a particularity which seems almost impossible for one who knew it only by hearsay. Thus, among many other details, he speaks of "a chalky taste of dust on the mouth and lips, a gritty sense of earth on the fingers, and an all-pervading heat and smell of cattle." And in the same description occurs one of those minute touches for which he is remarkable: "The hoofs of the draught-oxen, occasionally striking in the dust with a dull report, sent little puffs like smoke on either side of the track."

Often the cattle would break loose at night and disappear on the vast Plains, and men in search of them were sometimes lost, and died of starvation or were killed by Indians. Simply for the sake of better grazing oxen have been known to retrace their steps at night for twenty-five miles.

The opportunities for selfishness, for petulance, for obstinacy, for resentment were almost innumerable. Cooking and was.h.i.+ng were the labors which, in the absence of women, proved most vexatious to the emigrants.

"Of all miserable work," said one, "was.h.i.+ng is the worst, and no man who crossed the Plains will ever find fault again with his wife for scolding on a was.h.i.+ng day." All the Pioneers who have related their experiences on the overland journey speak of the bad effect on men's tempers. "The perpetual vexations and hards.h.i.+ps keep the nerves in a state of great irritability. The trip is a sort of magic mirror, exposing every man's qualities of heart, vicious or amiable."[22]

The shooting affairs which occurred among the emigrants were usually the result of some sudden provocation, following upon a long course of irritation between the persons concerned. Those who crossed the Plains in the summer of 1853, or afterward, might have pa.s.sed a grave with this inscription:

BEAL SHOT BY BOLSBY, JUNE 15, 1853.

And, a day's journey further, they would have noticed another grave thus inscribed:

BOLSBY SHOT FOR THE MURDER OF BEAL, JUNE 16, 1853.

This murder, to call it such, was the consequence of some insult offered to Bolsby by the other. Bolsby was forthwith tried by the company, and condemned to be shot the next morning at sunrise. He had been married only about a year before, and had left his wife and child at their home in Kentucky. For the remainder of the day he travelled with the others, and the short hours of the summer night which followed were spent by him in writing to his wife and to his father and mother. Of all the great mult.i.tude, scattered over the wide earth, who pa.s.sed that particular night in sleepless agony of mind, perhaps none was more to be pitied. When morning came he dressed himself neatly in his wedding suit, and was led out to execution. With rare magnanimity, he acknowledged that his sentence was a just one, and said that he had so written to his family, and that he had been treated with consideration; but he declared that if the thing were to happen again, he would kill Beal as before. He then knelt on his blanket, gave the signal for shooting, and fell dead, pierced by six bullets.

The misfortunes of the Donner party began with a homicide. This is the party whose sufferings are described by Bret Harte without exaggeration in _Gabriel Conroy_. It included robbers, cannibals, murderers and heroes; and one interesting aspect of its experience is the superior endurance, both moral and physical, shown by the women. In the small detachment which, as a forlorn hope, tried to cross the Mountains in winter without provisions, and succeeded, there were twelve men and five women. Of the twelve men five died, of the five women none died![23]

Indians were often encountered on the Great Plains and in the valleys of the Colorado and Rio Grande. They were well-disposed, at first, and soon acquired some familiarity with the ordinary forms of speech used by the Pioneers. Thus one traveller reports the following friendly salutation from a member of the Snake Tribe:

"How de do--Whoa haw! G--d d--n you!"

On another occasion when a party of Pioneers were inquiring of some Indians about a certain camping-ground ahead of them, they were a.s.sured that there would be "plenty of gra.s.s there for the whoa haws, but no water for the g--d d--ns."

Later, however, owing chiefly to unprovoked attacks by emigrants, the Indians became hostile and dangerous. Many Pioneers were robbed and some were killed by them. The Western Indian was a figure at once grotesque and terrible; and Bret Harte's description of him, as he appeared to the emigrant boy lost on the Plains, gives the reader such a pleasant thrill of horror as he may not have experienced since Robinson Crusoe made his awful discovery of a human footprint in the sand.

"He awoke with a start. A moving figure had suddenly uplifted itself between him and the horizon!... A human figure, but so dishevelled, so fantastic, and yet so mean and puerile in its extravagance that it seemed the outcome of a childish dream. It was a mounted figure, yet so ludicrously disproportionate to the pony it bestrode, whose slim legs were stiffly buried in the dust in a breathless halt, that it might have been a straggler from some vulgar wandering circus. A tall hat, crownless and brimless, a castaway of civilization, surmounted by a turkey's feather, was on its head; over its shoulders hung a dirty tattered blanket that scarcely covered the two painted legs which seemed clothed in soiled yellow hose. In one hand it held a gun; the other was bent above its eyes in eager scrutiny of some distant point.... Presently, with a dozen quick noiseless strides of the pony's legs, the apparition moved to the right, its gaze still fixed on that mysterious part of the horizon. There was no mistaking it now! The painted Hebraic face, the large curved nose, the bony cheek, the broad mouth, the shadowed eyes, the straight long matted locks! It was an Indian!"[24]

There were some cases of captivity among the Indians the details of which recall the similar occurrences in New England in the seventeenth century.

Perhaps the most remarkable case was that of Olive Oatman, a young girl from Illinois, who was carried off by one tribe of Indians, was sold later to another, nearly died of starvation, and, finally, after a lapse of six years, was recovered safe and sound. Her brother, a boy of twelve, was beaten with clubs by the Indians, and left for dead with the bodies of his father and mother; but he revived, and succeeded in making his way back for a distance of seventy miles, when he met a party of Pima Indians, who treated him with kindness. Forty-five miles of that lonely journey lay through a desert where no water could be obtained.

Abner Nott's daughter, Rosey, the attractive heiress of the Pontiac, was made of the same heroic stuff. "The Rosey ez I knows," said her father, "is a little gal whose voice was as steady with Injuns yellin' round her nest in the leaves on Sweet.w.a.ter ez in her purty cabin up yonder." Lanty Foster, too, was of "that same pioneer blood that had never nourished cravens or degenerates, ... whose father's rifle had been levelled across her cradle, to cover the stealthy Indian who prowled outside."

It was from these Western and Southwestern emigrants that Bret Harte's n.o.bler kind of woman, and, in most cases, of man also was drawn. The "great West" furnished his heroic characters,--California was only their accidental and temporary abiding-place. These people were of the muscular, farm type, with such health and such nerves as result from an out-door life, from simple, even coa.r.s.e food, from early hours and abundant sleep.

The Pioneer women did indeed lack education and inherited refinement, as Bret Harte himself occasionally points out. "She brushed the green moss from his sleeve with some towelling, and although this operation brought her so near to him that her breath--as soft and warm as the Southwest trades--stirred his hair, it was evident that this contiguity was only frontier familiarity, as far removed from conscious coquetry as it was perhaps from educated delicacy."[25]

And yet it is very easy to exaggerate this defect. In most respects the wholesomeness, the democratic sincerity and dignity of Bret Harte's women, and of his men as well, give them the substantial benefits of gentle blood. Thus he says of one of his characters, "He had that innate respect for the secrets of others which is as inseparable from simplicity as it is from high breeding;" and this remark might have been put in a much more general form. In fact, the essential similarity between simplicity and high breeding runs through the whole nature of Bret Harte's Pioneers, and perhaps, moreover, explains some obscure points in his own life.

Be this as it may, the defects of Bret Harte's heroines relate rather to the ornamental than to the indispensable part of life, whereas the qualities in which they excel are those fundamental feminine qualities upon which, in the last a.n.a.lysis, is founded the greatness of nations. A sophisticated reader would be almost sure to underestimate them. Even that English critic who was perhaps his greatest admirer, makes the remark, literally true, but nevertheless misleading, that Bret Harte "did not create a perfectly n.o.ble, superior, commanding woman." No, but he created, or at least sketched, more than one woman of a very n.o.ble type. What type of woman is most valuable to the world? Surely that which is fitted to become the mother of heroes; and to that type Bret Harte's best women belong. They have courage, tenderness, sympathy, the power of self-sacrifice; they have even that strain of fierceness which seems to be inseparable in man or beast from the capacity for deep affection. They have the independence, the innocent audacity, the clear common-sense, the resourcefulness, typical of the American woman, and they have, besides, a depth of feeling which is rather primeval than American, which certainly is not a part of the typical American woman as we know her in the Eastern States.

Perhaps the final test of n.o.bility in man or woman is the capacity to value _something_, be it honor, affection, or what you will, be it almost anything, but to value something more than life itself; and this is the characteristic of Bret Harte's heroines. They are as ready to die for love as Juliet was, and along with this _abandon_ they have the coolness, the independence, the practical faculty, which belong to their time and race, but which were not a part of woman's nature in the age that produced Shakspere's "unlessoned girl."

Bret Harte's heroines have a strong family resemblance to those of both Tourgueneff and Thomas Hardy. In each case the women obey the instinct of love as unreservedly as men of an archaic type obey the instinct of fighting. There is no question with them of material advantage, of wealth, position, or even reputation. Such considerations, so familiar to women of the world, never enter their minds. They love as nature prompts, and having once given their love, they give themselves and everything that they have along with it. There is a magnificent forgetfulness of self about them. This is the way of nature. Nature never counts the cost, never h.o.a.rds her treasures, but pours them out, to live or die as the case may be, with a profusion which makes the human by-stander--economical, poverty-stricken man--stand aghast. In Russia this type of woman is frequently found, as Tourgueneff, and to a lesser degree Tolstoi, found her among the upper cla.s.ses, which have retained a pristine quality long since bred out of the corresponding cla.s.ses in England and in the United States. For women of the same type in England, Thomas Hardy is forced to look lower down in the social scale; and this probably accounts for the fact that his heroines are seldom drawn from the upper cla.s.ses.

Women of this kind sometimes fail in point of chast.i.ty, but it is a failure due to impulse and affection, not to mere frivolity or sensuality.

After all, chast.i.ty is only one of the virtues that women owe to themselves and to the race. The chaste woman who coldly marries for money is, as a rule, morally inferior to the unchaste woman who gives up everything for love.

It is to be observed, however, that Bret Harte's women do not need this defence, for his heroines, with the single exception of the faithful Miggles, are virtuous. The only loose women in Bret Harte's stories are the obviously bad women, the female "villains" of the play, and they are by no means numerous. Joan, in _The Argonauts of North Liberty_, the wives of Brown of Calaveras and The Bell-Ringer of Angel's, respectively, the cold-blooded Mrs. Decker, and Mrs. Burroughs, the pretty, murderous, feline little woman in _A Mercury of the Foot-Hills_--these very nearly exhaust the list. On the other hand, in Thomas Hardy and Tourgueneff, to say nothing of lesser novelists, it is often the heroine herself who falls from virtue. Too much can hardly be made of the moral superiority of Bret Harte's stories in this respect. It is due, not simply to his own taste and preference, but to the actual state of society in California, which, in this respect as in all others, he faithfully portrayed. The city of San Francisco might have told a different story; but in the mining and agricultural parts of the State the standard of feminine virtue was high.

Perhaps this was due, in part at least, to the chivalry of the men reacting upon the women,--to that feeling which Bret Harte himself called "the Western-American fetich of the sanct.i.ty of s.e.x," and, again, "the innate Far-Western reverence for women."

In all European societies, and now, to a lesser degree, in the cities of the United States, every man is, generally speaking, the enemy of every young and good-looking woman, as much as the hunter is the enemy of his game. How vast is the difference between this att.i.tude of men to women and that which Bret Harte describes! The California men, as he says somewhere, "thought it dishonorable and a proof of incompetency to rise by their wives' superior fortune." They married for love and nothing else, and their love took the form of reverence.

The complement of this feeling, on the woman's side, is a maternal, protecting affection, perhaps the n.o.blest pa.s.sion of which women are capable; and this is the kind of love that Bret Harte's heroines invariably show. No mother could have watched over her child more tenderly than Cressy over her sweetheart. The cry that came from the lips of the Rose of Tuolumne when she flew to the rescue of her bleeding lover was "the cry of a mother over her stricken babe, of a tigress over her mangled cub."

Bret Harte's heroines are almost all of the robust type. A companion picture to the Rose is that of Jinny in the story _When the Waters Were Up at "Jules'."_ "Certainly she was graceful! Her tall, lithe, but beautifully moulded figure, even in its characteristic Southwestern indolence, fell into poses as picturesque as they were unconscious. She lifted the big mola.s.ses can from its shelf on the rafters with the att.i.tude of a Greek water-bearer. She upheaved the heavy flour sack to the same secure shelf with the upraised palm of an Egyptian caryatid."

Trinidad Joe's daughter, too, was large-limbed, with blue eyes, black brows and white teeth. It was of her that the Doctor said, "If she spoke rustic Greek instead of bad English, and wore a cestus instead of an ill-fitting corset, you'd swear she was a G.o.ddess."

Something more, however, goes to the making of a handsome woman than mere health and muscle. Bret Harte often speaks of the sudden appearance of beauty and refinement among the Western and Southwestern people. Kitty, for example, as the Reader will remember, "was slight, graceful, and self-contained, and moved beside her stumpy commonplace father and her faded commonplace mother, in the dining-room of the Boomville hotel, like some distinguished alien." In _A Vision of the Fountain_, Bret Harte, half humorously, suggested an explanation. He speaks of the hero as "a singularly handsome young fellow with one of those ideal faces and figures sometimes seen in Western frontier villages, attributable to no ancestor, but evolved possibly from novels and books devoured by ancestresses in the long, solitary winter evenings of their lonely cabins on the frontier."[26]

It seems more likely, however, that a fortunate environment is the main cause of beauty, a life free from care or annoyance; a deep sense of security; that feeling of self-respect which is produced by the respect of others, and, finally, surroundings which have either the beauty of art or the beauty of nature. These are the very advantages which, with many superficial differences, no doubt, are enjoyed alike by the daughters of frontiersmen and by the daughters of a n.o.bility. On the other hand, they are the very advantages with which the middle cla.s.s in cities, the c.o.c.kney cla.s.s, is almost always obliged to dispense, and that cla.s.s is conspicuously deficient in beauty. Perhaps no one thing is more conducive to beauty than the absence of those hideous creations known as "social superiors." Imagine a society in which it would be impossible to make anybody understand what is meant by the word "sn.o.b"! And yet such was, and to a considerable extent still is, the society of the Far West and of rural New England.

Bret Harte himself glanced at this subject in describing the Blue-Gra.s.s Penelope. "Beautiful she was, but the power of that beauty was limited by being equally shared with her few neighbors. There were small, narrow, arched feet besides her own that trod the uncarpeted floors of outlying cabins with equal grace and dignity; bright, clearly opened eyes that were equally capable of looking unabashed upon princes and potentates, as a few later did, and the heiress of the County judge read her own beauty without envy in the frank glances and unlowered crest of the blacksmith's daughter."

No less obvious is the connection of repose with beauty. Beauty springs up naturally among people who know the luxury of repose, and yet are vigorous enough to escape the dangers of sloth. Salomy Jane was lazy as well as handsome, and when we first catch a glimpse of her she is leaning against a door-post, engaged in the restful occupation of chewing gum. The same repose, amounting indeed to indolence, formed the chief charm of Mr.

MacGlowrie's Widow.

Whether or not the landscape plays a part in the production of womanly beauty is a question more open to dispute. Not many persons feel this influence, but, as experience will show, the proportion of country people who feel it is greater than that of city people, although they have considerably less to say upon the subject. The wide, open s.p.a.ces, the distant horizon, the gathering of storms, the changing green of Spring and Summer, the scarlet and gold of Autumn, the vast expanse of spotless snow glistening in Midwinter,--these things must be seen by the countryman, his eyes cannot escape them, and in some cases they will be felt as well as seen. Whoever has travelled a New England country road upon a frosty, moonless night in late October, and has observed the Northern Lights casting a pale, cold radiance through the leafless trees, will surely detect some difference between that method of illumination and a kerosene lantern.

A New England farmer whose home commanded a n.o.ble view of mountain, lake and forest was blessed with two daughters noted for their beauty. They grew up and married, but both died young; and many years afterward he was heard to say, as he looked dreamily out from his doorway, "I have often thought that the reason why my girls became beautiful women was that from their earliest childhood they always had this scene before their eyes."

And yet he had never read Wordsworth or Ruskin!

Bret Harte's heroines enjoyed all the advantages just enumerated as being conducive to beauty, and they escaped contamination from civilization.

They were close to nature, and as primitive in their love-affairs as the heroines of Shakspere. "Who ever loved that loved not at first sight!"

John Ashe's betrothed and Ridgeway Dent had known each other a matter of two hours or so, before they exchanged that immortal kiss which nearly cost the lives of both. Two brief meetings, and one of those in the dark, sufficed to win for the brave and clever young deputy sheriff the affections of Lanty Foster. In _A Jack and Jill of the Sierras_, a handsome girl from the East tumbles over a precipice, and falls upon the rec.u.mbent hero, part way down, with such violence as to stun him. This is hardly romantic, but the dangerous and difficult ascent which they make together furnishes the required opportunity. Ten minutes of contiguity suffice, and so well is the girl's character indicated by a few masterly strokes, that the reader feels no surprise at the result.