CHAPTER 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
Abramina, her little daughter, my wife, myself, and, stowed away
behind us, a cluster 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 carriageful reckoned up,
as near as we could 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 atmosphere 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 valley 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 managed to keep clear in our teeth
until the end.
For some two miles we rattled through the valley, skirting the
eastern foothills; then we struck off to the right, through haugh-
land, and presently, crossing a dry water-course, entered 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 clergyman 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 enormous pines. It was these pines, as they shot above
the lower wood, that produced 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 oak 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 underwood. As
Mount Saint Helena among her foothills, 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 healthful breath.
Gladness seemed to inhabit these upper zones, and we had left
indifference behind us in the valley. "I to the hills lift mine
eyes!" There are days in a life when thus to climb 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 opposition of
the wind, or how their great eyes were able to endure the dust.
Ten minutes after we went by, a tree fell, blocking 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 highest
point a trail strikes up the main hill to the leftward; and that
leads to Silverado. 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 buffetted and breathless, at the Toll House door.
A water-tank, and stables, and a gray house of two stories, with
gable ends and a verandah, 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 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 croquet ground,
and then you can lean over the edge and look deep below you through
the wood. I said croquet 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 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 member 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 kettles 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 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 youthfulness 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 verandah 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 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 hundred yards
to look complacently down that hole. For two hours we looked for
houses; and for two hours they followed us, smelling trees, picking
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 Silverado Hotel. Not another sign of habitation. Silverado
town had all been carted from the scene; one of the houses was now
the school-house far 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 after a
"bar," had risen late, and was now gone, it did not clearly appear
whither. Perhaps he had had wind of Kelmar'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, 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 rejected, he decided that
we must take up house with the Hansons. Mrs. Hanson had been, from
the first, flustered, 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
entrenchments, at last remembered with a 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 accompanying us. For about a furlong
we followed a good road alone, 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 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
farther corner of the dump; and when they were at an end, we still
persevered 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 great realm of air, and down upon treetops and
hilltops, and far and near on wild and varied 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 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. 1," 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. 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 farther up the canyon, it contained only rubbish and the
uprights for another triple tier of beds.
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 sunshine,
the platform lay overstrewn with busy litter, as though the labours
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 windless on the top; and clambering up, we could look
into an open shaft, leading edgeways down into the bowels of the
mountain, trickling with water, and lit by some stray sun-gleams,
whence I know not. 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 nodding 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 was, 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 otherwise than cold and windy.
Such was our fist prospect of Juan Silverado. I own I had looked
for something different: a clique of neighbourly houses on a
village green, we shall say, all empty to be sure, but swept and
varnished; 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, labouring
together at the ruin of that proud mountain. The view up the
canyon was a glimpse of devastation; dry red minerals sliding
together, here and there a crag, here and there dwarf thicket
clinging in the general glissade, and over all a broken outline
trenching on the blue of heaven. Downwards indeed, from our rock
eyrie, we behold the greener side of nature; and the bearing of the
pines and the sweet smell of bays and nutmegs commanded 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
striking 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 appearance to arrange the
details of our installation.
The latter part of the day, Fanny and I sat in the verandah 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 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 unweariedly 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,
wandering Hebrews. We could not suppose they had reached a
destination. 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 kindred sway upon their minds: but
before the attractions of a boy their most settled resolutions
would be war. We thought we could follow in fancy these three aged
Hebrew truants wandering in and out on hilltop 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.
