THE ACT OF SQUATTING
There were four of us squatters--myself and my wife, the King and
Queen of Silverado; Sam, the Crown Prince; and Chuchu, the Grand
Duke. Chuchu, a setter crossed with spaniel, was the most unsuited
for a rough life. He had been nurtured tenderly in the society of
ladies; his heart was large and soft; he regarded the sofa-cushion
as a bed-rook necessary of existence. Though about the size of a
sheep, he loved to sit in ladies' laps; he never said a bad word in
all his blameless days; and if he had seen a flute, I am sure he
could have played upon it by nature. It may seem hard to say it of
a dog, but Chuchu was a tame cat.
The king and queen, the grand duke, and a basket of cold provender
for immediate use, set forth from Calistoga in a double buggy; the
crown prince, on horseback, led the way like an outrider. Bags and
boxes and a second-hand stove were to follow close upon our heels
by Hanson's team.
It was a beautiful still day; the sky was one field of azure. Not
a leaf moved, not a speck appeared in heaven. Only from the summit
of the mountain one little snowy wisp of cloud after another kept
detaching itself, like smoke from a volcano, and blowing southward
in some high stream of air: Mount Saint Helena still at her
interminable task, making the weather, like a Lapland witch.
By noon we had come in sight of the mill: a great brown building,
half-way up the hill, big as a factory, two stories high, and with
tanks and ladders along the roof; which, as a pendicle of Silverado
mine, we held to be an outlying province of our own. Thither,
then, we went, crossing the valley by a grassy trail; and there
lunched out of the basket, sitting in a kind of portico, and
wondering, while we ate, at this great bulk of useless building.
Through a chink we could look far down into the interior, and see
sunbeams floating in the dust and striking on tier after tier of
silent, rusty machinery. It cost six thousand dollars, twelve
hundred English sovereigns; and now, here it stands deserted, like
the temple of a forgotten religion, the busy millers toiling
somewhere else. All the time we were there, mill and mill town
showed no sign of life; that part of the mountain-side, which is
very open and green, was tenanted by no living creature but
ourselves and the insects; and nothing stirred but the cloud
manufactory upon the mountain summit. It was odd to compare this
with the former days, when the engine was in fall blast, the mill
palpitating to its strokes, and the carts came rattling down from
Silverado, charged with ore.
By two we had been landed at the mine, the buggy was gone again,
and we were left to our own reflections and the basket of cold
provender, until Hanson should arrive. Hot as it was by the sun,
there was something chill in such a home-coming, in that world of
wreck and rust, splinter and rolling gravel, where for so many
years no fire had smoked.
Silverado platform filled the whole width of the canyon. Above, as
I have said, this was a wild, red, stony gully in the mountains;
but below it was a wooded dingle. And through this, I was told,
there had gone a path between the mine and the Toll House--our
natural north-west passage to civilization. I found and followed
it, clearing my way as I went through fallen branches and dead
trees. It went straight down that steep canyon, till it brought
you out abruptly over the roofs of the hotel. There was nowhere
any break in the descent. It almost seemed as if, were you to drop
a stone down the old iron chute at our platform, it would never
rest until it hopped upon the Toll House shingles. Signs were not
wanting of the ancient greatness of Silverado. The footpath was
well marked, and had been well trodden in the old clays by thirsty
miners. And far down, buried in foliage, deep out of sight of
Silverado, I came on a last outpost of the mine--a mound of gravel,
some wreck of wooden aqueduct, and the mouth of a tunnel, like a
treasure grotto in a fairy story. A stream of water, fed by the
invisible leakage from our shaft, and dyed red with cinnabar or
iron, ran trippingly forth out of the bowels of the cave; and,
looking far under the arch, I could see something like an iron
lantern fastened on the rocky wall. It was a promising spot for
the imagination. No boy could have left it unexplored.
The stream thenceforward stole along the bottom of the dingle, and
made, for that dry land, a pleasant warbling in the leaves. Once,
I suppose, it ran splashing down the whole length of the canyon,
but now its head waters had been tapped by the shaft at Silverado,
and for a great part of its course it wandered sunless among the
joints of the mountain. No wonder that it should better its pace
when it sees, far before it, daylight whitening in the arch, or
that it should come trotting forth into the sunlight with a song.
The two stages had gone by when I got down, and the Toll House
stood, dozing in sun and dust and silence, like a place enchanted.
My mission was after hay for bedding, and that I was readily
promised. But when I mentioned that we were waiting for Rufe, the
people shook their heads. Rufe was not a regular man any way, it
seemed; and if he got playing poker--Well, poker was too many for
Rufe. I had not yet heard them bracketted together; but it seemed
a natural conjunction, and commended itself swiftly to my fears;
and as soon as I returned to Silverado and had told my story, we
practically gave Hanson up, and set ourselves to do what we could
find do-able in our desert-island state.
The lower room had been the assayer's office. The floor was thick
with debris--part human, from the former occupants; part natural,
sifted in by mountain winds. In a sea of red dust there swam or
floated sticks, boards, hay, straw, stones, and paper; ancient
newspapers, above all--for the newspaper, especially when torn,
soon becomes an antiquity--and bills of the Silverado boarding-
house, some dated Silverado, some Calistoga Mine. Here is one,
verbatim; and if any one can calculate the scale of charges, he has
my envious admiration.
Calistoga Mine, May 3rd, 1875.
John Stanley
To S. Chapman, Cr.
To board from April 1st, to April 30 $25 75
" " " May lst, to 3rd ... 2 00
27 75
Where is John Stanley mining now? Where is S. Chapman, within
whose hospitable walls we were to lodge? The date was but five
years old, but in that time the world had changed for Silverado;
like Palmyra in the desert, it had outlived its people and its
purpose; we camped, like Layard, amid ruins, and these names spoke
to us of prehistoric time. A boot-jack, a pair of boots, a dog-
hutch, and these bills of Mr. Chapman's were the only speaking
relics that we disinterred from all that vast Silverado rubbish-
heap; but what would I not have given to unearth a letter, a
pocket-book, a diary, only a ledger, or a roll of names, to take me
back, in a more personal manner, to the past? It pleases me,
besides, to fancy that Stanley or Chapman, or one of their
companions, may light upon this chronicle, and be struck by the
name, and read some news of their anterior home, coming, as it
were, out of a subsequent epoch of history in that quarter of the
world.
As we were tumbling the mingled rubbish on the floor, kicking it
with our feet, and groping for these written evidences of the past,
Sam, with a somewhat whitened face, produced a paper bag. "What's
this?" said he. It contained a granulated powder, something the
colour of Gregory's Mixture, but rosier; and as there were several
of the bags, and each more or less broken, the powder was spread
widely on the floor. Had any of us ever seen giant powder? No,
nobody had; and instantly there grew up in my mind a shadowy
belief, verging with every moment nearer to certitude, that I had
somewhere heard somebody describe it as just such a powder as the
one around us. I have learnt since that it is a substance not
unlike tallow, and is made up in rolls for all the world like
tallow candles.
Fanny, to add to our happiness, told us a story of a gentleman who
had camped one night, like ourselves, by a deserted mine. He was a
handy, thrifty fellow, and looked right and left for plunder, but
all he could lay his hands on was a can of oil. After dark he had
to see to the horses with a lantern; and not to miss an
opportunity, filled up his lamp from the oil can. Thus equipped,
he set forth into the forest. A little while after, his friends
heard a loud explosion; the mountain echoes bellowed, and then all
was still. On examination, the can proved to contain oil, with the
trifling addition of nitro-glycerine; but no research disclosed a
trace of either man or lantern.
It was a pretty sight, after this anecdote, to see us sweeping out
the giant powder. It seemed never to be far enough away. And,
after all, it was only some rock pounded for assay.
So much for the lower room. We scraped some of the rougher dirt
off the floor, and left it. That was our sitting-room and kitchen,
though there was nothing to sit upon but the table, and no
provision for a fire except a hole in the roof of the room above,
which had once contained the chimney of a stove.
To that upper room we now proceeded. There were the eighteen bunks
in a double tier, nine on either hand, where from eighteen to
thirty-six miners had once snored together all night long, John
Stanley, perhaps, snoring loudest. There was the roof, with a hole
in it through which the sun now shot an arrow. There was the
floor, in much the same state as the one below, though, perhaps,
there was more hay, and certainly there was the added ingredient of
broken glass, the man who stole the window-frames having apparently
made a miscarriage with this one. Without a broom, without hay or
bedding, we could but look about us with a beginning of despair.
The one bright arrow of day, in that gaunt and shattered barrack,
made the rest look dirtier and darker, and the sight drove us at
last into the open.
Here, also, the handiwork of man lay ruined: but the plants were
all alive and thriving; the view below was fresh with the colours
of nature; and we had exchanged a dim, human garret for a corner,
even although it were untidy, of the blue hall of heaven. Not a
bird, not a beast, not a reptile. There was no noise in that part
of the world, save when we passed beside the staging, and heard the
water musically falling in the shaft.
We wandered to and fro. We searched among that drift of lumber-
wood and iron, nails and rails, and sleepers and the wheels of
tracks. We gazed up the cleft into the bosom of the mountain. We
sat by the margin of the dump and saw, far below us, the green
treetops standing still in the clear air. Beautiful perfumes,
breaths of bay, resin, and nutmeg, came to us more often and grew
sweeter and sharper as the afternoon declined. But still there was
no word of Hanson.
I set to with pick and shovel, and deepened the pool behind the
shaft, till we were sure of sufficient water for the morning; and
by the time I had finished, the sun had begun to go down behind the
mountain shoulder, the platform was plunged in quiet shadow, and a
chill descended from the sky. Night began early in our cleft.
Before us, over the margin of the dump, we could see the sun still
striking aslant into the wooded nick below, and on the
battlemented, pine-bescattered ridges on the farther side.
There was no stove, of course, and no hearth in our lodging, so we
betook ourselves to the blacksmith's forge across the platform. If
the platform be taken as a stage, and the out-curving margin of the
dump to represent the line of the foot-lights, then our house would
be the first wing on the actor's left, and this blacksmith's forge,
although no match for it in size, the foremost on the right. It
was a low, brown cottage, planted close against the hill, and
overhung by the foliage and peeling boughs of a madrona thicket.
Within it was full of dead leaves and mountain dust, and rubbish
from the mine. But we soon had a good fire brightly blazing, and
sat close about it on impromptu seats. Chuchu, the slave of sofa-
cushions, whimpered for a softer bed; but the rest of us were
greatly revived and comforted by that good creature-fire, which
gives us warmth and light and companionable sounds, and colours up
the emptiest building with better than frescoes. For a while it
was even pleasant in the forge, with the blaze in the midst, and a
look over our shoulders on the woods and mountains where the day
was dying like a dolphin.
It was between seven and eight before Hanson arrived, with a
waggonful of our effects and two of his wife's relatives to lend
him a hand. The elder showed surprising strength. He would pick
up a huge packing-case, full of books of all things, swing it on
his shoulder, and away up the two crazy ladders and the breakneck
spout of rolling mineral, familiarly termed a path, that led from
the cart-track to our house. Even for a man unburthened, the
ascent was toilsome and precarious; but Irvine sealed it with a
light foot, carrying box after box, as the hero whisks the stage
child up the practicable footway beside the waterfall of the fifth
act. With so strong a helper, the business was speedily
transacted. Soon the assayer's office was thronged with our
belongings, piled higgledy-piggledy, and upside down, about the
floor. There were our boxes, indeed, but my wife had left her keys
in Calistoga. There was the stove, but, alas! our carriers had
forgot the chimney, and lost one of the plates along the road. The
Silverado problem was scarce solved.
Rufe himself was grave and good-natured over his share of blame; he
even, if I remember right, expressed regret. But his crew, to my
astonishment and anger, grinned from ear to ear, and laughed aloud
at our distress. They thought it "real funny" about the stove-pipe
they had forgotten; "real funny" that they should have lost a
plate. As for hay, the whole party refused to bring us any till
they should have supped. See how late they were! Never had there
been such a job as coming up that grade! Nor often, I suspect,
such a game of poker as that before they started. But about nine,
as a particular favour, we should have some hay.
So they took their departure, leaving me still staring, and we
resigned ourselves to wait for their return. The fire in the forge
had been suffered to go out, and we were one and all too weary to
kindle another. We dined, or, not to take that word in vain, we
ate after a fashion, in the nightmare disorder of the assayer's
office, perched among boxes. A single candle lighted us. It could
scarce be called a housewarming; for there was, of course, no fire,
and with the two open doors and the open window gaping on the
night, like breaches in a fortress, it began to grow rapidly chill.
Talk ceased; nobody moved but the unhappy Chuchu, still in quest of
sofa-cushions, who tumbled complainingly among the trunks. It
required a certain happiness of disposition to look forward
hopefully, from so dismal a beginning, across the brief hours of
night, to the warm shining of to-morrow's sun.
But the hay arrived at last, and we turned, with our last spark of
courage, to the bedroom. We had improved the entrance, but it was
still a kind of rope-walking; and it would have been droll to see
us mounting, one after another, by candle-light, under the open
stars.
The western door--that which looked up the canyon, and through
which we entered by our bridge of flying plank--was still entire, a
handsome, panelled door, the most finished piece of carpentry in
Silverado. And the two lowest bunks next to this we roughly filled
with hay for that night's use. Through the opposite, or eastern-
looking gable, with its open door and window, a faint, disused
starshine came into the room like mist; and when we were once in
bed, we lay, awaiting sleep, in a haunted, incomplete obscurity.
At first the silence of the night was utter. Then a high wind
began in the distance among the tree-tops, and for hours continued
to grow higher. It seemed to me much such a wind as we had found
on our visit; yet here in our open chamber we were fanned only by
gentle and refreshing draughts, so deep was the canyon, so close
our house was planted under the overhanging rock.
