CHAPTER VII.

DIGGER INDIANS--THEIR LOVE OF DRESS--THEIR DOGS--THEIR FOOD--THEIR INGENUITY--INDIAN FEMALE BEAUTY, OR OTHERWISE--“HUNTING” THE INDIANS, AND TEACHING THEM MANNERS--COON HOLLOW--COYOTE DIGGINGS--COYOTES--WEAVER CREEK--THE WEATHER AND THE CLIMATE--CHINAMEN--A CELESTIAL “MUSS.”

Within a few miles of us there was camped a large tribe of Indians, who were generally quite peaceable, and showed no hostility to the whites.

Small parties of them were constantly to be seen in Hangtown, wandering listlessly about the street, begging for bread, meat, or old clothes. These Digger Indians, as they are called, from the fact of their digging for themselves a sort of subterranean abode in which they pass the winter, are most repulsive-looking wretches, and seem to be very little less degraded and uncivilisable than the blacks of New South Wales.

They are nearly black, and are exceedingly ugly, with long hair, which they cut straight across the forehead just above the eyes. They had learned the value of gold, and might be seen occasionally in unfrequented places washing out a panful of dirt, but they had no idea of systematic work. What little gold they got, they spent in buying fresh beef and clothes. They dress very fantastically. Some, with no other garment than an old dress-coat buttoned up to the throat, or perhaps with only a hat and a pair of boots, think themselves very well got up, and look with great contempt on their neighbours whose wardrobe is not so extensive. A coat with showy linings to the sleeves is a great prize; it is worn inside out to produce a better effect, and pantaloons are frequently worn, or rather carried, with the legs tied round the waist. They seem to think it impossible to have too much of a good thing; and any man so fortunate as to be the possessor of duplicates of any article of clothing, puts them on one over the other, piling hat upon hat after the manner of “Old clo.”

The men are very tenacious of their dignity, and carry nothing but their bows and arrows, while the attendant squaws are loaded down with a large creel on their back, which is supported by a band passing across the forehead, and is the receptacle for all the rubbish they pick up. The squaws have also, of course, to carry the babies; which, however, are not very troublesome, as they are wrapped up in papooses like those of the North American Indians, though of infinitely inferior workmanship.

They are very fond of dogs, and have always at their heels a number of the most wretchedly thin, mangy, starved-looking curs, of a dirty brindled colour, something the shape of a greyhound, but only about half his size. A strong mutual attachment exists between the dogs and their masters; but the affection of the latter does not move them to bestow much food on their canine friends, who live in a state of chronic starvation; every bone seems ready to break through the confinement of the skin, and their whole life is merely a slow death from inanition. They have none of the life or spirit of other dogs, but crawl along as if every step was to be their last, with a look of most humble resignation, and so conscious of their degradation that they never presume to hold any communion with their civilised fellow-creatures. It is very likely that canine nature cannot stand such food as the Indians are content to live upon, and of which acorns and grasshoppers are the staple articles. There are plenty of small animals on which one would think that a dog could live very well, if he would only take the trouble to catch them; but it would seem that a dog, as long as he remains a companion of man, is an animal quite incapable of providing for himself.

A failure of the acorn crop is to the Indians a national calamity, as they depend on it in a great measure for their subsistence during the winter. In the fall of the year the squaws are all busily employed in gathering acorns, to be afterwards stored in small conical stacks, and covered with a sort of wicker-work. They are prepared for food by being made into a paste, very much of the colour and consistency of opium. Such horrid-looking stuff it is, that I never ventured to taste it; but I believe that the bitter and astringent taste of the raw material is in no way modified by the process of manufacture.

As is the case with most savages, the digger Indians show remarkable instances of ingenuity in some of their contrivances, and great skill in the manufacture of their weapons. Their bows and arrows are very good specimens of workmanship. The former are shorter than the bows used in this country, but resemble them in every other particular, even in the shape of the pieces of horn at the ends. The head of the arrow is of the orthodox cut, the three feathers being placed in the usual position; the point, however, is the most elaborate part. About three inches of the end is of a heavier wood than the rest of the arrow, being very neatly spliced on with thin tendons. The point itself is a piece of flint chipped down into a flat diamond shape, about the size of a diamond on a playing-card; the edges are very sharp, and are notched to receive the tendons with which it is firmly secured to the arrow.

The women make a kind of wicker-work basket of a conical form, so closely woven as to be perfectly water-tight, and in these they have an ingenious method of boiling water, by heating a number of stones in the fire, and throwing a succession of them into the water till the temperature is raised to boiling point.

We had a visit at our cabin one Sunday from an Indian and his squaw. She was such a particularly ugly specimen of human nature, that I made her sit down, and proceeded to take a sketch of her, to the great delight of her dutiful husband, who looked over my shoulder and reported progress to her. I offered her the sketch when I had finished, but after admiring herself in the bottom of a new tin pannikin, the only substitute for a looking-glass which I could find, and comparing her own beautiful face with her portrait, she was by no means pleased, and would have nothing to do with it. I suppose she thought I had not done her justice; which was very likely, for no doubt our ideas of female beauty must have differed very materially.

Not many days after we had settled ourselves at Middletown, news was brought into Hangtown that a white man had been killed by Indians at a place called Johnson’s Ranch, about twelve miles distant. A party of three or four men immediately went out to recover the body, and to “hunt” the Indians. They found the half-burned remains of the murdered man; but were attacked by a large number of Indians, and had to retire, one of the party being wounded by an Indian arrow. On their return to Hangtown there was great excitement; about thirty men, mostly from the Western States, turned out with their long rifles, intending, in the first place, to visit the camp of the Middletown tribe, and to take from them their rifles, which they were reported to have bought from the storekeeper there, and after that to lynch the storekeeper himself for selling arms to the Indians, which is against the law; for however friendly the Indians may be, they trade them off to hostile tribes.

It happened, however, that on this particular day a neighbouring tribe had come over to the camp of the Middletown Indians for the purpose of having a _fandango_ together; and when they saw this armed party coming upon them, they immediately saluted them with a shower of arrows and rifle-balls, which damaged a good many hats and shirts, without wounding any one. The miners returned their fire, killing a few of the Indians; but their party being too small to fight against such odds, they were compelled to retreat; and as the storekeeper, having got a hint of their kind intentions towards him, had made himself scarce, they marched back to Hangtown without having done much to boast of.

When the result of their expedition was made known, the excitement in Hangtown was of course greater than ever. The next day crowds of miners flocked in from all quarters, each man equipped with a long rifle in addition to his bowie-knife and revolver, while two men, playing a drum and a fife, marched up and down the street to give a military air to the occasion. A public meeting was held in one of the gambling rooms, at which the governor, the sheriff of the county, and other big men of the place, were present. The miners about Hangtown were mostly all Americans, and a large proportion of them were men from the Western States, who had come by the overland route across the plains--men who had all their lives been used to Indian wiles and treachery, and thought about as much of shooting an Indian as of killing a rattlesnake. They were a rough-looking crowd; long, gaunt, wiry men, dressed in the usual old-flannel-shirt costume of the mines, with shaggy beards, their faces, hands, and arms, as brown as mahogany, and with an expression about their eyes which boded no good to any Indian who should come within range of their rifles.

There were some very good speeches made at the meeting; that of a young Kentuckian doctor was quite a treat. He spoke very well, but from the fuss he made it might have been supposed that the whole country was in the hands of the enemy. The eyes of the thirty States of the Union, he said, were upon them; and it was for them, the thirty-first, to avenge this insult to the Anglo-Saxon race, and to show the wily savage that the American nation, which could dictate terms of peace or war to every other nation on the face of the globe, was not to be trifled with. He tried to rouse their courage, and excite their animosity against the Indians, though it was quite unnecessary, by drawing a vivid picture of the unburied bones of poor Brown, or Jones, the unfortunate individual who had been murdered, bleaching the mountains of the Sierra Nevada, while his death was still unavenged. If they were cowardly enough not to go out and whip the savage Indians, their wives would spurn them, their sweethearts would reject them, and the whole world would look upon them with scorn. The most common-sense argument in his speech, however, was, that unless the Indians were taught a lesson, there would be no safety for the straggling miners in the mountains at any distance from a settlement. Altogether he spoke very well, considering the sort of crowd he was addressing; and judging from the enthusiastic applause, and from the remarks I heard made by the men around me, he could not have spoken with better effect.

The Governor also made a short speech, saying that he would take the responsibility of raising a company of one hundred men, at five dollars a-day, to go and whip the Indians.

The Sheriff followed. He “cal’lated” to raise out of that crowd one hundred men, but wanted no man to put down his name who would not stand up in his boots, and he would ask no man to go any further than he would go himself.

Those who wished to enlist were then told to come round to the other end of the room, when nearly the whole crowd rushed eagerly forward, and the required number were at once enrolled. They started the next day, but the Indians retreating before them, they followed them far up into the mountains, where they remained for a couple of months, by which time the wily savages, it is to be hoped, got properly whipped, and were taught the respect due to white men.

We continued working our claim at Middletown, having taken into partnership an old sea-captain whom we found there working alone. It paid us very well for about three weeks, when, from the continued dry weather, the water began to fail, and we were obliged to think of moving off to other diggings.

It was now time to commence preparatory operations before working the beds of the creeks and rivers, as their waters were falling rapidly; and as most of our party owned shares in claims on different rivers, we became dispersed. A young Englishman and myself alone remained, uncertain as yet where we should go to.

We had gone into Hangtown one night for provisions, when we heard that a great strike had been made at a place called Coon Hollow, about a mile distant. One man was reported to have taken out that day about fifteen hundred dollars. Before daylight next morning we started over the hill, intending to stake off a claim on the same ground; but even by the time we got there, the whole hillside was already pegged off into claims of thirty feet square, on each of which men were commencing to sink shafts, while hundreds of others were prowling about, too late to get a claim which would be thought worth taking up.

Those who had claims, immediately surrounding that of the lucky man who had caused all the excitement by letting his good fortune be known, were very sanguine. Two Cornish miners had got what was supposed to be the most likely claim, and declared they would not take ten thousand dollars for it. Of course, no one thought of offering such a sum; but so great was the excitement that they might have got eight hundred or a thousand dollars for their claim before ever they put a pick in the ground. As it turned out, however, they spent a month in sinking a shaft about a hundred feet deep; and after drifting all round, they could not get a cent out of it, while many of the claims adjacent to theirs proved extremely rich.

Such diggings as these are called “coyote” diggings, receiving their name from an animal called the “coyote,” which abounds all over the plain lands of Mexico and California, and which lives in the cracks and crevices made in the plains by the extreme heat of summer. He is half dog, half fox, and, as an Irishman might say, half wolf also. They howl most dismally, just like a dog, on moonlight nights, and are seen in great numbers skulking about the plains.

Connected with them is a curious fact in natural history. They are intensely carnivorous--so are cannibals; but as cannibals object to the flavour of roasted sailor as being too salt, so coyotes turn up their noses at dead Mexicans as being too peppery. I have heard the fact mentioned over and over again, by Americans who had been in the Mexican war, that on going over the field after their battles, they found their own comrades with the flesh eaten off their bones by the coyotes, while never a Mexican corpse had been touched; and the only and most natural way to account for this phenomenon was in the fact that the Mexicans, by the constant and inordinate eating of the hot pepper-pod, the _Chili Colorado_, had so impregnated their system with pepper as to render their flesh too savoury a morsel for the natural and unvitiated taste of the coyotes.

These coyote diggings require to be very rich to pay, from the great amount of labour necessary before any pay-dirt can be obtained. They are generally worked by only two men. A shaft is sunk, over which is rigged a rude windlass, tended by one man, who draws up the dirt in a large bucket while his partner is digging down below. When the bed rock is reached on which the rich dirt is found, excavations are made all round, leaving only the necessary supporting pillars of earth, which are also ultimately removed, and replaced by logs of wood. Accidents frequently occur from the “caving-in” of these diggings, the result generally of the carelessness of the men themselves.

The Cornish miners, of whom numbers had come to California from the mines of Mexico and South America, generally devoted themselves to these deep diggings, as did also the lead-miners from Wisconsin. Such men were quite at home a hundred feet or so under ground, picking through hard rock by candlelight; at the same time, gold mining in any way was to almost every one a new occupation, and men who had passed their lives hitherto above ground, took quite as naturally to this subterranean style of digging as to any other.

We felt no particular fancy for it, however, especially as we could not get a claim; and having heard favourable accounts of the diggings on Weaver Creek, we concluded to migrate to that place. It was about fifteen miles off; and having hired a mule and cart from a man in Hangtown to carry our long tom, hoses, picks, shovels, blankets, and pot and pans, we started early the next morning, and arrived at our destination about noon. We passed through some beautiful scenery on the way. The ground was not yet parched and scorched by the summer sun, but was still green, and on the hillsides were patches of wildflowers growing so thick that they were quite soft and delightful to lie down upon. For some distance we followed a winding road between smooth rounded hills, thickly wooded with immense pines and cedars, gradually ascending till we came upon a comparatively level country, which had all the beauty of an English park. The ground was quite smooth, though gently undulating, and the rich verdure was diversified with numbers of white, yellow, and purple flowers. The oaks of various kinds, which were here the only tree, were of an immense size, but not so numerous as to confine the view; and the only underwood was the mansanita, a very beautiful and graceful shrub, generally growing in single plants to the height of six or eight feet. There was no appearance of ruggedness or disorder; we might have imagined ourselves in a well-kept domain; and the solitude, and the vast unemployed wealth of nature, alone reminded us that we were among the wild mountains of California.

After travelling some miles over this sort of country, we got among the pine trees once more, and very soon came to the brink of the high mountains overhanging Weaver Creek. The descent was so steep that we had the greatest difficulty in getting the cart down without a capsize, having to make short tacks down the face of the hill, and generally steering for a tree to bring up upon in case of accidents. At the point where we reached the Creek was a store, and scattered along the rocky banks of the Creek were a few miners’ tents and cabins. We had expected to have to camp out here, but seeing a small tent unoccupied near the store, we made inquiry of the storekeeper, and finding that it belonged to him, and that he had no objection to our using it, we took possession accordingly, and proceeded to light a fire and cook our dinner.

Not knowing how far we might be from a store, we had brought along with us a supply of flour, ham, beans, and tea, with which we were quite independent. After prospecting a little, we soon found a spot on the bank of the stream which we judged would yield us pretty fair pay for our labour. We had some difficulty at first in bringing water to the long tom, having to lead our hose a considerable distance up the stream to obtain sufficient elevation; but we soon got everything in working order, and pitched in. The gold which we found here was of the finest kind, and required great care in washing. It was in exceedingly small thin scales--so thin, that in washing out in a pan at the end of the day, a scale of gold would occasionally float for an instant on the surface of the water. This is the most valuable kind of gold dust, and is worth one or two dollars an ounce more than the coarse chunky dust.

It was a wild rocky place where we were now located. The steep mountains, rising abruptly all round us, so confined the view that we seemed to be shut out from the rest of the world. The nearest village or settlement was about ten miles distant; and all the miners on the Creek within four or five miles living in isolated cabins, tents, and brush-houses, or camping out on the rocks, resorted for provisions to the small store already mentioned, which was supplied with a general assortment of provisions and clothing.

There had still been occasional heavy rains, from which our tent was but poor protection, and we awoke sometimes in the morning, finding small pools of water in the folds of our blankets, and everything so soaking wet, inside the tent as well as outside, that it was hopeless to attempt to light a fire. On such occasions, raw ham, hard bread, and cold water was all the breakfast we could raise; eking it out, however, with an extra pipe, and relieving our feelings by laying in fiercely with pick and shovel.

The weather very soon, however, became quite settled. The sky was always bright and cloudless; all verdure was fast disappearing from the hills, and they began to look brown and scorched. The heat in the mines during summer is greater than in most tropical countries. I have in some parts seen the thermometer as high as 120° in the shade during the greater part of the day for three weeks at a time; but the climate is not by any means so relaxing and oppressive as in countries where, though the range of the thermometer is much lower, the damp suffocating atmosphere makes the heat more severely felt. In the hottest weather in California, it is always agreeably cool at night--sufficiently so to make a blanket acceptable, and to enable one to enjoy a sound sleep, in which one recovers from all the evil effects of the previous day’s baking; and even the extreme heat of the hottest hours of the day, though it crisps up one’s hair like that of a nigger’s, is still light and exhilarating, and by no means disinclines one for bodily exertion.

We continued to work the claim we had first taken for two or three weeks with very good success, when the diggings gave out--that is to say, they ceased to yield sufficiently to suit our ideas: so we took up another claim about a mile further up the creek; and as this was rather an inconvenient distance from our tent, we abandoned it, and took possession of a log cabin near our claim which some men had just vacated. It was a very badly-built cabin, perched on a rocky platform overhanging the rugged pathway which led along the banks of the creek.

A cabin with a good shingle-roof is generally the coolest kind of abode in summer; but ours was only roofed with cotton cloth, offering scarcely any resistance to the fierce rays of the sun, which rendered the cabin during the day so intolerably hot, that we cooked and eat our dinner under the shade of a tree.

A whole bevy of Chinamen had recently made their appearance on the creek. Their camp, consisting of a dozen or so of small tents and brush-houses, was near our cabin on the side of the hill--too near to be pleasant, for they kept up a continual chattering all night, which was rather tiresome till we got used to it.

They are an industrious set of people, no doubt, but are certainly not calculated for gold-digging. They do not work with the same force or vigour as American or European miners, but handle their tools like so many women, as if they were afraid of hurting themselves. The Americans called it “scratching,” which was a very expressive term for their style of digging. They did not venture to assert equal rights so far as to take up any claim which other miners would think it worth while to work; but in such places as yielded them a dollar or two a-day they were allowed to scratch away unmolested. Had they happened to strike a rich lead, they would have been driven off their claim immediately. They were very averse to working in the water, and for four or five hours in the heat of the day they assembled under the shade of a tree, where they sat fanning themselves, drinking tea, and saying “too muchee hot.”

On the whole, they seemed a harmless, inoffensive people; but one day, as we were going to dinner, we heard an unusual hullaballoo going on where the Chinamen were at work; and on reaching the place we found the whole tribe of Celestials divided into two equal parties, drawn up against each other in battle array, brandishing picks and shovels, lifting stones as if to hurl them at their adversaries’ heads, and every man chattering and gesticulating in the most frantic manner. The miners collected on the ground to see the “muss,” and cheered the Chinamen on to more active hostilities. But after taunting and threatening each other in this way for about an hour, during which time, although the excitement seemed to be continually increasing, not a blow was struck nor a stone thrown, the two parties suddenly, and without any apparent cause, fraternised, and moved off together to their tents. What all the row was about, or why peace was so suddenly proclaimed, was of course a mystery to us outside barbarians; and the tame and unsatisfactory termination of such warlike demonstrations was a great disappointment, as we had been every moment expecting that the ball would open, and hoped to see a general engagement.

It reminded me of the way in which a couple of French Canadians have a set-to. Shaking their fists within an inch of each other’s faces, they call each other all the names imaginable, beginning with _sacré cochon_, and going through a long series of still less complimentary epithets, till finally _sacré astrologe_ caps the climax. This is a regular smasher; it is supposed to be such a comprehensive term as to exhaust the whole vocabulary; both parties then give in for want of ammunition, and the fight is over. I presume it was by a similar process that the Chinamen arrived at a solution of their difficulty; at all events, discretion seemed to form a very large component part of Celestial valour.