CHAPTER X.

THE GRIZZLY-BEAR HOUSE--ITS CUISINE--AN ILLINOIS WARRIOR AND THE MEXICAN CAMPAIGN--A BEAR-HUNTER--BEAR STORIES--GRIZZLIES--SOFT PILLOWS--“RANCHES”--WILD OATS--GRASSHOPPERS, AND GRASSHOPPER PASTE--ARRIVAL AT NEVADA CITY--SITUATION AND GENERAL APPEARANCE OF THE CITY--SUPPER AT THE HÔTEL DE PARIS--A THREE-DECKER--RICHARD III. AND BOMBASTES FURIOSO.

I made inquiries as to my route, and found that the first habitation I should reach was a ranch called the Grizzly-Bear House, about fifteen miles off. The trail had been well travelled, and I had little difficulty in finding my way. After a few hours’ walking, I was beginning to think that the fifteen miles must be nearly up; and as I heard an occasional crack of a rifle, I felt pretty sure I was getting near the end of my journey.

The ground undulated like the surface of the ocean after a heavy gale of wind, and as I rose over the top of one of the waves, I got a glimpse of a log-cabin a few hundred yards ahead of me, which, seen through the lofty colonnade of stately pines, appeared no bigger than a rat-trap.

As I approached, I found it was the Grizzly-Bear House. There could be no mistake about it, for a strip of canvass, on which “The Grizzly-Bear House” was painted in letters a foot and a half high, was stretched along the front of the cabin over the door; and that there might be no doubt as to the meaning of this announcement, the idea was further impressed upon one by the skin of an enormous grizzly bear, which, spread out upon the wall, seemed to be taking the whole house into its embrace.

I found half-a-dozen men standing before the door, amusing themselves by shooting at a mark with their rifles. The distance was only about a hundred yards, but even at that distance, when it comes to hitting a card nailed to a pine-tree nine times out of ten, it is pretty good shooting.

Before dark, four or five other travellers arrived, and about a dozen of us sat down to supper together. The house was nothing more than a large log-cabin. At one end was the bar, a narrow board three feet long, behind which were two or three decanters and some kegs of liquor, a few cigars in tumblers, some odd bottles of champagne, and a box of tobacco.

A couple of benches and a table occupied the centre of the house, and sacks of flour and other provisions stood in the corners. Out in the forest, behind the cabin, was a cooking-stove, with a sort of awning over it. This was the kitchen; and certainly the cook could not complain of want of room; but, judging from our supper, he was not called upon to go through any very difficult manœuvres in the practice of his art. He knocked off his rifle practice about half an hour before supper to go and light the kitchen fire, and the fruits of his subsequent labours appeared in a large potful of tea and a lot of beefsteaks. The bread was uncommonly stale, from which I presumed that, when he did bake, he baked enough to last for about a week.

After supper, every man lighted his pipe, and though all were sufficiently talkative, the attention of the whole party became very soon monopolised by two individuals, who were decidedly the lions of the evening. One of them was a man from Illinois, who had been in the Mexican war, and who no doubt thought he might have been a General Scott, if he had only had the opportunity of distinguishing himself. He commented on the tactics of the generals as if he knew more of warfare than any of them; and the awful yarns he told of how he and the American army had whipped the Mexicans, and given them “particular hell,” as he called it, was enough to make a civilian’s hair stand on end. Some of his hearers swallowed every word he said, without even making a wry face at it; but as he tried to make out that all the victories were gained by the Illinois regiment, in which he served as full private, two or three of the party, who knew something of the history of the war, and came from other States of the Union, had no idea of letting Illinois have all the glory of the achievements, and disputed the correctness of his statements. Illinois, however, was too many for them; he was not to be stumped in that way; he had a stock of authentic facts on hand for any emergency, with which he corroborated all his previous assertions. The resistance he met with only stimulated him to greater efforts, and the more one of his facts was doubted, the more incredible was the next; till at last he detailed his confidential conversations with General Taylor, and made himself out to be a sort of a fellow who swept Mexicans off the face of the earth as a common man would kill mosquitoes.

He did not have all the talking to himself, however. One of the men who kept the house was a bear-hunter by profession, and he had not hunted grizzlies for nothing. He had tales to tell of desperate encounters and hairbreadth escapes, to which the adventures of Baron Munchausen were not a circumstance. He was a dry stringy-looking man, with light hair and keen grey eyes. His features were rather handsome, and he had a pleasing expression; but he was so dried up and tanned by exposure and the hard life he led, that his face conveyed no idea of flesh. One would rather have expected, on cutting into him, to find that he was composed of gutta-percha, or something of that sort, and only coloured on the outside. He and Illinois listened to each other’s stories with silent contempt; in fact, they pretended not to listen at all, but at the same time each watched intently for the slightest halt in the other’s narrative; and while the Illinois man was only taking breath during some desperate struggle with the Mexicans, the hunter in a moment plunged right into the middle of a bear-story, and was half eaten up by a grizzly before we knew what he was talking about; and as soon as ever that bear was disposed of, Illinois immediately went on with his story as if he had never been interrupted.

The hunter had rather the best of it; his yarns were uncommonly tough and hard of digestion, but there were no historical facts on record to bring against him. He had it all his own way, for the only witnesses of his exploits were the grizzlies, and he always managed to dispose of them very effectually by finishing their career along with his story. He showed several scars on different parts of his gutta-percha person which he received from the paws of the grizzlies, and he was not the sort of customer whose veracity one would care to question, especially as implicit faith so much increased one’s interest in his adventures. One man nearly got into a scrape by laughing at the most thrilling part of one of his best stories. After firing twice at a bear without effect, the bear, infuriated by the balls planted in his carcass, was rushing upon him. He took to flight, and, loading as he ran, he turned and put a ball into the bear’s left eye. The bear winked a good deal, but did not seem to mind it much--he only increased his pace; so the hunter, loading again, turned round and put a ball into his right eye; whereupon the bear, now winking considerably with both eyes, put his nose to the ground, and began to run him down by scent. At this critical moment, a great stupid-looking lout, who had been sitting all night with his eyes and mouth wide open, sucking in and swallowing everything that was said, had the temerity to laugh incredulously. The hunter flared up in a moment. “What are you a-laafin’ at?” he said. “D’ye mean to say I lie?”

“Oh,” said the other, “if you say it was so, I suppose it’s all right; you ought to know best. But I warn’t laafin’ at you; I was laafin’ at the bar.”

“What do you know about bars?” said the hunter, “Did you ever kill a bar?”

The poor fellow had never killed a “bar,” so the hunter snuffed him out with a look of utter contempt and pity, and went on triumphantly with his story, which ended in his getting up a tree, where he sat and peppered the bear as he went smelling round the stump, till he at last fell mortally wounded, with I don’t know how many balls in his body.

The grizzlies are the commonest kind of bear found in California, and are very large animals, weighing sometimes sixteen or eighteen hundred pounds.

Hunting them is rather dangerous sport, as they are extremely tenacious of life, and when wounded invariably show fight. But unless molested they do not often attack a man; in fact, they are hardly ever seen on the trails during the day. At night, however, they prowl about, and carry off whatever comes in their way. They had walked off with a young calf from this ranch the night before, and the hunter was going out the next day to wreak his vengeance upon them. A grizzly is well worth killing, as he fetches a hundred dollars or more, according to his weight. The meat is excellent, but it needs to be well spiced, for in process of cooking it becomes saturated with bear’s grease. In the mines, however, pomatum is an article unknown, and so no unpleasantly greasy ideas occur to one while dining off a good piece of grizzly bear.

About ten o’clock, at the conclusion of a bear story, there was a general move towards one corner of the cabin where there were a lot of rifles, and where every man had thrown his roll of blankets. The floor was swept, and each one, choosing his own location, spread his blankets and lay down. Some slept in their boots, while others took them off, to put under their heads by way of pillows. I was one of the latter number, being rather partial to pillows; and selecting a spot for my head, where it would be as far from other heads as possible, I lay down, and stretching out my feet promiscuously, I was very soon in the land of dreams, where I went through the whole Mexican campaign, and killed more “bars” than ever the hunter had seen in his life.

People do not lie a-bed in the morning in California; perhaps they would not anywhere, if they had no better beds than we had; so before daylight there was a general resurrection, and a very general ablution was performed in a tin basin which stood on a keg outside the cabin, alongside of which was a barrel of water. Over the basin hung a very small looking-glass, in which one could see one eye at a time; and attached to it by a long string was a comb for the use of those gentlemen who did not travel with their dressing-cases.

Some of the party, the warrior among the number, commenced the day by taking a gin cocktail, the hunter acting as bar-keeper, while his partner the cook, who had been up an hour before any of us chopping wood and lighting a fire, was laying the table for breakfast.

Breakfast was an affair of but very few moments, and as soon as it was over, I set out in company with three or four of the party, who were going the same way.

We crossed the north fork of the American River at Kelly’s Bar, a very rocky little place, covered with a number of dilapidated tents. We had the usual mountains to descend and ascend in crossing the river, but on gaining the summit we found ourselves again in a beautiful rolling country. Not far from the river was a very romantic little place called Illinoistown, consisting of three shanties and a saw-mill. The pine-trees in the neighbourhood were of an enormous size, and were being fast converted into lumber, which was in great demand for various mining operations, and sold at 120 dollars per thousand feet. We fared sumptuously on stewed squirrels at a solitary shanty in the forest a few miles farther on.

These little wayside inns, or “ranches,” as they are usually called in the mines, are generally situated in a spot which offers some capabilities of cultivation, and where water, the great desideratum in the mountains, is to be had all the year. The owners employ themselves in fencing-in and clearing the land, and by degrees give the place an appearance of comfort and civilisation. One finds such places in all the different stages of improvement, from a small tent or log cabin, with the wild forest around it as yet undisturbed, to good frame-houses with two or three rooms, a boarded floor, and windows, and surrounded by several acres of cleared land under cultivation.

Oats and barley are the principal crops raised in the mountains. In some of the little valleys a species of wild oats, which makes excellent hay, grows very luxuriantly. In passing through one such place, where the grasshoppers were in clouds, we found a number of Indian squaws catching them with small nets attached to a short stick, in the style of an angler’s landing-net. I believe they bruise them and knead them into a paste, somewhat of the consistency of potted shrimps; it may be as palatable also, but I cannot speak from experience on that point. My companions, as we travelled on, branched off one by one to their respective destinations, and I was again alone when I got to the ranch where I intended to pass the night. It was somewhat the same style of thing as the Grizzly-Bear House, but the house was larger, and the accommodation more luxurious, inasmuch as we had canvass bunks or shelves to sleep upon.

I went on next day along with a young miner from Georgia, who was also bound for Nevada. We dined at a place where we crossed Bear River; and a villanous bad dinner it was--nothing but bad salt pork, bad pickled onions, and bad bread.

On resuming our journey, we were joined by a man who said he always liked to have company on that road. Several robberies and murders had been committed on it of late, and he very kindly pointed out to us, as we passed it, the exact spot where, a few days before, one man had been shot through the head, and another through the hat. One was robbed of seventy-five cents, the other of eight hundred dollars.

It was a very romantic place, and well calculated for the operations of the gentlemen of the road, being a little hollow darkened by the spreading branches of a grove of oak-trees; the underwood was thick and very high, and as the trail twisted round trees and bushes, a traveller could not see more than a few feet before or behind him. We had our revolvers in readiness; but I was not very apprehensive, as three men, all showing pistols in their belts, are rather more than those ruffians generally care to tackle.

We arrived at Nevada City between five and six o’clock, when I took a look round to find the most likely place for a good supper, being particularly ravenous after the long walk and the salt-pork dinner. I found a house bearing the sign of “Hôtel de Paris,” and my choice was made at once. As I had half an hour to wait for supper, I strolled about the town to see what sort of a place it was. It is beautifully situated on the hills bordering a small creek, and has once been surrounded by a forest of magnificent pine-trees, which, however, had been made to become useful instead of ornamental, and nothing now remained to show that they had existed but the numbers of stumps all over the hill-sides. The bed of the creek, which had once flowed past the town, was now choked up with heaps of “trailings”--the washed dirt from which the gold has been extracted--the white colour of the dirt rendering it still more unsightly. All the water of the creek was distributed among a number of small troughs, carried along the steep banks on either side at different elevations, for the purpose of supplying various quartz-mills and long-toms.

The town itself--or, I should say, the “City,” for from the moment of its birth it has been called Nevada City--is, like all mining towns, a mixture of staring white frame-houses, dingy old canvass booths, and log-cabins.

The only peculiarity about the miners was the white mud with which they were bespattered, especially those working in underground diggings, who were easily distinguished by the quantity of dry white mud on the tops of their hats.

The supper at the Hôtel de Paris was the best-got-up thing of the kind I had sat down to for some months. We began with soup--rather flimsy stuff, but pretty good--then bouilli, followed by filet-de-bœuf, with cabbage, carrots, turnips, and onions; after that came what the landlord called a “god-dam rosbif,” with green pease, and the whole wound up with a salad of raw cabbage, a cup of good coffee, and cognac. I did impartial justice to every department, and rose from table powerfully refreshed.

The company were nearly all French miners, among whom was a young Frenchman whom I had known in San Francisco, and whom I hardly recognised in his miner’s costume.

We passed the evening together in some of the gambling rooms, where we heard pretty good music; and as there were no sleeping quarters to be had at the house where I dined, I went to an American hotel close to it. It was in the usual style of a boarding-house in the mines, but it was a three-decker. All round the large sleeping-apartment were three tiers of canvass shelves, partitioned into spaces six feet long, on one of which I laid myself out, choosing the top tier in case of accidents.

Next door was a large thin wooden building, in which a theatrical company were performing. They were playing Richard, and I could hear every word as distinctly as if I had been in the stage-box. I could even fancy I saw King Dick rolling his eyes about like a man in a fit, when he shouted for “A horse! a horse!” The fight between Richard and Richmond was a very tame affair; they hit hard while they were at it, but it was too soon over. It was one-two, one-two, a thrust, and down went Dick. I heard him fall, and could hear him afterwards gasping for breath and scuffling about on the stage in his dying agonies.

After King Richard was disposed of, the orchestra, which seemed to consist of two fiddles, favoured us with a very miscellaneous piece of music. There was then an interlude performed by the audience, hooting, yelling, whistling, and stamping their feet; and that being over, the curtain rose, and we had Bombastes Furioso. It was very creditably performed, but, under the peculiar circumstances of the case, it did not sound to me nearly so absurd as the tragedy.

Some half-dozen men, the only occupants of the room besides myself, had been snoring comfortably all through the performances, and now about a dozen more came in and rolled themselves on to their respective shelves. They had been at the theatre, but I am sure they had not enjoyed it so much as I did.