CHAPTER XXIII.

A BULL-FIGHT--RIDING THE BULL--KILLING WITH THE SWORD--A MAGICIAN--NECROMANCY IN THE MINES--TABLE MOUNTAIN--SHAW’S FLATS.

A company of Mexican bull-fighters were at this time performing in Sonora every Sunday afternoon. The amphitheatre was a large well-built place, erected for the purpose on a small hill behind the street. The arena was about thirty yards in diameter, and enclosed in a very strong six-barred fence, gradually rising from which, all round, were several tiers of seats, shaded from the sun by an awning.

I took the first opportunity of witnessing the spectacle, and found a very large company assembled, among whom the Mexicans and Mexican women in their gay dresses figured conspicuously. A good band of music enlivened the scene till the appointed hour arrived, when the bull-fighters entered the arena. The procession was headed by a clown in a fantastic dress, who acted his part throughout the performances uncommonly well, cracking jokes with his friends among the audience, and singing comic songs. Next came four men on foot, all beautifully dressed in satin jackets and knee-breeches, slashed and embroidered with bright colours. Two horsemen, armed with lances, brought up the rear. After marching round the arena, they stationed themselves in their various places, one of the horsemen being at the side of the door by which the bull was to enter. The door was then opened, and the bull rushed in, the horseman giving him a poke with his lance as he passed, just to waken him up. The footmen were all waving their red flags to attract his attention, and he immediately charged at one of them; but, the man stepping gracefully aside at the proper moment, the bull passed on and found another red flag waiting for him, which he charged with as little success. For some time they played with the bull in this manner, hopping and skipping about before his horns with so much confidence, and such apparent ease, as to give one the idea that there was neither danger nor difficulty in dodging a wild bull. The bull did not charge so much as he butted, for, almost without changing his ground, he butted quickly several times in succession at the same man. The man, however, was always too quick for him, sometimes just drawing the flag across his face as he stepped aside, or vaulting over his horns and catching hold of his tail before he could turn round.

After this exhibition one of the horsemen endeavoured to engage the attention of the bull, and when he charged, received him with the point of his lance on the back of the neck. In this position they struggled against each other, the horse pushing against the bull with all his force, probably knowing that that was his only chance. On one occasion the lance broke, when horse and rider seemed to be at the mercy of the bull, but as quick as lightning the footmen were fluttering their flags in his face and diverting his fury, while the horseman got another lance and returned to the charge.

Shortly afterwards the footmen laid aside their flags and proceeded to what is considered a more dangerous, and consequently more interesting, part of the performances. They lighted cigars, and were handed small pieces of wood, with a barbed point at one end and a squib at the other. Having lighted his squibs at his cigar, one of their number rushes up in front of the bull, shouting and stamping before him, as if challenging him to come on. The bull is not slow of putting down his head and making at him, when the man vaults nimbly over his horns, leaving a squib fizzing and cracking on each side of his neck. This makes the bull still more furious, but another man is ready for him, who plays him the same trick, and so they go on till his neck is covered with squibs. One of them then takes a large rosette, furnished in like manner with a sharp barbed point, and this, as the bull butts at him, he sticks in his forehead right between the eyes. Another man then engages the bull, and, while eluding his horns, removes the rosette from his forehead. This is considered a still more difficult feat, and was greeted with immense applause, the Mexican part of the audience screaming with delight.

The performers were all uncommonly well made, handsome men; their tight dresses greatly assisted their appearance, and they moved with so much grace, and with such an expression on their countenance of pleasure and confidence, even while making their greatest efforts, that they might have been supposed to be going through the figures of a ballet on the stage, instead of risking death from the horns of a wild bull at every step they executed. During the latter part of the performance, being without their red flags, they were of course in greater danger; but it seemed to make no difference to them; they put a squib in each side of the bull’s neck, while evading his attack, with as much apparent ease as they had dodged him from behind their red flags. Sometimes, indeed, when they were hard pressed, or when attacked by the bull so close to the barrier that they had no room to manœuvre round him, they sprang over it in among the spectators.

The next thing in the programme was riding the bull, and this was the most amusing scene of all. One of the horsemen lassoes him over the horns, and the other, securing him in his lasso by the hind-leg, trips him up, and throws him without the least difficulty. By keeping the lassoes taut, he is quite helpless. He is then girthed with a rope, and one of the performers, holding on by this, gets astride of the prostrate bull in such a way as to secure his seat, when the animal rises. The lassoes are then cast off, when the bull immediately gets up, and, furious at finding a man on his back, plunges and kicks most desperately, jumping from side to side, and jerking himself violently in every way, as he vainly endeavours to bring his horns round so as to reach his rider. I never saw such horsemanship, if horsemanship it could be called; nor did I ever see a horse go through such contortions, or make such spasmodic bounds and leaps: but the fellow never lost his seat, he stuck to the bull as firm as a rock, though thrown about so violently that it seemed enough to jerk the head off his body. During this singular exhibition the spectators cheered and shouted most uproariously, and the bull was maddened to greater fury than ever by the footmen shaking their flags in his face, and putting more squibs on his neck. It seemed to be the grand climax; they had exhausted all means to infuriate the bull to the very utmost, and they were now braving him more audaciously than ever. Had any of them made a slip of the foot, or misjudged his distance but a hairbreadth, there would have been a speedy end of him; but fortunately no such mishap occurred, for the blind rage of the bull was impotent against their coolness and precision.

When the man riding the bull thought he had enough of it, he took an opportunity when the bull came near the outside of the arena, and hopped off his back on to the top of the barrier. A door was then opened, and the bull was allowed to depart in peace. Three or four more bulls in succession were fought in the same manner. The last of them was to have been killed with the sword; but he proved one of those sulky treacherous animals who do not fight fair; he would not put down his head and charge blindly at anything or everything, but only made a rush now and then, when he thought he had a sure chance. With a bull of this sort there is great danger, while with a furiously savage one there is none at all--so say the bull-fighters; and after doing all they could, without success, to madden and irritate this sulky animal, he was removed, and another one was brought in, who had already shown a requisite amount of blind fury in his disposition.

A long straight sword was then handed to the _matador_, who, with his flag in his left hand, played with the bull for a little, evading several attacks till he got one to suit him, when, as he stepped aside from before the bull’s horns, he plunged the sword into the back of his neck. Without a moan or a struggle the bull fell dead on the instant, coming down all of a heap, in such a way that it was evident that even before he fell he was dead. I have seen cattle butchered in every sort of way, but in none was the transition from life to death so instantaneous.

This was the grand feat of the day, and was thought to have been most beautifully performed. The spectators testified their delight by the most vociferous applause; the Mexican women waved their handkerchiefs, the Mexicans cheered and shouted, and threw their hats in the air, while the matador walked proudly round the arena, bowing to the people amid a shower of coin which his particular admirers in their enthusiasm bestowed upon him.

I one day, at some diggings a few miles from Sonora, came across a young fellow hard at work with his pick and shovel, whom I had met several times at Moquelumne Hill and other places. In the course of conversation he told me that he was tired of mining, and intended to practise his profession again; upon which I immediately set him down as either a lawyer or a doctor, there are such lots of them in the mines. I had the curiosity, however, to ask him what profession he belonged to,--“Oh,” he said, “I am a magician, a necromancer, a conjuror!” The idea of a magician being reduced to the level of an ordinary mortal, and being obliged to resort to such a matter-of-fact way of making money as digging gold out of the earth, instead of conjuring it ready coined out of other men’s pockets, appeared to me so very ridiculous that I could not help laughing at the thought of it. The magician was by no means offended, but joined in the laugh; and for the next hour or more he entertained me with an account of his professional experiences, and the many difficulties he had to encounter in practising his profession in such a place as the mines, where complete privacy was so hard to be obtained that he was obliged to practise the most secret parts of his mysterious science in all sorts of ragged canvass houses, or else in rooms whose rickety boarded walls were equally ineffectual in excluding the prying gaze of the unwashed. He gave me a great insight into the mysteries of magic, and explained to me how he performed many of his tricks. All the old-fashioned hat-tricks, he said, were quite out of the question in California, where, as no two hats are alike, it would have been impossible to have such an immense assortment ready, from which to select a substitute for any nondescript head-piece which might be given to him to perform upon. I asked him to show me some of his sleight-of-hand tricks, but he said his hands had got so hard with mining that he would have to let them soften for a month or two before he could recover his magical powers.

He was quite a young man, but had been regularly brought up to his profession, having spent several years as confederate to some magician of higher powers in the States--somewhat similar, I presume, to serving an apprenticeship, for when I mentioned the names of several of his professional brethren whose performances I had witnessed, he would say, “Ah, yes, I know him; he was confederate to so-and-so.”

As he intended very soon to resume his practice, he was on the look-out for a particularly smart boy to initiate as his confederate; and I imagine he had little difficulty in finding one, for, as a general thing, the rising generation of California are supernaturally smart and precocious.

I met here also an old friend in the person of the Scotch gardener who had been my fellow-passenger from New York to Chagres, and who was also one of our party on the Chagres River. He was now farming, having taken up a “ranch” a few miles from Sonora, near a place called Table Mountain, where he had several acres well fenced and cleared, and bearing a good crop of barley and oats, and was busy clearing and preparing more land for cultivation.

This Table Mountain is a very curious place, being totally different in appearance and formation from any other mountain in the country. It is a long range, several miles in extent, perfectly level, and in width varying from fifty yards to a quarter of a mile, having somewhat the appearance, when seen from a distance, of a colossal railway embankment. In height it is below the average of the surrounding mountains; the sides are very steep, sometimes almost perpendicular, and are formed, as is also the summit, of masses of a burned-looking conglomerate rock, of which the component stones are occasionally as large as a man’s head. The summit is smooth, and black with these cinder-like stones; but at the season of the year at which I was there, it was a most beautiful sight, being thickly grown over with a pale-blue flower, apparently a lupin, which so completely covered this long level tract of ground as to give it in the distance the appearance of a sheet of water. No one at that time had thought of working this

[Illustration:

J. D. BORTHWICK DEL^{T.} M & N HANHART, LITH.

SHAW’S FLATS.]

place, but it has since been discovered to be immensely rich.

A break in this long narrow Table Mountain was formed by a place called Shaw’s Flats, a wide extent of perfectly flat country, four or five miles across, well wooded with oaks, and plentifully sprinkled over with miners’ tents and shanties.

The diggings were rich. The gold was very coarse, and frequently found in large lumps; but how it got there was not easy to conjecture, for the flat was on a level with Table Mountain, and hollows intervened between it and any higher ground. Mining here was quite a clean and easy operation. Any old gentleman might have gone in and taken a turn at it for an hour or two before dinner just to give him an appetite, without even wetting the soles of his boots: indeed, he might have fancied he was only digging in his garden, for the gold was found in the very roots of the grass, and in most parts there was only a depth of three or four feet from the surface to the bed-rock, which was of singular character, being composed of masses of sandstone full of circular cavities, and presenting all manner of fantastic forms, caused apparently by the long-continued action of water in rapid motion.