Chapter XXV: Prospecting

The failure of the Copperhead Claim and the collapse of Copperhead City did not discourage me. The flame only burned the brighter to go forth and unearth the veins of mineral wealth which imagination showed me lying far and near in this land still of such recent settlement.

This was in 1863-64. The great silver leads of Nevada had but recently been discovered. The silver excitement was at its height. People were thinking that barely the threshold of the mineral richness of the Pacific slope had been reached and that untold treasure underground awaited the prospector’s exploration north, south, and east, so far as he could go.

Fired with this all-pervading thought I projected one of the grandest of my failures. I organized the “Mulford Mining, Prospecting, and Land Company,” whose intent was to take up and hold all the mineral veins I found and secure all desirable locations I might come upon for farms, town sites, and other purposes.

“Holding” a mineral vein, or whatever I might imagine to be a mineral vein, could be done after the proper notices were put up, by performing on such veins one day’s work a month, and such “day’s work” was supposed to be done by turning up a few shovelfuls of dirt on the property.

My Company consisted of thirty members, who lived at varying distances apart, within and without the county of Tuolumne. For my services as general prospector, discoverer, and holder of all properties accumulated (by myself) I was to receive from each member three dollars per month.

I fixed this princely stipend myself, being then ever in fear that I should overcharge others for services rendered.

By dint of great exertion, I succeeded in getting one-third of the members together one hot summer afternoon in a Montezuma grocery. I unfolded then the Company’s Constitution and By-Laws, written by myself at great length on several sheets of foolscap pasted together. I read the document. It provided for the Company a President, Secretary, Treasurer, and Board of Directors. It set forth their duties and my duties as “General Prospector.” I was particularly stringent and rigid regarding myself and my responsibilities to the Company.

The fragment of the new Company present assented to everything, paid in their first installment of three dollars, and bade me go forth and “strike something rich” as quickly as possible.

I went forth at first afoot with the few dollars paid me. I subsisted in a hap-hazard--indeed I must say beggarly fashion, stopping with mining friends and dependent to great extent on their hospitality, while I “held” the few claims I had already found and found others in their neighborhood.

At last I found a man who subscribed the use of a horse for the summer in consideration of being enrolled as a shareholder. On similar terms I gained a saddle, a shot-gun, a dog, and some provisions. This put the “Company” on a more stable footing, for I was now no longer dependent on house or hospitality, and could stop wherever night overtook me, and wood, water, and grass were at hand.

My horse I think was the slowest of his kind in the Great West, and my gun kicked so vigorously when discharged that I frequently sustained more injury than the game aimed at.

My field of operations extended over 150 miles of country, from the foot hills of the Sierras to their summits and beyond in the Territory of Nevada. Land, wood, water, grass, and game, if found, were free in every direction. The country was not fenced in, the meaning of “trespassing” on land was unknown--in fact it was then really a free country--a term also not altogether understood in the older States, where if you build a camp-fire in a wood lot you run some risk from the farmer who owns it, and his bulldog.

Sometimes, I would be a week or ten days without seeing a human face. A roof rarely covered me. I would camp one day near a mountain summit looking over fifty or sixty miles of territory and the next at its base with a view bounded by a wall of rock a few hundred yards distant. Sometimes I was very lonesome and uneasy at night in these mountain solitudes. I longed generally about sundown for some one to talk to. Anything human would answer such purpose then. In the bright clear morning the lonesome feeling was all gone. There was companionship then in the trees, the clouds, the mountain peaks, far and near, yet there were times when the veriest clod was better than all of these. Sometimes nothing but another human tongue will answer our needs, though it be a very poor one.

The first evening I spent alone in the forest, I left my dog “Put” to guard the camp. He wanted to follow me. I drove him back. He went back like a good dog and ate up most of my bacon which I had not hung high enough on the tree. By this experience I learned to hang my bacon higher. Wisdom must always be paid for.

I journeyed in the primeval forests of the Sierras. The primeval forest is dismal and inconvenient to travel through with fallen and rotten tree trunks interlacing each other in every direction. I have travelled half a day and found myself farther than ever from the place I wanted to reach. I have made at eve a comfortable camp under a great tree and when all arrangements were completed scrabbled out of it precipitately and packed my baggage elsewhere on looking up and seeing directly above me a huge dead limb hanging by a mere splinter, ready to fall at any moment and impale me. I think I know just how Damocles felt in that sword and hair business. Wolves sometimes frightened me at night exceedingly with their howlings. Bands of then unwarlike Indians also scared me. They were Utes fishing in the Walker River. Five years previous they had been hostile. Once I stumbled on one of their camps on the river bank. Before I could sneak off unseen one of them came up to me, announcing himself as the chief. He wanted to know who I was, where I came from, and where I was going. I answered all the questions this potentate asked me, acceded to his request for some “hoggadi” (tobacco), and when I found myself half a mile distant from His Majesty with a whole skin and all of my worldly goods intact, believed more firmly than ever in a kind and protecting Providence. I don’t suppose I stood in any real danger, but a lone man in a lone country with an average of one white settler to every five square miles of territory won’t naturally feel as easy in such circumstances as at his own breakfast table.

I learned never to pass a spot having wood, water, and grass after four o’clock in the afternoon, but make my camp for the night there. I learned on staking my horse out, not to give him pasture too near my camp-fire, for more than once in changing his base for a better mouthful of grass, has he dragged the lariat over my temporary possessions, upsetting coffee-pot and frying-pan and knocking the whole camp endways. I learned to camp away from the main road or trail leading over the mountains to Nevada, for it was beset by hungry, ragged men who had started afoot for the silver mines with barely a cent in their pockets, trusting to luck to get through, and who stumbling on my camp must be fed. You can’t sit and eat in your own out-door kitchen and see your fellow-beings eye you in hunger. But they ate me at times out of house and home, and the provision laid in for a week would not last three days with such guests. An old Frenchman so found me one day at dinner. He was starved. I kept my fresh meat in a bag. I handed him the bag and told him to broil for himself over the coals. Then I hauled off in the bush a little while to look at some rock. When I returned the bag was empty; two pounds of beef were inside the Frenchman and he didn’t seem at all abashed or uneasy. These experiences taught me that charity and sympathy for others must be kept under some government or our own meal bags, bread bags, and stomachs may go empty.

Grizzlies were common in those mountain solitudes, but I never saw one nor the track of one, nor even thought of them near as much as I would now, if poking about in the chaparral as I did then. I was camped near a sheep herder one evening, when, seeing my fire about a quarter of a mile from his cabin, he came to me and said, “Young man, this isn’t a good place to stop in over night. You’re right in the track of the grizzlies. They’ve killed twenty-six of my sheep inside of three weeks. You’d better sleep in my barn.” I did so.

I learned never to broil a steak on a green pitch-pine branch till I got accustomed to the flavor of the turpentine which the heat would distil and the meat absorb.

I learned that when you have nothing for breakfast and must kill the only robin in sight or go without him, that robin will be ten times shyer and harder to coax within gunshot than when you don’t hunger for him.

I was not strong physically, and indeed far from being a well man. It was only the strong desire of finding a fortune in a mineral vein, that gave me strength at all. Once I was sick for three days, camped near a mountain top, and though it was June, every day brought a snow squall. A prospector from Silver City stumbled on my camp one day and declared he would not stay in such a place for all the silver in Nevada. The wind blew from a different quarter about every hour, and no matter where I built my fire, managed matters so as always to drive the smoke in my face. It converted me for a time into a belief of the total depravity of inanimate things.

I pre-empted in the name of the Company some of the grandest scenery in the world--valleys seldom trodden by man, with clear mountain streams flowing through them--lakes, still unnamed, reflecting the mountain walls surrounding them a thousand or more feet in height, and beautiful miniature mountain parks. In pre-empting them their commercial value entered little into my calculations. Sentiment and the picturesque, did. Claimants stronger than I, had firmer possession of these gems of the Sierras. The chief was snow, under which they were buried to the depth of ten or fifteen feet, seven months at least out of the twelve.

When once a month I came out of the mountains and put in an appearance among my shareholders, my horse burdened with blankets, provisions, tools, the frying-pan and tin coffee-pot atop of the heap, I was generally greeted with the remark, “Well, struck anything yet?” When I told my patrons of the land sites I had gained for them so advantageous for summer pasturages, they did not seem to catch my enthusiasm. They wanted gold, bright yellow gold or silver, very rich and extending deep in the ground, more than they did these Occidental Vales of Cashmere, or Californian Lakes of Como. They were sordid and sensible. I was romantic and ragged. They were after what paid. I was after what pleased.

The monthly three-dollar assessment from each shareholder came harder and harder. I dreaded to ask for it. Besides, two-thirds of my company were scattered over so much country that the time and expense of collecting ate up the amount received, a contingency I had not foreseen when I fixed my tax rate.

At last the end came. The man who subscribed the use of his horse, wanted him back. I gave him up. This dismounted the Company. Operations could not be carried on afoot over a territory larger than the State of Connecticut. I had indeed found several mineral veins, but they were in that numerous catalogue of “needing capital to develop them.” The General Prospector also needed capital to buy a whole suit of clothes.

I was obliged to suspend operations. When I stopped the Company stopped. Indeed I did not find out till then, that I was virtually the whole “Company.”