Chapter III: Across the Waters (4)

We entered the mountains on foot, packing our saddle-mules with corn to sustain the animals. We traveled on, laboring through the deep snow on the rugged mountain range, passing successively through what are called White Mountain Valley and Wet Mountain Valley into Grand River Valley. The cold was intense, and storms frequently compelled us to lie in camp, from the impossibility of forcing the mules against them. A number of the men were frozen; the animals became exhausted from the inclemency of the weather and want of food, what little grass there was being all buried in the snow. As we proceeded matters grew worse and worse. The mules gave out one by one and dropped down in the trail, and their packs were placed upon the saddle-mules. The cold became more and more intense, so many degrees below zero that the mercury sank entirely into the bulb. The breath would freeze upon the men's faces and their lips become so stiff from the ice that it was almost impossible to speak; the long beard and hair stood out white and stiff with the frost. The aspect of the mules was as bad as that of the men; their eyelashes and the long beard about their mouths were frozen stiff, and their breath settled upon their breasts and sides until they were perfectly white with frost. The snow, too, would clog under their hoofs until it formed a ball six inches long, making them appear as though they were walking on stilts. With the deep snow around us, and the pendant frost upon the leafless trees, Nature and ourselves presented a very harmonious picture. Two trappers, Old Bill informed us, had been frozen to death here the year previous.

After coming through Robideaux's Pass, which was exceedingly difficult, we descended into Grand River Valley. The snow lay deep, as elsewhere, and there was no sign of vegetation. One broad, white, dreary-looking plain lay before us, bounded by lofty white mountains. The Rio Grande lay fifty miles ahead, so we determined to get through the snow-covered plain as quickly as possible. We traveled late and camped in the middle of it, without any shelter from the winds, and with no fuel but some wild sage, a small shrub which grew sparsely around. At night the thermometer stood at seventeen degrees below zero. During the day Ducatel, a young fellow in the company, had come very near freezing to death. By collecting a quantity of the sage we made sufficient fire to cook, or rather half-cook, our supper of deer meat, five deer having been killed that evening by two of the men. Bolting down the half-cooked meat, we quickly turned into our blankets in order to keep tolerably warm and to protect ourselves against the driving snow, for since leaving the States we had scarcely stretched our tents. In the night, as ill luck would have it, our mules, poor creatures, which had stood shivering in the cold with bowed backs and drooping heads, suffering from their exposed situation and half-starved, being now reduced to a pint of corn twice a day, and having no other resource for food, broke loose from their weak fastenings of sage bushes and started off _en masse_ on the back trail. As soon as it was ascertained that they were gone, in the middle of the night, we had to rise from our beds, lifting half a foot of snow with our top blankets, and strike out in pursuit of them. We overtook them several miles from camp, and, taking them back, made them secure. But we rested little the remainder of the night.

The next day we reached the Rio Grande del Norte. This we found frozen over, and we camped on the river bottom, which is thickly timbered with cottonwood and willow. Here my feet and those of several others were frozen--the result in part of wearing boots, for which I quickly substituted moccasins, with blanket wrappers, which are much warmer than socks, and which, with leggings of the same material, afford the best protection for the lower extremities against severe cold.

Continuing up the river two or three days, we again entered the mountains, which soon assumed a very rugged character. Nature, in the ascent towards the Sierra Madre, presents herself with all her features prominent and strongly marked, her figures bold and colossal. Our progress became slow and laborious. Our track lay through deep mountain gorges, amid towering precipices and beetling crags, and along steep declivities where at any other season it would have been next to impossible to travel, but where now the deep snow afforded a secure foothold. In making the ascent of some of these precipitous mountain sides, now and then a mule would lose its footing and go tumbling and rolling many feet down. My saddle mule took one of these tumbles. Losing her foothold, she got her rope hitched upon a large log which lay loosely balanced on the rocks, and, knocking me down and jerking the log clear over my head, they went tumbling down together. But fortunately no one was hurt. A great obstacle to our progress were the rapid, rough-bottomed, but boggy streams which we had frequently to encounter in the deep and narrow ravines, where the mules would get balked, half a dozen at a time, with their packs on. Then we had to wade in up to our middle among the floating ice in the freezing water to help them out.

The farther we went the more obstacles we had to encounter; difficulties beset us so thickly on every hand as we advanced that they threatened to thwart our expedition. The snow became deeper daily, and to advance was but adding dangers to difficulties. About one-third of the men were already more or less frost-bitten; every night some of the mules would freeze to death, and every day as many more would give out from exhaustion and be left on the trail.... Finally, on the 17th of December, after frequent ineffectual attempts, we found that we could force our way no farther. By our utmost endeavors with mauls and spades we could make but half a mile or a mile per day. The cold became more severe, and storms constant, so that nothing was visible at times through the thick driving snow. For days in succession we would labor to beat a trail a few hundred yards in length, but the next day the storm would leave no trace of the previous day's work. We were on the St. John Mountain, a section of the Sierra Madre and the main range of the Rocky Mountains proper. At an elevation of 11,000 feet the cold was so intense and the atmosphere so rare that respiration became difficult; the least exertion became laborious and fatiguing, and would sometimes cause the blood to start from lips and nose. The mercury in the thermometer stood 20° below zero, and the snow was here from four to thirty feet deep. When we built our camp-fires deep pits were formed by the melting of the snow, completely concealing the different messes from each other. Down in these holes we slept, spreading our blankets upon the snow, every morning crawling out from under a deep covering of snow which had fallen upon us during the night. The strong pine smoke,--for here there was no timber but pine,--together with the reflection from the snow, so affected our sight that at times we could scarcely see. The snow drifted over us continually, driven about by the violence of the chill blasts which swept over the mountains.

Besides ourselves and our mules, no vestige of animal life appeared here in this lofty and dreary solitude; not even the ravens uttered their hoarse cry, nor the wolves their hollow and dismal howl. Finally nearly the entire band of our one hundred mules had frozen to death. After remaining in this condition for five days without being able to move camp, the colonel [Frémont] determined to return as quickly as possible by a different course to the Rio Grande. There we had left game upon which we could subsist until a party, to be previously despatched, should return with relief. So on the 22d of December we commenced our move, crossing over the bleak mountain strewn with the frozen mules, and packing our baggage with us. We were more than a week moving our camp and equipage over the top of this mountain, a distance of two miles from our first camp. The day we began to move (our provisions having been all consumed, except a small portion of macaroni and sugar, reserved against hard times), we commenced to eat the carcasses of the frozen mules. It was hoped we might save the few that yet lived, but this proving impossible, we began to kill and eat the surviving ones. On Christmas Day the colonel despatched a party of four men, King, Croitzfeldt, Brackenridge, and Bill Williams, to proceed down the Rio del Norte with all possible speed to Albuquerque, where they were to procure provisions and mules to relieve us. He allowed them sixteen days to go and return. We made our Christmas and New Year's dinner on mule meat,--not the fattest, as may be judged,--and continued to feed upon it while it was within reach.... At last we reached the river, but we found no game; the deer and elk had been driven off by the deep snow. For days we had been anxiously looking for the return of King's party with relief. The time allotted him had already expired; day after day passed, but with no prospect of relief. We concluded that the party had been attacked by Indians, or that they had lost their way and had perished. The colonel, who had moved down to the river before us, waited two days longer, and then, taking just enough provision before it was all exhausted to last them along the river, himself started off with Mr. Preuss, Godey, Theodore (Godey's nephew), and Sanders, the colonel's servant-man, intending to find out what had become of the party and hasten them back, or, if our fears concerning them proved true, to push on himself to the nearest settlement and send relief. He left an order, which we scarcely knew how to interpret, to the effect that we must finish packing the baggage to the river, and hasten on down as speedily as possible to the mouth of Rabbit River where we would meet relief, and that if we wished to see him again we must be in a hurry about it, as he was going on to California.

Two days after the colonel left we had all assembled on the river. The last of our provisions had been consumed, and we had been living for several days upon parfleche. Our condition was perilous in the extreme. Starvation stared us in the face; to remain there longer was certain death. We held a consultation and determined to start down the river the next day and try to make our way to some settlement where we could get relief; in the mean time keeping as much together as possible, and hunting along as we went as our only chance of safety.

Now commenced a train of horrors which it is painful to force the mind to dwell upon, and which the memory shrinks from. Before we had proceeded far Manuel, a California Indian of the Cosumne tribe, who had his feet badly frozen, stopped and begged Mr. Vincent Haler to shoot him, and failing to meet death in this way turned back to the lodge at the camp we had left, there to await his fate. The same day Wise lay down on the ice and died; and the Indian boys, Joaquin and Gregorio, who came along afterward, having stopped back to get some wood for Manuel, seeing his body, covered it over with brush and snow. That night Carver, crazed by hunger, raved terribly all night, so that some in the camp with him became alarmed for their safety. He told them, if any would follow him back, he had a plan by which they might live. The next day he wandered off and we never saw him again. The next night Sorel, his system wrought upon by hunger, cold, and exhaustion, took a violent fit which lasted for some time, and to which succeeded an entire prostration of all his faculties. At the same time he was almost totally snow-blind. Poor fellow, the next day he traveled as long as his strength would allow, and then, telling us we would have to leave him, that he could go no farther, blind with snow he lay down on the river-bank to die. Moran soon joined him, and they never came up again. Late at night, arriving one by one, we all came into a camp together on the river-bank. Gloom and despondency were depicted on every face. Our condition had become perfectly desperate. We knew not what to do; the candles and parfleche had kept us alive thus far, but these were gone. Our appearance was most desolate as we sat in silence around the fires, in view of a fast approaching death by starvation, while hunger gnawed upon our vitals. Then Vincent Haler, to whom the colonel had left the charge of the camp, and whom for that reason we had allowed to have the chief direction, spoke up and told us that he then and there threw up all authority; that he could do nothing, and knew not what to advise; that he looked upon our condition as hopeless, but he would suggest, as the best advice he could give, that we break up into small parties, and, hunting along, make the best of our way down separately, each party making use of all the advantages that might fall in its way, so that if any should chance to get through to a settlement they could forward relief to the others.... It was curious to hear different men tell of the workings of the mind when they were starving. Some were constantly dreaming or imagining that they saw before them a bountiful feast, and would make selections of different dishes. Others engaged their minds with other thoughts. For my part, I kept my mind amused by entering continually into all the minutiæ of farming, or of some other systematic business which would keep up a train of thought, or by working a mental solution of mathematical problems, bringing in review the rudiments of some science, or by laying out plans for the future, all having a connection with home and after life. So in this way never allowing myself to think upon the hopelessness of our condition, yet always keeping my eyes open to every chance, I kept hope alive and never once suffered myself to despond. And to this course I greatly attribute my support, for there were stronger men who, by worrying themselves, doubtless hastened their death. Ten out of our party of thirty-three that entered the mountains had perished, and a few days more would have finished the others.

Late in the afternoon of February 9, cold, hungry, and weary, with no little joy we all at once hailed the sight of the little Pueblo of the Colorado. We raised a yell as we came in sight which made the Pueblanos stand out and gaze. In a few minutes, with their assistance, we struggled forward with them and sought the comfort which the place afforded.

In sight of Taos, and several miles to the southeast, at the mouth of a deep gorge or cañon by which the Taos River debouches from the mountains, is a walled town or pueblo, one of a great many of the same kind in this country, inhabited by the Pueblos or civilized Indians, a remnant of the race of Montezuma. They live in houses built of stone and earth, or of adobe, most of which at this place were three or four stories high, and some of which even attained the height of eleven stories, each story receding a few feet back from the front of the one below it, and each one reached by a ladder placed against the wall, communicating with the door on top, and capable of being let down or drawn up at pleasure. A high mud wall incloses the buildings, which front towards the center, and in the middle is a lofty church of the same material as the other buildings, with walls six feet thick.

At Taos we first heard with certainty of the abundance of gold in California, the first account of which had reached the States immediately before our departure, but was scarcely believed.

On the 13th of February, having laid in a supply of provisions from the quartermaster's department, being facilitated by the generous kindness of the army officers, and having hired muleteers and a train of mules to take us down to Albuquerque, we set out for Santa Fé.

KIT CARSON, LAST OF THE TRAIL-MAKERS

BY CHARLES M. HARVEY

In his various activities, Carson played many parts, including those of hunter, ranchman, and miner.

As historians and writers of Western romance picture him, Kit Carson was solely an Indian-fighter and scout. Frontier exigencies, indeed, compelled him to be these, but he was much more. He was a sagacious civic chieftain as well as intrepid leader in war, Indian, foreign and civil; a wise counselor of red men and white; a man who touched the West's wild life at more points than any other person of any day; a man who blazed trails on which great commonwealths were afterward built, and who helped to build some of them.

Born in Kentucky ten months later than Lincoln, and seventy-five miles east of Lincoln's birthplace, Kit Carson, at an early age, was carried to Missouri by his parents. He received little school education, but learned to ride, to handle a rifle, and to trap bear and beaver on that borderline of civilization. He was set to work at a trade which had no attractions for him; and his imagination was fired by the tales of the strange and stirring scenes and deeds in the vast expanse off toward the sunset that came to him through passing hunters and traders. The _Missouri Intelligencer_, a weekly newspaper published in Franklin, on the Missouri River, in its issue of October 12, 1826, tells the sequel:

Notice is hereby given to all persons that Christopher Carson, a boy about sixteen years old, small for his age, but thick-set, with light hair, ran away from the subscriber, living in Franklin, Howard County, Missouri, to whom he had been bound to learn the saddler's trade, on or about the 1st of September last. He is supposed to have made his way to the upper part of the state. All persons are notified not to harbor, support, or assist said boy, under penalty of the law. One cent reward will be given to any person who will bring back the said boy.

DAVID WORKMAN.

Six years earlier than this, on the banks of the Missouri, and a hundred miles east of Franklin, died Daniel Boone. In the retrospect, Carson's name naturally associates itself with Boone's. On a broader field, in the face of obstacles and perils equally formidable, with a greater variety of resources, and with a far readier adaptability to rapidly changing conditions, Carson continued the rôle of empire-builder which Boone had begun.

In 1826, the only States west of the Mississippi were Missouri and Louisiana, and these, with the Territory of Arkansas, contained not much more than a third as many inhabitants as a single city of that region, St. Louis, has in 1910. Our present Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada and California, with parts of Colorado and Wyoming, belonged to Mexico, and, with Mexico, had just broken away from Spain. Oregon, Washington and Idaho, with large portions of Wyoming and Montana, were in controversy between the United States and England, and were to remain in that condition for twenty years longer. West and southwest of the Missouri, and on its upper waters for hundreds of miles east of that river, roamed some of the most warlike and powerful Indian tribes of North America. Except that, in the interval, the capital of the southwest territory had swung from Madrid, Spain, to Mexico, no perceptible change had taken place on the western frontier since the days, twenty years earlier, when Lewis and Clark explored the region from the mouth of the Missouri to the mouth of the Columbia; or since Captain Zebulon M. Pike, seeking the sources of the Red River, entered Spanish territory unawares, in the southern part of the present Colorado, and was carried a prisoner before Charles IV's governor-general at Santa Fé. In no age or land did adventure ever offer a more attractive field to daring and enterprise than that which spread itself out before young Carson at the moment when, fleeing from the little saddler's shop, he plunged into the current of the stirring life off to the westward.

First as a teamster on the Santa Fé Trail, of which Franklin was then the eastern terminus, then as a worker at the copper mines on the Gila, and afterward as a hunter, trapper, and guide across the West's wide spaces, Carson traversed a large part of the region from the Missouri to the Sacramento, from the Gulf of California to the upper reaches of the Columbia, and, as exigencies demanded, alternately fighting, fleeing from, or affiliating with Comanches, Apaches, Sioux, Pawnees, and Blackfeet. Thus he was thrown into active association with St. Vrain, the Bents, Ewing Young, Fitzpatrick, Bill Williams, Jim Bridger, the Sublettes, and other well-known plainsmen and mountaineers of the middle third of the nineteenth century, and won a reputation for initiative, versatility, and daring which made him a marked figure among the frontier leaders of his day. Moreover, in the midst of his exciting activities he found time to marry, to establish a home, and to practise the civic virtues which, refusing to lend themselves to picturesque treatment, have eluded the writers of romance.

At this time, May, 1842, Lieutenant John C. Frémont, on his way up the Mississippi with the first of his exploration parties, fell in with Carson and induced him to enter the government service as the official guide of the expedition. He afterward wrote:

On the boat I met Kit Carson. He was returning from putting his little daughter in a convent school in St. Louis. I was pleased with him and his manner of address at this first meeting. He was a man of medium height, broad-shouldered and deep-chested, with a clear, steady blue eye and frank speech and manner--quiet and unassuming.

Carson, then a little less than thirty-three years of age, was already a national character. The association which began at that time lasted to the end of the Mexican War.

Washington, a city which saw many strange spectacles, had a novel sight on the June day of 1847 when Kit Carson entered it with letters from Frémont. In various phrase, this is the substance of what the newspapers of Washington, New York, and Boston said: Here is the man who has blazed paths for the Pathfinder from the mouth of the Missouri to the Golden Gate; who, in 1846, guided General Stephen W. Kearny's column of the Army of the West through New Mexico to the Pacific; who, when Kearny was surrounded and besieged by the Mexicans, brought Commodore Stockton's forces to the rescue; and who has just ridden from Los Angeles, nearly 4,000 miles, with a military escort for the first 1200 miles of the way, eluding or fighting Mexicans and Indians, as circumstances dictated, carrying to President Polk and to War Secretary Marcy the story of the conquest of California and of the raising of the Stars and Stripes along the Pacific coast.

A little knowledge of history, coupled with even a smaller amount of historical imagination, will enable us to picture the sensation which Carson and his story caused at the Capital. Polk, Webster, Clay, and the other statesmen who met him were impressed with his quiet dignity, his candor and the absence of swagger in his demeanor. No longer could Congress listen with the old-time seriousness to the tales of the alleged Sahara barrenness of the western plains, for Frémont's story, just published in its first instalment, told of streams, of occasional tracts of timber, and of vast herds of buffalo. And here in Washington was the man who had piloted Frémont on his expeditions. From this time dates the decline of the myth of the Great American Desert, which the reports of Pike and of Long and Irving's chronicle of the overland march of the Astorians projected across the map of the second quarter of the nineteenth century from the western border of Missouri to the Sierra Nevada. With their imperialist notions, Senators Benton, Cass, and Douglas saw in Carson the advance courier of manifest destiny.

With the modesty which was one of his characteristics, Carson declined to accept himself at the appraisement which Washington gave him. As he viewed them, his achievements were merely part of his day's work, for the performance of which he deserved no special credit. Accordingly he left the Capital gladly with the despatches which Polk gave him for the military commander in California, and then, after another journey back to Washington, he returned, in 1848, to Taos, and resumed the life of a ranchman, which had been interrupted six years earlier.

Once more now, in Carson's case, we see the initiative, the versatility, and the resourcefulness which the frontier conditions of the older day demanded. In their widely different fields, Crockett, Sam Houston, and Lincoln disclosed these qualities. Appointed in 1853 Indian agent for the district of New Mexico and vicinity by President Pierce,--a post which he held till his death, except for the interlude of the Civil War, in which he rose to the rank of a brigadier-general,--he entered a sphere in which he gained a new distinction. The most formidable Indian-fighter of his age, he was equally successful as a counselor and conciliator of Indians. His administration stands guiltless of any complicity in the "century of dishonor."

As a peacemaker between red men and white and between red men and red, Carson was more effective than a regiment of cavalry. This was because he knew the Indian's nature, talked his tongue, took pains to learn his specific grievances, and could look at things from his point of view. The Indian had confidence in Carson in a larger degree than in any other agent of the older day except General William Clark, Lewis's old partner in the exploration of 1804-06, who, from Monroe's days in the Presidency to Van Buren's, was superintendent of Indian affairs, with headquarters at St. Louis. Except Clark, he was more active in treaty-making between the Government and the red man than any other agent down to his time.

Socially as well as physically Carson was a path-blazer. With the Dawes severalty act of 1887 began a revolution in our methods of dealing with the red men. Many years before that statute was dreamed of, Carson recommended that the Indians be taught to cultivate the soil, that allotments of land be given to them as they become capable of using them, that they be trained to become self-supporting, and that they be prepared to merge themselves into the mass of the country's citizenship. In a crude and general way our Indian policy for the last quarter of a century has proceeded along these lines.

More than any other Indian agent of his day or earlier, Carson exerted influence with the national authorities to induce them to listen to the appeals of the country's wards, to remove their grievances, as far as practicable, to deal with them as individuals, and to arouse in them an ambition to rise to the industrial status of their white neighbors.

Although more than forty-two years have passed since Carson's death many of his acquaintances are still living in various parts of the West. In talks which I have had with some of them in the past year or two they revealed him on a side which the historical and fiction writers never disclosed. As a youth on the plains I caught a glimpse of him in the last year of his life, and as he had always been a hero to me as a boy beyond any other frontier character, I was surprised at the absence in his appearance of everything traditionally associated with the aspect of an Indian fighter. Although he was still alert and resolute, his face had the kindly look which reminded me of Father De Smet, the head of the mission among the Flatheads on the Bitter Root River, in Montana, whom I had met shortly before that time.

"One of my most vivid recollections of Carson," says Major Rafael Chacon, of Trinidad, Colorado, who was an officer in his company of scouts in the campaign of 1855 against the Utes and Apaches, and who was a captain and later on a major in the First Regiment of New Mexican Volunteers in the Civil War, of which Carson was the colonel, "was of one day in 1862 in Albuquerque, when I saw him lying on an Indian blanket in front of his quarters, with his children gleefully crawling all over him and taking from his pockets the candy and the lumps of sugar which he had purchased for them. Their mother, his second wife, Dona Josefa Jaamillo, to whom he was ardently devoted, he called by the pet name of Chipita."

Jacob Beard, eighty-two years of age, of Monrovia, California, who became acquainted with Carson at Taos in 1847, says one of his most pleasant memories is of the day in 1852 when, while working on a ranch near San Francisco, he met Carson, who had just reached that city with a great drove of sheep which he and a few men had conducted from New Mexico, nearly a thousand miles over deserts, across swift and dangerous rivers, and through wild mountain passes, a large part of the course being infested by Indians. "Kit, on seeing you I feel homesick," he exclaimed, "and I think I ought to go back with you." Carson became sympathetic at once, and said: "Well, Jake, we have only one life to live, and in living it we should make the most of our opportunities." Beard added, in telling this to me: "That settled the matter. I returned to the ranch, adjusted my affairs there, saddled my mule, caught up with Carson's party, went back to New Mexico, and lived there for many years afterward."

Daniel L. Taylor, mayor of Trinidad, Colorado, who probably stood closer to Carson during the later years of his life than any other man now living, related recently to me an incident showing his dislike of anything which savored of flattery. One day in 1862 the great frontiersman chanced to stop at Maxwell's ranch, on the Cimmaron River, in New Mexico, a well-known point on the Santa Fé trail, when a regular army officer of high rank who was there exclaimed, exuberantly: "So this is the distinguished Kit Carson who has made so many Indians run." Carson silenced his eulogist by quietly remarking: "Yes, I made some Indians run, but much of the time they were running after me."

For his honesty and courage in exposing an official who was defrauding the Government in 1864-65 he was removed by one of his political superiors from the command at Fort Union to Fort Garland, in Colorado, but he never complained, and the cause of the removal, which was eminently creditable to him, was divulged by others, and not by himself.

"In Kit Carson Park, which I have given to the city of Trinidad," said Mayor Taylor to me, "we shall soon erect a monument to Carson, and we shall try to make the affair interesting to the entire West. In many ways he was the most wonderful man that I ever knew."

Even to his old neighbors and associates Carson was a hero during his lifetime. Merit meets no severer test than this.

An old friend of Carson's told me that his dying exclamation to the physician who was with him, was "_Doctor, compadre, adios_." The date was May 23, 1868. As this last of the great trail-makers was dying, the Union Pacific, pushing westward, and the Central Pacific, moving eastward, were about to meet at Promontory, Utah, and the continent was crossed by rail. The heroic age of western expansion had closed.

THE MACMONNIES PIONEER MONUMENT FOR DENVER

AN EMBODIMENT OF THE WESTERN SPIRIT

See Frontispiece.

The pioneer monument of which the equestrian statue of Kit Carson is the crowning figure consists of a granite shaft decorated with buffalo skulls and oak garlands, rising from basins decorated with bronze sculpture groups typifying the prospector, the hunter and the pioneer mother and child. The fountain, the ground-plan of which is hexagonal, will be raised on five granite steps. Water will spout into basins from mountain-lion and trout heads. At the base, the shaft will be decorated with the arms of Denver, and horns of plenty overflowing with fruit, grain, corn and gold and silver money--all being the produce of Colorado.

In developing the main motive of the monument, which seeks to express the expansive character of the West and its people, the sculptor has sought to reconcile sculpturesque quality and decorative style with the portrayal of types of character, without the loss of local definition. He has sought dignity by avoiding momentary, story-telling situations, and in the portrayal of character rather than episode, has endeavored to condense all that is most broadly typical of the West.

In the prospector he has sought to express something of the philosophy of the miner who alone, in the solitude of the desert, is sustained by constant hope, and a prophetic vision which recognizes great possibilities in the smallest indications. In the hunter he has tried to suggest something of the roving life of the pioneer living among primitive conditions, daily menaced by death, either from starvation or from treacherous enemies, and who is only saved from destruction by constant vigilance and superior woodcraft. In the group of the mother and child, he has endeavored to reflect the high qualities of courage and resourcefulness of the pioneer woman, always ready to meet danger in the defense of her child and her home.

In the equestrian statue of Kit Carson, the sculptor's aim was to sum up the sentiment of the whole western movement, "The Call of the West"--"Westward Ho."

The costumes are from actual objects, including a coat worn by Carson, now owned by Mr. John S. Hough, of Lake City, Colorado. Suggestions for the head of the mounted scout were taken from his early portraits; for the hunter, from Jim Baker, an old scout of Colorado; while the head of the prospector was studied from portraits of prominent Colorado pioneers.

THE DISCOVERY OF GOLD IN CALIFORNIA

BY JOHN S. HITTELL

In the summer of 1847 the American residents of California, numbering perhaps two thousand, and mostly established near San Francisco Bay, looked forward with hope and confidence to the future. Their government held secure possession of the whole territory, and had announced its purpose to hold it permanently. The Spanish Californians, dissatisfied with the manner in which Mexico had ruled them, and convinced that she could not protect them, had abandoned the idea of further resistance. Notwithstanding the unsettled condition of political affairs, the market prices of cows, horses and land, which at that time were the chief articles of sale in the country, had advanced, and this enhancement of values was generally regarded as a certain proof of the increased prosperity that would bless the country under the Stars and Stripes when peace, which seemed near at hand, should be finally made.

It so happened that at this time one of the leading representatives of American interests in California was John A. Sutter, a Swiss by his parentage; a German by the place of his birth in Baden; an American by residence and naturalization in Missouri; and a Mexican by subsequent residence and naturalization in California. In 1839 he had settled at the junction of the Sacramento and American Rivers, near the site of the present city of Sacramento.

When he selected this site it was generally considered very undesirable, but it had advantages which soon became apparent. It was the head of navigation on the Sacramento River for sailing vessels, and steam had not yet made its appearance in the waters of the Pacific. It had a central position in the great interior valley. Its distance of sixty miles from the nearest village, and its situation on one of the main traveled routes of the territory, gave political and military importance to its proprietor. The Mexican governors sought his influence and conferred power on him. But more important than all these advantages was the fact that the only wagon road from the Mississippi Valley to California first reached the navigable waters of the Pacific at Sutter's Fort. This road had been open for several years and was of much prospective importance. The immigration had been interrupted by the war, but would certainly start again as soon as peace should be restored.

The American residents of California, knowing the feeling prevalent among their relatives east of the Rocky Mountains, expected that at least a thousand immigrants, and perhaps two or three times as many, would arrive overland every year; and they supposed that such additions to the population would soon add much to the value of property, to the demand for labor, and to the activity of general business. The immigration would be especially beneficial to Sutter. At his rancho they would reach the first settlement of white men in the Sacramento Valley. There, after their toilsome march across the desert, they would stop and rest. There, they would purchase supplies of food and clothing. There, they would sell their exhausted horses and oxen, and buy fresh ones. There, the penniless would seek employment. There, those who were ready to continue their journey would separate for the valleys to the northward, westward, and southward. There, parties starting for Oregon or "the States" would obtain their last stock of supplies. The advantages of the site were numerous and evident.

But the advantages of Sutter's Fort imposed certain obligations on its owner. He should be prepared to furnish provisions to the immigrants. He should not expect the Americans to be content with the Mexican system of crushing grain by hand on the _metate_, as the flat under millstone of the Mexicans and native Californians is called, the upper millstone being cylindrical and used like a rolling-pin. He ought to build a flour-mill in the Sacramento Valley to grind the wheat which he cultivated in considerable quantity. There was no great difficulty about the construction of such a mill. He had a site for it on his own rancho. The necessary timber for it could be found not far away. Among the Americans at the fort there was skill to build and to manage it. These ideas pleased Sutter; he adopted them, and acted on them. He selected a site and made his plans for a flour-mill, and, partly to get lumber for it, he determined to build a saw-mill also.

Since there was no good timber in the valley, the saw-mill must be in the mountains. The site for it was selected by James W. Marshall, a native of New Jersey, a skilful wheelwright by occupation, industrious, honest, generous, but "cranky," full of wild fancies, and defective in some kinds of business sense. By accident he discovered the gold of California, and his name is inseparably connected with her history, but it is impossible to make a great hero of him. The place for his mill was in the small valley of Coloma, 1500 feet above the level of the sea, and 45 miles from Sutter's Fort, from which it was accessible by wagon without expense for road-making. Good yellow-pine timber was abundant in the surrounding hills; the water-power was more than sufficient; there were opportunities to make a secure dam and race with small expense, and there was little danger of loss by flood. Sutter left the plans and construction of the mill, as well as the selection of the site, to Marshall, and on the 27th of August the two signed an agreement of partnership under which Sutter was to furnish money, men, tools and teams, and Marshall was to supply the skill for building and managing.

While the project of the saw-mill was under consideration some Mormons arrived at New Helvetia and solicited employment. They had belonged to the Mormon battalion, which, after enlisting in Nebraska for one year, marching to the Pacific by way of the Gila, and garrisoning San Diego, had been mustered out at Los Angeles on the preceding 16th of July. They were on their way to Salt Lake, but at the fort received letters advising all who could not bring provisions for the winter to remain in California until the following spring. They were sober, orderly, peaceful, industrious men, and Sutter hired them to work at his flour-mill and saw-mill. He sent six of them to Coloma. Besides these, Marshall had three "Gentile" laborers, and about a dozen Indians. All the white men were natives of the United States.

For four months these men worked at Coloma, seeing no visitors, and rarely communicating with the fort. The mill had been nearly completed, the dam was made, the race had been dug, the gates had been put in place, the water had been turned into the race to carry away some of the loose dirt and gravel, and then had been turned off again. On the afternoon of Monday the 24th of January Marshall was walking in the tail-race, when on its rotten granite bed-rock he saw some yellow particles and picked up several of them. The largest were about the size of grains of wheat. They were smooth, bright, and in color much like brass. He thought they were gold, and went to the mill, where he told the men that he had found a gold mine. At the time little importance was attached to his statement. It was regarded as a proper subject for ridicule.

Marshall hammered his new metal, and found it malleable; he put it into the kitchen fire, and observed that it did not readily melt or become discolored; he compared its color with gold coin; and the more he examined it, the more he was convinced that it was gold. The next morning he paid another visit to the tail-race, where he picked up other specimens; and putting all he had collected, about a spoonful, on the crown of his slouch hat, he went to the mill, where he showed them to the men as proof of his discovery of a gold mine. The scantiness in the provision supply gave Marshall an excuse for going to the fort, though he would probably not have gone at this time if he had not been anxious to know Sutter's opinion of the metal. He rode away, and, according to Sutter's diary, arrived at the fort on Friday the 28th. Sutter had an encyclopedia, sulphuric acid, and scales, and with the help of these, after weighing the specimens in and out of water, he declared that they were undoubtedly gold.

The first record of the discovery, and the only one made on the day of its occurrence, was in the diary of Henry W. Bigler, one of the Mormon laborers at the mill. He was an American by birth, then a young man, and afterwards a citizen of St. George, Utah. He was in the habit of keeping a regular record of his notable observations and experiences, selecting topics for remark with creditable judgment. His journal kept during his service in the Mormon battalion and his subsequent stay in California is one of the valuable historical documents of the State. On the 24th of January, in the evening, Bigler wrote in his diary, "This day some kind of mettle was found in the tail-race that looks like goald."

The artless arrangement of ideas, and the ungrammatical phraseology, accompanied by the regular mental habits that demanded a diary, and the perception that enabled him to catch with his pen the main facts of life as they passed, add much to the interest as well as to the authority of his diary.

For six weeks or more the work on the mill continued without serious interruption. Never having seen placer-mining, and having no distinct idea of the methods of finding and washing gold, the laborers at Coloma did not know how to gather the treasures in their vicinity. The first one to find gold outside of the tail-race was Bigler, who was the hunter of the party, sent out by Marshall at least one day in every week to get venison, which was a very acceptable addition to unground wheat and salt salmon, the main articles of food sent from Sutter's Fort. Deer being numerous in the neighboring hills, it was not necessary that Bigler should go far for game; and more than once he managed, while hunting, to look at the banks of the river and find some of the precious metal. His report of his success stimulated others, and they, too, found gold at various places.

In regard to the beginning of gold washing as a regular occupation there is a conflict of testimony. Bigler says that the first men who, within the range of his observation, devoted themselves to placer-mining were Willis Hudson and five others, all of Sam Brannan's Mormon colony, whom he visited at Mormon Island, on the American River below Coloma, on the 12th of April. On that day, washing the gravel with pans and pan-like Indian baskets, they took out more than two ounces and a half (forty-one dollars) for each man. On the other hand, Isaac Humphrey, who had been a placer-miner in Georgia, and who was the first person to use a rocker in the Sierra Nevada and to teach others there to use it, said that he arrived in Coloma on the 7th of March, and within a week commenced work with a rocker. We may explain the discrepancy between these two authorities by imagining that for some weeks Humphrey purposely avoided observation, as placer-miners often do; or that in the interval of ten years between his first appearance at Coloma and the publication of his reminiscences his memory misled him in the date.

In the spring of 1848 San Francisco, a village of about seven hundred inhabitants, had two newspapers, the _Californian_ and the _Californian Star_, both weeklies. The first printed mention of the gold discovery was a short paragraph in the former, under date of the 15th of March, stating that a gold mine had been found at Sutter's Mill, and that a package of the metal worth thirty dollars had been received at New Helvetia. Five weeks later the _Star_ announced that its editor, E. C. Kemble, was about to take a trip into the country, and on his return would report his observations. He went to Coloma and either saw nothing or understood nothing of what he saw, for he preserved absolute silence in his paper about his trip. On the 20th of May, after a number of men had left San Francisco for the mines, he came out with the opinion that the mines were a "sham," and that the people who had gone to them were "superlatively silly." The increasing production of the mines soon overwhelmed the doubters; and before the middle of June the whole territory resounded with the cry of "_gold!_ GOLD!! GOLD!!!" as it was printed in one of the local newspapers. Nearly all the men hurried off to the mines. Workshops, stores, dwellings, wives and even fields of ripe grain, were left for a time to take care of themselves.

In 1848 the gold hunters of the Sierra Nevada did not need a scientific education. The method of washing gold was then so simple, and they were so skilful in many kinds of industrial labor, that they learned it quickly. Capital, like scientific education and technical experience, was unnecessary to the early placer-miner. With the savings of a week's work he could buy the pick, shovel, pan, and rocker which were his only necessary tools. As compared with other auriferous deposits of which we have definite knowledge, those of the Sierra Nevada were unequaled for the facility of working. They were not deep under ground, or scantily supplied with water, as in Australia and South Africa; nor in a land of tropical heat, as in Brazil; nor in a region of long and severe winters, as in Siberia. The deposits were on land belonging to the National Government, which, without charge, without official supervision, and without previous permit or survey, allowed every citizen to take all the gold from any claim held in accordance with the local regulations adopted by the miners of his district.

The first gold washing was done on the bars of the rivers, where the gravel was shallow, usually not more than two or three feet deep, and where prospecting was easy, and mining was prompt in its returns and liberal in its rewards. The gravel was rich if it yielded twenty-five cents to the pan; and in favorable situations a man could dig and wash out fifty to sixty pans in a day, while with a rocker he could do three times as much. But on the bars of the American, the Bear and the Yuba Rivers it was no uncommon event to obtain from one dollar to five dollars in a pan, and then the yield for a day's work was equal to a princely revenue.

When the rainy season began in the winter of 1848 the rivers rose and covered their bars, and the miners, compelled to hunt claims elsewhere, found them in ravines which were dry through nine months of the year. These were in many cases almost as rich as the bars. It was not uncommon to hear, on good authority, that this or that man had taken out $1000 in a day, and occasionally $5000 or more would reward the day's work. In 1849 the miners generally got $16 a day or more, and when a claim would not yield that much it had no value.

The successful miners demanded provisions, tools, clothing and many luxuries, for which they offered prices double, treble, and tenfold greater than those paid elsewhere. Sailing vessels went to Oregon, Mexico, South America, Australia and Polynesia with gold dust to purchase supplies, and soon filled all the seaports of the Pacific with the contagion of excitement. The reports of the discovery, which began to reach the Atlantic States in September, 1848, commanded little credence there before January; but the news of the arrival of large amounts of gold at Mazatlan, Valparaiso, Panama, and New York in the latter part of the winter put an end to all doubt, and in the spring there was such a rush of peaceful migration as the world had never seen. In 1849, 25,000--according to one authority, 50,000--immigrants went by land, and 23,000 by sea from the region east of the Rocky Mountains, and by sea perhaps 40,000 from other parts of the world, adding twelve-fold to the population and fifty-fold to the productive capacity of the territory. The newcomers were nearly all young, intelligent, and industrious men. Fortunately the diggings were rich enough and extensive enough to give good reward to all of them, and to much larger numbers who came in later years. The gold yield of 1848 was estimated at $5,000,000; that of 1849 at $23,000,000; that of 1850 at $50,000,000; that of 1853 at $65,000,000; and then came the decline which has continued until the present time. In forty-one years the gold yield of California was about $1,200,000,000.

Gold mining was neither novel nor rare, but the unexampled combination of wonderful richness, highly favorable geographical conditions, high intelligence in the miners, and great freedom in the political institutions of California led to such a sudden rush of people, and such an immense production of gold, that the whole world was shaken. The older placers of Brazil and Siberia, and the later ones of Australia and South Africa, had a much smaller influence on general commerce and manufactures.

The discovery of the mines was an American achievement. It was the result of the American conquest, and of preparation for American immigrants. It was made by an American, one of a little group of laborers in which all the white men were Americans, as were the first men who devoted themselves to mining. They also were Americans who subsequently invented the sluice and the hydraulic process of placer-washing, and who planned and constructed the great ditches, flumes, and dams that gave a distinctive character to the placer-mining of California.