First Fam'lies of the Sierras. Joaquin Miller
The wild beasts were utterly amazed. In this place even the red man had never yet set his lodge. Deep, and dark, and still. Even the birds were mute. Great snowy clouds, white as the peaks about which they twined, and to which they flew like flocks of birds at night to rest, would droop and droop through the tops of tossing pines, and all the steep and stupendous mountain side on either hand glistened with dew and rain in Summer, or glittered and gleamed in mail and rime of frost and ice in Winter.
These white, foamy, frightened little rivers ran and tumbled together, as if glad to get down the rugged, rocky mountain, and from under the deep and everlasting shadows of fir, and pine, and tamarack, and spruce, and madrona, and the dark sweeping yew, with its beads of scarlet berries. They fairly shouted as they ran and leapt into the open bit of clearing at the Forks. Perhaps they were glad to get away from the grizzlies up there, and were shouting with delight. At all events, they rose together here, united their forces in the friendliest sort of manner, and so moved on down together with a great deal more dignity than before.
You see it was called the Forks simply because it was the Forks. In California things name themselves, or rather Nature names them, and that name is visibly written on the face of things, and every man may understand who can read.
If they call a man Smith in that country it is simply because he looks as if he ought to be called Smith—Smith, and nothing else.
Now there was Limber Tim, one of the first and best men of all the thousand bearded and brawny set of Missourians, a nervous, weakly, sensitive sort of a fellow, who kept always twisting his legs and arms around as he walked, or talked, or tried to sit still, who never could face anything or any one two minutes without flopping over, or turning around, or twisting about, or trying to turn himself wrong side out, and of course anybody instinctively knew his name as soon as he saw him.
The baptismal name of Limber Tim was Thomas Adolphus Grosvenor. And yet these hairy, half-savage, unread Missourians, who had stopped here in their great pilgrimage of the plains, and never yet seen a city, or the sea, or a school-house, or a church, knew perfectly well that there was a mistake in this matter the moment they saw him, and that his name was Limber Tim.
It is pretty safe to say that if one of these wild and unread Missourians had met this timid limber man meandering down the mountain trail—met him, I mean, for the first time in all his life, without ever having heard of him before—he would have gone straight up to him, taken him by the hand, and shaking it heartily, said,
"How d'ye do, Limber Tim?"
The Forks had just been "struck." Some Missourians had slid into this crack in the earth, had found the little streams full of gold, and making sure that they had not been followed, and, like Indians, obliterating all signs of their trail, they went out slily as they came, struck the great stream of immigrants from the plains, and turned the current of their friends from Pike into this crack of the earth till it flowed full, and there was room for no more. The Forks was at once a little Republic; a sort of San Marino without a patron saint or a single tower.
A thousand men, I said, and not a single woman; that is, not one woman who was what these men called "on the square." Of course, two or three fallen women, soiled doves, had followed the fortunes of these hardy fellows into the new camp, but they were in some respects worse than no women at all.
As was usual with these fallen angels, they kept the camp, or certain elements in the camp, in a constant state of uproar, and contributed more to the rapid filling-up of the new graveyard up on the hill than all other causes put together. The fat and dirty little judge, who really wanted to keep peace, and who felt that he must always give an opinion, when asked why it was that the boys would fight so dreadfully over these women, and kill each other, said, "It is all owing to this glorious climate of Californy."
The truth is, they fought and killed each other, and kept up the regular Sunday funeral all Summer through, not because these bad women were there, but because the good women were not there. Yet possibly "the glorious climate of Californy" had a bit to do with the hot blood of the men, after all.
CHAPTER II.
LITTLE BILLIE PIPER.
Nobody knew when he came. Perhaps nobody cared. He was the smallest man in the camp. In fact he was not a man. He was only a boyish, girlish-looking creature that came and went at will. He was so small he crowded no one, and so no one cried out about him, or paid him any attention, so long as they were all busily taking possession of and measuring off the new Eden.
What a shy, sensitive, girlish-looking man! His boyish face was beautiful, dreamy and childish. It was sometimes half-hidden in a cloud of yellow hair that fell down about it, and was always being pushed back by a small white hand, that looked helpless enough, in the battle of life among these bearded and brawny men on the edge of the new world.
He had a little bit of a cabin on the hill-side, not far way from the Forks, and lived alone. This living alone was always rated to be a bad sign. It was counted selfish. Few men lived alone in the mines. In fact the cabins in the mines were generally jammed and crowded as tight with men as if they had been little tin boxes packed with sardines.
When the bees in this new and busy hive began to settle down to their work; when they in fact got a little of the hurry and flurry of their own affairs a little off their minds, and they had a bit of time to look into the affairs of others, they began to reflect that no man had ever entered this little cabin.
Cabins in the mines in those days were generally open to all. "The latch string," to use the expression of the Sierras, hung on the outside to strangers. But this one peculiar cabin had no "latch-string" for any man.
Men began to get curious. I assert that curiosity is not the monopoly of sex. One Sunday some half idle and wholly inquisitive men went up to this cabin as they passed in the trail, which ran hard by, and asked for a drink of water.
A little hand brought a dipper of water to the door. A boy face lifted up timidly to the great bearded men from Missouri as they in turn drank and passed the big tin dipper from one to the other till it was drained; then the little hand took the dipper back again and disappeared, while the men, half ashamed and wholly confounded, stumbled on up the trail.
The boy had been so civil, so shy, so modest, and yet, when occasion offered, so kind withal, that few could refuse to be his friends; and now he had, only by lifting his eyes, won over this knot of half-vulgar, half-ruffianly fellows wholly to his side.
Once the saloon-keeper, the cinnamon-haired man of the Howling Wilderness, as the one whisky shop of this New Eden was called, met him on the trail as he was going out with a pick and shovel on his shoulder, to prospect for gold.
"What is your name, my boy?"
"Billie Piper."
The timid brown eyes looked up through the cluster of yellow curls, as the boy stepped aside to let the big man pass; and the two, without other words, went on their ways.
Oddly enough they allowed this boy to keep his name. They called him Little Billie Piper.
He was an enigma to the miners. Sometimes he looked to be only fifteen. Then again he was very thoughtful. The fair brow was wrinkled sometimes; there were lines, sabre cuts of time, on the fair delicate face, and then he looked to be at least double that age.
He worked, or at least he went out to work, every day with his pick and pan and shovel; but almost always they saw him standing by the running stream, looking into the water, dreaming, seeing in Nature's mirror the snowy clouds that blew in moving mosaic overhead and through and over the tops of the tossing firs.
He rarely spoke to the men more than in monosyllables.