Transcribed from the 1906 Chatto & Windus edition by David Price,
email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk




THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS




The scene of this little book is on a high mountain.  There are,
indeed, many higher; there are many of a nobler outline.  It is no
place of pilgrimage for the summary globe-trotter; but to one who
lives upon its sides, Mount Saint Helena soon becomes a centre of
interest.  It is the Mont Blanc of one section of the Californian
Coast Range, none of its near neighbours rising to one-half its
altitude.  It looks down on much green, intricate country.  It
feeds in the spring-time many splashing brooks.  From its summit
you must have an excellent lesson of geography:  seeing, to the
south, San Francisco Bay, with Tamalpais on the one hand and Monte
Diablo on the other; to the west and thirty miles away, the open
ocean; eastward, across the corn-lands and thick tule swamps of
Sacramento Valley, to where the Central Pacific railroad begins to
climb the sides of the Sierras; and northward, for what I know, the
white head of Shasta looking down on Oregon.  Three counties, Napa
County, Lake County, and Sonoma County, march across its cliffy
shoulders.  Its naked peak stands nearly four thousand five hundred
feet above the sea; its sides are fringed with forest; and the
soil, where it is bare, glows warm with cinnabar.

Life in its shadow goes rustically forward.  Bucks, and bears, and
rattle-snakes, and former mining operations, are the staple of
men's talk.  Agriculture has only begun to mount above the valley.
And though in a few years from now the whole district may be
smiling with farms, passing trains shaking the mountain to the
heart, many-windowed hotels lighting up the night like factories,
and a prosperous city occupying the site of sleepy Calistoga; yet
in the mean time, around the foot of that mountain the silence of
nature reigns in a great measure unbroken, and the people of hill
and valley go sauntering about their business as in the days before
the flood.

To reach Mount Saint Helena from San Francisco, the traveller has
twice to cross the bay:  once by the busy Oakland Ferry, and again,
after an hour or so of the railway, from Vallejo junction to
Vallejo.  Thence he takes rail once more to mount the long green
strath of Napa Valley.

In all the contractions and expansions of that inland sea, the Bay
of San Francisco, there can be few drearier scenes than the Vallejo
Ferry.  Bald shores and a low, bald islet inclose the sea; through
the narrows the tide bubbles, muddy like a river.  When we made the
passage (bound, although yet we knew it not, for Silverado) the
steamer jumped, and the black buoys were dancing in the jabble; the
ocean breeze blew killing chill; and, although the upper sky was
still unflecked with vapour, the sea fogs were pouring in from
seaward, over the hilltops of Marin county, in one great,
shapeless, silver cloud.

South Vallejo is typical of many Californian towns.  It was a
blunder; the site has proved untenable; and, although it is still
such a young place by the scale of Europe, it has already begun to
be deserted for its neighbour and namesake, North Vallejo.  A long
pier, a number of drinking saloons, a hotel of a great size, marshy
pools where the frogs keep up their croaking, and even at high noon
the entire absence of any human face or voice--these are the marks
of South Vallejo.  Yet there was a tall building beside the pier,
labelled the Star Flour Mills; and sea-going, full-rigged ships lay
close along shore, waiting for their cargo.  Soon these would be
plunging round the Horn, soon the flour from the Star Flour Mills
would be landed on the wharves of Liverpool.  For that, too, is one
of England's outposts; thither, to this gaunt mill, across the
Atlantic and Pacific deeps and round about the icy Horn, this crowd
of great, three-masted, deep-sea ships come, bringing nothing, and
return with bread.

The Frisby House, for that was the name of the hotel, was a place
of fallen fortunes, like the town.  It was now given up to
labourers, and partly ruinous.  At dinner there was the ordinary
display of what is called in the west a TWO-BIT HOUSE:  the
tablecloth checked red and white, the plague of flies, the wire
hencoops over the dishes, the great variety and invariable vileness
of the food and the rough coatless men devoting it in silence.  In
our bedroom, the stove would not burn, though it would smoke; and
while one window would not open, the other would not shut.  There
was a view on a bit of empty road, a few dark houses, a donkey
wandering with its shadow on a slope, and a blink of sea, with a
tall ship lying anchored in the moonlight.  All about that dreary
inn frogs sang their ungainly chorus.

Early the next morning we mounted the hill along a wooden footway,
bridging one marish spot after another.  Here and there, as we
ascended, we passed a house embowered in white roses.  More of the
bay became apparent, and soon the blue peak of Tamalpais rose above
the green level of the island opposite.  It told us we were still
but a little way from the city of the Golden Gates, already, at
that hour, beginning to awake among the sand-hills.  It called to
us over the waters as with the voice of a bird.  Its stately head,
blue as a sapphire on the paler azure of the sky, spoke to us of
wider outlooks and the bright Pacific.  For Tamalpais stands
sentry, like a lighthouse, over the Golden Gates, between the bay
and the open ocean, and looks down indifferently on both.  Even as
we saw and hailed it from Vallejo, seamen, far out at sea, were
scanning it with shaded eyes; and, as if to answer to the thought,
one of the great ships below began silently to clothe herself with
white sails, homeward bound for England.

For some way beyond Vallejo the railway led us through bald green
pastures.  On the west the rough highlands of Marin shut off the
ocean; in the midst, in long, straggling, gleaming arms, the bay
died out among the grass; there were few trees and few enclosures;
the sun shone wide over open uplands, the displumed hills stood
clear against the sky.  But by-and-by these hills began to draw
nearer on either hand, and first thicket and then wood began to
clothe their sides; and soon we were away from all signs of the
sea's neighbourhood, mounting an inland, irrigated valley.  A great
variety of oaks stood, now severally, now in a becoming grove,
among the fields and vineyards.  The towns were compact, in about
equal proportions, of bright, new wooden houses and great and
growing forest trees; and the chapel bell on the engine sounded
most festally that sunny Sunday, as we drew up at one green town
after another, with the townsfolk trooping in their Sunday's best
to see the strangers, with the sun sparkling on the clean houses,
and great domes of foliage humming overhead in the breeze.

This pleasant Napa Valley is, at its north end, blockaded by our
mountain.  There, at Calistoga, the railroad ceases, and the
traveller who intends faring farther, to the Geysers or to the
springs in Lake County, must cross the spurs of the mountain by
stage.  Thus, Mount Saint Helena is not only a summit, but a
frontier; and, up to the time of writing, it has stayed the
progress of the iron horse.




PART I--IN THE VALLEY




CHAPTER I--CALISTOGA



It is difficult for a European to imagine Calistoga, the whole
place is so new, and of such an accidental pattern; the very name,
I hear, was invented at a supper-party by the man who found the
springs.

The railroad and the highway come up the valley about parallel to
one another.  The street of Calistoga joins the perpendicular to
both--a wide street, with bright, clean, low houses, here and there
a verandah over the sidewalk, here and there a horse-post, here and
there lounging townsfolk.  Other streets are marked out, and most
likely named; for these towns in the New World begin with a firm
resolve to grow larger, Washington and Broadway, and then First and
Second, and so forth, being boldly plotted out as soon as the
community indulges in a plan.  But, in the meanwhile, all the life
and most of the houses of Calistoga are concentrated upon that
street between the railway station and the road.  I never heard it
called by any name, but I will hazard a guess that it is either
Washington or Broadway.  Here are the blacksmith's, the chemist's,
the general merchant's, and Kong Sam Kee, the Chinese laundryman's;
here, probably, is the office of the local paper (for the place has
a paper--they all have papers); and here certainly is one of the
hotels, Cheeseborough's, whence the daring Foss, a man dear to
legend, starts his horses for the Geysers.

It must be remembered that we are here in a land of stage-drivers
and highwaymen:  a land, in that sense, like England a hundred
years ago.  The highway robber--road-agent, he is quaintly called--
is still busy in these parts.  The fame of Vasquez is still young.
Only a few years go, the Lakeport stage was robbed a mile or two
from Calistoga.  In 1879, the dentist of Mendocino City, fifty
miles away upon the coast, suddenly threw off the garments of his
trade, like Grindoff, in The Miller and his Men, and flamed forth
in his second dress as a captain of banditti.  A great robbery was
followed by a long chase, a chase of days if not of weeks, among
the intricate hill-country; and the chase was followed by much
desultory fighting, in which several--and the dentist, I believe,
amongst the number--bit the dust.  The grass was springing for the
first time, nourished upon their blood, when I arrived in
Calistoga.  I am reminded of another highwayman of that same year.
"He had been unwell," so ran his humorous defence, "and the doctor
told him to take something, so he took the express-box."

The cultus of the stage-coachman always flourishes highest where
there are thieves on the road, and where the guard travels armed,
and the stage is not only a link between country and city, and the
vehicle of news, but has a faint warfaring aroma, like a man who
should be brother to a soldier.  California boasts her famous
stage-drivers, and among the famous Foss is not forgotten.  Along
the unfenced, abominable mountain roads, he launches his team with
small regard to human life or the doctrine of probabilities.
Flinching travellers, who behold themselves coasting eternity at
every corner, look with natural admiration at their driver's huge,
impassive, fleshy countenance.  He has the very face for the driver
in Sam Weller's anecdote, who upset the election party at the
required point.  Wonderful tales are current of his readiness and
skill.  One in particular, of how one of his horses fell at a
ticklish passage of the road, and how Foss let slip the reins, and,
driving over the fallen animal, arrived at the next stage with only
three.  This I relate as I heard it, without guarantee.

I only saw Foss once, though, strange as it may sound, I have twice
talked with him.  He lives out of Calistoga, at a ranche called
Fossville.  One evening, after he was long gone home, I dropped
into Cheeseborough's, and was asked if I should like to speak with
Mr. Foss.  Supposing that the interview was impossible, and that I
was merely called upon to subscribe the general sentiment, I boldly
answered "Yes."  Next moment, I had one instrument at my ear,
another at my mouth and found myself, with nothing in the world to
say, conversing with a man several miles off among desolate hills.
Foss rapidly and somewhat plaintively brought the conversation to
an end; and he returned to his night's grog at Fossville, while I
strolled forth again on Calistoga high street.  But it was an odd
thing that here, on what we are accustomed to consider the very
skirts of civilization, I should have used the telephone for the
first time in my civilized career.  So it goes in these young
countries; telephones, and telegraphs, and newspapers, and
advertisements running far ahead among the Indians and the grizzly
bears.

Alone, on the other side of the railway, stands the Springs Hotel,
with its attendant cottages.  The floor of the valley is extremely
level to the very roots of the hills; only here and there a
hillock, crowned with pines, rises like the barrow of some
chieftain famed in war; and right against one of these hillocks is
the Springs Hotel--is or was; for since I was there the place has
been destroyed by fire, and has risen again from its ashes.  A lawn
runs about the house, and the lawn is in its turn surrounded by a
system of little five-roomed cottages, each with a verandah and a
weedy palm before the door.  Some of the cottages are let to
residents, and these are wreathed in flowers.  The rest are
occupied by ordinary visitors to the Hotel; and a very pleasant way
this is, by which you have a little country cottage of your own,
without domestic burthens, and by the day or week.

The whole neighbourhood of Mount Saint Helena is full of sulphur
and of boiling springs.  The Geysers are famous; they were the
great health resort of the Indians before the coming of the whites.
Lake County is dotted with spas; Hot Springs and White Sulphur
Springs are the names of two stations on the Napa Valley railroad;
and Calistoga itself seems to repose on a mere film above a
boiling, subterranean lake.  At one end of the hotel enclosure are
the springs from which it takes its name, hot enough to scald a
child seriously while I was there.  At the other end, the tenant of
a cottage sank a well, and there also the water came up boiling.
It keeps this end of the valley as warm as a toast.  I have gone
across to the hotel a little after five in the morning, when a sea
fog from the Pacific was hanging thick and gray, and dark and dirty
overhead, and found the thermometer had been up before me, and had
already climbed among the nineties; and in the stress of the day it
was sometimes too hot to move about.

But in spite of this heat from above and below, doing one on both
sides, Calistoga was a pleasant place to dwell in; beautifully
green, for it was then that favoured moment in the Californian
year, when the rains are over and the dusty summer has not yet set
in; often visited by fresh airs, now from the mountain, now across
Sonoma from the sea; very quiet, very idle, very silent but for the
breezes and the cattle bells afield.  And there was something
satisfactory in the sight of that great mountain that enclosed us
to the north:  whether it stood, robed in sunshine, quaking to its
topmost pinnacle with the heat and brightness of the day; or
whether it set itself to weaving vapours, wisp after wisp growing,
trembling, fleeting, and fading in the blue.

The tangled, woody, and almost trackless foot-hills that enclose
the valley, shutting it off from Sonoma on the west, and from Yolo
on the east--rough as they were in outline, dug out by winter
streams, crowned by cliffy bluffs and nodding pine trees--wore
dwarfed into satellites by the bulk and bearing of Mount Saint
Helena.  She over-towered them by two-thirds of her own stature.
She excelled them by the boldness of her profile.  Her great bald
summit, clear of trees and pasture, a cairn of quartz and cinnabar,
rejected kinship with the dark and shaggy wilderness of lesser
hill-tops.



CHAPTER II--THE PETRIFIED FOREST



We drove off from the Springs Hotel about three in the afternoon.
The sun warmed me to the heart.  A broad, cool wind streamed
pauselessly down the valley, laden with perfume.  Up at the top
stood Mount Saint Helena, a bulk of mountain, bare atop, with tree-
fringed spurs, and radiating warmth.  Once we saw it framed in a
grove of tall and exquisitely graceful white oaks, in line and
colour a finished composition.  We passed a cow stretched by the
roadside, her bell slowly beating time to the movement of her
ruminating jaws, her big red face crawled over by half a dozen
flies, a monument of content.

A little farther, and we struck to the left up a mountain road, and
for two hours threaded one valley after another, green, tangled,
full of noble timber, giving us every now and again a sight of
Mount Saint Helena and the blue hilly distance, and crossed by many
streams, through which we splashed to the carriage-step.  To the
right or the left, there was scarce any trace of man but the road
we followed; I think we passed but one ranchero's house in the
whole distance, and that was closed and smokeless.  But we had the
society of these bright streams--dazzlingly clear, as is their
wont, splashing from the wheels in diamonds, and striking a lively
coolness through the sunshine.  And what with the innumerable
variety of greens, the masses of foliage tossing in the breeze, the
glimpses of distance, the descents into seemingly impenetrable
thickets, the continual dodging of the road which made haste to
plunge again into the covert, we had a fine sense of woods, and
spring-time, and the open air.

Our driver gave me a lecture by the way on Californian trees--a
thing I was much in need of, having fallen among painters who know
the name of nothing, and Mexicans who know the name of nothing in
English.  He taught me the madrona, the manzanita, the buck-eye,
the maple; he showed me the crested mountain quail; he showed me
where some young redwoods were already spiring heavenwards from the
ruins of the old; for in this district all had already perished:
redwoods and redskins, the two noblest indigenous living things,
alike condemned.

At length, in a lonely dell, we came on a huge wooden gate with a
sign upon it like an inn.  "The Petrified Forest.  Proprietor:  C.
Evans," ran the legend.  Within, on a knoll of sward, was the house
of the proprietor, and another smaller house hard by to serve as a
museum, where photographs and petrifactions were retailed.  It was
a pure little isle of touristry among these solitary hills.

The proprietor was a brave old white-faced Swede.  He had wandered
this way, Heaven knows how, and taken up his acres--I forget how
many years ago--all alone, bent double with sciatica, and with six
bits in his pocket and an axe upon his shoulder.  Long, useless
years of seafaring had thus discharged him at the end, penniless
and sick.  Without doubt he had tried his luck at the diggings, and
got no good from that; without doubt he had loved the bottle, and
lived the life of Jack ashore.  But at the end of these adventures,
here he came; and, the place hitting his fancy, down he sat to make
a new life of it, far from crimps and the salt sea.  And the very
sight of his ranche had done him good.  It was "the handsomest spot
in the Californy mountains."  "Isn't it handsome, now?" he said.
Every penny he makes goes into that ranche to make it handsomer.
Then the climate, with the sea-breeze every afternoon in the
hottest summer weather, had gradually cured the sciatica; and his
sister and niece were now domesticated with him for company--or,
rather, the niece came only once in the two days, teaching music
the meanwhile in the valley.  And then, for a last piece of luck,
"the handsomest spot in the Californy mountains" had produced a
petrified forest, which Mr. Evans now shows at the modest figure of
half a dollar a head, or two-thirds of his capital when he first
came there with an axe and a sciatica.

This tardy favourite of fortune--hobbling a little, I think, as if
in memory of the sciatica, but with not a trace that I can remember
of the sea--thoroughly ruralized from head to foot, proceeded to
escort us up the hill behind his house.

"Who first found the forest?" asked my wife.

"The first?  I was that man," said he.  "I was cleaning up the
pasture for my beasts, when I found THIS"--kicking a great redwood
seven feet in diameter, that lay there on its side, hollow heart,
clinging lumps of bark, all changed into gray stone, with veins of
quartz between what had been the layers of the wood.

"Were you surprised?"

"Surprised?  No!  What would I be surprised about?  What did I know
about petrifactions--following the sea?  Petrifaction!  There was
no such word in my language!  I knew about putrifaction, though!  I
thought it was a stone; so would you, if you was cleaning up
pasture."

And now he had a theory of his own, which I did not quite grasp,
except that the trees had not "grewed" there.  But he mentioned,
with evident pride, that he differed from all the scientific people
who had visited the spot; and he flung about such words as "tufa"
and "scilica" with careless freedom.

When I mentioned I was from Scotland, "My old country," he said;
"my old country"--with a smiling look and a tone of real affection
in his voice.  I was mightily surprised, for he was obviously
Scandinavian, and begged him to explain.  It seemed he had learned
his English and done nearly all his sailing in Scotch ships.  "Out
of Glasgow," said he, "or Greenock; but that's all the same--they
all hail from Glasgow." And he was so pleased with me for being a
Scotsman, and his adopted compatriot, that he made me a present of
a very beautiful piece of petrifaction--I believe the most
beautiful and portable he had.

Here was a man, at least, who was a Swede, a Scot, and an American,
acknowledging some kind allegiance to three lands.  Mr. Wallace's
Scoto-Circassian will not fail to come before the reader.  I have
myself met and spoken with a Fifeshire German, whose combination of
abominable accents struck me dumb.  But, indeed, I think we all
belong to many countries.  And perhaps this habit of much travel,
and the engendering of scattered friendships, may prepare the
euthanasia of ancient nations.

And the forest itself?  Well, on a tangled, briery hillside--for
the pasture would bear a little further cleaning up, to my eyes--
there lie scattered thickly various lengths of petrified trunk,
such as the one already mentioned.  It is very curious, of course,
and ancient enough, if that were all.  Doubtless, the heart of the
geologist beats quicker at the sight; but, for my part, I was
mightily unmoved.  Sight-seeing is the art of disappointment.


"There's nothing under heaven so blue,
That's fairly worth the travelling to."


But, fortunately, Heaven rewards us with many agreeable prospects
and adventures by the way; and sometimes, when we go out to see a
petrified forest, prepares a far more delightful curiosity, in the
form of Mr. Evans, whom may all prosperity attend throughout a long
and green old age.



CHAPTER III--NAPA WINE



I was interested in Californian wine.  Indeed, I am interested in
all wines, and have been all my life, from the raisin wine that a
schoolfellow kept secreted in his play-box up to my last discovery,
those notable Valtellines, that once shone upon the board of
Caesar.

Some of us, kind old Pagans, watch with dread the shadows falling
on the age:  how the unconquerable worm invades the sunny terraces
of France, and Bordeaux is no more, and the Rhone a mere Arabia
Petraea.  Chateau Neuf is dead, and I have never tasted it;
Hermitage--a hermitage indeed from all life's sorrows--lies
expiring by the river.  And in the place of these imperial elixirs,
beautiful to every sense, gem-hued, flower-scented, dream-
compellers:- behold upon the quays at Cette the chemicals arrayed;
behold the analyst at Marseilles, raising hands in obsecration,
attesting god Lyoeus, and the vats staved in, and the dishonest
wines poured forth among the sea.  It is not Pan only; Bacchus,
too, is dead.

If wine is to withdraw its most poetic countenance, the sun of the
white dinner-cloth, a deity to be invoked by two or three, all
fervent, hushing their talk, degusting tenderly, and storing
reminiscences--for a bottle of good wine, like a good act, shines
ever in the retrospect--if wine is to desert us, go thy ways, old
Jack!  Now we begin to have compunctions, and look back at the
brave bottles squandered upon dinner-parties, where the guests
drank grossly, discussing politics the while, and even the
schoolboy "took his whack," like liquorice water.  And at the same
time, we look timidly forward, with a spark of hope, to where the
new lands, already weary of producing gold, begin to green with
vineyards.  A nice point in human history falls to be decided by
Californian and Australian wines.

Wine in California is still in the experimental stage; and when you
taste a vintage, grave economical questions are involved.  The
beginning of vine-planting is like the beginning of mining for the
precious metals:  the wine-grower also "Prospects." One corner of
land after another is tried with one kind of grape after another.
This is a failure; that is better; a third best.  So, bit by bit,
they grope about for their Clos Vougeot and Lafite.  Those lodes
and pockets of earth, more precious than the precious ores, that
yield inimitable fragrance and soft fire; those virtuous Bonanzas,
where the soil has sublimated under sun and stars to something
finer, and the wine is bottled poetry:  these still lie
undiscovered; chaparral conceals, thicket embowers them; the miner
chips the rock and wanders farther, and the grizzly muses
undisturbed.  But there they bide their hour, awaiting their
Columbus; and nature nurses and prepares them.  The smack of
Californian earth shall linger on the palate of your grandson.

Meanwhile the wine is merely a good wine; the best that I have
tasted better than a Beaujolais, and not unlike.  But the trade is
poor; it lives from hand to mouth, putting its all into
experiments, and forced to sell its vintages.  To find one properly
matured, and bearing its own name, is to be fortune's favourite.

Bearing its own name, I say, and dwell upon the innuendo.

"You want to know why California wine is not drunk in the States?"
a San Francisco wine merchant said to me, after he had shown me
through his premises.  "Well, here's the reason."

And opening a large cupboard, fitted with many little drawers, he
proceeded to shower me all over with a great variety of gorgeously
tinted labels, blue, red, or yellow, stamped with crown or coronet,
and hailing from such a profusion of clos and chateaux, that a
single department could scarce have furnished forth the names.  But
it was strange that all looked unfamiliar.

"Chateau X-?" said I.  "I never heard of that."

"I dare say not," said he.  "I had been reading one of X-'s
novels."

They were all castles in Spain!  But that sure enough is the reason
why California wine is not drunk in the States.

Napa valley has been long a seat of the wine-growing industry.  It
did not here begin, as it does too often, in the low valley lands
along the river, but took at once to the rough foot-hills, where
alone it can expect to prosper.  A basking inclination, and stones,
to be a reservoir of the day's heat, seem necessary to the soil for
wine; the grossness of the earth must be evaporated, its marrow
daily melted and refined for ages; until at length these clods that
break below our footing, and to the eye appear but common earth,
are truly and to the perceiving mind, a masterpiece of nature.  The
dust of Richebourg, which the wind carries away, what an apotheosis
of the dust!  Not man himself can seem a stranger child of that
brown, friable powder, than the blood and sun in that old flask
behind the faggots.

A Californian vineyard, one of man's outposts in the wilderness,
has features of its own.  There is nothing here to remind you of
the Rhine or Rhone, of the low cote d'or, or the infamous and
scabby deserts of Champagne; but all is green, solitary, covert.
We visited two of them, Mr. Schram's and Mr. M'Eckron's, sharing
the same glen.

Some way down the valley below Calistoga, we turned sharply to the
south and plunged into the thick of the wood.  A rude trail rapidly
mounting; a little stream tinkling by on the one hand, big enough
perhaps after the rains, but already yielding up its life; overhead
and on all sides a bower of green and tangled thicket, still
fragrant and still flower-bespangled by the early season, where
thimble-berry played the part of our English hawthorn, and the
buck-eyes were putting forth their twisted horns of blossom:
through all this, we struggled toughly upwards, canted to and fro
by the roughness of the trail, and continually switched across the
face by sprays of leaf or blossom.  The last is no great
inconvenience at home; but here in California it is a matter of
some moment.  For in all woods and by every wayside there prospers
an abominable shrub or weed, called poison-oak, whose very
neighbourhood is venomous to some, and whose actual touch is
avoided by the most impervious.

The two houses, with their vineyards, stood each in a green niche
of its own in this steep and narrow forest dell.  Though they were
so near, there was already a good difference in level; and Mr.
M'Eckron's head must be a long way under the feet of Mr. Schram.
No more had been cleared than was necessary for cultivation; close
around each oasis ran the tangled wood; the glen enfolds them;
there they lie basking in sun and silence, concealed from all but
the clouds and the mountain birds.

Mr. M'Eckron's is a bachelor establishment; a little bit of a
wooden house, a small cellar hard by in the hillside, and a patch
of vines planted and tended single-handed by himself.  He had but
recently began; his vines were young, his business young also; but
I thought he had the look of the man who succeeds.  He hailed from
Greenock:  he remembered his father putting him inside Mons Meg,
and that touched me home; and we exchanged a word or two of Scotch,
which pleased me more than you would fancy.

Mr. Schram's, on the other hand, is the oldest vineyard in the
valley, eighteen years old, I think; yet he began a penniless
barber, and even after he had broken ground up here with his black
malvoisies, continued for long to tramp the valley with his razor.
Now, his place is the picture of prosperity:  stuffed birds in the
verandah, cellars far dug into the hillside, and resting on pillars
like a bandit's cave:- all trimness, varnish, flowers, and
sunshine, among the tangled wildwood.  Stout, smiling Mrs. Schram,
who has been to Europe and apparently all about the States for
pleasure, entertained Fanny in the verandah, while I was tasting
wines in the cellar.  To Mr. Schram this was a solemn office; his
serious gusto warmed my heart; prosperity had not yet wholly
banished a certain neophite and girlish trepidation, and he
followed every sip and read my face with proud anxiety.  I tasted
all.  I tasted every variety and shade of Schramberger, red and
white Schramberger, Burgundy Schramberger, Schramberger Hock,
Schramberger Golden Chasselas, the latter with a notable bouquet,
and I fear to think how many more.  Much of it goes to London--
most, I think; and Mr. Schram has a great notion of the English
taste.

In this wild spot, I did not feel the sacredness of ancient
cultivation.  It was still raw, it was no Marathon, and no
Johannisberg; yet the stirring sunlight, and the growing vines, and
the vats and bottles in the cavern, made a pleasant music for the
mind.  Here, also, earth's cream was being skimmed and garnered;
and the London customers can taste, such as it is, the tang of the
earth in this green valley.  So local, so quintessential is a wine,
that it seems the very birds in the verandah might communicate a
flavour, and that romantic cellar influence the bottle next to be
uncorked in Pimlico, and the smile of jolly Mr. Schram might mantle
in the glass.

But these are but experiments.  All things in this new land are
moving farther on:  the wine-vats and the miner's blasting tools
but picket for a night, like Bedouin pavillions; and to-morrow, to
fresh woods!  This stir of change and these perpetual echoes of the
moving footfall, haunt the land.  Men move eternally, still chasing
Fortune; and, fortune found, still wander.  As we drove back to
Calistoga, the road lay empty of mere passengers, but its green
side was dotted with the camps of travelling families:  one
cumbered with a great waggonful of household stuff, settlers going
to occupy a ranche they had taken up in Mendocino, or perhaps
Tehama County; another, a party in dust coats, men and women, whom
we found camped in a grove on the roadside, all on pleasure bent,
with a Chinaman to cook for them, and who waved their hands to us
as we drove by.



CHAPTER IV--THE SCOT ABROAD



A few pages back, I wrote that a man belonged, in these days, to a
variety of countries; but the old land is still the true love, the
others are but pleasant infidelities.  Scotland is indefinable; it
has no unity except upon the map.  Two languages, many dialects,
innumerable forms of piety, and countless local patriotisms and
prejudices, part us among ourselves more widely than the extreme
east and west of that great continent of America.  When I am at
home, I feel a man from Glasgow to be something like a rival, a man
from Barra to be more than half a foreigner.  Yet let us meet in
some far country, and, whether we hail from the braes of Manor or
the braes of Mar, some ready-made affection joins us on the
instant.  It is not race.  Look at us.  One is Norse, one Celtic,
and another Saxon.  It is not community of tongue.  We have it not
among ourselves; and we have it almost to perfection, with English,
or Irish, or American.  It is no tie of faith, for we detest each
other's errors.  And yet somewhere, deep down in the heart of each
one of us, something yearns for the old land, and the old kindly
people.

Of all mysteries of the human heart, this is perhaps the most
inscrutable.  There is no special loveliness in that gray country,
with its rainy, sea-beat archipelago; its fields of dark mountains;
its unsightly places, black with coal; its treeless, sour,
unfriendly looking corn-lands; its quaint, gray, castled city,
where the bells clash of a Sunday, and the wind squalls, and the
salt showers fly and beat.  I do not even know if I desire to live
there; but let me hear, in some far land, a kindred voice sing out,
"Oh, why left I my hame?" and it seems at once as if no beauty
under the kind heavens, and no society of the wise and good, can
repay me for my absence from my country.  And though I think I
would rather die elsewhere, yet in my heart of hearts I long to be
buried among good Scots clods.  I will say it fairly, it grows on
me with every year:  there are no stars so lovely as Edinburgh
street-lamps.  When I forget thee, auld Reekie, may my right hand
forget its cunning!

The happiest lot on earth is to be born a Scotchman.  You must pay
for it in many ways, as for all other advantages on earth.  You
have to learn the paraphrases and the shorter catechism; you
generally take to drink; your youth, as far as I can find out, is a
time of louder war against society, of more outcry and tears and
turmoil, than if you had been born, for instance, in England.  But
somehow life is warmer and closer; the hearth burns more redly; the
lights of home shine softer on the rainy street; the very names,
endeared in verse and music, cling nearer round our hearts.  An
Englishman may meet an Englishman to-morrow, upon Chimborazo, and
neither of them care; but when the Scotch wine-grower told me of
Mons Meg, it was like magic.


"From the dim shieling on the misty island
Mountains divide us, and a world of seas;
Yet still our hearts are true, our hearts are Highland,
And we, in dreams, behold the Hebrides."


And, Highland and Lowland, all our hearts are Scotch.

Only a few days after I had seen M'Eckron, a message reached me in
my cottage.  It was a Scotchman who had come down a long way from
the hills to market.  He had heard there was a countryman in
Calistoga, and came round to the hotel to see him.  We said a few
words to each other; we had not much to say--should never have seen
each other had we stayed at home, separated alike in space and in
society; and then we shook hands, and he went his way again to his
ranche among the hills, and that was all.

Another Scotchman there was, a resident, who for the more love of
the common country, douce, serious, religious man, drove me all
about the valley, and took as much interest in me as if I had been
his son:  more, perhaps; for the son has faults too keenly felt,
while the abstract countryman is perfect--like a whiff of peats.

And there was yet another.  Upon him I came suddenly, as he was
calmly entering my cottage, his mind quite evidently bent on
plunder:  a man of about fifty, filthy, ragged, roguish, with a
chimney-pot hat and a tail coat, and a pursing of his mouth that
might have been envied by an elder of the kirk.  He had just such a
face as I have seen a dozen times behind the plate.

"Hullo, sir!" I cried.  "Where are you going?"

He turned round without a quiver.

"You're a Scotchman, sir?" he said gravely.  "So am I; I come from
Aberdeen.  This is my card," presenting me with a piece of
pasteboard which he had raked out of some gutter in the period of
the rains.  "I was just examining this palm," he continued,
indicating the misbegotten plant before our door, "which is the
largest spAcimen I have yet observed in Califoarnia."

There were four or five larger within sight.  But where was the use
of argument?  He produced a tape-line, made me help him to measure
the tree at the level of the ground, and entered the figures in a
large and filthy pocket-book, all with the gravity of Solomon.  He
then thanked me profusely, remarking that such little services were
due between countrymen; shook hands with me, "for add lang syne,"
as he said; and took himself solemnly away, radiating dirt and
humbug as he went.

A month or two after this encounter of mine, there came a Scot to
Sacramento--perhaps from Aberdeen.  Anyway, there never was any one
more Scotch in this wide world.  He could sing and dance, and
drink, I presume; and he played the pipes with vigour and success.
All the Scotch in Sacramento became infatuated with him, and spent
their spare time and money, driving him about in an open cab,
between drinks, while he blew himself scarlet at the pipes.  This
is a very sad story.  After he had borrowed money from every one,
he and his pipes suddenly disappeared from Sacramento, and when I
last heard, the police were looking for him.

I cannot say how this story amused me, when I felt myself so
thoroughly ripe on both sides to be duped in the same way.

It is at least a curious thing, to conclude, that the races which
wander widest, Jews and Scotch, should be the most clannish in the
world.  But perhaps these two are cause and effect:  "For ye were
strangers in the land of Egypt."




PART II--WITH THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL




CHAPTER I.--TO INTRODUCE MR. KELMAR



One thing in this new country very particularly strikes a stranger,
and that is the number of antiquities.  Already there have been
many cycles of population succeeding each other, and passing away
and leaving behind them relics.  These, standing on into changed
times, strike the imagination as forcibly as any pyramid or feudal
tower.  The towns, like the vineyards, are experimentally founded:
they grow great and prosper by passing occasions; and when the lode
comes to an end, and the miners move elsewhere, the town remains
behind them, like Palmyra in the desert.  I suppose there are, in
no country in the world, so many deserted towns as here in
California.

The whole neighbourhood of Mount Saint Helena, now so quiet and
sylvan, was once alive with mining camps and villages.  Here there
would be two thousand souls under canvas; there one thousand or
fifteen hundred ensconced, as if for ever, in a town of comfortable
houses.  But the luck had failed, the mines petered out; and the
army of miners had departed, and left this quarter of the world to
the rattlesnakes and deer and grizzlies, and to the slower but
steadier advance of husbandry.

It was with an eye on one of these deserted places, Pine Flat, on
the Geysers road, that we had come first to Calistoga.  There is
something singularly enticing in the idea of going, rent-free, into
a ready-made house.  And to the British merchant, sitting at home
at ease, it may appear that, with such a roof over your head and a
spring of clear water hard by, the whole problem of the squatter's
existence would be solved.  Food, however, has yet to be
considered, I will go as far as most people on tinned meats; some
of the brightest moments of my life were passed over tinned mulli-
gatawney in the cabin of a sixteen-ton schooner, storm-stayed in
Portree Bay; but after suitable experiments, I pronounce
authoritatively that man cannot live by tins alone.  Fresh meat
must be had on an occasion.  It is true that the great Foss,
driving by along the Geysers road, wooden-faced, but glorified with
legend, might have been induced to bring us meat, but the great
Foss could hardly bring us milk.  To take a cow would have involved
taking a field of grass and a milkmaid; after which it would have
been hardly worth while to pause, and we might have added to our
colony a flock of sheep and an experienced butcher.

It is really very disheartening how we depend on other people in
this life.  "Mihi est propositum," as you may see by the motto, "id
quod regibus;" and behold it cannot be carried out, unless I find a
neighbour rolling in cattle.

Now, my principal adviser in this matter was one whom I will call
Kelmar.  That was not what he called himself, but as soon as I set
eyes on him, I knew it was or ought to be his name; I am sure it
will be his name among the angels.  Kelmar was the store-keeper, a
Russian Jew, good-natured, in a very thriving way of business, and,
on equal terms, one of the most serviceable of men.  He also had
something of the expression of a Scotch country elder, who, by some
peculiarity, should chance to be a Hebrew.  He had a projecting
under lip, with which he continually smiled, or rather smirked.
Mrs. Kelmar was a singularly kind woman; and the oldest son had
quite a dark and romantic bearing, and might be heard on summer
evenings playing sentimental airs on the violin.

I had no idea, at the time I made his acquaintance, what an
important person Kelmar was.  But the Jew store-keepers of
California, profiting at once by the needs and habits of the
people, have made themselves in too many cases the tyrants of the
rural population.  Credit is offered, is pressed on the new
customer, and when once he is beyond his depth, the tune changes,
and he is from thenceforth a white slave.  I believe, even from the
little I saw, that Kelmar, if he choose to put on the screw, could
send half the settlers packing in a radius of seven or eight miles
round Calistoga.  These are continually paying him, but are never
suffered to get out of debt.  He palms dull goods upon them, for
they dare not refuse to buy; he goes and dines with them when he is
on an outing, and no man is loudlier welcomed; he is their family
friend, the director of their business, and, to a degree elsewhere
unknown in modern days, their king.

For some reason, Kelmar always shook his head at the mention of
Pine Flat, and for some days I thought he disapproved of the whole
scheme and was proportionately sad.  One fine morning, however, he
met me, wreathed in smiles.  He had found the very place for me--
Silverado, another old mining town, right up the mountain.  Rufe
Hanson, the hunter, could take care of us--fine people the Hansons;
we should be close to the Toll House, where the Lakeport stage
called daily; it was the best place for my health, besides.  Rufe
had been consumptive, and was now quite a strong man, ain't it?  In
short, the place and all its accompaniments seemed made for us on
purpose.

He took me to his back door, whence, as from every point of
Calistoga, Mount Saint Helena could be seen towering in the air.
There, in the nick, just where the eastern foothills joined the
mountain, and she herself began to rise above the zone of forest--
there was Silverado.  The name had already pleased me; the high
station pleased me still more.  I began to inquire with some
eagerness.  It was but a little while ago that Silverado was a
great place.  The mine--a silver mine, of course--had promised
great things.  There was quite a lively population, with several
hotels and boarding-houses; and Kelmar himself had opened a branch
store, and done extremely well--"Ain't it?" he said, appealing to
his wife.  And she said, "Yes; extremely well." Now there was no
one living in the town but Rufe the hunter; and once more I heard
Rufe's praises by the yard, and this time sung in chorus.

I could not help perceiving at the time that there was something
underneath; that no unmixed desire to have us comfortably settled
had inspired the Kelmars with this flow of words.  But I was
impatient to be gone, to be about my kingly project; and when we
were offered seats in Kelmar's waggon, I accepted on the spot.  The
plan of their next Sunday's outing took them, by good fortune, over
the border into Lake County.  They would carry us so far, drop us
at the Toll House, present us to the Hansons, and call for us again
on Monday morning early.



CHAPTER II--FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF SILVERADO



We were to leave by six precisely; that was solemnly pledged on
both sides; and a messenger came to us the last thing at night, to
remind us of the hour.  But it was eight before we got clear of
Calistoga:  Kelmar, Mrs. Kelmar, a friend of theirs whom we named
Abramina, her little daughter, my wife, myself, and, stowed away
behind us, a cluster of ship's coffee-kettles.  These last were
highly ornamental in the sheen of their bright tin, but I could
invent no reason for their presence.  Our carriageful reckoned up,
as near as we could get at it, some three hundred years to the six
of us.  Four of the six, besides, were Hebrews.  But I never, in
all my life, was conscious of so strong an atmosphere of holiday.
No word was spoken but of pleasure; and even when we drove in
silence, nods and smiles went round the party like refreshments.

The sun shone out of a cloudless sky.  Close at the zenith rode the
belated moon, still clearly visible, and, along one margin, even
bright.  The wind blew a gale from the north; the trees roared; the
corn and the deep grass in the valley fled in whitening surges; the
dust towered into the air along the road and dispersed like the
smoke of battle.  It was clear in our teeth from the first, and for
all the windings of the road it managed to keep clear in our teeth
until the end.

For some two miles we rattled through the valley, skirting the
eastern foothills; then we struck off to the right, through haugh-
land, and presently, crossing a dry water-course, entered the Toll
road, or, to be more local, entered on "the grade."  The road
mounts the near shoulder of Mount Saint Helena, bound northward
into Lake County.  In one place it skirts along the edge of a
narrow and deep canyon, filled with trees, and I was glad, indeed,
not to be driven at this point by the dashing Foss.  Kelmar, with
his unvarying smile, jogging to the motion of the trap, drove for
all the world like a good, plain, country clergyman at home; and I
profess I blessed him unawares for his timidity.

Vineyards and deep meadows, islanded and framed with thicket, gave
place more and more as we ascended to woods of oak and madrona,
dotted with enormous pines.  It was these pines, as they shot above
the lower wood, that produced that pencilling of single trees I had
so often remarked from the valley.  Thence, looking up and from
however far, each fir stands separate against the sky no bigger
than an eyelash; and all together lend a quaint, fringed aspect to
the hills.  The oak is no baby; even the madrona, upon these spurs
of Mount Saint Helena, comes to a fine bulk and ranks with forest
trees--but the pines look down upon the rest for underwood.  As
Mount Saint Helena among her foothills, so these dark giants out-
top their fellow-vegetables.  Alas! if they had left the redwoods,
the pines, in turn, would have been dwarfed.  But the redwoods,
fallen from their high estate, are serving as family bedsteads, or
yet more humbly as field fences, along all Napa Valley.

A rough smack of resin was in the air, and a crystal mountain
purity.  It came pouring over these green slopes by the oceanful.
The woods sang aloud, and gave largely of their healthful breath.
Gladness seemed to inhabit these upper zones, and we had left
indifference behind us in the valley.  "I to the hills lift mine
eyes!"  There are days in a life when thus to climb out of the
lowlands, seems like scaling heaven.

As we continued to ascend, the wind fell upon us with increasing
strength.  It was a wonder how the two stout horses managed to pull
us up that steep incline and still face the athletic opposition of
the wind, or how their great eyes were able to endure the dust.
Ten minutes after we went by, a tree fell, blocking the road; and
even before us leaves were thickly strewn, and boughs had fallen,
large enough to make the passage difficult.  But now we were hard
by the summit.  The road crosses the ridge, just in the nick that
Kelmar showed me from below, and then, without pause, plunges down
a deep, thickly wooded glen on the farther side.  At the highest
point a trail strikes up the main hill to the leftward; and that
leads to Silverado.  A hundred yards beyond, and in a kind of elbow
of the glen, stands the Toll House Hotel.  We came up the one side,
were caught upon the summit by the whole weight of the wind as it
poured over into Napa Valley, and a minute after had drawn up in
shelter, but all buffetted and breathless, at the Toll House door.

A water-tank, and stables, and a gray house of two stories, with
gable ends and a verandah, are jammed hard against the hillside,
just where a stream has cut for itself a narrow canyon, filled with
pines.  The pines go right up overhead; a little more and the
stream might have played, like a fire-hose, on the Toll House roof.
In front the ground drops as sharply as it rises behind.  There is
just room for the road and a sort of promontory of croquet ground,
and then you can lean over the edge and look deep below you through
the wood.  I said croquet GROUND, not GREEN; for the surface was of
brown, beaten earth.  The toll-bar itself was the only other note
of originality:  a long beam, turning on a post, and kept slightly
horizontal by a counterweight of stones.  Regularly about sundown
this rude barrier was swung, like a derrick, across the road and
made fast, I think, to a tree upon the farther side.