It was the Fourth of July, the great holiday of boys, if not of the nation, when the Swiftsure came slowly into the magnificent harbor of San Francisco. The weather-beaten sails and canvas told of a long and disastrous voyage. The crew were sullen and discontented, the passengers worn down by long confinement and miserable fare. They had escaped any furious gales after leaving Rio, but encountered head winds, and long unhealthy calms, almost from the time of entering the Pacific. They laid scarcely out of sight of Valparaiso twenty days together. Sam was not the only one on ship-board, who thought then, with almost longing, of the stiff gales and driving sleet and mist off Cape Horn. Our young sailor had comparatively a very comfortable experience of that great bugbear to all seamen. Sometimes the weather was fine for several days together; and gentle-eyed cape pigeons, so tame that it seemed cruel to capture them, came round the ship, or the passengers amused themselves in snaring an albatross, and watching the flapping of its useless wings from the deck.
This strange looking bird reminded Sam of the story he had read in verse, from a book belonging to his last teacher. Ben and he had carried it off from the desk to hide it, and have their own fun in the search, but finding the “Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner,” read it over so frequently, that they could remember more than half, when the hue and cry after the missing volume compelled them to restore it. Jackson and his messmates were favored with recitations as they passed within sight of the rugged and barren promontory, and stretching far away for a favorable wind, entered the long, rolling swell of the Pacific. There was life and excitement in the hardest squall they encountered there, that Sam considered in every way more agreeable than the sameness of a calm in a southern latitude.
Jackson was sure a sailor must have written the description Sam used to spout from his favorite “Ancient Mariner,” and was disappointed to find it was only a poet—“a kind of craft” he had very little respect for. And so it was—
“Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down,
’Twas sad as sad could be—
And they did speak only to break
The silence of the sea.
All in a hot and copper sky,
The bloody sun at noon,
Right up above the mast did stand
No bigger than the moon.
Day after day, day after day,
They stuck, nor sense nor motion,
As idle as a painted ship,
Upon a painted ocean.”
Life grew almost a blank to those on board, until the certainty of nearing San Francisco, roused once more the feverish excitement with which they had left home.
Sam thought the last night would never end. He walked the deck restlessly, and tried to plan what they were going to do. Colcord he knew had schemes of his own, that Mr. Gilman would be sure to follow. But how were they to get to the mines to begin with? They had no money, no friends to apply to. The day broke over the broad swell of the bay, and lifted the heavy fog that obscured the new city of San Francisco. It was as yet a wilderness of tents and canvas-covered sheds, stretching along the beach without order or regularity. Here they dropped anchor at last, and another eager crowd of adventurers landed on the shores of California.
Mr. Gilman planning the voyage in the bar-room of Mooney’s tavern, or talking it over, by his comfortable fireside, was a very different person from Mr. Gilman landed on the beach at San Francisco, not knowing where to get a breakfast, or the money to pay for it. Colcord too, was more crest-fallen than Sam ever saw him before or afterwards, and condescended to say, “Well, Sammy my boy, what are we going to do first?”
That was the question, for they could not sit on their chests all day and watch the vessels anchored near their own, and Mr. Gilman found, to his dismay, that it would cost twenty dollars even to land his cherished gold rocker. Colcord proposed that they should try to get an advance on it, and for this the two men left Sam to look after their baggage, a very useless precaution as he soon found. The whole shore was strewn with piles of goods far more valuable than a sea chest, and lighters were already coming and going from the different ships, adding to them. Sam strolled off towards one of these, as he thought he made out the ship from which it came. He was not mistaken; the Mermaid had arrived before them, and if the disheartened boy had suddenly been set down at home, he could scarcely have felt happier, than when he saw his Rio acquaintance, John, spring on shore. It was a most fortunate meeting. John had been a Californian three whole weeks, and gave Sam an astonishing account of what was going on in the country. People had to pay fifty dollars a week for board, and poor fare at that, John said; as for the gold-washer, on which so much depended, if they got themselves to the mines they would be fortunate, and nobody wanted to buy machinery on speculation for that reason. John had gone to work already, and advised Sam to do the same. He knew men were wanted to help unload the Mermaid, and other vessels in port, and some of them had ten dollars a day; boys like themselves were earning six and eight. John had not much time to talk. He looked as important as any business man on the New-York Exchange, and bustled around among the sailors and porters, assisting the clerk who had come down to take charge of the Mermaid’s cargo. Fourth of July gave no respite from business here, and but for the national flag flying from every ship, and an occasional ambitious discharge of Chinese crackers, no one seemed to notice it.
Colcord and Mr. Gilman came back, not very amiable towards each other or any one else. Sam had been thinking over his mother’s parting counsel, and came to the conclusion that she was right about work, as well as other things.
“Never be afraid of hard work”—he said to himself. “If one kind of work is not handy, do something else.”—He had come to dig gold, but as far as that was concerned he might as well have been at home. So he thought the next best thing would be to earn it. Sam walked up and down the beach, with hands in both pockets, whistling Hail Columbia, in honor of the day, with an absent air, when the two men came up; but in half an hour from that time he was working away alongside the Mermaid, under John’s orders. Colcord followed his example, when he found it was the only thing to be done, but Mr. Gilman could not forget his pride, or conquer his indolence, until driven to it by a very uncomfortable night on the beach. Even the shelter of a canvas tent had to be paid for. He did more real hard work, that one week in San Francisco, than he had on the farm in six years.
Sam now began to be of some consequence in the partnership, and felt his importance, as might be supposed. He contributed almost as much as either of the others to the common stock, when they came to purchase their tools and provisions for the mines.
Mr. Gilman insisted on taking the gold-washer, until the very last moment, although after he succeeded in getting it landed, it was said to be useless by people coming from the diggings. No one would make him the smallest offer for it, and finding at last that it would be impossible to get it carried across the country from the Sacramento, he left it reluctantly on the beach at San Francisco, the twenty dollars—two days’ hard work!—paid for landing, added to the original cost.
Sam was very glad to bid good-bye to San Francisco, and find himself actually on his way to the mines. He had seen very little of it, except at night, when the eating houses and gambling saloons were like so many great transparencies, as the light struck through the canvas roofs and sides. There were no other places of amusement, no churches, no public buildings to visit. Men worked and speculated all day, and managed to spend at night almost as much money as they had made. They had no homes, no family circles, scarcely a tie to life; no wonder that half of them grew reckless. Sam was not old enough either in years or in the world to comprehend these things, and he longed for new adventures. He gave a last look to the old Swiftsure, rocking in the bay, without any other feeling of regret than a fear he should never see Jackson, his sailor friend, again. Jackson thought they might “run alongside” in China or Calcutta yet, but Sam did not think it was very likely his travels would ever extend so far. John said he might possibly “take a run up to the mines before the rainy season set in,”—for California boys talk very independently, and it was John’s great ambition to be considered grown up. He patronized Sam extensively, the last few days, and slapped him on the shoulder with a “good-bye old boy—take care of yourself”—as the little party embarked on the sloop in which they had engaged passage to Sacramento.
The clothes that Mrs. Gilman so carefully prepared, were reduced to a very small compass, when they selected what they could carry to the mines. Where every thing had to be paid for at the rate of twenty cents a pound, and provisions and mining tools were indispensable, ordinary baggage was not to be thought of. Many boys of Sam’s age think it impossible to leave home for a quarter at boarding-school, without at least “five changes of raiment”—not to mention dressing case, desk and carpet bag, including a silver fork and spoon. The catalogue of the young miner’s outfit was very brief. The clothes he wore—two shirts, and a huge jack-knife, with a common share in the pans, pick-axes and shovels, a tin cup, frying-pan, and coffee-pot. Boarding-school fare, much as it is berated, would be considered a feast in comparison to the crackers, jerked and salt beef—packed with their “assorted cargo”—the stock of provisions that was to last them to the mines.
Sam felt very dignified and Robinson Crusoe-ish, as he stuck his knife in a new leather belt, and slung a coarse blue blanket that was to serve as a bed,—mattress, quilts, pillows, and all,—over his shoulder. He found the last slightly uncomfortable when the sun beat down upon the narrow deck, and was obliged to deposit it ignobly beneath him. He was ready for any kind of adventure in the morning, Indians, coyotes or bears, but such an unworthy foe as a mosquito cloud damped his ardor very considerably. He was not at all prepared for the early advances these tormenting little insects made, nor the perseverance with which the attack was followed up. He could readily believe the stories some of the passengers told, of men who had gone mad from their torments, and especially of a thief, who could not be made to confess by the lash, or any threat of death, but came to terms very suddenly when tied to a tree, where he was exposed, defenceless, to a swarm of mosquitoes. Some of these men had already been to the mines, and were returning with supplies from San Francisco. Their marvellous stories of the increasing abundance of the gold, the great yield of the gulches on the Yuba and Feather Rivers, and the ease with which it was attained, elated Mr. Gilman wonderfully. He was in better humor all through the trip than he had been since leaving New-York, and talked more to Sam of home. To have listened to him, any one would have thought he had always been a most loving and considerate husband, and was now exiled from all that he cared for, a martyr for their sakes; when the truth was, he had wasted all that belonged to them, and came away when his wife would willingly have worked twice as hard, rather than have him and her son exposed to the hardships and temptations they were now encountering.
The low, foliage-covered banks of the Sacramento looked pleasant, late as it was in the season, to those who had been so long on ship-board. Sometimes they had a distant glimpse of the mountainous country they were approaching, through the glades and openings along the bank. Then the river spread through the tule-marshes, all overflowed in the rainy season, but now only beds of rank coarse rushes. The voyage to Sacramento City, which lasted three days, was on the whole monotonous and uncomfortable, varied only by a succession of mosquito battles, or going on shore as the sloop warped slowly through the cut-away, a kind of canal, made by a turn in the river, which had forced its way through, instead of winding around a jutting point of land.
Sacramento City, like San Francisco, they found to be a collection of temporary houses, half the population living in tents, which were pitched under the old forest trees, so recently standing there in solitude. The streets were more regularly laid out, and filled with a motley crowd, the teams of emigrants and miners arriving and departing constantly. The canvas-covered stores were as busy as if they had been the most respectable brick warehouses, quick sales and large profits being the order of the day. The cattle market and auction sales going on in the open air, called together the oddest looking people Sam had ever seen; genuine miners, with their faces and hands like leather, their long beards and careless dress being the most noticeable. It was certainly a great contrast to the quiet routine of New England village life, more so even than the narrow, crowded streets of Rio; and Sam sometimes thought he must be dreaming over Gulliver’s Travels in the great barn chamber. What had altered him most of any thing since leaving home, was having no companion his own age. He had lived among men, and listened to their conversation, until he had almost lost the fresh simplicity of boyhood. When he first comprehended his father’s faults, it took away his simple faith, and the care which his mother impressed on him, had changed the ordinary feeling between father and son. Painfully sensitive to every weakness in his father’s habits and disposition, he could not bear any one else to notice them, and never thought for a moment that there was any less claim on his obedience. Yet the first love and devotion of his heart was his mother’s. It was the same everywhere; up aloft on the Swiftsure, watching for a sail, toiling on the hot beach at San Francisco, or lying in a dream of home, as the sloop glided up the Sacramento, the thought of his mother brought a glow to his heart, and often tears to his eyes. She should not be disappointed in him at any rate, he said to himself, a hundred times, as he remembered the troubled, anxious look he had seen at times steal over her cheerful face.