Chapter 6
To a novelist (who sometimes pretends to think, however much such an unpopular tendency be hidden) environment and its necessary results are of infinite interest. Upon the Karroo, even when in the train, I tried to build up the aloof and lonely Boer, and, though I failed, there came to me in whiffs (like far odours borne on a westerly wind) some suggestions that I really understood deep in my mind how he came to be. The chill fresh air of the morning, before the sun was yet above the horizon, recalled to me some ancient dawns in far Australia: and then again I thought of days upon the Texan plateaux. But still the secret of the lone-riding Boer, who loves a country of magnificent distances, escaped me.
But one early dawn, when I was half-way between Krugersdorp and Mafeking, I came out upon the veldt in darkness, which was a lucid darkness, and in the silent crisp air I stumbled upon the truth. Betwixt sleep and waking as I walked I felt infinite peace pour over me. So had the silent Campo Santo at Pisa affected me; so had I felt for a moment among the ancient ruins of the abbey at Rivaulx. In this dawn hour came a time of reversion. I too was very solitary, and loved my solitude. The necessities of civilisation were necessities no more: I needed luxury even less than I needed news. I cared for nothing that the men of a city ask: there was space before me and room to ride. The lack of small urgent stimuli, the barren growth of civilisation's weedy fields, left me to the great and simple organic impulses of the outstretched world. And in that moment I perceived that this silence is the very life of the wandering Boer, even though he knows it not; for it has sunk so deep into him that he is unaware of it. He belongs not to this age, nor to any age we know.
For one long year, twenty years ago, I lived upon a great plain in Australia, and now I remembered how slowly I had been able to divest myself of my feeling of loneliness. But when I came at last to be at home upon that mighty stretch of earth, which seemed a summit, I grew to love it and to see with opened eyes its infinite charm that could be told to none. I knew that the need of much talk was a false need: as false as the diseased craving for books.
To feel this was true of the widespread wandering folks who once came out of crowded Holland to resume a more ancient type, instructed me in what a false relation they stand to the rolling dun war-cloud of "Progress." They called in the unreverted Hollander to stand between them and the men of mines, and now they love the Hollander as a man loves a hated cousin, who is a man of his blood, but in nothing like him. But anything was, and is, better than to stand face to face with busy crowds. To have to talk, to argue, to explain to the unsympathetic was overmuch. The veldt called to them: it is their passion. As one labours in London and sinks into a dream, remembering the hills wherein he spends a lonely summer, among Westmorland's fells and by the becks, so the Boer, called cityward, looks back upon the wide and lonely veldt which is never too wide and never lonelier to him than to any of the beasts he loves to hunt.
But the fauna disappear, and ancient civilisations crumble. And those who revert are once more overwhelmed by civilisation. It is a great and pathetic story, a story as old as the tales told in stone by the preserved remnants of prehistoric monsters.
Yet, speaking of monsters, what is a stranger monster (to an eye that hates it or merely wonders) than the many-jointed Rand demon crawling along the line of banked outcrop? I saw it first by day, when it seemed an elongated wire-drawn Manchester in a pure air, but I remember it best as I saw it when returning from Pretoria. First I beheld the gleam of electric lights, and remembered the glow of Fargo in Eastern Dakota as I saw it across the prairie. Then the mines were no longer separate: they joined together and became like a fiery reptile, a dragon in the outcrop, clawing deep with every joint, wounding the earth with every claw, as a centipede wounds with every poisoned foot. The white residues gleamed beneath the moon, from every smoke stack poured smoke: the dragon breathed. Then the great white cyanide tanks were like bosses on the beast; the train stopped, and the battery roared. That night, for it was a silent and windless night, I heard forty miles of batteries beating on the beach of my mind like a great sea. And men laboured in the bowels of the earth for gold. But out upon the veldt it was very quiet, "quietly shining to the quiet moon." I understood then that it was no wonder if the simple and stolid Dutchman had a peculiar abhorrence for a town, which, even at night, was never at rest. In Johannesburg is neither rest, nor peace, nor any school for nobility of thought; it destroys the pleasures of the simple, and satisfies not the desires of those whose simplicity is their least striking feature.
Upon the veldt and the Karroo, and even through the Mapani scrub country that lies north of Lobatsi, simplicity is the chief characteristic of the scenery. As I went by Victoria West (I had spent the night talking politics with the civillest Dutchmen) I came in early morning to the first Karroo I had seen. The air was tonic, like an exhilarating wine with some wonderful elixir in it other than alcohol, and though the country reminded me in places of vast plains in New South Wales, it lacked, or seemed to lack, the perpetual brooding melancholy that invests the great Austral island. As I stood on the platform of the car, the sun, not yet risen, gilded level clouds. The light reddened and the gold died: and the sudden sun sparkled like a big star, and heaved a round shoulder up between two of Africa's flat-topped hills, which were yet blue in the far distance. Then the level light of earliest day poured across the plateau, yellow with thin grass, which began to ask for rain. The picture left upon my mind is without detail, and made up of broad masses. Even a railway station, with some few gum trees, and the pinky cloud of peach blossom about the little house, was excellently simple and homely. A distant farm, with smoke rising beneath the shadow of a little kopje, a band of emerald green, where irrigation sent its flow of water, a thousand sheep with a blanketed Kaffir minding them, filled the eye with satisfaction.
Out of such a country should come simple lives. By the sport of fate the cruellest complexity of politics is to be found there.
And yet who can declare that the environment shall not in time exert its inevitable influence on the busy crowding English, and make them or their sons glad to sit upon their stoeps and smoke and look out upon the veldt with a quiet satisfaction which is unuttered and unutterable? The Karroo and the veldt do not change except according to the seasons; they pour their influences for ever upon those who ride across them as the Drakensberg Mountains send their waters down upon Natal beneath their mighty wall. And even now the busy Englishman complains that his African-born son is lazy and seems more content to live than to be for ever working. Each country exacts a certain amount of energy from those who live there; as one judges from the Boer, the tax is not over heavy.
And as in time to come the great centre of interest shifts north, as now it seems to shift, one may prophesy with some hope, certainly without dread of such a result, that a more energetic Dutch race, and a less energetic English one, will fuse together, and look back upon their childish quarrels with mere historic interest. Perhaps the Dutch in those times will become the aristocrats, as they have done in New York; they may even see their chance of going for ever out of politics. For they never yet sat down to the political gaming-table gladly.
BY THE FRASER RIVER
The first experience I had in regard to gold mining was in Ballarat, when a well-known miner and business man in that pretty town took me round the old alluvial diggings and pointed out the most celebrated claims. These (in 1879) were, of course, deserted or left to an occasional Chinese "fossicker," who rewashed the rejected pay dirt, which occasionally has enough gold in it to satisfy the easily-pleased Mongolian. I went with my friend that same day into the Black Horse Mine, and saw quartz crushing for the first time; but, naturally enough, I took far more interest in the alluvial workings that can be managed by few friends than in operations which required capital and the importation of stamping machinery from England; and Ballarat, rich as it once was for the single miner, is now left to corporations.
One of the strangest features of an old gold-mining district is its wasted and upturned appearance. The whole of the surrounding country is, as it were, eviscerated. It is all hills and hollows, which shine and glare in the hot sun and look exceedingly desolate. When, in addition, the town itself fails and fades for want of other means of support, and the houses fall into rack and ruin as I have seen in Oregon, the place resembles a disordered room seen in the morning after a gambling debauch. The town is happy which is able to reform and live henceforth on agriculture, as is now the case to a great extent with Ballarat and with Sandhurst, which has discarded its famous name of Bendigo.
To a miner, or indeed to anyone in want of money, as I usually was when knocking about in Australian or American mining districts, the one painful thing is to know where untold quantities of gold lie without being able to get a single pennyweight of it. I remember on more than one occasion sitting on the banks of the Fraser River in British Columbia, or of the Illinois River in Oregon, pondering on the absurdity of my needing a hundred dollars when millions were in front of me under those fast-flowing streams. Those who know nothing about gold countries may ask how I knew there were millions there. The answer is simple enough. First let me say a few words about one common process of mining.
When it is discovered that there is a certain quantity of gold in the vast deposits of gravel which are found in many places along the Pacific slope, but especially in Oregon and California, water, brought in a "flume" or aqueduct from a higher level, is directed, by means of a pipe and nozzle fixed on a movable stand, against the crumbling bench, which perhaps contains only two or three shillings-worth of gold to the ton. This is washed down into a sluice made of wooden boards, in which "riffles," or pieces of wood, are placed to stop the metal as it flows along in the turbid rush of water. Some amalgamated copper plates are put in suitable places to catch the lighter gold, or else the water which contains it is allowed to run into a more slowly-flowing aqueduct, which gives the finer scales time to settle. This, roughly put, is the hydraulic method of mining which causes so much trouble between the agricultural and mining interests in California; for the finer detritus of this washing, called technically "slickens," fills up the rivers, causes them to overflow and deposit what is by no means a fertilising material on the pastures of the Golden State.
Now, what man does here in a small way, and with infinite labour and pains, Nature has been doing on a grand scale for unnumbered centuries. Let us, for instance, take the Fraser River and its tributary the Thompson, which is again made up of the North and South Forks, which unite at Kamloops, as the main rivers do at Lytton. The whole of the vast extent of mountainous country drained by these streams is known to be more or less auriferous. Many places, such as Cariboo, are, or were, richly so; and there are few spots in that part which will not yield what miners know as a "colour" of gold--that is, gold just sufficient to see, even if it is not enough to pay for working by our slight human methods. I have been in parts of Oregon where one might get "colour" by pulling up the bunches of grass that grew sparsely on a thin soil which just covered the rocks. But the united volumes of the Fraser and the two Thompsons and all their tributaries have been doing an enormous gold-washing business for a geological period; and all that portion of British Columbia which lies in their basin may be looked upon as similar to the bench of gravel which is assaulted by the hydraulic miner. And just as the miner makes the broken-down gold-bearing stuff run through his constructed sluices, Nature sends all her gold in a torrent into the natural sluice which is known as the Fraser Canyon.
This canyon, which is cut through the range of mountains known erroneously as the Cascades, is about forty miles long, if we count from Lytton and Yale. In its narrowest part, at Hell Gate, a child may throw a stone across; and its current is tremendous. So rapidly does it run, that no boat can venture upon it, and nothing but a salmon can stem its stream. It is full, too, of whirlpools; and at times the under rush is so strong that the surface appears stationary. What its depth may be it is impossible to tell. But one thing is certain, and that is, that in the cracks and crannies of its rocky bed must be gold in quantities beyond the dreams of a diseased avarice. But is this not all theory? No, it is not. At one part of the river, in the upper canyon, there is a place where the current stayed, and, with a long backward swirl, built up a bar. If you ask an old British Columbian about Boston Bar, he will, perhaps, tell stories which may seem to put Sacramento in the shade. Yet there will be much truth in them, for there was much gold found on that bar. Again, some years ago, at Black Canyon, on the South Fork of the Thompson, when that clear blue stream was at a low stage, there was a great landslip, which for some eighty minutes dammed back the waters into a lake. The whole country side gathered there with carts and buckets, scraping up the mud and gold from the bottom. Many thousands of dollars were taken out of the dry river bed before the dam gave way to the rising waters. And, if there was gold there, what is there even now in the great main sluice of the vastest natural gold mining concern ever set going, which has never yet since it began indulged in a "cleanup?"
I have been asked sometimes, when speaking about the Fraser and other rivers, which are undoubtedly gold traps, why it was that nobody attempted to turn them. Of course, my questioners were neither engineers nor geographers. Certainly an inspection of the map of British Columbia would show the utter impossibility of such a scheme. To dam the Fraser would be like turning the Amazon. Yet once I do not doubt that it was dammed, and that all the upper country was a vast lake, until the waters found the way through the Cascades which it has now cut into a canyon. Otherwise I cannot account for the vast benches and terraces which rise along the Thompson. Indeed, the whole of the Dry Belt down to Lytton has the appearance, to an eye only slightly cognisant of geological evidence, of an ancient lacustrine valley.
Yet much work of a similar kind to damming this river has been done in California; and even now there is a company at the great task of turning the Feather River (which is also undoubtedly gold bearing) through a tunnel in order to work a large portion of its bed. Whether they will succeed or not is perhaps doubtful; but if they do, the returns will probably be large, as they would be if anyone were able to turn aside the Illinois in Southern Oregon, or the Rogue River, which has been mining in the Siskiyou Range for untold generations.
I feel certain that all human gold discovering has been a mere nothing; that our methods are only faint and feeble imitations of Nature, and that only by circumventing her shall we be able to reach the richer reward. But by the very vastness of her operations we are precluded from imitating the sluice robber, who does not work himself, but "cleans up" the rich boxes of some mining company which has undertaken a scheme too large for any one man.
OLD AND NEW DAYS IN BRITISH COLUMBIA
The whole of this vast country--this sea of mountains, as it has very appropriately been called--used practically to belong to the Hudson's Bay Trading Company, and they made more than enough money out of it and its inhabitants. The Indians, though never quite to be trusted, were, and are, not so warlike as their neighbours far to the south of the forty-ninth parallel, such as the Sioux and Apaches, and naturally were so innocent of the value of the furs and skins they brought into the trading ports and forts as to be vilely cheated, in accordance with all the best traditions of white men dealing with ignorant and commercially unsophisticated savages. Guns and rifles being the objects most desired by the Indian, he was made to pay for them, and to pay an almost incredible price, as it seems to us now, for the company made sure of three or four hundred per cent, at the very least, and occasionally more; so that a ten shilling Birmingham musket brought in several pounds when the pelts for which it was exchanged were sold in the London market.
Their dominion of exclusion passed away with the discovery of gold in Cariboo, and the consequent assumption of direct rule by the Government. The palmy days of mining are looked back on with great regret by the old miners, and many are the stories I have heard by the camp fire or the hotel bar, which explained how it was that the narrator was still poor, and how So-and-so became rich. There were few men who were successful in keeping what they had made by luck or hard work, yet gold dust flew round freely, and provisions were at famine prices. I knew one man who said he had paid forty-two dollars (or nearly nine pounds) for six pills. They were dear but necessary; and as the man who possessed them had a corner in drugs, he was able to name his price. At that time, too, some men made large sums of money by mere physical labour, and for packing food on their backs to the mines they received a dollar for every pound weight they brought in.
An acquaintance of mine, who is now an hotel-keeper at Kamloops, was a living example of the strange freaks fortune played men in Cariboo. He was offered a share in a mine for nothing, but refused it, and bought into another. Gold was taken out of the first one to the tune of 50,000 dollars, and the other took all the money invested in it and never returned a cent. He was in despair about one mine, and tried to sell out in vain. He was thinking of giving up his share for nothing, when gold was found in quantities. I think he makes more out of whisky, however, than he ever did at Cariboo, though he still hankers after the old exciting times and the prospects of the gold-miner's toast, "Here's a dollar to the pan, the bed-rock pitching, and the gravel turning blue."
Nowadays there are still plenty of men who traverse the country in all directions looking for new finds. They are called "prospectors," and go about with a pony packed with a pick, a shovel, and a few necessaries, hunting chiefly for quartz veins, and they talk of nothing but "quartz," "bed-rock," "leads," gold and silver, and so many ounces to the ton. It is now many years ago since I was working on a small cattle ranch in the Kamloops district, when one of these men, a tall, grey-haired old fellow named Patterson, came by. My employer knew him, and asked him to stay. He bored us to death the whole evening, and showed innumerable specimens, which truly were not very promising, as it seemed to us. His great contempt for farming was very characteristic of the species. "What's a few head of rowdy steers?" asked Mr Patterson; "why, any day I might strike ten thousand dollars." "Yes," I answered mischievously; "and any day you mightn't." He turned and glared at me, demanding what I knew about mining. "Not a great deal," said I; "but I have seen mining here and in Australia, and for one that makes anything a hundred die dead broke." "Well," he replied, scornfully "I'd rather die that way than go ploughing, and I tell you I know where there is money to be made. Just wait till I can get hold of a capitalist."
That is another of the poor prospector's stock cries; but as a general rule capitalists are wary, and don't invest in such "wild cat" speculations.
Next morning Mr Patterson proposed that I should go along with him and he would make my fortune. "What at?" said I. "Quartz mining?" "Not this time," was his answer; "it's placer" (alluvial). I was not in the least particular then what I did if I could only get good wages, so I wanted to know what he proposed giving me. "Bed-rock wages," said he. Now that means good money if a strike is made, and nothing if it is not. So I shook my head, and he turned away, leaving me to wallow in the mire of contemptible security. I can hardly doubt that he will be one day found dead in the mountains, and that his Eldorado will be but oblivion.
Just as I was about to leave British Columbia for Washington Territory there were very good reports of the new Similkameen diggings, and for the first and only time in my life I was very nearly taking the gold fever. But though I saw much of the gold that had been taken out of the creek, I managed to restrain myself, and was glad of it afterwards, when I learned from a friend of mine in town that very few had made anything out of it, and that most had returned to New Westminster penniless and in rags.
Railroads and modern progress are nowadays civilising the country to a great extent, though I am by no means sure that civilisation is a good thing in itself. However, manners are much better than they used to be in the old times, and it might be hard now to find an instance of ignorance parallel to one which my friend Mr H. told me. It appears that a dinner was to be given in the earlier days to some great official from England, and an English lady, who knew how such things should be done, was appointed manager. She determined that everything should be in good style, and ordered even such extravagant and unknown luxuries as napkins and finger-glasses. Among those who sat at the well-appointed table were miners, cattle-men, and so on, and one of them on sitting down took up his finger-bowl, and saying, "By golly, I'm thirsty," emptied it at a draught. Then, to add horror on horror, he trumpeted loudly in his napkin and put it in his breast pocket.
The progress of civilisation, however, destroys the Indians and their virtues. One Indian woman, who was married to a friend of mine--and a remarkably intelligent woman she was--one day remarked to me that before white men came into the country the women of her tribe (she was a Ptsean) were good and modest but that now that was all gone. It is true enough. This same woman was remarkable among the general run of her class, and spoke very good English, being capable of making a joke too. A half-bred Indian, working for her husband, one day spoke contemptuously of his mother's tribe, and Mrs ----, being a full-blooded Indian, did not like it. She asked him if he was an American, and, after overwhelming him with sarcasm, turned him out of doors.