FIRST FAMILIES OF THE SIERRAS.*
THESE wild, picturesque stories of the gold-diggers of California are getting just a little bit stale, and they want either altogether new treatment, or nothing _less than the grace and delicacy of handling which Bret Harte alone can give them. His -sense of beauty is so keen, that he can extract it from the rough chaos—moral and physical—of lawless giants in fierce fight for gold amongst the canons of the Rocky Mountains, and we read some of his stories with the same quiet but exquisite pleasure with which we gaze at a small, but finished picture, simple in its elements, but revealing the genius that can detect the subtlest beauty, and interpret it with a delicate touch of marvellous fidelity. But Joaquin Miller has not this delicacy of touch. His love for beauty—genuine enough, very probably—seems to us like the rude caress of the ass in the fable, and moves us rather to anger, or at best, to a sort of pitiful laughter. Mr. Miller seems to us, in the story before us, to point with a huge thumb —a great smile of ignorant naiveté and self-importance on his good-humoured countenance—to a crowd of very coarse men, worshipping an ordinary woman, and later on, an ordinary baby, and to expect us to be full of admiration, because the great fellows don't abuse the woman and the baby,— and we are not without a suspicion that he has discovered that this picture of the gentle mastery exercised by weak woman, and the inherent gallantry latent in the rudest man, is rather effective, and calculated to " bring down the house." But he has forgotten to show us why they treated her with such exceptional respect, and how she came to gain such an ascendancy over them ; and we feel as incredulous as a child after its first fairy story. True, we hear that she had little hands and a white brow, but beyond that, far too much is left to our imagination. Our admiration for her is not increased because she married a very big, rough man—though be were the best in the camp—after a very short courtship, of which this is part of the opening scene :— " Will you not come in?' The man rolled forward. He sat down in the Widow's cabin, in a perfect glow of excitement and delight. I am bound to admit that, upright and great as Sandy was, he kept thinking to himself, 'What will the Judge and the boys say of this ?' He even was glad in his heart that Limber Tim stood with his back glued up against the palings on the outside, and his hands reached back and wound in and around the rails, so that he could testify to the boys, tell it, in fact, to the world, that he had entered in, and sat down -in the Widow's cabin. It was not easy work for Sandy sitting there. He soon began to suffer, he hitched about and twisted around on the broad wooden stool as if he had sat down on a very hot stove. The Widow sat a little way back across the cabin, a bit of work in her lap, look- ing up at Sandy now, and now dropping her half-sad blue eyes down to her work, and all the time, in a low, sweet way, doing every word of the talking. Sandy's hot stove began getting hotter and hotter. He began to wish he was down with tho boys at the Howling Wilderness, consult- ing the oracle of cocktails. All at once he seemed to discern his great long legs. They seemed to him as if they reached almost clean across the cabin, like two great anacondas going to swallow up the Widow. He fished them up, curved them, threw his two great hands across them, nursed them affectionately, but they seemed more in the way and -uglier than ever before. Then be thrust them out again, but jerked them back instantly and drove them back under his bench as if they had been two big and unruly bull-dogs, and he nearly upset himself in -doing it. They had fairly frightened him, they were surely never half so long before. It seemed to him as if they would reach across the room, through the wall, and even down to tho Howling Wilderness. He twisted them up under the bench and got them fast there, and was glad .of it, for now they would not and could not run out and rush across the room at the Widow. But now poor Sandy saw another skeleton. His eyes came upon them suddenly, in a sort of discovery. It seemed as if he had just found them out for the first time, and knew them for mortal enemies, and determined to do away with them at once and at any sacrifice. Such hands ! had the Widow really been looking at them all this time? the back of that hand was big and rough as the bark of a tree. That finger-nail had a white rim of dough around it ; that thumb- nail was as big and about as dirty as a ore vicing-spoon ! He picked up that hand, thrust it under him, sat firmly over on that side, and held it -down and out of sight with all his might. The other one lay there, still in the way. It was uglier than the one he had just slain and hidden away in the bush. There was dirt enough about the nails to make a small mining claim. He rolled the hand over and over on his • First Families of the Sierras. By Joaquin Miller. 1 roL London: George Boutledge and Sons. lap as if it had been somebody's baby ; and a baby with the colic. At last, in a state of desperation, he rolled it off and let it fall and take care of itself. It hung down at his side like a great big felon from the scaffold. It twisted and swung around there as if it had just been hung up by the neck in the expiation of some awful crime. It felt to Sandy as if it weighed a ton. He tried to lift it up again, to take care of it, to nurse it, to turn it over on its stomach, to stroke it, and talk to it, and pity it, and soothe away its colic, but lo! he could not lift it. He began to perspire, he was so very warm. It was the warmest time that Sandy had ever seen. All this time Sandy had sat close by the door, and not one word had he uttered."
It seems that the widow increased her popularity in the camp by nursing a young man in a fever, and by taking in the men's washing. But we should know much more of her before the story of her influence could move us, and we are only told that she reformed the camp ; and the evidence of reformation, from any cause, is slight, consisting mainly in the fact that two un- fortunates are- made "honest women" by two of Sandy's com- panions ; beyond this, we have no means of judging, as the gold comes to an end, and the camp breaks up.
And Joaquin Miller is as far behind Bret Harte in humour, as in the perception and delineation of true beauty. The quotation we have already given is a specimen of his idea of humour, which consists in extravagant exaggeration of Dickens's love of caricaturing some ugly and grotesque personal defects or tricks. The simple truth is that Mr. Miller has not succeeded in making us enthusiastic about these lawless, swear- ing, fire-drinking gold-diggers—who filled pools with their camp-fellows' blood on holidays and Sundays—merely because they were kind to their washerwoman and drank her baby's health and left gold nuggets surreptitiously on her chimney-piece. It is pleasant to detect the human element in the brute, because we feel that a human being may be made out of him, but the human being must have risen from the ashes of the brute before we can take heartily to him, or care deeply for the incidents of his life. Only at the end of his book does Mr. Miller touch our feelings at all ; and that is in the history of the unsociable gold- digger, who lived and died with a reputation for murder, wealth, and niggardliness ; but who had, in reality, nursed instead of murdered his young chum ; and had, after his death and till his own, sent all his earnings, and fictitious news of his deceased friend's well-being to the widowed mother and sisters, in order that they might never know want, nor the grief of hearing Of his early death. But this part of the present story is almost a re- print of "The Last Man in the Mexican Camp," which was pub- lished with Bret Harte's Stories of the Sierras, and which bears strangely the impress of Bret Harte's style and genius.
Perhaps we may accord the quality of real humour to the account of the marriages which take place in the camp, and which are celebrated by the little man who has been pushed into the position of judge, clergyman, magistrate, and anything else where precedence is necessary, rather because he can do nothing else, than because he has the very thinnest conceivable veneer of general knowledge. The way in which the service is made out by hesitation, wise looks, scraps of Acts of Parliament, disjointed sentences from the Prayer-Book, and lines of childish hymns, from his favourite commencement, "In this glorious climate of Californy," to the close, "Then by the authority in me vested, and according to the laws in such cases made and provided, I pronounce you man and wife," is not so much amusing in itself, as because it is made quite credible that it is accepted by the rude Congregation, in sober seriousness and with unquestioning respect and admiration, as an edifying religious and binding civil service.
Mr. Miller succeeds, however, in transporting us to the wild West, in burying us in the deep canon, whence we look up to the solemn pines, and above them to the eternal snows, and where we feel our awful solitude and the impassable distance from others of our kind, and hear only the roaring torrents, or the avalanche, or the howling wolf, or at best, the melancholy sighing of the wind in the pine forests. But it is the fascination of awe rather than of beauty which his pictures produce, and which "the glorious climate of Californy " cannot disperse or brighten :— "There was a grey streak of dawn just breaking through the black tree-tops that tossed above the high, far, deep snow, on the mountain that lifted to the east, as the door opened, and Bunker Hill came forth alone. There were ugly clouds rolling overh'ead, mixing, marching, and counter-marching, as if preparing for a great battle of the elements. On the west wall of the mountain a wolf howled dolefully to his mate on the opposite crest of the canon. The water tumbled and thundered through the gorge below, and sent up echoes and sounds that were sad and lonesome as the march to the home of the dead How dark it was down there! The earth, it seemed, had been cracked open. Then it seemed as if Nature had reached out a band, smoothed down the ruggedest places, set the whole in a dense and sable forest, topt the mountains roundabout with everlasting snow, then reached it on to man. And then it looked as if man had come along just as it was nearly
ready, slid into the crack, and not being strong enough to got out, re- solved to remain there. 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
A' 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."
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