The Land Of Little Rain - Mary Hunter Austin
There is a place on Waban, south of White Mountain, where flat,
wind-tilted cedars make low tents and coves of shade and shelter, where
the wild sheep winter in the snow. Woodcutters and prospectors had
brought me word of that, but the Pocket Hunter was accessory to the
fact. About the opening of winter, when one looks for sudden big storms,
he had attempted a crossing by the nearest path, beginning the ascent at
noon. It grew cold, the snow came on thick and blinding, and wiped out
the trail in a white smudge; the storm drift blew in and cut off
landmarks, the early dark obscured the rising drifts. According to the
Pocket Hunter's account, he knew where he was, but couldn't exactly say.
Three days before he had been in the west arm of Death Valley on a short
water allowance, ankle-deep in shifty sand; now he was on the rise of
Waban, knee-deep in sodden snow, and in both cases he did the only
allowable thing--he walked on. That is the only thing to do in a
snowstorm in any case. It might have been the creature instinct, which
in his way of life had room to grow, that led him to the cedar shelter;
at any rate he found it about four hours after dark, and heard the heavy
breathing of the flock. He said that if he thought at all at this
juncture he must have thought that he had stumbled on a storm-belated
shepherd with his silly sheep; but in fact he took no note of anything
but the warmth of packed fleeces, and snuggled in between them dead with
sleep. If the flock stirred in the night he stirred drowsily to keep
close and let the storm go by. That was all until morning woke him
shining on a white world. Then the very soul of him shook to see the
wild sheep of God stand up about him, nodding their great horns beneath
the cedar roof, looking out on the wonder of the snow. They had moved a
little away from him with the coming of the light, but paid him no more
heed. The light broadened and the white pavilions of the snow swam in
the heavenly blueness of the sea from which they rose. The cloud drift
scattered and broke billowing in the canons. The leader stamped lightly
on the litter to put the flock in motion, suddenly they took the drifts
in those long light leaps that are nearest to flight, down and away on
the slopes of Waban. Think of that to happen to a Pocket Hunter! But
though he had fallen on many a wished-for hap, he was curiously inapt at
getting the truth about beasts in general. He believed in the venom of
toads, and charms for snake bites, and--for this I could never forgive
him--had all the miner's prejudices against my friend the coyote. Thief,
sneak, and son of a thief were the friendliest words he had for this
little gray dog of the wilderness.
Of course with so much seeking he came occasionally upon pockets of more
or less value, otherwise he could not have kept up his way of life; but
he had as much luck in missing great ledges as in finding small ones. He
had been all over the Tonopah country, and brought away float without
happening upon anything that gave promise of what that district was to
become in a few years. He claimed to have chipped bits off the very
outcrop of the California Rand, without finding it worth while to bring
away, but none of these things put him out of countenance.
It was once in roving weather, when we found him shifting pack on a
steep trail, that I observed certain of his belongings done up in green
canvas bags, the veritable "green bag" of English novels. It seemed so
incongruous a reminder in this untenanted West that I dropped down
beside the trail overlooking the vast dim valley, to hear about the
green canvas. He had gotten it, he said, in London years before, and
that was the first I had known of his having been abroad. It was after
one of his "big strikes" that he had made the Grand Tour, and had
brought nothing away from it but the green canvas bags, which he
conceived would fit his needs, and an ambition. This last was nothing
less than to strike it rich and set himself up among the eminently
bourgeois of London. It seemed that the situation of the wealthy English
middle class, with just enough gentility above to aspire to, and
sufficient smaller fry to bully and patronize, appealed to his
imagination, though of course he did not put it so crudely as that. It
was no news to me then, two or three years after, to learn that he had
taken ten thousand dollars from an abandoned claim, just the sort of
luck to have pleased him, and gone to London to spend it. The land
seemed not to miss him any more than it had minded him, but I missed him
and could not forget the trick of expecting him in least likely
situations. Therefore it was with a pricking sense of the familiar that
I followed a twilight trail of smoke, a year or two later, to the swale
of a dripping spring, and came upon a man by the fire with a coffee-pot
and frying-pan. I was not surprised to find it was the Pocket Hunter. No
man can be stronger than his destiny.
SHOSHONE LAND
It is true I have been in Shoshone Land, but before that, long before, I
had seen it through the eyes of Winnenap' in a rosy mist of
reminiscence, and must always see it with a sense of intimacy in the
light that never was. Sitting on the golden slope at the campoodie,
looking across the Bitter Lake to the purple tops of Mutarango, the
medicine-man drew up its happy places one by one, like little blessed
islands in a sea of talk. For he was born a Shoshone, was Winnenap'; and
though his name, his wife, his children, and his tribal relations were
of the Paiutes, his thoughts turned homesickly toward Shoshone Land.
Once a Shoshone always a Shoshone. Winnenap' lived gingerly among the
Paiutes and in his heart despised them. But he could speak a tolerable
English when he would, and he always would if it were of Shoshone Land.
He had come into the keeping of the Paiutes as a hostage for the long
peace which the authority of the whites made interminable, and, though
there was now no order in the tribe, nor any power that could have
lawfully restrained him, kept on in the old usage, to save his honor and
the word of his vanished kin. He had seen his children's children in the
borders of the Paiutes, but loved best his own miles of sand and
rainbow-painted hills. Professedly he had not seen them since the
beginning of his hostage; but every year about the end of the rains and
before the strength of the sun had come upon us from the south, the
medicine-man went apart on the mountains to gather herbs, and when he
came again I knew by the new fortitude of his countenance and the new
color of his reminiscences that he had been alone and unspied upon in
Shoshone Land.
To reach that country from the campoodie, one goes south and south,
within hearing of the lip-lip-lapping of the great tideless lake, and
south by east over a high rolling district, miles and miles of sage and
nothing else. So one comes to the country of the painted hills,--old red
cones of craters, wasteful beds of mineral earths, hot, acrid springs,
and steam jets issuing from a leprous soil. After the hills the black
rock, after the craters the spewed lava, ash strewn, of incredible
thickness, and full of sharp, winding rifts. There are picture writings
carved deep in the face of the cliffs to mark the way for those who do
not know it. On the very edge of the black rock the earth falls away in
a wide sweeping hollow, which is Shoshone Land.
South the land rises in very blue hills, blue because thickly wooded
with ceanothus and manzanita, the haunt of deer and the border of the
Shoshones. Eastward the land goes very far by broken ranges, narrow
valleys of pure desertness, and huge mesas uplifted to the sky-line,
east and east, and no man knows the end of it.
It is the country of the bighorn, the wapiti, and the wolf, nesting
place of buzzards, land of cloud-nourished trees and wild things that
live without drink. Above all, it is the land of the creosote and the
mesquite. The mesquite is God's best thought in all this desertness. It
grows in the open, is thorny, stocky, close grown, and iron-rooted. Long
winds move in the draughty valleys, blown sand fills and fills about the
lower branches, piling pyramidal dunes, from the top of which the
mesquite twigs flourish greenly. Fifteen or twenty feet under the drift,
where it seems no rain could penetrate, the main trunk grows, attaining
often a yard's thickness, resistant as oak. In Shoshone Land one digs
for large timber; that is in the southerly, sandy exposures. Higher on
the table-topped ranges low trees of juniper and pinon stand each apart,
rounded and spreading heaps of greenness. Between them, but each to
itself in smooth clear spaces, tufts of tall feathered grass.
This is the sense of the desert hills, that there is room enough and
time enough. Trees grow to consummate domes; every plant has its perfect
work. Noxious weeds such as come up thickly in crowded fields do not
flourish in the free spaces. Live long enough with an Indian, and he or
the wild things will show you a use for everything that grows in these
borders.
The manner of the country makes the usage of life there, and the land
will not be lived in except in its own fashion. The Shoshones live like
their trees, with great spaces between, and in pairs and in family
groups they set up wattled huts by the infrequent springs. More wickiups
than two make a very great number. Their shelters are lightly built, for
they travel much and far, following where deer feed and seeds ripen, but
they are not more lonely than other creatures that inhabit there.
The year's round is somewhat in this fashion. After the pinon harvest
the clans foregather on a warm southward slope for the annual adjustment
of tribal difficulties and the medicine dance, for marriage and mourning
and vengeance, and the exchange of serviceable information; if, for
example, the deer have shifted their feeding ground, if the wild sheep
have come back to Waban, or certain springs run full or dry. Here the
Shoshones winter flockwise, weaving baskets and hunting big game driven
down from the country of the deep snow. And this brief intercourse is
all the use they have of their kind, for now there are no wars, and many
of their ancient crafts have fallen into disuse. The solitariness of the
life breeds in the men, as in the plants, a certain well-roundedness and
sufficiency to its own ends. Any Shoshone family has in itself the
man-seed, power to multiply and replenish, potentialities for food and
clothing and shelter, for healing and beautifying.
When the rain is over and gone they are stirred by the instinct of those
that journeyed eastward from Eden, and go up each with his mate and
young brood, like birds to old nesting places. The beginning of spring
in Shoshone Land--oh the soft wonder of it!--is a mistiness as of
incense smoke, a veil of greenness over the whitish stubby shrubs, a web
of color on the silver sanded soil. No counting covers the multitude of
rayed blossoms that break suddenly underfoot in the brief season of the
winter rains, with silky furred or prickly viscid foliage, or no foliage
at all. They are morning and evening bloomers chiefly, and strong
seeders. Years of scant rains they lie shut and safe in the winnowed
sands, so that some species appear to be extinct. Years of long storms
they break so thickly into bloom that no horse treads without crushing
them. These years the gullies of the hills are rank with fern and a
great tangle of climbing vines.
Just as the mesa twilights have their vocal note in the love call of the
burrowing owl, so the desert spring is voiced by the mourning doves.
Welcome and sweet they sound in the smoky mornings before breeding time,
and where they frequent in any great numbers water is confidently looked
for. Still by the springs one finds the cunning brush shelters from
which the Shoshones shot arrows at them when the doves came to drink.
Now as to these same Shoshones there are some who claim that they have
no right to the name, which belongs to a more northerly tribe; but that
is the word they will be called by, and there is no greater offense than
to call an Indian out of his name. According to their traditions and all
proper evidence, they were a great people occupying far north and east
of their present bounds, driven thence by the Paiutes. Between the two
tribes is the residuum of old hostilities.
Winnenap', whose memory ran to the time when the boundary of the Paiute
country was a dead-line to Shoshones, told me once how himself and
another lad, in an unforgotten spring, discovered a nesting place of
buzzards a bit of a way beyond the borders. And they two burned to rob
those nests. Oh, for no purpose at all except as boys rob nests
immemorially, for the fun of it, to have and handle and show to other
lads as an exceeding treasure, and afterwards discard. So, not quite
meaning to, but breathless with daring, they crept up a gully, across a
sage brush flat and through a waste of boulders, to the rugged pines
where their sharp eyes had made out the buzzards settling.
The medicine-man told me, always with a quaking relish at this point,
that while they, grown bold by success, were still in the tree, they
sighted a Paiute hunting party crossing between them and their own land.
That was mid-morning, and all day on into the dark the boys crept and
crawled and slid, from boulder to bush, and bush to boulder, in cactus
scrub and on naked sand, always in a sweat of fear, until the dust caked
in the nostrils and the breath sobbed in the body, around and away many
a mile until they came to their own land again. And all the time
Winnenap' carried those buzzard's eggs in the slack of his single
buckskin garment! Young Shoshones are like young quail, knowing without
teaching about feeding and hiding, and learning what civilized children
never learn, to be still and to keep on being still, at the first hint
of danger or strangeness.
As for food, that appears to be chiefly a matter of being willing.
Desert Indians all eat chuck-wallas, big black and white lizards that
have delicate white flesh savored like chicken. Both the Shoshones and
the coyotes are fond of the flesh of _Gopherus agassizii_, the turtle
that by feeding on buds, going without drink, and burrowing in the sand
through the winter, contrives to live a known period of twenty-five
years. It seems that most seeds are foodful in the arid regions, most
berries edible, and many shrubs good for firewood with the sap in them.
The mesquite bean, whether the screw or straight pod, pounded to a meal,
boiled to a kind of mush, and dried in cakes, sulphur-colored and
needing an axe to cut it, is an excellent food for long journeys.
Fermented in water with wild honey and the honeycomb, it makes a
pleasant, mildly intoxicating drink.
Next to spring, the best time to visit Shoshone Land is when the
deer-star hangs low and white like a torch over the morning hills. Go up
past Winnedumah and down Saline and up again to the rim of Mesquite
Valley. Take no tent, but if you will, have an Indian build you a
wickiup, willows planted in a circle, drawn over to an arch, and bound
cunningly with withes, all the leaves on, and chinks to count the stars
through. But there was never any but Winnenap' who could tell and make
it worth telling about Shoshone Land.
And Winnenap' will not any more. He died, as do most medicine-men of the
Paiutes.
Where the lot falls when the campoodie chooses a medicine-man there it
rests. It is an honor a man seldom seeks but must wear, an honor with a
condition. When three patients die under his ministrations, the
medicine-man must yield his life and his office. Wounds do not count;
broken bones and bullet holes the Indian can understand, but measles,
pneumonia, and smallpox are witchcraft. Winnenap' was medicine-man for
fifteen years. Besides considerable skill in healing herbs, he used his
prerogatives cunningly. It is permitted the medicine-man to decline the
case when the patient has had treatment from any other, say the white
doctor, whom many of the younger generation consult. Or, if before
having seen the patient, he can definitely refer his disorder to some
supernatural cause wholly out of the medicine-man's jurisdiction, say to
the spite of an evil spirit going about in the form of a coyote, and
states the case convincingly, he may avoid the penalty. But this must
not be pushed too far. All else failing, he can hide. Winnenap' did this
the time of the measles epidemic. Returning from his yearly herb
gathering, he heard of it at Black Rock, and turning aside, he was not
to be found, nor did he return to his own place until the disease had
spent itself, and half the children of the campoodie were in their
shallow graves with beads sprinkled over them.
It is possible the tale of Winnenap''s patients had not been strictly
kept. There had not been a medicine-man killed in the valley for twelve
years, and for that the perpetrators had been severely punished by the
whites. The winter of the Big Snow an epidemic of pneumonia carried off
the Indians with scarcely a warning; from the lake northward to the lava
flats they died in the sweat-houses, and under the hands of the
medicine-men. Even the drugs of the white physician had no power. After
two weeks of this plague the Paiutes drew to council to consider the
remissness of their medicine-men. They were sore with grief and afraid
for themselves; as a result of the council, one in every campoodie was
sentenced to the ancient penalty. But schooling and native shrewdness
had raised up in the younger men an unfaith in old usages, so judgment
halted between sentence and execution. At Three Pines the government
teacher brought out influential whites to threaten and cajole the
stubborn tribes. At Tunawai the conservatives sent into Nevada for that
pacific old humbug, Johnson Sides, most notable of Paiute orators, to
harangue his people. Citizens of the towns turned out with food and
comforts, and so after a season the trouble passed.
But here at Maverick there was no school, no oratory, and no
alleviation. One third of the campoodie died, and the rest killed the
medicine-men. Winnenap expected it, and for days walked and sat a little
apart from his family that he might meet it as became a Shoshone, no
doubt suffering the agony of dread deferred. When finally three men came
and sat at his fire without greeting he knew his time.
He turned a little from them, dropped his chin upon his knees, and
looked out over Shoshone Land, breathing evenly. The women went into the
wickiup and covered their heads with their blankets.
So much has the Indian lost of savageness by merely desisting from
killing, that the executioners braved themselves to their work by
drinking and a show of quarrelsomeness. In the end a sharp
hatchet-stroke discharged the duty of the campoodie. Afterward his women
buried him, and a warm wind coming out of the south, the force of the
disease was broken, and even they acquiesced in the wisdom of the tribe.
That summer they told me all except the names of the Three.
Since it appears that we make our own heaven here, no doubt we shall
have a hand in the heaven of hereafter; and I know what Winnenap's will
be like: worth going to if one has leave to live in it according to his
liking. It will be tawny gold underfoot, walled up with jacinth and
jasper, ribbed with chalcedony, and yet no hymn-book heaven, but the
free air and free spaces of Shoshone Land.
JIMVILLE--A BRET HARTE TOWN
When Mr. Harte found himself with a fresh palette and his particular
local color fading from the West, he did what he considered the only
safe thing, and carried his young impression away to be worked out
untroubled by any newer fact. He should have gone to Jimville. There he
would have found cast up on the ore-ribbed hills the bleached timbers of
more tales, and better ones.
You could not think of Jimville as anything more than a survival, like
the herb-eating, bony-cased old tortoise that pokes cheerfully about
those borders some thousands of years beyond his proper epoch.
Not that Jimville is old, but it has an atmosphere favorable to the type
of a half century back, if not "forty-niners," of that breed. It is said
of Jimville that getting away from it is such a piece of work that it
encourages permanence in the population; the fact is that most have been
drawn there by some real likeness or liking. Not however that I would
deny the difficulty of getting into or out of that cove of reminder, I
who have made the journey so many times at great pains of a poor body.
Any way you go at it, Jimville is about three days from anywhere in
particular. North or south, after the railroad there is a stage journey
of such interminable monotony as induces forgetfulness of all previous
states of existence.
The road to Jimville is the happy hunting ground of old stage-coaches
bought up from superseded routes the West over, rocking, lumbering, wide
vehicles far gone in the odor of romance, coaches that Vasquez has held
up, from whose high seats express messengers have shot or been shot as
their luck held. This is to comfort you when the driver stops to rummage
for wire to mend a failing bolt. There is enough of this sort of thing
to quite prepare you to believe what the driver insists, namely, that
all that country and Jimville are held together by wire.
First on the way to Jimville you cross a lonely open land, with a hint
in the sky of things going on under the horizon, a palpitant, white, hot
land where the wheels gird at the sand and the midday heaven shuts it in
breathlessly like a tent. So in still weather; and when the wind blows
there is occupation enough for the passengers, shifting seats to hold
down the windward side of the wagging coach. This is a mere trifle. The
Jimville stage is built for five passengers, but when you have seven,
with four trunks, several parcels, three sacks of grain, the mail and
express, you begin to understand that proverb about the road which has
been reported to you. In time you learn to engage the high seat beside
the driver, where you get good air and the best company. Beyond the
desert rise the lava flats, scoriae strewn; sharp-cutting walls of
narrow canons; league-wide, frozen puddles of black rock, intolerable
and forbidding. Beyond the lava the mouths that spewed it out,
ragged-lipped, ruined craters shouldering to the cloud-line, mostly of
red earth, as red as a red heifer. These have some comforting of shrubs
and grass. You get the very spirit of the meaning of that country when
you see Little Pete feeding his sheep in the red, choked maw of an old
vent,--a kind of silly pastoral gentleness that glazes over an elemental
violence. Beyond the craters rise worn, auriferous hills of a quiet
sort, tumbled together; a valley full of mists; whitish green scrub; and
bright, small, panting lizards; then Jimville.
The town looks to have spilled out of Squaw Gulch, and that, in fact, is
the sequence of its growth. It began around the Bully Boy and Theresa
group of mines midway up Squaw Gulch, spreading down to the smelter at
the mouth of the ravine. The freight wagons dumped their loads as near
to the mill as the slope allowed, and Jimville grew in between. Above
the Gulch begins a pine wood with sparsely grown thickets of lilac,
azalea, and odorous blossoming shrubs.
Squaw Gulch is a very sharp, steep, ragged-walled ravine, and that part
of Jimville which is built in it has only one street,--in summer paved
with bone-white cobbles, in the wet months a frothy yellow flood. All
between the ore dumps and solitary small cabins, pieced out with tin
cans and packing cases, run footpaths drawing down to the Silver Dollar
saloon. When Jimville was having the time of its life the Silver Dollar
had those same coins let into the bar top for a border, but the
proprietor pried them out when the glory departed. There are three
hundred inhabitants in Jimville and four bars, though you are not to
argue anything from that.
Hear now how Jimville came by its name. Jim Calkins discovered the Bully
Boy, Jim Baker located the Theresa. When Jim Jenkins opened an
eating-house in his tent he chalked up on the flap, "Best meals in
Jimville, $1.00," and the name stuck.
There was more human interest in the origin of Squaw Gulch, though it
tickled no humor. It was Dimmick's squaw from Aurora way. If Dimmick had
been anything except New Englander he would have called her a mahala,
but that would not have bettered his behavior. Dimmick made a strike,
went East, and the squaw who had been to him as his wife took to drink.
That was the bald way of stating it in the Aurora country. The milk of
human kindness, like some wine, must not be uncorked too much in speech
lest it lose savor. This is what they did. The woman would have returned
to her own people, being far gone with child, but the drink worked her
bane. By the river of this ravine her pains overtook her. There Jim
Calkins, prospecting, found her dying with a three days' babe nozzling
at her breast. Jim heartened her for the end, buried her, and walked
back to Poso, eighteen miles, the child poking in the folds of his denim
shirt with small mewing noises, and won support for it from the
rough-handed folks of that place. Then he came back to Squaw Gulch, so
named from that day, and discovered the Bully Boy. Jim humbly regarded
this piece of luck as interposed for his reward, and I for one believed
him. If it had been in mediaeval times you would have had a legend or a
ballad. Bret Harte would have given you a tale. You see in me a mere
recorder, for I know what is best for you; you shall blow out this
bubble from your own breath.