Prentice Mulford-Humorist of Jamestown, California                 

Prentice Mulford(1834-1891) came from New York by ship to the Mother Lode.  In Jamestown, California he was a gold miner, cook, school teacher, lecturer and a observer of human nature.  He was a fixture in San Francisco  literary circles with the likes of  Twain, Harte and the Bohemian set in the 1860's. He wrote dozens of  humorous short stories for the Overland Monthly, Golden Era, Californian, and other local journals. He referred to himself as "Dogberry."

Let us reminisce back to 1860 in Jamestown with "Dogberry" reflecting on life in a declining mining town with its citizens searching for individual identities with lots of time on their hands and little personal possessions or money.  

"Jimtown"

On those hot July and August afternoons, when the air simmered all along the heated earth, and I was trying to keep awake in my seminary on the hill, and wrestling with the mercury at 100 deg. and my sixty polyglot  pupils, the grown up "boys" would be tilted back in their chairs under the portico and against the cool brick wall of the Bella Union. They did not work, but they spun yarns. How half the boys lived was a mystery-as much a mystery, I do believe, to themselves as any one else. Some owned quartz claims, some horses, and all ran regularly for office. They belonged to the stamp of men who worked and mined in earlier times, but come what might, they had resolved to work in that way no longer. And when such resolve is accompanied by determination and an active, planning, inventive brain, the man gets along somehow. It is speculation that makes fortunes, and plan, calculation, and forethought for speculation, require leisure of   body.  A hard-working, ten-hour-per-day digging, delving miner works all his brains out through his fingers' ends.  He has none left to speculate with.  When I was mining at Swett's Bar, there came one day to my cabin a long, lean,. lank man looking for a lost  cow. The cow and the man belonged near Jacksonville, twelve miles up the Tuolumne. I dined that man principally off some bread of my own making, and I had the name then of making the best bread of any one in the house, where I lived alone.  After dinner the man sat himself down on one boulder and I on another, and I asked him if he had a good claim. That roused him to wrath.  He had, it seems, just reached the last point of his disgust for hard work and mining. Said he: "Don't talk to me of a good claim; don't.  It sounds like speaking of a good guillotine,  or a beautiful halter, or an elegant rack you're about to be stretched on." He had gone through his probation of hard work with his hands and had just resolved to let them rest and give his head a chance to speculate.  So he did.   I don't know that he ever met the cow again, but eight or nine years after I met him in the Legislature of California, he sat in the biggest chair there, and was Lieutenant-Governor of the State.

In 1860 the certain class of men of  whom I speak were in a transition state. They had left off  working with their hands and they were waiting for something to turn up on which to commence working with their heads. While thus waiting they became boys and played. The climate and surroundings were eminently favorable to this languid, loafing condition of existence, no long, sharp winters forcing people to bestir themselves and provide against its severities; little style to keep up; few families to maintain; no disgrace for a man to cook his own victuals; houses dropping to pieces; little new paint anywhere to make one's eyes smart; gates dropping from their hinges; few municipal improvements, with accompanying heavy taxes, and that bright summer sun for months and months shining over all and tempting everybody to be permanently tired and seek the shade.   The boys forgot their years; they dreamed away their days; they gossiped all the cool night; they shook off dignity; they played; they built waterwheels in the ditch running by the Bella Union door.

They instituted ridiculous fictions and converted them into realities; they instituted a company for the importation of smoke in pound packages into Jamestown; Muldoon was President and the "Doctor" Secretary.  It was brought by a steamer up Woods Creek; the steamer was wrecked on a dam a mile below town; the company met day after day in old Nielsen's saloon to consult; the smoke was finally taken to Jamestown and sold; the proceeds were stored in sacks at the express office; there was an embezzlement consequent on the settlement; the money, all in ten-cent pieces, was finally deposited in the big wooden mortar over Baker's drug store; this the "Doctor" was accused of embezzling, having time after time climbed up the mortar and abstracted the funds dime after dime and spent them for whiskey. Then came a lawsuit. Two mule teams freighted with lawyers for the plaintiff and defendant were coming from Stockton, and the Pound Package Smoke Company met day after day in preparation of the great trial. This fiction lasted about four months, and amused everybody except Captain James S----, an ex-Sheriff of the county, who, being a little deaf, and catching from time to time words of great financial import regarding the Pound Package Jamestown Smoke Company, as they dropped from Muldoon's and the "Doctor's" mouths, and being thereby time after time misled into a temporary belief that this fiction was a reality, and so often becoming irritated at finding himself ridiculously mistaken, burst out upon these two   worthies one day with all the wrath becoming the dignity of a Virginia gentleman, and denounced them profanely and otherwise for their frivolity and puerility.

Another specimen thinker and speculator of that era was Carroll.   He, too, had forever thrown aside pick and shovel, and when I met him he was a confirmed "tilter-back" under the Bella Union portico. Carroll was the theorist of Jamestown.  He broached new ones daily; he talked them to everybody in Jamestown, and after making clean work of that hamlet would go up to Sonora and talk there, and lastly published them in the Union Democrat. Said Carroll one Monday morning to the Presbyterian domine: "Mr. H----,  I heard your sermon yesterday on 'Heaven.' You argue, I think, that heaven is really a place.  I think it ought to be a place, too.   I've been thinking about it all night.  I'm satisfied not only that it is a place, but that I've got at the locality, or at least have approximated to it.  I've reasoned this out on purely scientific data, and here they are. We have an atmosphere, and they say it is from thirty-three to forty-five miles high.  Angels only live in heaven, and angels have wings.  If angels have wings, it's proof that they must have an atmosphere to fly in.  Now, the only atmosphere we are sure of is that around the earth. Therefore, putting all these facts and conclusions together, I've proved to myself that heaven must be from thirty-three  to forty-five miles from the ground we stand on."

  On commencing my pedagogical career, I rented a room of Carroll.   He owned at that time a quantity of real estate in Jamestown, some of which, including the premises I occupied, was falling rapidly and literally on his hands. The house I lived in was propped up several feet from the ground. The neighbors' chickens fed under this house from the crumbs swept through the cracks in the floor.  It was an easy house to sweep clean.  Rumor said that during my landlord's occupancy of these rooms many chickens had been heard from the interior of the house. The floor cracks did show powder marks, and there was an unaccountable quantity of feathers blowing about the yard.  In a conversation with my landlord he admitted that his boomerang could beat a six-shooter in fetching a chicken. Then he showed me his boomerang, which was of accidental construction, being the only remaining leg and round of an oaken arm-chair.   Properly shied, he said, it would kill a chicken at twenty yards.  French Joe, who dept the grocery next to Keefe's saloon, and it was in Jimtown a current report that Carroll and Joe had once invited the Catholic priest, Father A----, from Sonora to dinner; that the backbone of this dinner was a duck; that at or about this time Mrs. Hale, five doors down the street, had missed one of her flock of ducks; that on the morning of the dinner in question a strong savor of parboiling duck permeated all that part of Jamestown lying between Joe's and Mrs. Hale's; that Mrs. Hale smelt it; that  putting two and two--cause and effect and her own suspicions--together, she armed herself with her buntormentor fork and going from her back yard to the little outdoor kitchen in Joe's back yard found a pot over a fire and her presumed duck parboiling in it; and that, transfixing this duck on her tormentor, she bore it home, and the priest got no duck for dinner.

Carroll's mortal aversion was the hog.  His favorite occupation for ten days in the early spring was gardening, and his front fence was illy secured against hogs, for Carroll, though a man of much speculative enterprise, was not one whose hands always seconded the work of his head.  There was not a completed thing on his premises, including a well which he had dug to the depth of twelve feet and which he had then abandoned forever. The hogs would break through his fence and root up his roses, and the well caving in about the edges became a yawning gulf  in his garden, and during the rainy season it partly filled up with water, and a hog fell in one night and, to Carroll's joy, was drowned.

Men did their best in the dead of a rainy night to get the poor animal out, but a hog is not a being possessed of any capacity for seconding or furthering human attempts at his own rescue.  So he drowned, and was found the morning after a grand New Year's ball at the Bella Union Hall hanging by Joyce's clothesline over the middle of the street between the Bella Union and the Magnolia. The next night they put him secretly in the cart of a fish-peddler who had come up with salmon from the lower San Joaquin, and this man unwittingly hauled the hog out of town.

About four weeks after this transaction, coming home one dark, rainy night, I heard a great splashing in the well, and called out to Carroll that he had probably caught another hog.  He came out with a lantern and both of us peering over the brink of the cavity saw, not as we expected, a hog, but a man, a friend of Carroll's up to is chest in the water.  He was a miner from Campo Seco, who, on visiting Jimtown on one of his three months periodical sprees, had called on Carroll, and on leaving had mistaken the route to the gate and walked into the well. We fished him out with much difficulty, and on gaining the brink he came near precipitating us and himself   into the unfinished chasm through the unsteadiness of his perpendicular. As we turned to leave, looking down the well by the lantern's flash I saw what appeared to be another man half floating on the surface. There was a coat and at the end of it a hat, and I remarked, "Carroll, there is another man down your well." The rescued miner looked down also, and chattered as he shivered with cold, "Why, s-s-so there is!" We were really horrified until we discovered the supposed corpse to be only Lewellyn's coat with his hat floating at the end of it, which he had taken off in his endeavor to clamber out.

  Carroll, unfortunately, allowed his mind to wander and stray overmuch in the maze of theological mysteries and its (to him) apparent contradictions.  He instituted a private and personal quarrel between himself and his Creator, and for years he obtruded his quarrel into all manner of places and assemblages.  He arrived at last at that point  where many do under similar circumstances--a belief in total annihilation after death, and this serving to make him more miserable that ever, his only relief was to convert others to the same opinion and make them as wretched as himself.   Occasionally he succeeded.  He came to me one day and on his face was the grin of a fiend. "I've got Cummings," said he. "Cummings thought this morning he was a good Methodist, but I've been laboring with him for weeks.  I've convinced his of the falsity of it all.  I knocked his last plank of faith from under him to-day.   He hasn't now a straw to cling to, and he's as miserable as I am."

"But with Mullins," he remarked afterward, "I've slipped up on him.  I  wrought three weeks with Mullins; took him through the Bible, step by step--unconverted him steadily as we went along--got him down to the last leaf in the last chapter of the last  book of  Revelations, and there, fool like, I let up on him to go home to supper.  And do you know when I tackled him next morning, to close out Mullins' faith in the religion of his fathers, I found Mullins, in my absence, had got scared.  He'd galloped in belief  way back to Genesis, and now, I've got all that job to do over again."

There was a great deal of life in those little mining camps in Tuolumne County like Jamestown. They might not have the population of a single block in New York City, but there was a far greater average of mental activity, quickness, and intelligence to the man, at least so far as getting the spice out of life was concerned.

The social life of a great city may be much more monotonous through that solitude imposed by great numbers living together. Everybody at these camps knew us, and we knew everybody, and were pretty sure of meeting everybody we knew.  In the town one is not sure of meeting an acquaintance socially, save by appointment.  There are few loafing or lounging resorts; people meet in a hurry and part in a hurry.  Here in New York I cross night and morning on a ferry with five hundred people, and of these 495 do not speak or know each other.

  Four hundred of these people will sit and stare at  each other for a half an hour, and all the time wish they could talk with some one. And many of these people are so meeting, so crossing, so staring, and so longing to talk year in and year out. There is no doctor's shop where the impromptu symposium meets daily in the back room, as ours did at Doc Lampson's in Montezuma, or Baker's in Jamestown, or Dr. Walker's in Sonora. There's no reception every  evening at the Camp grocery as there used to be at "Bill Brown's" in Montezuma. There's no lawyer's office, where he feels privileged to drop in as we did at Judge Preston's in Jamestown, or Judge Quint's in Sonora. There's no printing office and editorial room all in one on the ground floor whereinto the "Camp Senate," lawyer, Judge, doctor, merchant and other citizens may daily repair in the summer's twilight, tilted back in the old hacked arm chairs on the front portico, and discuss the situation as we used to with A.N. Francisco of the Union Democrat in Sonora, and as I  presume the relics of antiquity and "'49" do at that same office today. These are a few of the features which made "Camp" attractive. These furnished the social anticipations which lightened our footsteps over those miles of mountain, gulch, and flat.  Miles are nothing, distance is nothing, houses a mile apart and "Camps" five miles apart are nothing when people you know and like live in those camps and houses at the end of those miles.   An evening at the Bella Union salon in "Jimtown" was a circus. Because men of individuality, character, and originality met there. They had something to say.   Many of them had little to do, and, perhaps, for that  very reason their minds the quicker took note of  so many of those little peculiarities of human nature., which when told, or hinted, or suggested prove the sauce piquant to conversation.

  When Brown, the lawyer, was studying French and read his Telemaque aloud by his open office window in such a stentorian voice as to be heard over a thread of the "camp," and with never a Frenchman at hand to correct his pronunciation, which he manufactured to suit himself as he went along, it was a part of the Bella Union circus to hear "Yank" imitate him.  When old Broche, the long, thin, bald-headed French baker, who never would learn one word of English, put on his swallow-tailed Sunday coat, which he had brought over from La Belle France, and lifted up those coat tails when he tripped over the mud-puddles as a lady would her skirts, it was a part of the Bella Union circus to see "Scotty" mimic him.  When John S---, the Virginian, impressively and loudly swore that a Jack-rabbit he had killed that day leaped twenty-five feet in the air on being shot, and would then look around the room as if he longed to find somebody who dared dispute his assertion, while his elder brother, always at his elbow in supporting distance, also glared into the eyes of the company, as though he also, longed to fight the somebody who should dare discredit "Brother John's" "whopper," it was a part of the circus to see the "boys" wink at each other when they had a chance.  When one heard and saw so many of every other man's peculiarities, oddities, and mannerisms, save his own, set off and illustrated while the man was absent, and knew also that his own, under like circumstances, had been or would be brought out on exhibition, it made him feel that it was somewhat dangerous to feel safe on the slim and slippery ice of self-satisfaction and self-conceit.  People in   great cities haven't so much time to make their own fun and amusement, as did the residents of so many of those lazy, lounging, tumbling-down, ramshackle "camps" of the era of "1863" or thereabouts.

People in the city have more of their fun manufactured for them at the theatres of high and low degree.  Yet it was wonderful how in "camp" they managed to dig so many choice bits and specimens out of the vein of  varied human nature which lay so near them. Whenever I visited "Jimtown" my old friend Dixon would take me into his private corner to tell me "the last" concerning a character who was working hard on an unabridged copy of  Webster's Dictionary in the endeavor to make amends for a woeful lack of grammatical knowledge, the result of a neglected education. "He's running now on two words," Dixon would say, "and these are 'perseverance' and 'assiduity.'  We hear them forty times a day, for he lugs them in at every possible opportunity, and, indeed, at times when there is no opportunity.  He came to business the other morning a little unwell, and alluded to his stomach as being 'in a chaotic state.'  And, sir, he can spell the word 'particularly' with six i's. How he does it , I can't tell; but he can."      - Dogberry

Jamestown had as much as 6000 residents during the early days of the gold rush.  By 1855 the "camps" that Twain, Harte and Mulford saw were in decline and many of the miners, merchants and opportunists had moved on to new haunts.  Today, Jamestown has about 1200 residents.  The famous Bella Union has been relocated across the street from the Royal Hotel.  There are still a few old timers with a tale or two who visit the Jamestown Coffee Emporium for their "expresso" in the mornings.  The Union Democrat is still being published in Sonora with a circulation of about 13,000 faithful.  You can still find humorist articles in the paper from time-to-time on the front page.  Visit the Jamestown Visitor Center on Main Street to obtain "The Early Days of Jimtown", an old fashioned newspaper of  stories about Jamestown during the gold rush  days   published by the Royal Hotel.  Also, see the 90 exhibit frames of movie and TV history in Tuolumne County since 1916 in the Jamestown Visitor Center.  By the way, we saw the great-great-great grandfather pig majestically riding in the back of a 1950's era Chevy pickup on his way to the annual Tuolumne County Fair. Great fun!

        Local Folklore      44 lb. Gold Nugget        Poet of the Sierras