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Show 12 THE CITIZEN petered out and hes off prospecting. And then you forget him. g.MlllHIIIUHllUiiiiiiuiimiiuiiiiniiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiniiiiuiiiiiiiiiiiiiiniiiiuuuiiiimuimiiiiiiiuuuiuuiiuiiiiiiiMuuiiuiimniiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii; AMONG THE NEW BOOKS I THE Dl AR Y.1 OF FORTY-- N record N E R. Edited by C. L; Canfield, Published by the Houghton Mifflin' Company, ' ii V. Boston. V : A I n "it' - It is not the refined gold of scholarly recollection,' but rather the rough nuggets of a rugged miners memory that we count over almost with the greedy pleasure of a miser as we peruse the pages of this unusual diary. It comes to ih out of a pa3t that has figured often in literature, a past that Mark Twain and Bret Harte, in the fires of their genius, welded into an unending future. Not with their skill nor their sophistication is the story told, for the diarist was not of the immortals to whom art comes as a gift of divine dispensation. Nevertheless it has an appeal of its own not wholly disengaged from the elements of which art is made romance, poetry, love and laughter. Originally the volume was published in San Francisco just before the earthquake. Soon afterwards the plates and many copies of the diary were destroyed. Since then, we are informed, copies have sold at high prices. . Mr. Canfield discovered the treasure, but recently when a stout leather-bounbook of 300 pages came into his possession and opened up to his enamored gaze poetic vistas of the argo, i . old-tim- . sin-Cl- 8 . d nauts of Forty-Nin- e. It was the diary of Alfred T. Jackson, who from the narrow associations of Norfolk, Conn., ras a boy and graveled into that western world which) as he delights to relate, broadened his vision and gave him a wider and a better knowledge and love of man. For the most part the scene is Nevada county, California. The contents are a mingling of record and narrative ranging from the costs of provisions and sup- plies to the ways and deeds of his comrades. In the lapse of fifty years since it had been written the ink had faded and turned yellow, many of the lines were barely legible, and a dozen of the first leaves of the book had been torn away. The remainder was intact. It is this authentic, unadorned chronicle of the placer mining days of die-part- ed Certainly none of these lay figures appear in their familiar roles in Jack sons picture of the free, careless life that vanished forever even before the golden harvest had been gathered from creek, gulch and ravine. But what a life the argonauts did live in those hills, close to paganism, laughing scornfully at the shackles of the civilization they had left behind in The States. pine-clothe- vivid and convincing in the absence of conscious literary endeavor, that the editor passes on to the readers of his fascinating book. Mr. Canfield adds that the many incidents and happenings so simply noted have been verified, both by local tradition and the testimony of old timers still living. (The original date of the preface to the book was 1906.) been among the earliest of those fear less argonauts who ventured into the California foothills is argued by the date of the first entry in his personal d I guess we stopped at forty cabins on the way; never failed to get an invitation to grub, never were allowed to pay a cent, and I want to put it down right here that bigger hearted, more generous, or more hospitable men than there are in these mountains never lived on earth. We dont ask what a man is worth or how much he has got. The only question is, Is he a good fellow? This is. a great country for everybody minding his own business. If there is one thing above another that prevails, it is the good fellowship among us all. If a man is taken sick, is hurt, or in .bad luck, there is not one of us that is not ready to nurse the foothills, told in simple and, at times, ungrammatical sentences, yet Alfred T. Jackson, according to the inscription of the inside front cover of his diary, came from Norfolk, Litch field county, Conn. That he must have er d . , him or put our hands into our pockets if necessary. We don't ask who' he is, where he came from, .or what is his religion. Onythe other hand, men are coming and going all the time. You may have known a man for a year, then you miss him, see a stranger at his cabin, and ask what has become of the old occupant and the answer will be, Oh, he has made his pile and gone back to the States," or "His claim t Of course, all things were not as golden as this passage would suggest. The unsettled conditions had their oth- ener side, as witness ! d life of the old, wide-opedays before the law came into the California gold country those days of vaulting success and- sordid failure when men bulked big and life ran large, when a rich vein made a prospector a millionaire in a day and the faro table made him a pauper in a night. Never have there been more picturesque times in the history of America, and never have they been more vividly portrayed than in this diary of a man who lived where living was as dramatic and colorful as in any romance written. In a sense, the book is a unique contribution to American history. The period which it describes has had no parallel, and no historian unless we include the fiction of Bret Harte and his imitators. And according to Mr. Canfield, who is by way of himbeing something of an self, Bret Harte should be ruled out as a historian: The present generation is content to adopt Bret Hartes tales as veracious chronicles of life in the foothills and mining camps of the Fifties, yet every old pioneer knows that his types were exaggerated, the miners dialect impossible and unknown; but he illumined his pages with genius, he caught the atmosphere, and neither protest nor denial is sufficient to remove the belief that he was writing We have had real history. a surfeit of the stoic gambler, uncouth courtesans and miner, draggle-taileimpossible school mistresses. These were inventions touched, distorted and illumlnatecby Bret Hartes genius. , . ; May 19, 1850. He lived the I the-followi- ng try: The mountains are full of miners tramping around from one section to another, wandering over the country, men leaving with their piles or hunting better diggings, and there are numerous hold-up- and murders on the s trails that become known only when somebody runs across the bodies. As we are all strangers to each other out- side of our immediate neighborhoods, the Identity of the murdered man is rarely discovered and but little inters est is taken in apprehending the Greatest of the blessings were the unmatchable friendships' between men who cabined together through good luck and bad. To cabin together in the fifties signified an interdependent relationship between man and man that is not found today outside of the trenches, a relationship intimate, more than that, of brothers, a love that forgave the irascibility re suiting from toil, exposure and fatigue, Chat rose superior even to the test of the repetitions of sour bread and a scorching of the bean pot. And what rollicking larks Jackson describes, not always innocent liquor often flowed too freely but never uns wholesome. The at play were like colts unbroke, and as naive in their fun as schoolboys. Imagine, if you can, half a hundred husky men holding a mock funeral over the remains of Thanksgiving turkey and getting such huge enjoyment out of their own sheer nonsense that their woodland home rang and echoed with their merriment. Or try to picture the population of a otwn feting a jackass that vanquished a bear in a battle tsaged between them in an improvised self-sacrifici- soul-tryin- g Forty-Niner- A procession was formed, the animal in the lead, and we all tramped back to town, shouting, singing and banging away with pistols. When we reached Caldwells store (which is now Nevada City), the place went mad. The crowd would drive the burro into a saloon, insist on pledging him for drinks, then redeem him by taking up a collection for the bill, and repeat at the next saloon. The town was in for a grand drunk, but I soon git tired of it and rode home. (When the author of the diary left the Litchfield hills he promised his mother not to drink, and according to his written record he never broke his word.) Joyous holiday making such as that just described typifies as well as could the ingenuous spirit of the any-thin- k Firty-niner- s. ; whom he almost inyariably refers to throughout his book simply as Pard," I know he wen the diarist writes: through college and hung out his shin. gle as a lawyer. He can recite poetry by the yard and quote from all sort of books. The editor of the diary adds the information that Pard, who . . appears in the diary under his assumed name of Anderson, later stood aomng the foremost at the San Francisco bar and high in the councils of state. ' One' of the most fascinating feature of this remarkable document is diarists self-revelati- on of the his evolution from a Puritanical New Englander, bound and shackled with the preju. dices of generations, narrow and limited in his views and opinions, unsophisticated in his experiences, nto a broadminded man whose mental growth is miraculously- - stimulated by the free-dom of his environment and associa-tions- . He becomes tolerant of his fellows and convinced of the existence of a worthwhile world beyond the horizon of the Litchfield hills whence he came, but away from which he had , never ventured twenty miles until he joined the gold rush. The companionship of his educated Pard was probably as big a factor as the free life itself- in bringing Jackson out of his chrysalis. But we must not overlook the evidence of the latter part of the diary. It becomes a love romance, pure and simple, telling poetically and with . poignant directness of the currents that brought together this Yankee and a French woman whom he first saw dealing twenty-on- e in a mining town. From his first meeting with her the prosaic facts of his existence are given with less and less detail in his diary. Idyllic passages are more frequent. He sees everything with the eyes of a poet. He begins to note all beautiful things, whether they be of the outer or of the spiritual world. It is in his pictures of his life with An- - ' derson that the awakening of his soul shows itself in most idlyyc form. The shere smplicty land sincerity of his entries iive the diary a new literary s qualty, despte the ocacsional of his language. One quotation must suffice as an illustration: hard-heade- d crude-nes:e- Pard and I sat out under the old pine tonight for the last time we will be busy tomorrow getting our traps Into town and neither one of us was In the best of spirits, although as far as we can see there is nothing but happiness ahead of us. The moonbeams shimmered down through the pine needles, the frogs croaked in the creek, a coyote barked up on the hill, the echo of the hoot of an owl drifted up from the trail. We have listened to the same sounds every night for ; years: but somehow this evening it seemed as if they were all saying "Good-by.- " r The early entries in Jackson's diary show that he was unmistakably homesick, particularly for Hetty. North, the girl he left behind him. Then he and Anderson, an educated fellow from Syracuse, cast their lot together, and from that time onward Jacksons homesickness is steadily supplanted by a growing love for the new land and the freer life. In describing this man, ' A SHARP REPLY. Tourist Whats that beast? Native Thats a razorback hawr, suh. Tourist Whats he rubbing himself on the tree for? Native Jest stropping hisself, suh, jest stropping hisself. |