Thus came to a close the first chapter in his life after his return to California. The period prior to that is complete, self-contained and final. With his return to California the years of his journalistic satire began in earnest, for his mining expedition was of slight duration. He had entered the field at a most significant time. The “terrible seventies,” as Mrs. Atherton refers to the period, saw the collapse of the artificial and unutterably gorgeous society of the sixties. In those early years the town had gleamed with gold, and mining speculation became the enterprise of an entire community, with the Nevada stocks alone rising from seventeen millions to eighty-four millions in one year. It was the day of Comstock Lode, Consolidated Virginia, Crown Point, Belcher and Ophir. The mining fever acted as a vortex that sucked into its inexorable funnel all the gold that the forty-niners had discovered, along with all the additional money that the settlers had brought with them. The end of the seventies saw the money being accumulated into the hands of a few, and, while the eyes of the community were dazzled with dreams of gold, the promoters of the trans-continental railroad had very craftily saddled and bridled the state. When people awoke from the trance, they were servants to an empire of monopoly. Radicalism swept in for just a moment, but was poorly generaled by Denis Kearney, and soon failed. The leader of the Sand Lot abandoned the W. P. C. and went back to Boston, where he captured large audiences at’ Faneuil Hall with orations that were written for him by newspaper reporters. Bierce saw all these swift and moving events and was conscious only of the particular actors in the drama and the essential pettiness of both sides. The romantic California of the sixties was gone forever: Spanish California, built on a sound, self-contained culture, had existed for years and might have flowered into a fine civilization but for the discovery of gold. With 1849 a new era came into existence, raced through its meager term of years, and expired in 1870. There would be no more cotillions and Calico Balls; Mrs. Fair would now forget her ambiguous origins and become a grand lady. By 1876 the whirligig society of the sixties, in which Mollie Day’s hand was open game, was irretrievably gone, and, the pity is, without a record. Bayard Taylor’s slight volume, the romantic tales of Bret Harte, and a little of Twain: this alone marks the passage of an immensely important era. With the seventies came a period of horrific solemnity — magnificent, dull and empty.
The period that followed suffered from the excesses of individualism. Mr. Brownell once wrote that “Lack of sympathy with each other; a narrow and degrading struggle for ‘success’; a crying competition; a dull, leaden introspection; no community of interest, material or ideal, except of a grossly material religious ideality; duty ignorantly conceived; sacrifices needlessly made; generous impulses leading nowhither, and elevated effort clogged by the absence of worthy ends; the human spirit, in fine, thrown back on itself and operating, so to speak, in vacuo,—” and, to break his sentence, one knows that this is a description of the seventies. Read “Prattle” just as it appeared in the newspapers and note the advertisements, the popular news, the announcements, and, in a word, all the unstudied expression of the period, and you cannot help but conclude that Bierce wrote “in vacuo.” Later his steadfast skepticism bore fruit in a tradition, but in the early days his satire was wasted; he might just as well have gone fishing with a copy of Rabelais, as to have written those reams of abuse.
What difference did it make whether rogues were rogues; and why become excited over the fact that the county treasurer was a thief or that there was an occasional murder in San Francisco? Did it really matter so much?
This, then, was the end of an important experience; the high adventure of the war was a memory; the trip across the plains was forgotten; London existed only in the form of a few witty anecdotes; and he was now nearing middle-age, married, with a family to support, with no position, hated by every powerful lobby in the state. Is it small wonder that during these days when Bierce thought that the firebrands of the sandlot were destroying the nation he had fought to preserve that he exclaimed: “Patriotism? Wouldst thou serve thy fatherland? Cultivate, then, the habit of uttering whatever thou art most reluctant that its enemies should know.... Patriotism is fierce as fenur, pitiless as the grave, blind as a stone, and irrational as a headless hen.” Patriotism? And every 4th of July saw General W. H. L. Barnes marching at the head of his regiments of valiant peace-soldiers down Market Street!
These were, indeed, bad days for Bierce. The country reeked with the peculiarly fetid odor of money-lust. In all those days Bierce, alone of his generation in the West, mustered a shout against the awful futility of such a society. He stuck by his guns in a most manly fashion, and never once truckled to the molochs of the day. As an editor, his only congenial contributor was Emma Frances Dawson, an old maid who wrote ghost stories for The Argonaut and later turned into a ghost herself, living alone for years in a little hut, and dying finally of starvation in Palo Alto. While Mr. Stanford was mouthing delicious platitudes in public and waiting eagerly for the decision in Colton vs. Stanford, the decision of the supreme court having been delayed several times to permit of convenient last-minute elections, the artists of the day had turbulent dreams of rattlesnakes and wrote ghost stories. It was the tradition of Poe or that of Godey’s Lady Book. Of Mr. Godey’s magazine Bierce wrote: “It is a publication which from the teens of our grandmothers has poured a thick and slab stream of irreparable and unaffected bosh into the misunderstanding of genderless gents, lettered wet nurses and misses cherishing a blasted hope apiece.” One afternoon in a quiet corner of the lobby in the old Belle Vista Hotel, a very beautiful woman, who dressed in charming widow’s weeds and had a taste for poetry, asked Mr. Bierce why he never wrote a love story. Her question was, under the circumstances, something of a love poem itself, but he answered: “The world to-day is only interested in love and horror and it is impossible at present to write of love with decency.” He was quite right. The most scandalous book of the seventies in San Francisco, a volume that rocked the town, was “On the Verge: a Romance of the Centennial” by Philip Shirley. “Philip Shirley” was the pen name for Annie Lake Townsend, who, en passant, wrote some very tender poems to Mr. Bierce. Her novel was a sensation. One may open the book at random and find such delicious morsels as this:
“He found, beside the concerto, Schubert’s ‘Wanderer,’ Spohr’s ‘Bright Star of Night’ and Virginia Gabriel’s ‘When the Pale Moon Arose.’ His expression as he looked them over was just what she knew it would be and what she had determined not to encounter; but the thing was done now. She leaned back and defied him with flashing eyes.”
In 1879, when such a book as “On the Verge” was hailed as a masterpiece, the only thing for a gentleman to do was to write a ghost story.
Bierce closed this chapter of his life thinking he was through with journalism forever: better mining than blasphemy at nothing a line. This time he left San Francisco under colors not quite so bright or fair as before. There was not quite such an atmosphere of hope and triumph about his trip to Dakota as there was to the London adventure. Mark Twain tried his hand at the publishing business; Ambrose Bierce became a miner. “The Gilded Age” claimed them momentarily, and when it “panned out,” both were left to do some prospecting in their souls.
CHAPTER VIII. THE BLACK HILLS
GOOD memoirs,” Max Beerbohm once wrote, “must ever be the cumulation of gossip.” If the truth of this statement be assumed, it is not surprising to find that Bierce’s fragmentary memoirs are so disappointing. The manner in which a man writes about his own life, the details which he selects as illuminating, the attitudes he stresses as important, constitute a good measure of his capacity for honesty. Bierce, who was so frightfully honest about others, was not publicly truthful about himself. In his letters there are moments when he is off guard, but his “Bits of Autobiography,” found in Volume I of the “Collected Works,” are most significant in their highly romantic version of several major happenings of his life. He never related a mean experience about his
life; he selected only the “grand” episodes and wrote of them after the manner of an elderly gentleman entertaining a circle of excited ladies. One can detect in the manner in which these experiences are narrated, the dramatic and studied gesture, the carefully planned pause, the shock and surprise, and then the murmur of laughter and approval as the delighted audience of faithful admirers subside in quiescent rapture. His “memoirs” are told in the manner of a professional raconteur, and were selected solely for their dramatic possibilities as stories and for the romantic halo which they cast about his own life. He bows, in these memoirs, more than once to the galleries.
In none of these episodes was he more misleading than in the few paragraphs which refer to his experience as a miner in the Black Hills. He prefaces the episode with a note about the melancholy that enshrouds the life of a “sole survivor.” Then he announces that he was once on his way to Rockerville, Dakota, with “thirty thousand dollars on my person, belonging to a mining company of which I was the general manager. Naturally, I had taken the precaution to telegraph my secretary, etc.” The story follows about how one of his hired desperadoes, Boone May, shot a bandit who attempted to rob the manager of his money. This is the only record that Bierce left about his year in the Black Hills of Dakota. There are reasons why he would not particularly care to discuss this period in his life, and why he permitted it to be veiled in obscurity. Even his own family did not know much about what happened, and his only advisors in San Francisco were Judge Boalt and “Charley” Kauffman. It was surely not the romantic interlude that he infers in the episode mentioned.
The entire matter may be traced to Bierce’s trip across the plains in 1866. Hazen’s expedition had passed through the Black Hills on its way west, and Bierce had made numerous sketches for a map to be made of the entire region. When, after his return to San Francisco from England, there began to be much excitement about the Black Hills territory, which was then being thrown open by the government for settlement, Bierce made these notes into a map which was published by A. L. Bancroft & Company, in 1877, under the title: “Map of the Black Hills Region, Showing the Gold Mining District and the Seat of the Indian War. Drawn by A. G. Bierce from surveys ordered by the War Department.” The gold fields of the Far West had been thoroughly exploited by then and the floating, migratory, mining population was looking for new regions in which to prospect for gold and silver. Naturally Bierce was interested, particularly as he was familiar with the Black Hills region. He was, moreover, beginning to be rather disgusted with Pixley.
Mining as an adventure exercised a great sway over the popular imagination from 1849 to 1890; the period of the supremacy of mining as a popular ideal probably lasted until after the collapse of silver mining which perished with the repeated defeats of William Jennings Bryan. There was scarcely a Western family during these years that was not affected in some manner by mining. The extent of the widespread popular interest in mining is reflected in the Western journals of the day. These newspapers were full of mining news, mining stock quotations, rumors of strikes, the fabulous escapades of Tabor and the rise of Leadville. The habits of the miner became Western traits of character, and the jargon of the mining camp colored the stream of our vocabulary. It is an amazing experience to check over the lists of publishing houses during this period and to note the flood of books, pamphlets and tracts about mines or mining life. The list of “homely” philosophies of life inspired by queer mining characters would alone make a considerable bibliography. The three foremost figures in Western literature, Mark Twain, Bret Harte and Ambrose Bierce, were intimately associated with mining life. The poems, stories, and novels that came out of the west during this period centered about mining life and, towards 1898, one can trace the sweep of the mining hordes to Alaska and the emergence of a new group of writers who attempted to record that phase of the movement. It is not, therefore, surprising to find that Bierce resigned his position with The Argonaut to become a miner.
The matter was even more personal. Bierce had a natural interest in mining; it was a vocation to which many members of his family gravitated. Several Bierces are to-day prominent mining engineers: H. C. Bierce, of Los Angeles, is a hydraulic engineer; and Herman Bierce Waters and Lucius Fuller are well known in their profession. Albert Bierce showed this same interest. Ambrose had some engineering training. Moreover, his work at the Sub-Treasury, which was in effect the United States Mint, put him in contact with mining and mining men. Several of his best friends, such as Capt. Nichols, who married the beautiful Belle Thomas, and O. C. Miller, were miners. Then, too, his wife’s family had been miners for two generations.
Dr. Danziger intimates that Bierce’s mining expedition into the Black Hills was, in some strange manner, connected with the Southern Pacific. But this, of course, is nonsense. And, contrary again to the doctor’s vivid imagination, Bierce did not quarrel with Frank Pixley prior to leaving for Dakota. Bierce was not discharged from The Argonaut. Both Pixley and Fred Somers are, of course, long since dead. The only person who perhaps recalls exactly what happened at the time is Jerome A. Hart, an early contributor to The Argonaut and its owner and publisher after the Pixley-Somers régime.
As a journalist in the early days, Mr. Hart came to know Bierce, Pixley, Somers, James Watkins, and the other figures of the San Francisco press. According to Mr. Hart, who was on the staff at the time, Bierce ceased writing for The Argonaut in April of 1879, and was absent from the office until November of that year. This coincides with the circumstances, for Bierce’s copy disappeared from The Argonaut in May of 1879. There were a few items throughout the summer; and one series of “Fables and Anecdotes” and “Little Johnny” appeared on October 11, 1879, but it is apparent that this was copy which had been left at the office. From other records which Bierce left with his daughter, it appears that during the summer of 1879 he was interested in the promotion of several mining companies. There are several letters from O. C. Miller, an old friend, written during August of 1879, indicating that Bierce was associated, in some manner, with the Carrie Steele Mining Company, along with Miller and several other San Franciscans.
What happened after Bierce returned to the office of The Argonaut in the fall of 1879, may be related by Mr. Hart. “About this time Bierce grew much excited over the talk of gold mines in the Black Hills, then thrown open by the U. S. Government to miners and settlers. His knowledge of assaying acquired in the United States Mint (sic) led to his securing a well-paid position with a mining company in the Black Hills. He resigned from The Argonaut staff; I think this was in the spring of 1880. There was no quarrel with Pixley or anybody else; his parting was amicable; everybody in the office wished him well and envied him his potential wealth as a gold miner.” This statement is substantially correct. Bierce secured the appointment because of his familiarity with the Black Hills region, as the publication of his map had made him something of an authority, and not because of any knowledge of assaying that he may have acquired.
The company that Bierce finally became associated with as “superintendent” was The Black Hills Placer Mining Company, which had headquarters at Rockerville, South Dakota. Bierce got in contact with the organizers of this company through an old army friend who was attorney for the project. He was none other than Sherburne Black Eaton, the “S. B.
Eaton,” head of the treasury agents in Section No 1 of Alabama, who had returned to New York after the reconstruction work and entered the practice of the law under the firm name of Chamberlain, Carter & Eaton. He had kept up his acquaintance with Bierce by correspondence after the war, and when this opportunity arose had naturally tendered the position to his old associate. The company had been organized before Bierce went to Dakota. He was its general agent, with full power of supervision, from July to September, of 1880, at Rockerville, South Dakota.
The company’s former agent was one Captain Ichabone M. West. He had resigned from his position, but was fulfilling a contract with the company for the erection of a flume and othe
r structures at the time Bierce took over the management. Some two hundred thousand dollars were advanced to this man under Bierce’s supervision on construction work. The company seems to have been poorly organized and soon ran out of capital. Bierce began to write Eaton urgent letters, demanding money to meet the payroll of the mine, as laborers and other creditors were becoming quite insistent in their demands. To make matters worse, Captain West defaulted with the proceeds of a draft from the New York offices, and the local bank refused to pay Bierce the balance of the funds which were on deposit in his name as agent, inasmuch as the bank claimed the right to offset the money West had taken against the amount of the draft.
The situation became too acute for Bierce, and he left for New York in an effort to secure additional funds to carry on the work of the company. But nothing could be done. The Black Hills did not, of course, develop into a great gold mining region and many other companies failed about this time. He stayed on in New York for several weeks, conferring with Eaton and Marcus Walker, and a Mr. Amidon, but it was apparent that the company was insolvent and the directors did not have sufficient confidence in the enterprise to finance it further. So Bierce left New York for California, a very disappointed and disheartened man. His great bonanza had failed and he was in a much worse position than before, since the company even owed him the greater part of his wages for the time he was in Dakota. It was surely not a very pleasant dénouement to what had promised to be such an exciting triumph.
Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Delphi Classics) Page 352