Literary career launched at Red Mountain Bar,
Three of pioneer California's most noted literary figures drew considerable inspiration from early day Tuolumne County.
Mark Twain absorbed sufficient local color while living on Jackass Hill to jump start his fabled writing career in late 1865 with “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.”
Bret Harte breezed through the Gold Country, stopped at Jackass Hill after Twain and briefly taught school, possibly at La Grange. He returned to San Francisco with valuable character and landscape impressions that pop up in such short stories as “The Luck of Roaring Camp” and “The Outcasts at Poker Flat.”
The third, Prentice Mulford, is less well known, but he is usually listed as part of the pantheon of a half dozen or so journalists, storytellers and poets who produced the best literature of 1860s California.
Dame Fortune seldom smiled on Mulford. Shy, short of selfconfidence and feeling that failure was his future, he propelled himself through life on gumption, humor and blithe spirit. In 1860 at age 26, a flair for journalism awoke in him at Red Mountain Bar on the Tuolumne River while he and other gold miners sat under a big pine tree recovering from a spree the night before and reveling in it.
On a whim, as occurred often in his life, Mulford put pen to paper and sent his humorous thoughts to The Union Democrat over the signature “Dogberry.” With publisher A.N. Francisco's encouragement, he submitted more articles full of witty observations of the life that surrounded him.
Mulford said his articles gained him a “small county, but cashless reputation” during his remaining six years in Tuolumne County.
Seventy years later, a noted scholar of western literature dignified Mulford with the description “The Diogenes of the Tuolumne,” a reference to the Greek philosopher/cynic.
A lifetime of misadventure gave Mulford a rich source of material for newspapers and periodicals, the same ones that published Twain and Harte.
As a teenager, Mulford was installed as the manager of his family's hotel in the whaling village of Sag Harbor, New York. Under his management, it slowly eased into bankruptcy over a four-year period.
The outcome of other endeavors were just as bleak. Jobs as mechanic and clerk didn't last long. Mulford even enrolled at a teacher's college but only stayed six months. Then, as he wrote in his autobiography, “Prentice Mulford's Story,” “I made up my mind to become a sailor … I had tried several other of this world's callings and seemed to find none suitable.”
At age 21, Mulford signed on as a crew member of the Wizard bound for San Francisco via Cape Horn. The clipper ship sailed out of Sag Harbor, where he was born on April 5, 1834.
Rough seas slammed Mulford to the deck more than once, working aloft in the wind-whipped rigging proved an impossible struggle, ocean water swamped his quarters, rigid discipline chafed, there was a short-lived mutiny by 15 sailors, and he had to clean out the ship's pig pen. The Wizard reached San Francisco in August 1856 and, as the wannabe sailor disembarked, the captain said he was not cut out to be a sailor.
Mulford did not go directly to California's mining region as so many men from Sag Harbor had before him. He drifted around in the port city for several months, toiling at menial jobs such as sorting and counting seagull eggs from the Farallones, which many restaurants and families substituted for the more expensive hen fruit.
The sea beckoned again and, on the strength of a batch of Irish stew Mulford put together for the captain of the Henry, he was hired as the schooner's cook. He spent 10 months aboard the Henry as it sailed south along the Pacific Coast in search of abalone and whales for their oil.
Unfortunately for the 20-man crew, Irish stew was all that Mulford could cook. It was a long three months for him and the sailors before he figured out how to prepare meals that were digestible. Early disasters were coffee accidently made with salt water and “involuntary meat pie.” The latter culinary fiasco happened when a small mouse ate its way into some biscuit dough unseen by Mulford, who baked it in his wood stove and served it to the men.
When the Henry docked at San Francisco, Mulford received his share of the haul — $250.
With little success at his chosen profession, Mulford “resolved to go to the mines.” It was 1857, and he headed straight for Hawkins' Bar on the Tuolumne River, where two friends from home were mining: cousins Howard Gardiner and Robert “Bob” Gardiner, the latter of whom moved on to politics as Tuolumne County clerk for four terms.
Mulford arrived with $18 and a bag of clothes that included seven vests, the leavings of an equal number of worn-out suits. Late to the Gold Rush, he described Hawkins' Bar as “on its last legs.” He took to mining after two jobs that didn't pan out.
The first job that didn't pan out for Mulford involved distributing a butcher's tough beef steaks to the Bar's miners. About a week into the job, the horse carrying the steaks ran away from him, kicking as it went. The meat flew out of baskets faster than he could pick it up.
Mulford finally caught the horse, piled the dirt-covered steaks in the baskets and washed the meat in the muddy water of the Tuolumne, then he continued on his way by depositing the steaks in the meat safes of the miners on his route.
After Mulford was fired by the butcher, he became an “errand boy” for a store at Hawkins' Bar delivering provisions. Again, this pack animal got the best of him and bucked off the entire order. “As he ran,” Mulford wrote, “the motion burst the bag of flour, ditto the potatoes, and then the whiskey demi-john broke … The flour rose in the air like a white cloud,” the potatoes “flew” out of their sack, and “the whole was interspersed with jets of whiskey. It looked like a snow squall traveling on horseback.”
His mining began with a borrowed rocker and making only $1.50 a day. He partnered with an experienced miner whom he felt “such a man must turn up gold.” Such was not the case. And there was more disappointment. A heavy rainstorm in September 1858 destroyed the men's brush hut and soaked them to the skin as they shivered all night in their summer clothes. The dye from Mulford's black hat ran in rivulets down his face. Upon reflection, Mumford found humor in the situation and gloried in being on his own to live as he wished.
Unlike Twain and Harte, he lived what he wrote about. A miner's life is described in his book: “Dressing was a short job. A pair of damp overalls, a pair of socks, a pair of shoes or possibly the heavy rubber mining boots. Flannel shirts we slept in. A face-swabbing with cold water in the tin basin outside and “a lick and a promise” for the hair with a comb. That was about all for work days.”
Mulford's experience as the Henry's cook prepared him for cooking his own food. Breakfast was a slab of “bull mahogany,” boiled potatoes and camp-made bread burned in places and raw in others. The plates and utensils he used stayed in place, ready for the noontime meal.
His workday began by standing in the Tuolumne River using a pick and shovel in search of gold hidden in its embankment. “Pick and shovel and scrape and scrape, shovel and pick” while the river roared by. Sometimes miners conversed with each other during breaks. Following dinner (lunch), it is more of the same. “We are on duty bound to work till six o'clock, though the hard work has tired most men by four.” After three years mining at Hawkins' Bar, Swett's Bar and Red Mountain Bar, Mulford expressed the heartbreak of the luckless: “I wonder how many years more I shall spend here … I am no nearer to fortune than three years ago.”
Obviously discouraged, Mulford abandoned gold mining in the late summer of 1860 just as trustees of the Jamestown School District were seeking a teacher for their one-room school. After spelling “cat,” “rat” and “mat,” the board hired him and everyone retired to the nearest saloon for drinks. Today's Jamestown Methodist Church on Seco Street was his classroom.
“I was shut up in that little church six hours a day with 60 children … from four to 18 years of age.” Discipline was difficult to enforce. Some of the older boys once locked Mulford out of the school. On hot days, children would get sick or faint, and keeping pupils' dogs outside took constant vigil.
His tenure at his Jimtown “cathedral” at $75 per month lasted two years before another whim overtook him. “The grandest of my failures” came next: the formation of companies to stake copper and silver claims. That venture ended at David Hays' tavern at Eureka Valley on a trip back to Tuolumne County.
Winter announced its arrival with a near-blizzard, and Mulford was stranded at Hays' place on the old Sonora-mono Road between Kennedy Meadows and Dardanelle. Hays and his partner were well-provisioned, and Mulford stayed there from December 1964 until March 1965. Ironically, that time period coincided with the three months that Mark Twain spent at the Gillis cabin on Jackass Hill taking notes on saloon keepers, miners and frogs.
The two writers on the cusp of fame did not meet at that time, but when both were in London on speaking tours in the early 1870s, Twain helped the impecunious Mulford gain access to a London editor likely to publish his work.
Mulford left for Sonora in March anxious to begin a lecture tour that took him (by foot) to camps and towns in the region. It was a dangerous and foolhardy trip out of the high country covered in deep snow. His humorous lectures were well-attended, but at 10 or 25 cents per person, hardly profitable. However, they stoked his “self-esteem” and, on yet another whim, became a Democratic candidate for State Assembly. He campaigned but did not win.
His clever, comical stories continued to appear in The Union Democrat and attracted the attention of the editor of The Golden Era, a popular San Francisco weekly newspaper that published Twain and Harte.
After several years as a journalist and storyteller in San Francisco, Mulford began a lecture and writing tour of Europe in 1872 funded by some of the city's businessmen “to advance by writing and talking the good and glory of California,” he explained.
Mulford returned to the United States a year later with a wife, Josie Allen, and the couple settled in New York City, where he wrote articles on local history for The Daily Graphic newspaper.
Josie pursued a career as an artist's model, which her husband discovered upon seeing her naked image on a pack of cheap cigarettes. They separated, and Mulford retired to a small cabin he built in the swamplands near Passaic, New Jersey, saying he was tired of working.
In the rustic cabin surrounded by nature's beauty, Mulford turned to spiritualism, publishing 5-cent booklets with titles such as “The Slavery of Fear,” “Mental Tyranny” and “Love Thyself.” They spoke to a broad audience and were translated into many languages. At the same time, he was putting together his autobiography, which was published in 1888.
Mulford died alone and peacefully on May 27, 1891, while navigating his little boat to Sag Harbor, where he was born 57 years earlier.
At Mulford's final resting place in Sag Harbor's Oakland Cemetery, there is a granite headstone affectionately placed on his grave by some of his old friends in California. On the memorial is the word “Philosopher.”