Explore the full ebook collection and download it now at textbookfull.

com

Studying the Novel 7th Edition Jeremy Hawthorn

https://textbookfull.com/product/studying-the-novel-7th-
edition-jeremy-hawthorn/

OR CLICK HERE

DOWLOAD EBOOK

Browse and Get More Ebook Downloads Instantly at https://textbookfull.com

Click here to visit textbookfull.com and download textbook now
 Your digital treasures (PDF, ePub, MOBI) await
Download instantly and pick your perfect format...

Read anywhere, anytime, on any device!

The Paradox Hotel A Novel 7th Edition Hart Rob

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-paradox-hotel-a-novel-7th-
edition-hart-rob/

textbookfull.com

Studying Mathematics Marco Bramanti

https://textbookfull.com/product/studying-mathematics-marco-bramanti/

textbookfull.com

Studying Scots Law 5th Edition Megan Dewart

https://textbookfull.com/product/studying-scots-law-5th-edition-megan-
dewart/

textbookfull.com

Studying Public Policy 4th Edition Michael Howlett

https://textbookfull.com/product/studying-public-policy-4th-edition-
michael-howlett/

textbookfull.com
The Limitations of the Open Mind 1st Edition Jeremy Fantl

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-limitations-of-the-open-mind-1st-
edition-jeremy-fantl/

textbookfull.com

Studying Lacan s Seminar VII The Ethics of Psychoanalysis

1st Edition Owens

https://textbookfull.com/product/studying-lacan-s-seminar-vii-the-
ethics-of-psychoanalysis-1st-edition-owens/

textbookfull.com

Studying Scientific Metaphor in Translation Mark

Shuttleworth

https://textbookfull.com/product/studying-scientific-metaphor-in-
translation-mark-shuttleworth/

textbookfull.com

Rethinking Mahler 1st Edition Jeremy Barham

https://textbookfull.com/product/rethinking-mahler-1st-edition-jeremy-
barham/

textbookfull.com

Quantum Profiles 2nd Edition Jeremy Bernstein

https://textbookfull.com/product/quantum-profiles-2nd-edition-jeremy-
bernstein/

textbookfull.com
Studying the
Novel
 ALSO AVAILABLE IN THE STUDYING... SERIES

Studying Film, 2nd Edition, Nathan Abrams, Ian Bell, and Jan Udris
Studying Literary Theory, 2nd Edition, Roger Webster
Studying Literature, 2nd Edition, Paul Goring, Jeremy Hawthorn, and
Domhnall Mitchell
Studying the Media, 3rd Edition, Tim O’Sullivan, Brian Dutton, and Philip
Rayner
Studying Plays, 3rd Edition, Simon Shepherd and Mick Wallis
Studying Poetry, 2nd Edition, Stephen Matterson and Darryl Jones
 Studying the
Novel
7th Edition

Jeremy Hawthorn

Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
 Contents

Introduction to the Seventh Edition

1 Fiction and the Novel

The universality and the distinctiveness of fiction
Fiction, play, fantasy
Imaginary characters and real life
Prose
Narrative
Characters, action, plot
Novel, short story, novella

2 History, Genre, Culture

When was the novel born?
Ancestors and close relations
Novel and romance
Life and pattern
The “rise of the novel”

3 Shorter Fiction
The short story
The novella
4 Realism, Modernism, Postmodernism—and
Beyond
Realism
Modernism
Postmodernism
The electronic revolution

5 Analyzing Fiction
Prose fiction and formal analysis
Narrative technique
Character
Plot
Structure
Setting
Theme
Symbol and image
Speech and dialogue

6 Studying the Novel

Studying the novel in the digital age
Reading, responding, criticizing
How to take notes
Using critics
Using computers
Revision/review
Essays and examinations

7 Versions, Adaptations, Translations

Versions
Adaptations
 Translations

8 Critical Approaches to Fiction

Courses and approaches
Categorizing criticism
Narratology: Structuralist and rhetorical
The literary critical tradition
Textual approaches
Contextual approaches
Ideological approaches

9 World Literature and Fiction

World Literature
For whom does the novel speak today?
Fiction, truth, and (recent) history

Timeline of the Novel

Glossary of Terms
Bibliography
Index
 Introduction to the Seventh
Edition

The seventh edition of this book includes new material and a certain amount
of restructuring. There is now discussion of issues associated with reading
novels in translation (Chapter 7) and inclusion of a new chapter (Chapter 9)
on World Literature. Chapter 9 contains material on the novel and travel, the
novel and cultural imperialism, and on fiction and the Holocaust, which in
previous editions was located in other chapters.
The material on “Fiction and the electronic media” that had a chapter to
itself in the sixth edition has been updated and repositioned in Chapter 4, and
the section on “Using computers” in Chapter 6 has been thoroughly updated.
Four anonymous readers made valuable suggestions, and I am grateful to
them for their advice. One reader pointed out that “the canon” is a contested
and controversial term, and I have tried to make this clearer than I did in
previous editions.
I thank Camilla Ulleland Hoel, for introducing me to the pleasures of The
Lizzie Bennet Diaries, and Frode Lerum Boasson, for pointing me in the
direction of useful material on the publishing history of Knut Hamsun’s
Hunger. I owe an especial debt to Jakob Lothe, who has read and commented
on some of the new sections in this book. All errors and inadequacies in the
published version are, of course, my sole responsibility.
Since my retirement in May 2012, the Norwegian University of Science
and Technology has made it possible for me to continue to have a work space
on campus, along with access to e-mail, computer, and library facilities. This
has been of great benefit to me and I am very grateful.

Jeremy Hawthorn
Trondheim, Norway, January 2016
 1
Fiction and the Novel

Preview
This chapter deals with:
• Some preliminary definitions: novel, fiction, narrative
• The universality of fiction and the distinctiveness of literary fiction
• Imaginary characters and real life
• Prose and narrative
• Showing and telling
• Characters, action, plot
• Novel, short story, novella: some preliminary comments

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a novel is “a fictitious prose

narrative or tale of considerable length (now usually one long enough to fill
one or more volumes) in which characters and actions representative of the
real life of past or present times are portrayed in a plot of more or less
complexity.” This may sound a bit like stating the obvious, but there are
some important points contained in this very concise definition. Let us
consider some of its component parts.

The universality and the

distinctiveness of fiction
“Telling stories” is an activity that is so central to our culture that we pay it
little analytical attention. From a very early age, we learn to distinguish not
just between true and untrue reports but also between different sorts of untrue
reports—“lies” and “stories,” for example. Fiction is much wider than the
novel or, indeed, than prose fiction: jokes, imitations and parodies, and songs
and narrative poems can all be described as fictions—and wider, non-literary
usages include such things as legal fictions and (perhaps) folktales and urban
myths (fictions do not have to take the form of a story or a narrative).
However, if fiction seems to be universally present in the lives of all human
beings, it nevertheless assumes different forms in different ages and different
societies. Not all fictions are novels, then, but the specific tradition or set of
traditions which we refer to as “the novel” is made possible by a far more
widespread and fundamental reliance upon fiction in human society.
We can start with a number of seeming paradoxes: fictions are not true, but
they are not lies; they typically describe that which is not real but which is
nonetheless not totally unreal; they can include references to real people and
events without jeopardizing their fictional status; they are designed to get
readers or listeners to respond “as if,” but not (normally) to deceive them;
even though readers are aware that fictions describe people who do not exist
or events which have not happened, they may nonetheless produce real
emotions, important reflections, and even altered behavior in the real world.
If fiction is in one sense universal, those fictions that we call novels and
short stories are arguably possessed of certain unique features. In her book
The Distinction of Fiction (1999), Dorrit Cohn makes an impressively
energetic case for the distinctiveness of literary fiction. Cohn suggests that
literary fictions can be distinguished from other non-fictional narratives in
three ways. First, the distinction between story and plot (in her terminology
story and discourse) does not have the same validity for “texts that refer to
events that have occurred prior to their narrative embodiment.” You will find
this point easier to understand after having read the discussion of story and
plot on p. 134. Second, only in fictional narratives can narrators enter the
consciousness of persons apart from themselves. Third, in non-fictional
narratives the distinction between author and narrator does not make the same
sort of sense as it does when applied to fictional texts (1999, 130). I take up
some of the issues raised by fictional accounts of actual events in Chapter 9
in a discussion of stories written by survivors of the Nazi Holocaust (see p.
252).
In the 1950s the London Evening Standard ran a regular feature entitled
“Did It Happen?” The newspaper would publish an account of a striking
experience, then ask readers to decide whether the experience really did
happen, with the truth being revealed the following day. The authors ranged
from Stevie Smith and Angus Wilson to Gerard Hoffnung and Benny Hill,
and their contributions were gathered together and published as a book in
1956 (Did It Happen?: Stories). Reading through the contributions it is
interesting to see what a writer has to do to leave the reader in doubt as to
whether he or she is reading fact or fiction. All of the accounts are in the first
person, and in no case does the narrator enter the consciousness of another
person. No account suggests a distinction between author and narrator. Once
we know whether the account is fact or fiction we can indeed recognize, as
Cohn suggests, that the distinction between author and narrator and that
between story and plot make a different sort of sense for the two types of
account. But these are retrospective judgments. It is the entering of the
consciousness of a person other than the narrator that seems to suggest most
strongly that a narrative is fictional, and the authors of the “fictional”
accounts seem instinctively to have recognized this.

Fiction, play, fantasy

Anyone who has watched a child grow and mature will know that he or she
attempts to understand and master the world and his or her relation to it
through modeled performances that we call play. However much we may like
to think of play as sharply distinguished from the real, workaday world,
relegated to “free time” or “relaxation,” there seems little doubt that the rules
of games can function as a model of the social and material restraints which
we meet with in the world, and that play can help us to internalize these
aspects of the world and of our operating within it. A number of recent
theorists have developed this analogy in discussing the role that fiction plays
in ordinary people’s lives. In her book Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind
and the Novel (2006), Lisa Zunshine writes as follows:
The cognitive rewards of reading fiction might thus be aligned with the cognitive
rewards of pretend play through a shared capacity to stimulate and develop the
 imagination. It may mean that our enjoyment of fiction is predicated—at least in part—
upon our awareness of our “trying on” mental states potentially available to us but at a
given moment differing from our own. (Zunshine 2006, 17)

In his book The Rhetoric of Fictionality: Narrative Theory and the Idea of
Fiction, Richard Walsh introduces another helpful analogy—that between
fiction and “exercise.” As he notes, “When you go for a jog, you may not be
trying to get anywhere in particular, but you are certainly not pretending to
run” (Walsh 2007, 45). The comment is clearly aimed at those who believe
that when, for example, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield as a first-
person narrative, he was pretending to be David Copperfield, and he wanted
the reader to pretend that his novel really was written by the character. Both
Zunshine and Walsh agree that reading fiction does not require an
abandonment of a sense of who we are or who the author is. Indeed they
suggest that retaining such a sense is crucial to the reading of fiction.
Fictional stories present us with models of (especially) the social world
with which we can empathize, but which we can observe because we are not
constrained to act. According to Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen
(1994), readers “often fantasize with fictive content, ‘filling in’ as the whim
takes them, and no doubt some genres of fantasy actively encourage this kind
of whimsical response.” This is rather stern, and it becomes more so as the
two authors then insist upon the need to distinguish between authorized and
non-authorized responses—with “the content itself and its presentation” as
the source of this authority (89). Although academic discussion of literature
has to insist upon such standards in order to establish ground rules for
discussion and debate, I do not think that readers (as against students or
critics) of novels are—or ever have been—obliged to remain within the
boundaries of the academically authorized. Indeed, were it possible to render
“whimsical responses” impossible, then I suspect that novel-reading would
be a lot less popular than it is today. Remember, however, that “response” is
not the same as “interpretation”; my response may be different from yours,
but we can try to reach agreement about our interpretation of a given work
through discussion of the text.

Imaginary characters and real life

The novel typically depicts imaginary characters and situations. A novel may
include reference to real places, people, and events, but a narrative that
contained only such references would have to establish its fictional
credentials by imagining the thoughts of characters. Even though its
characters and actions are imaginary, they are in some sense “representative
of real life,” as the dictionary definition has it; although fictional, they bear
an important resemblance to the real. What exactly this resemblance is has
been a matter of much discussion and dispute among literary critics, and it is
arguable that it varies in kind from novel to novel. Even so, this resemblance
to real life is one of the features that distinguishes the novel from other forms
such as the epic and the romance (see the Glossary and also the discussion on
p. 14), however much we recognize that “real life” is a problematic concept.
Later on in Chapter 4 we will see that the term “realism” is one that, although
arguably indispensable to discussion of the novel, requires careful definition
and use.
The Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin points out that “[t]he world of the epic
is the national heroic past,” it is based upon a “national tradition (not personal
experience and the free thought that grows out of it),” and “an absolute epic
distance separates the epic world from contemporary reality.” The novel, “by
contrast, is determined by experience, knowledge and practice (the future)”
(Bakhtin 1981, 13, 15). The novel presents us with stories, experiences that
are new; whereas those who experienced the epic knew what was to occur,
when we pick up a novel we hope that our curiosity will be aroused by our
wanting to know “what happens.” As I will argue in Chapter 2, this
difference has a lot to do with the different sorts of society from which these
two genres emerge.

Prose
The novel is in prose rather than verse, although the language of novels may
often strike us as very “poetic” on occasions. It would nonetheless be a
serious mistake to assume that the language of a novel—and especially the
speech of characters—is identical to that of ordinary speech or of most non-
literary writing, and I discuss this more on p. 150. Even so, the fact that the
novel is in prose helps to establish that sense of “real life”—of recognizable,
everyday, “prosaic” existence—that is the preserve of the genre.
Generalization is dangerous, but prose has the potentiality of being a more
transparent medium than, for example, verse. Reading a novel, our attention
is not naturally drawn to considering the language as language. The tendency
is more for us to “look through” the language of the novel at what it describes
and evokes than to “look at” it—although novelists can write prose that
arrests our attention as language, and many novelists are known for the
manner in which they draw the reader’s attention to their use of language. In
the course of studying novels, we must learn to pay more overt attention to
their language than does the average casual reader.

Narrative
Novels and shorter works of literary fiction are narratives: in other words
they all in some sense present readers with a “telling” rather than an
“enacting,” and this distinguishes them in an important sense from the drama.
One useful way to define narrative involves reference to what Seymour
Chatman has called “double chronology” (1990, 114): the things that happen
in a novel happen in a particular order, and the telling of what happens also
takes place in a particular order. Importantly, these two “orders” or
chronologies are not necessarily the same, and the interaction between them
constitutes a fundamentally important aspect of the novel and the short story.
Double chronology entails that built into the very fact of narrative is an act of
looking back, of recounting. As the first-person narrator of Javier Marías’s
novel Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me remarks, “in fact, the person
telling the story always tells it later on, which allows him to add things if he
wants, to distance himself: ‘I have turned away my former self, I am not the
thing I was nor the person I was, I neither know nor recognize myself’”
(Marías 1997, 308).
You will find more about narrative’s double chronology in the discussion
of story and plot on p. 134. Double chronology is a necessary but not a
sufficient condition of a narrative, as it may apply also to plays and films.
(Citizen Kane opens with the depiction of events which take place after the
events that are recounted in the bulk of the film have taken place: the order-
in-which-things-take-place is not the same as the order-in-which-we-witness-
what-takes-place.) What is, I would argue, central to narration is the element
of telling: events in a piece of prose fiction come to us mediated through an
organizing consciousness that puts them into words.
 Here I should note that not all narrative theorists would agree with my
exclusion of film and drama from the category of narrative. In the previous
paragraph, for example, I quote from Seymour Chatman, and the book from
which his comment is drawn is entitled Story and Discourse: Narrative
Structure in Fiction and Film. Those who argue that a film is as much a
narrative as a novel generally base their view on the fact that the events and
actions depicted in a film are (at least metaphorically) “told” to us through
the organizing work of a director. Even so, watching a film or a play, we
observe things as they happen. Reading a novel, we are told that things
happen, have happened, or will happen.
Of course, novels can contain very dramatic scenes, scenes that grip us
with their immediacy. Reading such scenes, we may forget that what we learn
of character and event is not experienced directly through a presentation or an
enactment (as in the theater or the cinema) but mediated through a particular
telling, coming from a narrative source. Take the opening of Henry James’s
short story “The Lesson of the Master” (1888):
He had been told the ladies were at church, but this was corrected by what he saw from
the top of the steps—they descended from a great height in two arms, with a circular
sweep of the most charming effect—at the threshold of the door which, from the long
bright gallery, overlooked the immense lawn. (James 1970, 3)

If our first impression is that we are witnessing a scene directly, a second

glance will confirm that we are actually being told about the scene, which is
presented as one character experiences it. The telling is such that we can
visualize what is described—that is often the mark of an accomplished
narrative—but we see what is first selected and then pointed out to us by a
narrator or a narrative voice or source. Of course, this selection and
presentation are fictional: the author is actually creating rather than selecting
what we see. Nevertheless, as we read we are given the sense that the scene’s
potentially infinite complexity is reduced, ordered, and explained to us
through the organizing and filtering consciousness of a narrator. Could any
filmed version of the above scene lead us to think of the steps as forming
“two arms”? Would we find the effect of the “circular sweep” “most
charming” unless a character used these words? Would we know that we saw
the scene as a given character was seeing it? I will say more about the
difference between film and prose narrative in Chapter 7.
An additional word of caution is needed at this point. You should be aware
that there is a further way in which the term “narrative” can be used both with
a narrow and specific meaning and also with a rather wider one. This sense
has nothing to do with such questions as whether films are narratives, but
with the issues raised by calling a long novel a narrative when it contains
passages that are not strictly speaking narratives but may be lyric interludes
or philosophical discussions. From a more restrictive perspective only parts
of such a long novel would, then, qualify as examples of narrative: those
involving the telling of events, the recounting of things that happen. (Clearly
events can just as well be mental as physical: a sudden dawning of insight is
as much an event as is the outbreak of the First World War.)
The words “tell” and “recount” are both related to the action of counting,
or enumerating (think of a bank teller, who counts money). As “tell” is
etymologically related to “tale,” we can say that behind the act of narrative
itself lies the idea of communicating things that can be counted. (Compare
the French conte, for which a brief definition is provided in the Glossary.) If
we limit ourselves to a restrictive definition of narrative, therefore, we must
remember that neither description (of a beautiful scene) nor argument (about,
say, the existence of God) are examples of narrative in this strict sense; they
do not involve the telling or enumerating of discrete events or countable
entities. However, the term “narrative” is also conventionally used in a less
restrictive sense to include everything that comes within the purview of a
particular telling or recounting. From this perspective a novel is a narrative
even though it contains passages of description and argument. If you think
about it, much the same is true of our use of the word “fiction.” After all,
many statements in novels are literally true, yet we do not restrict use of the
word “fiction” to only those parts of novels that are untrue.
In Chapter 8 I will say more about narratology—a body of theory that has
emerged in the past four decades out of attempts to generalize about different
types of narrative, and to develop concepts and methods that can be used to
classify and analyze narratives.

Characters, action, plot

The novel has characters, action(s), and a plot: it presents the reader with
individuals who do things in a defining context or “secondary world” (see p.
19) ruled over by some sort of connective logic: chronology, cause and
effect, or whatever. In most novels we also find a connection between these
three elements such that they form some sort of unity. A poem does not have
to contain characters or a plot—or, indeed, any action—but it is only very
rare novels which dispense with one of these elements, and in such unusual
cases it is often a matter of dispute as to whether the net result is recognizable
as a novel. Some recent narrative theorists have preferred to talk of “actors”
rather than characters, pointing out that a work of science fiction might be
based on roles filled by non-human participants. I return to the relationship
between literary characterizations and the emergence of ideas of human
individuality on page 27.
We have of course to give the term “action” a relatively broad meaning in
the present context. Much recent fiction involves significant concentration
upon what has been termed “inner action,” that is, events taking place in a
character’s consciousness rather than in the social and physical worlds
outside. It is nevertheless revealing that there are few novels that consist
only, or mainly, of inner action. It is as if our view of the novel requires that
it contain a significant amount of action more traditionally defined.
Ian Watt has argued that the novel is distinguished by the fact that unlike
the works of the great English and Classical poets and dramatists, its plots are
generally not taken from traditional sources (Watt 1963, 14). If we compare
the modern novel with the prose fictions of antiquity, or the medieval
romance, Watt’s point is certainly justifiable. On the other hand, even the
modern novel has recourse to certain recurrent plots and story lines (see the
more extended discussion of plot on p. 134). As a result, many modern
novels manifest an important and productive tension between their fidelity to
the random and unpredictable nature of everyday life and their patterning
according to the demands of certain predetermined but widely different
structures, from “tragedy” to “repetition” or “the journey.” Novels can be
written within traditions that are highly formulaic—that is, written to
conform to a particular, pre-existing pattern. The popular romance of today
with its shy blonde heroine who is finally appreciated by the good-looking
hero after he has seen through the strikingly attractive but treacherous dark
anti-heroine is but one in a long line of formulaic sub-genres that can be
traced back to the folk tales of oral cultures.

Novel, short story, novella

Finally, the novel is of a certain length. A poem can be anything from a
couplet to a thousand pages or more, but we feel unhappy about bestowing
the term “novel” on a tale of some forty or fifty pages. Of course it is not just
a question of length: we feel that a novel should involve an investigation of
an issue of human significance in such a manner as allows for complexity of
treatment, and by common consent a certain length is necessary to allow for
such complexity. In practice, therefore, we now usually refer to a prose
narrative of some twenty or thirty pages or fewer as a short story, while a
work that seems to hover on the awkward boundary between “short story”
and “novel,” having a length of between forty or fifty and a hundred pages, is
conventionally described as a novella (plural: novelle or novellas). I say
“now,” because some of these conventional categorizations are relatively
recent, particularly so far as the short story and the novella are concerned,
and some of the issues raised by dividing prose fiction into three main
categories in this way are discussed in-depth in Chapter 3.

Topics for discussion

• What elements must a literary work contain to be considered a novel? Does
the answer change as the novel changes?
• Is literary fiction different from other fictions? If so, in what ways?
• Do you read novels to escape from “the real world” or to learn more about
it? Or both?
• Can reading a novel change your life?
• Why do we classify novels and short stories as narratives?
 2
History, Genre, Culture

Preview
This chapter deals with:
• The problem of deciding when (and if) the novel was born
• The relationship between the novel and the romance
• The contribution of literacy, printing, a market economy, and individualism to
the novel
• The novel, secularism, and urban experience

When was the novel born?

In her The True Story of the Novel (1996), Margaret Anne Doody reminds her
readers that the distinction between novel and romance (see below, p. 14) is
one that is not reflected in all languages in the way that it is in English, and
she proposes that it “has outworn its usefulness, and that at its most useful it
created limitations and encouraged blind spots” (1996, xvii). Resisting a
common view that the novel emerges as a new literary form in the late
seventeenth or early eighteenth century, she claims that the novel “as a form
of literature in the West has a continuous history of about two thousand
years,” a fact that, she argues, recent scholarship has denied or obscured
(1996, 1). In order to press her case, she advances a rather wider and more
all-embracing definition of the novel from that which I quoted from the OED
at the start of my first chapter; for her, a work is a novel if “it is fictional, if it
is in prose, and if it is of a certain length” (1996, 16).
A less comprehensive attack on the conventional view that the novel
emerges with Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding is provided by J.A. Downie,
who draws attention to the fact that “writings calling themselves novels had
been appearing in print in English for about a hundred and fifty years before
the publication of Robinson Crusoe [in 1719],” and that while Richardson’s
Pamela did indeed lead to a sustained increase in the demand for fiction,
Defoe’s work did not (Downie 2000, 311, 325).
There is no doubt that, if one defines the novel as Doody recommends,
then it is quite correct to see it as a literary form with a continuous history of
two thousand years, and it is certainly the case that the term “novel” did not
emerge for the first time in the eighteenth century. It is also the case that we
should avoid falling into the trap of believing that the works on modern
literature syllabuses were the only ones read by and exerting influence on
readers and writers, and we need further to be aware that there are
continuities and lines of tradition that cut across the sharp dividing lines
posited by talk of “the birth of the novel.”
Critics other than Margaret Doody have also engaged in debate about the
extent to which those “novel” works produced by writers such as Defoe,
Richardson, and Fielding in the first half of the eighteenth century were or
were not in direct line of descent from the chapbooks and the French fiction
of the late seventeenth century, hundreds of which were translated into
English and published in England at this time (Novak 1991, 8). Even those
who concur with the view that the modern novel emerges as a new literary
genre in the eighteenth century concede that it still owes much to traditions
and works, literary and non-literary, from earlier times. No serious student of
the novel would deny, for example, that its development in the eighteenth
century was profoundly influenced by works such as François Rabelais’s
Pantagruel and Gargantua (1532 and 1534) and Miguel de Cervantes’s Don
Quixote (1605–15)—whether or not one agrees to classify these works as
novels.
These views notwithstanding, my own view is that what happened to prose
fiction in the course of the eighteenth century in Europe represents such a
radical change that what, to sidestep debate, we can call “the modern novel”
merits and repays separate study. As Michael McKeon points out, it was the
first modern “novelists” themselves who affirmed that “a distinct new form”
had emerged: Richardson believed he had introduced a new “species” of
writing while Fielding claimed a new “kind” or “province” (McKeon 1987,
410). (See too Samuel Johnson’s comments on “[t]he works of fiction, with
which the present generation seems more particularly delighted,” on p. 17
later in this chapter.)

Ancestors and close relations

It would be a serious mistake to assume that to trace the novel’s descent we
need to examine only a sequence of written forms, or of oral and written
narratives. We should rather picture a family tree in which certain lines of
descent involve various written forms, certain involve a succession of oral
narrative forms, but others involve a wide range of very different elements. I
have already suggested that fiction has an analogue in play, but other
relatives are equally important: introspective self-analyses, both in diary and
in unrecorded form; joke-telling; sermons; travel accounts; letters. What
distinguishes the novel is, among other things, the heterogeneity of its
ancestry, a heterogeneity that Mikhail Bakhtin has argued is mirrored in the
variety of different “voices” to be found in any single novel. He claims (and
this is by no means uncontroversial) that, however many contradictions and
conflicts are developed in a poem, the world of poetry is always illuminated
by “one unitary and indisputable discourse.” The novel, in contrast, is he
argues characterized by that “variety of individualized voices” that is “the
prerequisite for authentic novelistic prose” (Bakhtin 1981, 286). It should be
noted that the term “voice” has more than a physical reference for Bakhtin,
and includes ideological and existential elements too.
One of the impulses that often moves those who compile family trees is a
desire to prove that all the discovered ancestors were respectable and
legitimate. In the case of the novel, we have to be prepared to accept that
many of its ancestors were neither. As J. Paul Hunter has put it,
I join the debate here by arguing that the emerging novel must be placed in a broader
context of cultural history, insisting that popular thought and materials of everyday print
—journalism, didactic materials with all kinds of religious and ideological directions,
and private papers and histories—need to be seen as contributors to the social and
intellectual world in which the novel emerged. (Hunter 1990, 5)
Even though it be true that fictional narratives can be found almost as far
back as we have written records, those produced before the emergence of the
modern novel lack many of the characteristics that today we associate with
the novel. First, they are often in verse rather than prose. Second, they rarely
concern themselves with “the real life of past or present times” but portray
the experiences of those whose existences can be said to resemble “real life,”
however it is defined, only in extremely convention-governed and indirect
ways (gods or mythical heroes, for example). Third, their characters tend not
to be individualized—to the extent that even the use of our familiar term
“character” is problematic. We do not feel too comfortable calling a purely
stereotyped or conventionally portrayed individual a character precisely
because today the term “character” is associated with distinctive traits, with
some particularity or individuality. (For further discussion of literary
character, see p. 126.)
The etymology of “character” is very revealing: the word comes from a
Greek word for an instrument used for marking or engraving, just as “style”
is etymologically related to the word stylus and is also associated with a
cutting instrument. As a result, the word’s literal meanings—as the OED will
confirm—are related to marks that distinguish and represent individuality
(think of the obsolescent use of the word “character” to mean a person’s
handwriting). From this we get the familiar OED definition: “A personality
invested with distinctive attributes and qualities, by a novelist or dramatist.”
Our sense of human individuality, this etymology suggests, is closely related
to making marks—to writing. Writing allows human beings to develop
individualities, to be and to know themselves to be different, particular,
unique.

Novel and romance

There is no better example of the problems attendant upon generic
classification than those connected with the romance, universally agreed to
represent one of the most important traditions contributing to the emergence
of the modern novel. (The term “roman,” as Margaret Anne Doody reminds
us [see p. 11], is the equivalent of “novel” in many modern European
languages. Etymologically the two terms tell different stories; while the word
“novel” comes from the Italian “novella”—“small new thing”—the word
“romance” evolves from a word denoting a concern with the Romans. Even
in modern usage this sense of the novel looking forward to the new and the
romance looking back to the old can be detected.)
The traditional chivalric romance that developed in twelfth-century France
depicted not epic heroes but a highly stylized and idealized courtly life
founded upon rigid but sophisticated conventions of behavior. Like the epic
(which it displaced) it often involved supernatural elements—another factor
that in general terms distinguishes it from the modern novel. The distinction
with which we are familiar is first commented upon in the eighteenth century,
the century in which, I have argued, the novel appears in its recognizable
modern form in Britain. Geoffrey Day quotes the following from a review of
Frances Burney’s novel Camilla, which appeared in The British Critic of
November 1796:
To the old romance, which exhibited exalted personages, and displayed their sentiments
in improbable or impossible situations, has succeeded the more reasonable, modern
novel; which delineates characters drawn from actual observation, and, when ably
executed, presents an accurate and captivating view of real life. (Day 1987, 6)

As Day notes, “throughout the eighteenth century ‘romance’ was seen by

many as a term suggesting excessive flights of fancy” (1987, 6). However as
Day adds, this neat definition, one which served to distinguish the “romance”
from the “novel,” was not universally accepted: many writers tended to lump
the two terms together relatively uncritically.
[T]hough there is a tradition of clarity of definition, there is vastly more evidence to
show that those works now commonly referred to as “eighteenth-century novels” were
not perceived as such by the readers or indeed by the major writers of the period, and
that, far from being ready to accept the various works as “novels,” they do not appear to
have arrived at a consensus that works such as Robinson Crusoe, Pamela, Joseph
Andrews, Clarissa, Tom Jones, Peregrine Pickle and Tristram Shandy were even all of
the same species. (1987, 7)

(In case we should be tempted to feel superior to these dull individuals who
were incapable of recognizing the birth of a new genre, it is salutary to stop
and think about the enormous formal variety that this short list of works
represents.)
In an extract from a letter written by the eighteenth-century man of politics
Lord Chesterfield to his son, we can detect both the familiar novel–romance
distinction and also a sense that the two categories overlap to a considerable
extent.

I am in doubt whether you know what a Novel is: it is a little gallant history, which must
contain a great deal of love, and not exceed one or two small volumes. The subject must
be a love affair; the lovers are to meet with many difficulties and obstacles, to oppose the
accomplishment of their wishes, but at last overcome them all; and the conclusion or
catastrophe must leave them happy. A Novel is a kind of abbreviation of a Romance; for
a Romance generally consists of twelve volumes, all filled with insipid love nonsense,
and most incredible adventures.
…
In short, the reading of Romances is a most frivolous occupation, and time merely
thrown away. The old Romances, written two or three hundred years ago, such as
Amadis of Gaul, Orlando the Furious, and others, were stuffed with enchantments,
magicians, giants, and such sort of impossibilities, whereas the more modern Romances
keep within the bounds of possibility, but not of probability. (Carey 1912, 90; the
original letter is in French, and is probably written 1740–1)

Geoffrey Day points out that in his Dictionary (1755), Samuel Johnson also
insisted on the importance of length, defining a novel as “A small tale,
generally of love.” Today Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–8) is
uncontroversially defined as a novel, but it is certainly not a “small tale”; at
the same time, Johnson’s own small tale Rasselas (1759) cannot comfortably
be assimilated into what we now think of as a novel. It is arguably only in the
early years of the nineteenth century that our present understanding of what a
novel is starts to emerge as a consensus view.
Although the development of the English novel is generally associated
with a concern with the everyday and a rejection of the supernatural, those
aspects of the romance that were repressed as the novel defined itself did not
disappear from fiction altogether. Freudians claim that the repressed always
returns, and the history of prose fiction would seem to confirm this: the
fantastic, the supernatural, the other-worldly (whether defined in religious or
in astronomical terms) constitute the novel’s dogged shadow. Sometimes this
family of repressed elements emerges within what we can call mainstream
fiction in hints and suggestions (madness, dreams, and fevered hallucinations
are a favored way of introducing the supernatural into fiction without directly
challenging a realistic framework). At the same time, this family of excluded
romance components also survives in what we can call sub-genres such as the
modern romance or the ghost story. As I will argue later on, it is noticeable
how many of the elements excluded from what I have termed mainstream
fiction suddenly reappear in forms associated with the electronic media.
There are clear and, I think, undeniable lines of descent from the medieval
romance through the gothic novel to fantasy games such as “Dungeons and
Dragons” and computer games such as Tomb Raider (for more discussion of
this, see Chapter 4, p. 86).
However, even if fantastic and romance elements survive in the novel,
there is no doubt that an emphasis upon the this-worldly is fundamental to the
novel’s emergence as a major genre, and at the time of the birth of the
modern novel in the early and mid-eighteenth century, this emphasis was
widely believed by contemporary readers to distinguish the novel from the
romance. Geoffrey Day cites another useful contemporary definition that
again defines the novel by contrasting it to the romance, from Samuel
Johnson’s fourth Rambler essay (1750). Johnson clearly has in mind what we
now call the novel in these comments, but he designates it “the comedy of
romance.”
The works of fiction, with which the present generation seems more particularly
delighted, are such as exhibit life in its true state, diversified only by accidents that daily
happen in the world, and influenced by passions and qualities which are really to be
found in conversing with mankind.
This kind of writing may be termed not improperly the comedy of romance, and is to
be conducted nearly by the rules of comic poetry. Its province is to bring about natural
events by easy means, and to keep up curiosity without the help of wonder: it is therefore
precluded from the machines and expedients of the heroic romance, and can neither
employ giants to snatch away a lady from the nuptial rites, nor knights to bring her back
from captivity; it can neither bewilder its personages in desarts, nor lodge them in
imaginary castles.
…
The task of our present writers is very different; it requires, together with that learning
which is to be gained from books, that experience which can never be attained by
solitary diligence, but must arise from general converse, and accurate observation of the
living world. (Johnson 1958, 60, 61)

This is what was seen to be new about the fictional narratives written by
Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, whether or not these works were called
novels. “Life in its true state,” “accurate observation of the living world”:
these narratives have a relationship with ordinary life, with the detail of
contemporary experience, both social and individual, which sets them apart
from the romance. Michael Seidel sums up these characteristics as follows: “a
concentration on daily life in particularized settings; a sense of information
and immediacy; conventions of behaviour that would appear, at least to a
reading audience, as part of its recognizable world” (Seidel 2000, 194). It is
worth noting that Johnson thought that this characteristic of the emerging
genre carried with it specific dangers. He observed that novels were
written chiefly to the young, the ignorant, and the idle, to whom they serve as lectures of
conduct, and introductions into life. They are the entertainment of minds unfurnished
with ideas, and therefore easily susceptible of impressions; not fixed by principles, and
therefore easily following the current of fancy; not informed by experience, and
consequently open to every false suggestion and partial account. (61)

These new and vulnerable readers would not have been tempted to model
their behavior on the old romances because these depicted transactions and
sentiments “remote from all that passes among men,” but, fears Johnson, they
may be so tempted by depictions of a world similar to their own.
[W]hen an adventurer is levelled with the rest of the world, and acts in such scenes of the
universal drama, as may be the lot of any other man; young spectators fix their eyes upon
him with closer attention, and hope, by observing his behaviour and success, to regulate
their own practices, when they shall be engaged in the like part. (62)

Thus whereas nowadays our cultural guardians are most worried that
fantastic or unrealistic fiction or film may corrupt readers (think of the
worries about the Harry Potter books!), for Johnson it is fiction that depicts
our own familiar world that is most likely to corrupt its impressionable
readers.
Michael McKeon points out that “even though Defoe, Richardson, and
Fielding explicitly subvert the idea and ethos of romance, they nonetheless
draw upon many of its stock situations and conventions,” and he suggests that
the “general problem of romance in all three novelists is related to the
particular problem of spirituality, equally antithetical to the secularizing
premises of formal realism, in Defoe.” In addition, McKeon draws attention
to the fact that the romance exhibits certain characteristics of formal realism,
and that it continues to coexist with the novel during the period of the latter’s
emergence (McKeon 1987, 2–3). J. Paul Hunter too warns against drawing
too absolute a distinction between the novel and the romance.
We do the novel—and not only the early novel—a disservice if we fail to notice, once
 we have defined the different world from romance that novels represent, how fully it
engages the unusual, the uncertain, and the unexplainable …
A closely related feature involves the novel’s engagement with taboos. Operating from
a position of semi-respectability from the start, the novel has always been self-conscious
about appearing to be pornographic, erotic, or obscene. (Hunter 1990, 35)

Michael Seidel again has a useful comment, noting that while it is true that
paradigms of romance such as victimage, forbearance, and rescue remain
entrenched in the realist fiction that emerges in the form of the modern novel,
“what is removed are those generic parts of romance that define causality and
circumstance by forces inapplicable to the world of conventional experience”
(Seidel 2000, 196).
Before moving on, I would like to draw your attention to Hunter’s use of
the term “different world.” In the course of a discussion of fiction and the
electronic media later on in this book, I will consider the concepts of “textual
world” and “simulated world” provided by commentators on “electronic
fiction” (see p. 89). What readers seem always to require of a work of fiction
is that it provide such a “world,” a distinct space within which characters can
move that is governed by a clear, coherent, and consistent set of rules and
conventions. In realistic fiction the world concerned is very much like the
reader’s, even though it may be removed in time, space, or culture from his or
hers. In works of fantasy, the ghost story, science fiction, or cyberfiction, the
world we encounter is very different from that of the reader—although the
two may share certain important common elements. But, however different, it
must offer the reader some sense of inner consistency. Neil Cornwell
provides a useful comment taken from T.E. Little’s The Fantasts:

All writers of creative fiction are subcreators of Secondary Worlds. The secondary world
of a non-fantastic writer will be as close to the Primary World as his talents and the
needs of his art will allow … A licence is granted to writers of “normal” creative fiction
to change the Primary World for the purpose of their art. Fantasy begins when an
author’s Secondary World goes beyond that license and becomes “other” … Such a
creation should be called a Tertiary World. (Cornwell 1990, 16, quoting from Little
1984, 9–10)

Cornwell himself notes that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) can be seen
as a key text, because in it religion has been replaced by science as the basis
of a reality different from the everyday, a suggestion worth thinking about
when you read my later comments on the novel and secularism (p. 29).
Another Random Scribd Document
with Unrelated Content
attention as he wobbled across the flat from the base of the range.
A moment later he fell at their feet. They saw then that he was a
Chinaman; that his tongue was swollen, his eyes red and sunken;
that he clutched at his throat in a vain effort to speak. He could
make no intelligible sound and lapsed into unconsciousness. They
thought he had died and was left on their hands for burial.

Salty Bill afterwards stated that he’d said to Searles: “‘Fremont,

Carson, or the Mormons old Bill Williams, for whom Bill Williams
River, Bill Williams Mountain, and the town of Williams, Arizona, are
named was at Resting Springs. He’ll spoil in an hour. I’ll go for a
shovel while you choose a place to plant him.’ I’d actually turned to
go when Searles called me back.” Searles had seen some sign of life
and after removing a canvas bag strapped to his body they took him
to a nearby shed, gave him a few spoonfuls of water and eventually
he was restored to consciousness. He lay in a semi-stupor all the
afternoon and was obsessed with the idea that he was going to die.
His chief concern was to get to Mojave so that he could take a stage
for a seaport and die in China or failing, arrange for the burial of his
bones with those of his ancestors.

He had been working at Old Harmony Borax Works, picking cotton-

ball borax with other Chinese employed by the company, but tiring
of abuse by a tough boss, he’d asked for his wages and walked out.
Some Piutes told him of a short cut across the Panamint and this he
took.

En route he picked up a piece of rich float, stuck it into his bag.

Farther on his journey he ran out of water and became hopelessly
lost. He managed to reach the Slate Range, however, and from the
summit saw Searles’ Lake. Though in no condition to stand the
rough trip to Mojave he begged to be sent there and yielding finally,
Salty Bill, ready to leave with his load, threw the Chinaman on his
wagon and started on his trip.
Before reaching Mojave, the Chinaman’s condition became worse
and Salty Bill stopped the team in answer to his yells. The canvas
sack lay alongside the stricken Chinaman and reaching for it, he
brought out a lump of ore.

“Never in my life,” said Salty Bill, “have I seen ore like that.”

The Chinaman gave the ore to Salty, thanked him for his friendly
treatment, told him that at a place in the Panamint where “the Big
Timber pitches down into a steep canyon,” he had found the float.
Again he expressed his belief that he was going to die and exacted a
promise from Salty that if death came before reaching Mojave, Salty
would see that his remains be shipped to China, adding that any
Chinaman in Mojave would provide money if needed. “You 160
find the gold and keep it,” he told Salty. “For me—no good.
No can....”

The journey was completed and Salty learned that the Chinaman did
die at Mojave and that a countryman there saw that the remains
were sent to the Flowery Kingdom.

Salty Bill showed the ore to John Searles and Searles, usually
indifferent to yarns of hidden ledges, was even more excited than
Salty. For four or five years the two men made trips in search of the
place where Big Timber pitches into a canyon. After these, other
tireless prospectors sought the elusive ledge but the Lost Chinaman
is still lost.

THE LOST WAGON. Jim Hurley went to Parker, Arizona. Broke, he

wanted quick money and was looking for placer. The storekeeper
was a friend of Jim and had previously staked him.

“I’m looking for a place to wash out some gold, but I’ve no money
and no grub....”
Jim was told of a butte on the Colorado Desert. “It’s good placer
ground and you ought to pan a few dollars without much trouble....”
He provided Jim with bacon and beans and feed for his burros.

Jim set out, found the butte, but no gold and decided to try a new
location. On the way out he saw behind some bushes an old wagon
that seemed to be half buried in blow sand. Thinking it would be a
good feeding place for his burros, he went over. On the ground
nearby he saw the bleached skeleton of a man. He threw aside a
half-rotted tarpaulin in the wagon bed and discovered fifteen sacks
of ore.

It was obvious that the wagon had stood there for a long time. He
examined the ore and saw that it was rich and of a peculiar color. He
loaded the ore on his burros, returned to Parker and sent it to the
smelter. He received in return, $1800. Losing no time, Jim returned
to find the source of the ore and though for the next five years he
looked at intervals for a quartz to match that found in the wagon, he
could find nothing that even resembled it. Where it came from no
prospector on the desert would even venture an opinion, but all
declared they had seen no quartz of that peculiar color and all of
them knew the country from Mexico to Nevada.

But Jim added to his store an adventure and a memory and there is
no treasure in this life richer than a memory.

THE LOST GOLLER. This, I believe, is a lost mine that really exists
and though the location has been prospected from the days of Dr.
Darwin French in 1860, none have looked for it except the one who
lost it in 1850. He was John Goller, who came to California 161
with the Jayhawkers.

Goller was a blacksmith and wagon maker and was the first
American to establish such a business in the pueblo of Los Angeles.
After convincing the native Californian that his spoke-wheel wagon
would function as effectively as the rounded slabs of wood, the only
vehicles then used, he made a comfortable fortune and no one in
the pueblo had a reputation for better character.

Crossing the Panamint, Goller, though strong and husky, became

separated from his companions and barely escaped with his life.
Coming down a Panamint canyon he found some gold nuggets and
filled his pockets with them. After crossing Panamint Valley and the
Slate Range, he was found by Mexican vaqueros of Don Ignacio del
Valle, owner of the great Camulos Rancho. After his recovery he
proceeded to Los Angeles. In showing the nuggets to friends he
said, “I could have filled a wagon with them.”

Goller, because of his means was soon able to take vacations which
were devoted to looking for the lost location, and though he
searched for years he found no more nuggets. Finally he found a
canyon which he believed might have been the site, but no wagon
load of nuggets.

John Goller was a solid, clear-thinking man—not the type to chase

the rainbow. Gold is known to exist in the canyon and some mines
have been operated with varying success, but none have been
outstanding. It is quite possible that cloudbursts for which the
Panamint is noted washed Goller’s gold away or buried it under an
avalanche of rock, dirt, and gravel. Manly, with his forgivable
inclination to error refers to Goller as Galler and discounts the story.

“Some day,” said Dr. Samuel Slocum, a man who made a fortune in
gold, “somebody will find a fabulously rich mine in that canyon.” It is
located about 12 miles south of Ballarat and is called Goler canyon—
one of the l’s in Goller’s name having been dropped.

THE LOST SPOOK. A spiritualist with tuberculosis came to Ballarat

and employed an Indian known as Joe Button as packer and guide.
He told Joe to lead him to the driest spot in the country. Joe took
him into the Cottonwood Range and left him. The invalid remained
for several weeks, returned to Ballarat en route to San Bernardino,
presumably for supplies. He was reticent as to his luck but he had
several small sacks filled with ore and in his haste to catch the
stage, dropped a piece of quartz from a loosely tied sack. It was
almost solid gold and weighed eight ounces.

While in San Bernardino he died. His relatives sold the 162

remaining ore, which yielded $7200. They tried to find the
claim but failed.

Shorty Harris heard of it months afterward and looked up Joe

Button. With his own burros, Joe’s pack horses, and an Indian
known as Ignacio, he set out. Cloudbursts had washed out the
previous trails, filled gulches, levelled hills and so transformed the
country that the Indian was unable to find any trace of his previous
course; gave up the hunt and turned back.

Shorty cached his supplies and with the meager description Joe
could give him, searched for weeks. At last he came upon a camp
where he discovered a collection of pamphlets dealing with the
occult, but no trails. It was apparent that these had been destroyed
by floods and for two months Shorty searched for the diggings. A
brush pile aroused his suspicions and removing it, he found the hole.
“The ore had Uncle Sam’s eagle all over it,” Shorty said, “and the
world was mine.”

“I returned to my camp, started spending the money. A million

dollars for a rest home for old worn-out prospectors. Fifty thousand
a year for all my pals....”

Shorty ate his supper, spread his blankets and went to sleep with his
dream. In the middle of the night he awoke. Something was running
over his blanket. He raised up and in the moonlight recognized the
only thing on earth he was afraid of—the “hydrophobic skunk.”

“I started packing right now,” Shorty said, “and walked out. There’s
a mine there and whoever wants it can have it. I don’t.”
THE LOST CANYON has some evidence of reality. Jack Allen, a miner
and prospector of almost superhuman endurance, got drunk at
Skidoo and filled with remorse and shame the morning after, decided
to leave and seek a job at the Keane Wonder Mine, about 40 miles
northeast across Death Valley. To save distance, Allen took a short
cut over Sheep Mountain and in going through a canyon he picked
up a piece of quartz and seeing a fleck of color, he broke it. Excited
by its apparent richness he filled his pockets, noted his bearings and
went on his way. When he reached the Keane Wonder he took the
ore to Joe McGilliland, the company’s assayer, who became more
excited than the finder. “I’ll put it in the button for half,” Joe said.

Allen agreed. The assay showed values as high as $20,000 to the

ton. He closed his office and ran out to find Jack working in the
mine. “Chuck this job,” he cried. “Go back to that claim quick as you
can. Get your monuments up and record the notices.”

Jack Allen bought a burro, loaded his supplies and went back only to
discover that a cloudburst had destroyed all his landmarks.

Both Shorty Harris and “Bob” Eichbaum, who established 163

Stove Pipe Wells resort, considered this the best chance
among all the legends of lost mines. It is wild, rough, and largely
virgin country and because of that the hardiest prospectors always
passed it by.

THE LOST JOHNNIE. An Indian known as Johnnie used to come into

York’s store at Ballarat about once a month with gold in bullion form.
He would sell it to York or trade it for supplies. Frequently he had
credits amounting to a thousand or more dollars.

Other Indians soon learned of Johnnie’s mine and would trail him
when he left town, but none were able to outsmart him. That it was
near Arastre Spring was generally believed. Upon one occasion
Johnnie was seen leaving the old arastre and disappear in the
canyon. Immediately evidence that the arastre had been used within
the hour was discovered. For years no prospector worked in that
region without keeping his eyes peeled for Johnnie’s bonanza.

164
 Chapter XXIII
Panamint City. Genial Crooks
The first search for gold in Death Valley country was in Panamint
Valley.

From the summit of the Slate Range on the road from Trona, one
comes suddenly upon an enchanting and unforgettable view of the
Panamint. If you are one who thrills at breath taking scenery you will
not speak. You will stand and look and think. Your thoughts will be
of dead worlds; of the silence spread like a shroud over all that you
see.

Below, a yellow road twists in and out of hidden dry washes, around
jutting hills to end in the green mesquite that hides the ghost town
of Ballarat. There the Panamint lifts two miles—its gored sides a riot
of pastelled colors.

If you have coached yourself with trivia of history it will require

imagination’s aid to accept the fact that from this wasteland came
fortunes and industries of world-wide fame. From New York to San
Francisco on envied social thrones, sit the children and grandchildren
of those who with pick and shovel, here dug the family fortune in
ragged overalls.

Only recently a descendant of one of these, living in a city far

removed, informed me her mansion was for sale, “because the
neighborhood is being ruined....” A sheep herder newly rich on war
profits, was moving in.
Eleven miles north of Ballarat, Surprise Canyon, which leads to
Panamint City, opens on a broad, alluvial fan that tilts sharply to the
valley floor.

In April, 1873, W. T. Henderson, whose first trip into Death Valley

country was made to find the Lost Gunsight, came again with R. B.
Stewart and R. C. Jacobs. In Surprise Canyon they discovered silver
which ran as high as $4000 a ton and filed more than 80 location
notices.

Henderson was an adventurer of uncertain character who 165

had roamed western deserts like a nomad. During the Indian
war that threatened extermination of the white settlers in Inyo
county, Thieving Charlie, a Piute, was induced by outnumbered
whites to approach his warring tribesmen under a flag of truce and
succeeded in getting eleven of them to return with him to Camp
Independence for a peace talk. Henderson, with two companions
waylaid and murdered them.

He had been a member of the posse organized by Harry Love to

shoot on sight California’s most famous bandit—Joaquin Murietta and
boasted that he fired the bullet which killed the glamorous Joaquin.
It was he who cut off and pickled the bandit’s head as evidence to
get the reward. At the same time he pickled the hand of Three
Fingered Jack Garcia, Joaquin’s chief lieutenant, and the bloodiest
monster the West ever saw. Garcia had an odd habit of cutting off
the ears of his victims and stringing them for a saddle ornament.
The slaying of Joaquin was not a pretty adventure and as the details
came out, Henderson renounced the honor.

The grewsome vouchers which obtained the reward became the

attraction for the morbid on a San Francisco street and there above
the din of traffic one heard a spieler chant the thrills it gave “for only
two measly bits....” The exhibit was destroyed in the San Francisco
fire and earthquake of 1906.
In his book, “On the Old West Coast” Major Horace Bell states that
Henderson confided to him there was never a day nor night that
Joaquin Murietta did not come to him and though headless, would
demand the return of his head; that Henderson was never
frightened by the apparition, which would vanish after Henderson
explained why he couldn’t return the head and his excuse for cutting
it off.

Bell quotes Henderson: “I would never have cut Joaquin’s head off
except for the excitement of the chase and the orders of Harry
Love.”

To give credence to the ghost story he says of Henderson, “He was

for several years my neighbor and a more genial and generous
fellow I never met....” Major Bell, it is known, was not always strictly
factual.

Following the Surprise Canyon strike, Panamint City was quickly built
and quickly filled with thugs who lived by their guns; gamblers and
painted girls who lived by their wits.

An engaging sidewalk promoter known as E. P. Raines, who

possessed a good front and gall in abundance, but no money,
assured the owners of the Panamint claims that he could raise the
capital necessary for development. He set out for the city, registered
at the leading hotel, attached the title of Colonel to his name;
exchanged a worthless check for $25 and made for the 166
barroom. It was no mere coincidence that Mr. Raines before
ordering his drink, parked himself alongside a group of the town’s
richest citizens and began to toy with an incredibly rich sample of
ore. It was natural that members of the group should notice it.
Particularly the multimillionaire, Senator John P. Jones, Nevada silver
king.

Soon the charming crook was the life of the party. His $25 spent, he
actually borrowed $1000 from Jones. Having drunk his guests under
the table, Mr. Raines went forth for further celebration and landed
broke in the hoosegow. Hearing of his misadventure, his new friends
promptly went to his rescue. “... Outrage ... biggest night this town
ever had....”

To make amends for the city’s inhospitable blunder, Raines was

taken to his hostelry, given a champagne bracer and made the honor
guest at breakfast. “Where’s the Senator?” he asked. Informed that
Senator Jones had taken a train for Washington, Raines quickened
“Why, he was expecting me to go with him....” He jumped up,
fumbled through his pockets in a pretended search for money.
“Heavens—my purse is gone!” Instantly a half dozen hands reached
for the hip and Mr. Raines was on his way.

It required but a few moments to get $15,000 from the Senator and
his partner, Senator William R. Stewart, for the Panamint claims. He
also sold Jones the idea of a railroad from a seaport at Los Angeles
to his mines and this was partially built. The project ended in Cajon
Pass. The scars of the tunnel started may still be seen.

Jones and Stewart organized the Panamint Mining Company with a

capital of $2,000,000. Other claims were bought but immediate
development was delayed by difficulties in obtaining title because
many of the owners were outlaws, difficult to find. A few were
located in the penitentiary and there received payment. For some of
the claims the promoters paid $350,000.

On June 29, 1875, the first mill began to crush ore from the Jacobs
Wonder mine. Panamint City became one of the toughest and most
colorful camps of the West. It was strung for a mile up and down
narrow Surprise Canyon. It was believed that here was a mass of
silver greater than that on the Comstock and shares were active on
the markets.

The most pretentious saloon in the town was that of Dave Nagle,
who later as the bodyguard of U. S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen
J. Field, killed Judge David Terry, distinguished jurist, but stormy
petrel of California Vigilante days. Judge Terry had represented, then
married his client, the Rose of Sharon—Sarah Althea Hill—in her suit
to determine whether she was wife or mistress of Senator 167
Sharon, Comstock millionaire. Feuding had resulted with
Field, the trial judge. Meeting in a railroad dining room, Judge Terry
slapped Justice Field’s face and Nagle promptly killed Terry.

Poker at Panamint City was never a piker’s game. Bets of $10,000 on

two pair attracted but little comment. Gunning was regarded as a
minor nuisance, but funerals worried the town’s butcher. He had the
only wagon that had survived the steep canyon road into the camp.
“I bought it,” he complained, “to haul fresh meat, but since there’s
no hearse I never know when I’ll have to unload a quarter of beef to
haul a stiff to Sourdough Canyon.”

Panamint City attained an estimated population of 3,000. Harris and

Rhine, merchants, having the only safe in the town permitted
patrons to deposit money for safe keeping and often had large
sums. On one occasion they had the $10,000 payroll of the Hemlock
mine.

A clerk arriving early at the store, suddenly faced two gentlemen

who directed him to open the safe and pass out the money. “Just as
well count it as you fork it over,” one ordered. The clerk had counted
$4000 when he was told to stop. “This’ll do for the present,” the
spokesman said. “We’ll come back and get the rest.”

“Yeh,” added his partner. “Too damned many thugs in this town.”

They sallied forth on a spending spree. The down-and-out along the

mile-long street received generous portions of the loot and a widow
whose husband had been killed in a mine explosion, received $500.

These bandits, Small and McDonald, thereafter became incredibly

popular and the legend follows that what they stole from those who
had, they shared with those who hadn’t.
Wells-Fargo and Company offered a reward of $1000 for their
capture, but their arrest was never accomplished. Invariably they
were apprised of the approach of pursuers and simply retired to
some convenient canyon. The bandits further endeared themselves
to the citizenry when Stewart and Jones arranged for the
importation of a hundred Chinese laborers.

This aroused the ire of the white miners and a meeting was called to
protest. “This is a white man’s town,” was the cry of labor.

Small and McDonald agreed. “Just leave it to us,” they told the
leaders. “No use in a lotta fellows getting hurt.” They stationed
themselves at the mouth of the canyon and when the coolies
arrived, a sudden volley from the bandits’ six-guns brought the
caravan to a halt. The frightened Chinamen leaped from the hacks
and fled in panic across the desert and Panamint remained a white
man’s town.

Engaged at work around their hideout, Hungry Bill stopped to beg

for food. They told the Indian to wait until they finished their 168
task. His sullen impatience angered Small who booted him
down the trail. Hungry Bill left cursing and told a prospector whom
he met that he would return shortly with his tribesmen and
assassinate the entire population.

Panamint City was warned but Small and McDonald declared that
since they had started the trouble, they alone should end it.
Accordingly, they set out for Hungry Bill’s ranch to stop the attack
before it started. But near Hungry Bill’s stone corral they were
ambushed by the Indians. The bandits shot their way into the corral
and barricading themselves, killed and wounded about half of the
renegades, after which the remainder fled.

Panamint City harbored a hoard of unsung assassins who merely lay

in wait, shot the unwary victim down, took his poke, rolled the body
into a ravine, went up town to spend the money.
One killer who came decided to dominate the field and with that in
view he set forth to establish himself quickly as a gunman not to be
trifled with. He chose to display his prowess upon an inoffensive,
quiet faro dealer known as Jimmy Bruce, who, it was easy to see,
“was just a chicken-livered punk.” The publicity of a well-done
murder in such a setting would give prestige.

Armed with two guns, the bully contrived to start an argument with
Bruce. The indoor white of the gambler seemed to grow whiter as
the rage of his towering tormenter reached the climax. The players
moved out of range. The bartenders ducked under the counter.
Patrons helpless to intervene, fled from the kill.

A shot rang out. Cautiously, the bartenders lifted their heads. On the
floor lay the bad man. Mr. Bruce was calmly lighting a cigar.

There was consternation among the killers. They swore vengeance.

After five of them had fallen before Bruce’s gun, he was let alone.

The silent faro dealer, it was learned too late, was surpassingly quick
on the trigger.

A spot somewhat distant from the regular cemetery was chosen for
the burial place and it became known as Jim Bruce’s private
graveyard.

Remi Nadeau, a French Canadian, was the first to haul freight into
Panamint City. Nadeau was a genius of transportation. There was no
country too rough, too remote, too wild for him. He came to Los
Angeles in 1861 from Utah and teamed as far east as Montana.

The Cerro Gordo mine, on the eastern side of Owens Lake in Inyo
County began to ship ore in 1869 and Nadeau obtained a contract to
haul the ore to Wilmington where it was shipped by boat to San
Francisco. He soon had to increase his equipment to 32 teams, using
more than 500 animals. For his return trip he bought such 169
commodities as he could peddle or leave for sale at stations he built
along the route.

In 1872, the contract having expired, Judson and Belshaw, owners

of the mine, received a lower bid and Nadeau was left with 500
horses on his hands and heavily in debt. He wanted to dispose of his
outfit for the benefit of his creditors but they had confidence in him
and persuaded him to “carry on.” Borax discovered in Nevada saved
him. Meanwhile the lower bidder on the Cerro Gordo job proved
unsatisfactory and Judson and Belshaw asked Nadeau to take the
old job back. But now Nadeau informed them they would have to
buy a half interest in his outfit and advance $150,000 to construct
relay stations at Mud Springs, Mojave, Lang’s Springs, Red Rock,
Little Lake, Cartago, and other points. They gladly agreed.

Shortly after Nadeau began hauling across the desert, he picked up

a man suffering from gunshot and crazed from thirst. Taking the
victim to his nearest station, he left instructions that he be cared for.

Sometime afterward, one of Nadeau’s competitors whose trains had

been held up several times by outlaws, wondered why none of
Nadeau’s teams or stations had been molested. At the time, Nadeau
himself didn’t know that the fellow whom he’d picked up on the
desert was Tiburcio Vasquez, the bandit terror.

Vasquez naively condoned his banditry. It disgusted him at dances

he said, to see the senoritas of his race favor the interloping
Americans. He had a singular power over women. When Sheriff
William Rowland effected his capture, women of Los Angeles filled
his cell with flowers. He was hanged at San Jose.

Nadeau was now hauling ore from the Minnietta and the Modoc
mines in the Argus Range on the west side of Panamint Valley. The
Modoc was the property of George Hearst, the father of the
publisher, William Randolph Hearst. These mines were directly across
the valley from Panamint City and because of Nadeau’s record for
building roads in places no other dared to go, Jones and Stewart
engaged him to haul out of Surprise Canyon, which was barely wide
enough in places for a burro with a pack.

On a hill, locally known as “Seventeen”—that being the per cent of

grade, located on the old highway between Ballarat and Trona, one
may see the dim outline of a road pitching down precipitously to the
valley floor. This road was built by Nadeau and one marvels that
anything short of steam power could move a load from bottom to
top.

Acquiring a fortune, Nadeau built the first three-story building in Los

Angeles and the Nadeau Hotel, long the city’s finest, retained favor
among many wealthy pioneer patrons long after the more 170
glamorous Angelus and Alexandria were built in the early
1900’s.

The first ore from the Panamint mines was shipped to England and
because of its richness showed a profit, but difficulties arose in
recovery processes which they did not know how to overcome. The
mines would have paid fabulously under present day processes.

Finis was written to the story of Panamint after two hectic years and
in 1877 Jones and Stewart had lost $2,000,000 and quit. It would be
more factual to state that since they had received from the public
$2,000,000 to put into it, who lost what is a guess.
171
 Chapter XXIV
Indian George. Legend of the
Panamint
The previous chapter records accepted history of the silver discovery
at Panamint City. Indian George Hansen had another version which
he told me at his ranch 11 miles north of Ballarat. It fits the period
and the people then in the country.

George, when a youngster lived in the Coso Range. East of the Coso
there was no white man for 100 miles and renegades fleeing from
their crimes and deserters from the Union army sought hideouts in
the Panamint. Thus George was employed as a guide by three
outlaws to lead them to safe refuge.

George, a Shoshone, had both friends and relatives among the

Shoshones and the Piutes and took the bandits into Surprise Canyon
where a camp for the night was chosen. While staking out his pack
animals, George discovered a ledge of silver ore. Breaking off a
chunk, he stuck it into his pocket, saying nothing about it until they
were out of the locality. Then he showed the specimen and to
promote a deal, gave one of them a sample. They wanted to see the
ledge but George refused to disclose it. Then George said the three
fellows stepped aside and after talking in whispers told him they
didn’t like the country and returning with him to the Coso Range,
went on their way. Two or three months later they were back to
bargain.

George had traded with the white man before. They had always
given him a few dollars and a rosy promise. “Now me pretty foxy. So
I say, ‘no want money. Maybe lose.’ Him say, ‘what hell you want?’

“‘Heap good job all time I live.’

“‘Okay,’ him say. ‘We give you job.’

“I show claim.” George paused, a look of smoldering hate in his dark

eyes, then added: “I get job. Two weeks. Him say, ‘you fired.’ I get
$50.”

All Indians and many of the old timers believe that the ledge 172
George found was that for which Jones and Stewart paid
$2,000,000.

George made another deal worthy of mention. The town of Trona on

Searles’ Lake needed the water owned by George’s relative, Mabel,
who herded 500 goats and sold them to butchers at Skidoo,
Goldfield, and Rhyolite where they became veal steak or lamb chops.
Trona offered $30 a month for the use of the water. Mabel consulted
George as head man of the Shoshones and advised Trona that the
sum would not be considered. It must pay $27.50 or do without. A
superstition regarding numbers accounted for the price George fixed
for the water.

My acquaintance with Indian George began on my first trip to

Ballarat with Shorty Harris and was the result of a stomach ache
Shorty had. I suggested a trip to a doctor at Trona instead.

“No, sir. I’ll see old Indian George. If these doctors knew as much as
these old Indians, there wouldn’t be any cemeteries.”

I asked what evidence he had of George’s skill.

“Plenty. You know Sparkplug (Michael Sherlock)? He was in a bad

way. Fred Gray put a mattress in his pickup, laid Sparkplug on it and
hauled him over to Trona. Nurses took him inside. Doctor looked him
over and came out and asked Fred if he knew where old Sparkplug
wanted to be buried. ‘Why, Ballarat, I reckon,’ Fred said.

“Well, you take him back quick. He’ll be dead when you get there.
Better hurry. He’ll spoil on you this hot weather.’

“Fred raced back, taking curves on Seventeen with two wheels

hanging over the gorge, but he made it; stopped in front of
Sparkplug’s shack, jumped out and called to me to bring a pick and
shovel. Then he ran over to Bob Warnack’s shack for help to make a
coffin. Indian George happened to ride by the pickup and saw
Sparkplug’s feet sticking out. He crawled off his cayuse, took a look,
lifted Sparkplug’s eyelids and leaving his horse ground-hitched, he
went out in the brush and yanked up some roots here and there.
Then he went up to Hungry Hattie’s and came back with a handful of
chicken guts and rabbit pellets; brewed ’em in a tomato can and
when he got through he funneled it down Sparkplug’s throat and in
no time at all Sparkplug was up and packing his flivver to go
prospecting. If you don’t believe me, there’s Sparkplug right over
there tinkering with his car.”

George’s age has been a favorite topic of writers of Death Valley

history for the last 30 years.

I stopped for water once at the little stream flumed out of Hall’s
Canyon to supply the ranch. He was irrigating his alfalfa in a
temperature of 122 degrees. I had brought him three or four 173
dozen oranges and suggested that Mabel would like some of
the fruit.

“Heavy work for a man of your age,” I said.

He bit into an orange, eating both peeling and pulp. “Me papoose.
Me only 107 years old.”

There were less than a dozen oranges left when I began to cast
about for a tactful way to preserve a few for Mabel. Seeing her
chopping wood in the scorching sun I said, “I’ll bet Mabel would like
an orange just now. Shall I call her?”

“No—no—” George grunted. “Oranges heap bad for squaw,” and

speeding up his eating, he removed the last menace to Mabel.

Once George told me of watching the sufferings of the Jayhawkers

and Bennett-Arcane party:

“Me little boy, first time I see white man. Whiskers make me think
him devil. I run. I see some of Bennett party die. When all dead, we
go down. First time Indians ever see flour. Squaws think it what
make white men white and put it on their faces.”

I asked George why he didn’t go down and aid the whites. “Why?”
he asked, “to get shot?”

“How many Shoshones are left?” I asked George.

He counted them on his fingers. “Nineteen. Soon, none.”

George died in 1944 and it is safe I believe, to say that for 110 years
he had baffled every agency of death on America’s worst desert.
Because his ranch was a landmark and the water that came from the
mountains was good, it was a natural stopping place and he was
known to thousands. Following a curious custom of Indians George
adopted the Swedish name Hansen because it had euphony he liked.

The Panamint is the locale of the legend of Swamper Ike, first told I
believe by Old Ranger over a nation-wide hookup, while he was M.C.
of the program “Death Valley Days.”

A daring, but foolhardy youngster, with wife and baby, undertook to

cross the range. Unacquainted with the country and scornful of its
perils, he reached the crest, but there ran out of water. He left his
wife and the baby on the trail, comfortably protected in the shade of
a bluff and started down the Death Valley side of the range to find
water.

After a thorough search of the canyons about, he climbed to a

higher level, scanned the floor of the valley. Seeing a lake that
reflected the peaks of the Funeral Range he made for it under a
withering sun. He learned too late that it was a mirage and
exhausted, started back only to be beaten down and die.

After waiting through a night of terror, the young mother prepared a

comfortable place for her baby and went in search of her 174
husband. She too saw the blue lake and made for it, saw it
vanish as he had. Then she discovered his tracks and undertook to
follow him, but she also was beaten down and fell dead within a few
feet of his lifeless body.

A band of wandering Cocopah Indians crossing the range, found the

baby. They took the child to their own habitation on the Colorado
river and named him Joe Salsuepuedes, which is Indian for “Get-out-
if-you-can.”

Joe grew up as Indian, burned dark by the desert sun. But he had
an idea he wasn’t Indian. Learning that he was a foundling, picked
up in the Panamint, he set out for Death Valley, possessed of a
singular faith that somehow he would discover evidence that he was
a white man.

He obtained a job as swamper for the Borax Company. When he

gave his name the boss said, “Too many Joe’s working here. We’ll
call you Ike.”

Early Indians, as you may see in Dead Man’s Canyon, the Valley of
Fire, and numerous canyons in the western desert had a habit of
scratching stories of adventure or signs to inform other Indians of
unusual features of a locality on the canyon walls—often coloring the
tracing with dyes from herbs or roots. Knowing this, Swamper Ike
was always alert for these hieroglyphs on any boulder he passed or
in any canyon he entered.

One day Swamper Ike went out to look for a piece of onyx that he
could polish and give to the girl he loved. While seeking the onyx he
noticed a flat slab of travertine and on it the picture story of “Get-
out-if-you-can.”

Swamper Ike had justified his faith.

175
 Chapter XXV
Ballarat. Ghost Town
In the early 1890’s gold discovered on the west side of the Panamint
in Pleasant Canyon caused the rush responsible for Ballarat. For
more than 20 years the district had been combed by prospectors
holed in at Post Office Spring, about one half mile south of the site
upon which Ballarat was subsequently built. Here the government
had a small army post and here soldiers, outlaws, and adventurers
received their mail from a box wired in the crotch of a mesquite tree.

The Radcliffe, which was the discovery mine was a profitable

producer. The timbers and machinery were hauled from Randsburg
over the Slate Range and across Panamint Valley, to the mouth of
the canyon. There, under the direction of Oscar Rogers, it was
packed on burros and taken up the steep grade to the mine site.

Copperstain Joe, a noted half-breed Indian made the next strike.

With a specimen, he went to Mojave where he showed it to Jim
Cooper. For five dollars and a gallon of whiskey he led Cooper to the
site.

But his deal with Cooper interested me less than the cunning of his
burro, Slick. Copperstain strode into a hardware store and asked for
a lock. “It’s for Slick’s chain. Picks a lock soon as I turn my back—
dam’ him.”

The merchant showed him a lock of intricate mechanism, “He won’t

pick this. Costs more, but worth it.”
“I don’t care what it costs,” Copperstain said and bought it. Later he
looped the chain around the burro’s feet, fastened the links with the
lock and tethered Slick to a stake. “That’ll hold you—” he said
defiantly.

The next morning he was back in the store, belligerent. “Helluva lock
you sold me. Slick picked it in no time.”

“Impossible.”

“The burro’s gone, ain’t he?” Copperstain bristled, and reaching into
his pocket, produced the lock. “See that nail in the keyhole? I 176
didn’t put it there. Slick just found a nail—that’s all.”

The future of Pleasant Canyon seemed assured and it was decided

to move the two saloons and grocery to the flats below, where a
town would have room to grow.

When citizens met to choose a name, George Riggins, a young

Australian suggested the new town be given a name identified with
gold the world over. Ballarat in his native country met the
requirement and its name was adopted.

Shorty Harris discovered The Star, The Elephant, the World Beater,
The St. Patrick. In Tuba, Jail, Surprise, and Goler Canyons more
strikes were made. It is curious that none were made in Happy
Canyon.

The production figures of early mines are rarely dependable and the
yield is often confused with that obtained by swindlers from outright
sale or stock promotion. My friend, Oscar Rogers, superintendent,
told me the Radcliffe produced a net profit of approximately
$500,000. Less authentic are figures attributed to the following:

The O. B. Joyful in Tuba Canyon, $250,000; The Gem in Jail Canyon,

$150,000; and Shorty Harris’ World Beater, $200,000.
Among the noted of Ballarat residents was John LeMoyne, a
Frenchman. He discovered a silver mine in Death Valley but the best
service he gave the desert was a recipe for coffee. He walked into
Ballarat one day and had lunch. The lady who owned the cafe asked
if everything suited. “All but the coffee,” John said.

“How do you make your coffee?” she asked.

“Madame, there’s no trick about making good coffee. Plenty coffee.

Dam’ little water.”

From one end of Death Valley country to the other, coffee is judged
by John LeMoyne’s standard. You may not always get it, but mention
it and the waiter will know.

For years LeMoyne held his silver claim in spite of offers far beyond
its value, which he believed was $5,000,000. But once when the
urge to return to his beloved France was strong and Goldfield,
Tonopah, and Rhyolite excited the nation, he weakened and decided
to accept an offer said to have been $200,000. “But,” he told the
buyers, “it must be cash.”

After a huddle, John’s demand was met and a check offered. John
brushed it aside. “But this eez not cash,” he complained. No, he
wouldn’t go to town to get the cash. He had work to do. “You get
eet.”

Disgusted, the buyers left and John LeMoyne continued to wear his
rags, eat his beans, and dream of La Belle France.

A young Shoshone Indian came into Keeler excited as an Indian ever

gets, looked up Shorty Harris and said: “Short Man, your 177
friend go out. No come back. Maybe him sick.” It was
midsummer, but LeMoyne had undertaken to reach his claim.

In the bottom of the valley, Shorty identified LeMoyne’s tracks by a

peculiar hobnail which LeMoyne used in his shoes. He followed the
tracks to Cottonwood Spring and there found an old French pistol
which he knew had belonged to LeMoyne. Convinced he was on the
right trail, he went on and after a mile or two met Death Valley
Scotty.

“I know why you’re here,” Scotty said. “I’ve just found his body.”

LeMoyne was partially eaten by coyotes and nearby were his dead
burros. Though tethered to the mesquite with slender cotton cords
which they could easily have broken, the patient asses had elected
to die beside him.

And there ended the dream of the glory trail back to the France he
loved. Those who believe in the jinx will find something to sustain
their faith in the record of John LeMoyne’s mine.

After LeMoyne’s death, Wild Bill Corcoran who had made and lost
fortunes in the lush days of Rhyolite, set out from Owens Valley to
relocate it. Never a ranting prohibitionist, Bill believed that the best
remedy for snake bite was likker in the blood when the snake bit.
When he reached Darwin he was not feeling well and stopped long
enough for a nip with friends and to get a youngster to drive his car
and help at the camp.

It was midsummer, with record temperature but Bill wanted John

LeMoyne’s mine. Becoming worse in the valley he stopped in
Emigrant Canyon and sent the boy back for a doctor. Bill crawled into
an old shack under the hill. When the boy and the doctor came, they
found Bill Corcoran on the floor, his hand stretched toward a bottle
of bootleg liquor. His soul had gone over the hill.

One after another, five others followed Bill to file on LeMoyne’s claim
and each in turn joined Bill over the hill.

LeMoyne’s Christian name was Jean. His surname has been spelled
both Lemoigne and Lemoine. The claim from which Indians had
formerly taken lead was filed upon by LeMoyne in 1882.
Joe Gorsline, a graduate of Columbia, with a background of wealth,
came to Ballarat during the rush, looked over the town. “Wouldn’t
spend another day in this dump for all the gold in the mint,” he
announced. He had a few drinks, heard a few yarns, eyed a few girls
in the honkies. It was all new to Joe, but something about the
informalities of life appealed to him and in a little while he was
renamed Joe Goose.

Then the town’s constable shot its Judge and Ballarat chose him to
succeed the deceased. Not liking the laws of the code, he made a
batch of his own, which were never questioned. While 178
watching the flow of time and liquor, he “went desert” and
put aside the things that might have been for the more alluring
things-as-they-are.

When Ballarat became a ghost town, Joe Gorsline took his body to
the city, but his soul remained and years afterward when he died, a
hearse came down the mountain and in it was Joe Gorsline, home
again. He is buried in a little cemetery out on the flat and in the
spring the golden sun cups, grow all around and you walk on them
to get to his grave.

Adding a cultural touch to Ballarat was an English nobleman who

“going desert” tossed his title out of the window, donned overalls
and brogans and promptly earned the approving verdict, “An all right
guy.” Soon he was drinking with the toper and dancing with the
demimonde. Like others, he did his own cooking and washing. He
lived in a ’dobe cabin which, because it was on the main street, had
its window shades always down.

But there was one little custom of his British routine he never
abandoned and this was discovered by accident. He stopped in John
Lambert’s saloon one evening before going to his cabin for dinner.
He left his watch on the bar and had gone before Lambert noticed it.
An hour later Lambert, having an opportunity to get away, took the
watch to the cabin. John thus reported what he saw: “He was eating
his dinner and bigod—he had on a white shirt, wing collar, and
swallow tail.”

Ballarat chuckled but no one suggested a lynching party. They knew

how deep grow the roots in the soil one loves. “Maybe,” said
Lambert, “that’s why John Bull always wins the last battle. They give
up nothing.”

A familiar figure throughout Death Valley country was Johnny-

Behind-the-Gun—small and wiry and as much a part of the land as
the lizard. His moniker was acquired from his habit of settling
disputes without cluttering up the courts. Johnny, whose name was
Cyte, accounted for three or four sizable fortunes. Having sold a
claim for $35,000 he once bought a saloon and gambling hall in
Rhyolite, forswearing prospecting forever.

Johnny advertised his whiskey by drinking it and the squareness of

his game, by sitting in it. One night the gentleman opposite was
overwhelmed with luck and his pockets bulged with $30,000 of
Johnny’s money. Having lost his last chip, Johnny said, “I’ll put up
dis place. Ve play vun hand and quit.”

Johnny lost. He got up, reached for his hat. “Vell, my lucky friend, I’ll
take a last drink mit you.” He tossed the liquor, lighted a 179
cigar. “Goodnight, chentlemen,” he said. “I go find me
anudder mine.”

Johnny had several claims near the Keane Wonder in the Funeral
Mountains, held by a sufferance not uncommon among old timers,
who respected a notice regardless of legal formalities.

Senator William M. Stewart, Nevada mining magnate, had employed

Kyle Smith, a young mining engineer to go into the locality and see
what he could find. Smith, a capable and likable chap, in working
over the districts, located several claims open for filing by reason of
Johnny’s failure to do his assessment work.
Welcome to our website – the ideal destination for book lovers and
knowledge seekers. With a mission to inspire endlessly, we offer a
vast collection of books, ranging from classic literary works to
specialized publications, self-development books, and children's
literature. Each book is a new journey of discovery, expanding
knowledge and enriching the soul of the reade

Our website is not just a platform for buying books, but a bridge
connecting readers to the timeless values of culture and wisdom. With
an elegant, user-friendly interface and an intelligent search system,
we are committed to providing a quick and convenient shopping
experience. Additionally, our special promotions and home delivery
services ensure that you save time and fully enjoy the joy of reading.

Let us accompany you on the journey of exploring knowledge and

personal growth!

textbookfull.com