Chapter 15

CONCERNING BALD-HEADED WHIZZERS

            TYPICAL adjunct to life in the hellroarin' days of the Argonauts when camps reeked gold and the humors of men were raw as new-plowed prairie land, was that effervescent phenomenon known as the Whizzer.

            The Whizzer was the high ace in the deck of life as it was dealt over gravel bar and auriferous stream bank. Individuals and towns reaped fame by it. A successful Whizzer not only crowned its originator and perpetrator with glory, but shed an enviable light upon the entire community that witnessed—or suffered—its execution. Whizzers of superlative merit have been embalmed in the memories of very old men who still sun themselves in the ghost towns of gold and who can be led, with much chuckling, to recount them. In a few rare volumes of reminiscences long out of print you'll find samples of this long extinct genus pinned like gorgeous butterflies to the pages.

            A noteworthy swindle, a practical joke, a brilliant hoax: these were the magic components of which the Whizzer was made. They were of two classes, the plain and the bald-headed. A bald-headed

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Whizzer was one so adroitly built upon a human foible or frailty, so carefully exploited by its author as to bring a whole community into the arena of mocking laughter. The distinction between the two varieties was comparative; the gage, you might say, of genius.

            One of the earliest Whizzers of the gold diggin's to gain immortality was that one perpetrated by a genius whose name comes down as Pike Sellers—undoubtedly one of the wild Missouri hellions generically lumped as "Pikes" in the vocabulary of the mines. This Pike had an imagination and a devilishly sly humor which would qualify him to-day for one of our highly specialized lines of salesmanship.

            It was in the spring of '50 when word of the incredible richness of Downie's Flat, away up near the headwaters of Yuba's north fork, swept downstream and set a crowd of wild-eyed boomers hurrying thither. Original discoverers of Downie's Flat were digging a pound of gold a day to the man out of crevices under the rim rock with the point of a butcher knife! Major Downie himself had sifted downstream to Bullard's Bar with $3000 in nuggets, result of three days work! So rumor exploded.

            When the first of the rush commenced to lower themselves hand over hand down the precipitous wall of the gorge to Downie's camp on the forks of white water they were not very cordially received by the ten or a dozen original discoverers who'd

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spent a hard winter there. It was, in fact, quite true that Downie and his associates had been whittling raw gold out of the bank with butcher knives and iron spoons over several months; and they did not welcome a division of riches.

            Then it was that Pike Sellers had his inspiration.

            He was working away at the soft dirt of the stream bank one day when he saw one of the boomers, pack on back, crawling precariously down trail. Pike, unseen himself, scrambled up out of the stream bed and commenced furiously prying with his long knife at the bark slabs on a jack pine. Just as the stranger came up one of the rough shags of bark became loosened. Pike pushed two fingers behind it and withdrew a fat gold nugget.

Eyes of the stranger popped. Pike tackled another bark slab without so much as a glance over shoulder at the fascinated onlooker. By a simple trick of legerdemain that hunk yielded a second alluring gold pebble.

            "My Gawd!—from the tenderfoot. "I hearn ye was diggin' the yaller stuff outs cracks in the rocks, but I didn't know she grew on trees."

            "Gits lodged thar when th' tree's pushing up through th' soil," indifferently from Pike. "Most of th' nuggets is up higher, but too dam'd much trouble to shin up the trees. Me, I'm jist satisfied to peck round nigh th' ground."

            Under the believing eyes of the newcomer Pike found a couple more nuggets. Then the former

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whipped out his bowie knife and started to work on a near-by jack pine.

            "Hold on thar!" commandingly from the Sellers person. "Yo're on my claim. Rule in this camp ev'ry fella's entitled to ten gold bearin' pines; that thar one belongs to me."

            The boomer wanted to know in an excited whine where he could stake himself to a tree. Reluctantly Pike Sellers abandoned his work to stride through the forest to where a jack pine of smaller growth reared.

            "Like I said, she's richest nigh th' top. Ye can climb this one 'thout a ladder iffen yo're so minded." Pike showed a commendable interest in seeing the newcomer make his first strike of jack pine gold. The latter dropped his pack and, bowie in teeth, commenced to shin up the rough trunk.

            "Higher up's better," bawled Pike when his protege had come to the first limbs. "Nothin' but flake gold low down mostly."

            Up went the avid tenderfoot, before his eyes the vision of a man prying nuggets from beneath pine tree bark. Pike let him risk his neck until the luckless light-wit was fifty or sixty feet from the ground.

            "That's a likely 'nough place to begin on. Only be mighty keerful not to drop any nuggets. I kain't be held responsible fer losses like that."

            The searcher after tree gold began to attack the bark with his bowie knife. Pike Sellers sifted back to the stream bed to bring an audience for the farce

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comedy he had staged. Thereafter "jack pine gold" became a synonym through all the Northern Mines.

            Pike Sellers reaped enduring fame as the father of a Whizzer.

            The scene of one of these examples of diablerie which comes well under the qualifications of the bald-headed rank is Galena Hill—or what remains of it. Five headstones hidden in the forest of second growth timber; not another stick nor stone to mark what was a high rollin' camp of the Fifties.

            When a thousand ground sluicers were washing an old river channel down to rich bed rock here at Galena Hill—the great cut is almost masked now by manzanita and lusty young pines—life ran high. Saloons and gambling halls never closed. The hurdy-gurdy gals came and went, dispensing their favors at a dollar a dance. And there was Madam Jewsharp's fandango house.

            Now Madam Jewsharp was hardly a lady. She was, in fact, a "Sydney duck"—vernacular for one from the convict camps of Australia—and she bore the sign of that caste—a chip neatly knifed out of her right ear. But have it on the word of old Henry Hazen of Depot Hill, Madam Jewsharp ran a good house: no fights or loud swearing—or practically next to none.

            Things went smoothly at the Maison Jewsharp until one Blazer Bill hit the diggin's. A fightin',

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swearin', cantankerous son of a gun was this Blazer Bill [says Henry] ; got himself run out of Brandy City, did Blazer, for slitting a gal's silk stocking for the nugget she had under her garter.

            Starts right in makin' his mark in Galena Hill.

            Got away with it, did Blazer, until one night he runs foul of Madam Jewsharp, which she's a bad old catamount to tie into once she roaches her hair and goes on the warpath. One word leads to another until finally the two of 'em lace into a scuffle and Blazer so far forgets his gentlemanly instincts and early trainin' as to bite the lady. Yessir, bit her plumb fair!

            Then next day she has him arrested for what-you-call-it--mayhem. Yessir, mayhem's the word. A right bad soundin' word, too, to hear round a respectable camp.

Looks like Blazer's in for a stiff term in county jail until he gets old Judge May of Camptonville to defend him. "I'll get you a change of venom to Downieville," the Judge tells Blazer. "You can't get a fair trial at Camptonville Court, what with the prejudice raised agin' you."

            Which he does. And trial day you couldn't wedge a thin half dollar between folks jamming that court room. Everybody there to see Blazer Bill get soaked for that outrageous crime of—of mayhem.

            Madam Jewsharp takes the stand to tell judge and jury about her bein' bit by Blazer, the prisoner.

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            And she don't miss nothin' in describing the attack.

            "Now, Madam Jewsharp," says Judge May, Blazer's lawyer, "kindly show judge and jury where you was bit."

            The old girl backs and fills and pulls a blush; but the Judge he clears the court room after a lot of trouble. Then the Madam shows judge and jury where she was bit—a double row of purple tooth marks plain as a signpost. Then Judge May puts Blazer on the stand.

            "This is the man you claim to have bit you?" he asks Madam Jewsharp.

            "Yessir—ee!"

            "Blazer," says Judge May, "turn an' face the jury full." Which Blazer done.

            "Blazer, open yore mouth wide." He done that, too.

            Blazer Bill didn't show a tooth on his whole upper jaw!

            A' course, the jury had to acquit him. And when Blazer got back to Galena Hill Judge May give him back his upper teeth.

            One of the by-products of the veritable blown-in-the-bottle Whizzer was the readiness of its victims to join in the laugh raised at their expense. It was an accepted convention that rancor marked a man down as a short sport and heightened the credit accruing to the nimble wits of the Whizzer's author.

            In the spring of '51 a notable Whizzer sprung on

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the entire town of Nevada City resulted in a celebration by the dupes which set a new high-water mark for that popular pastime.

            Two seedy looking showmen came up from the Southern Mines and hung a placard in front of Caldwell's Store :

            The bill set forth that the champion jackass already had whipped two bulls and a mountain lion down in Sonora and would fight the ferocious grizzly, rain or shine, on a certain date. Nevada City was skeptical until it saw a stockade of split pine posts bound with rawhide commence to rise outside of town. Then bets began to be laid on the respective chances of the fighting jackass and the grizzly. Excitement mounted.

            On the day of the battle nearly all the camp made for the staked arena. A rope stretched about two hundred feet from the stockade represented the seating space for the paid admissions—$1.00—and more than a thousand dug up the dollar.

            Spectators could see between the palings of the stockade a little mouse-colored jack nibbling grass

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and idly switching at flies. He didn't look much like a champion. Betters on the jack began to hedge by laying odds on what was inside a large packing box den which was pushed close to a trapdoor giving onto the arena; at least the smell told them a bear was inside.

            Finally the showmen raised the trap before the den and did some vigorous prodding with a long pole. After much hair raising growling—"man, that jack's a sure goner!"—there scuttled into the ring an undersized, very sick looking cinnamon bear. You could tell he was crying for his mamma just in one look.

            The champion jackass gave the intruder one careless look over shoulder and continued cropping-grass. A roar of disappointment from the crowd which must have speeded the two showmen on their way—for they hit the trail with their gate money just the minute that bear was pried into the ring.

            The crowd's yell terrified the bear and he nuzzled up against the jack for company. The latter, disturbed in his browsing, whirled and planted two trim heels under the disturber's diaphragm. Up over the top of the stockade scrambled the squealing bear and down amid the spectators. Men fell over one another and had their faces pushed in the dirt in making an aisle of escape for Bruin. In less than a minute all the spectators had to see for their dollar was a mouse-colored jack switching flies.

            Well, there was the Whizzer put over on the male

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population of the biggest camp in the Northern Mines! Did they talk of a rope for the showmen? Not at all. They took that jack out of the stockade and with him at the head, formed a procession back to town. Then from bar to bar with songs and shouts and banging of pistols. At each wet goods dispensary the champion fighting jackass of the state was pledged for drinks all round and then a collection taken to redeem him.

            And so far into the night --

            Perhaps the classic Whizzer—the classic baldheaded Whizzer of all time—was that one whose authors blundered into its launching under inspiration drawn with corks rather than with native cunning. Hear now the pitiful story of how the up-and-coming camp of Columbia failed to become the capital of the state.

            In the early Fifties Columbia with its 15,000 souls, its D. O. Mills bank and its seemingly inexhaustible placers all about, began to think pretty smart of itself. The capital of the state in that time was a nervous and changeable government seat; it had jumped from Monterey to Benicia to Sacramento. Columbia aspired to put salt on the tail of this greatly-to-be-desired prize, and so a petition to the Governor and Legislature setting forth the surpassing merits of Columbia as a capital site received over 5000 signatures and was intrusted to two leading citizens to be delivered in person to the State's executive.

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            These worthies rode down to Stockton in the valley, there designing to take boat for Sacramento. It was a long and dusty ride. In Stockton they went to a thirst-cutting station for restorative treatment. Their expense money was ample—some of it was to be used in persuading legislators—and so they prolonged the treatment with no financial pains to themselves.

            They found themselves somehow on a boat, but it was a boat bound for San Francisco and not for Sacramento. Heigh-ho, what a bore! Yet even in this embarrassment the two bright fellows from Columbia discovered that things might be a whole lot worse. The San Francisco boat had a bar --

            In San Francisco several days later Columbia's representatives sat in the back room of a gilded trap of sin and with their pick-me-ups before them they lapsed into gentle, perhaps tearful, sentimentality. One contributing cause of this mellowness was consideration of the sad fate of their dear friend and one-time fellow Columbian, Black-Shirt Bill, who'd but recently been condemned to a long stretch of imprisonment for stage robbery.

            "Poor ole Bill—nev' goin' see God's dear sunlight again! Nev' even goin' have nuzzer drink all his life!"

            The more the two ambassadors from Columbia considered Bill's dismal future, the more their hearts warmed to him. Finally inspiration was visited upon the soft-hearted gentlemen. They called upon the bartender for a pen and a fresh sheet of foolscap

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and they changed the whereases and wherefores of the petition they carried to have it read a prayer to the Governor of California to exercise his clemency in behalf of Black-Shirt Bill. A prayer for pardon carrying 5000 signatures of the good people of Columbia.

            The Governor pardoned Bill. Sacramento remained the capital of California. And Columbia the aspiring—well, it boasts a population of less than two hundred to-day.

            A minor prank, worthy of recording nevertheless for the happy touch of character entailed, was that one involving Dr. Theodore Schubert of Loyalton.

            He who called himself Doctor was an excitable German who set up in Dutch Flat, in the gorgeous Fifties, as a shoemaker. Later he turned brewer. Then he quit Dutch Flat for the rising town of Loyalton over Sierra crest to the north.

            Homeopathy was a new quirk in medicine in those days, a reasonable revolt—so far as the gold camps were concerned, at least—from the gargantuan doses of medicinal slop the horse doctors of the placers were wont to prescribe for their patients. Theo Schubert, ex-cobbler, ex-brewer, set up his shingle in Loyalton as "Dr. Theodore Schubert, Homeopath."

            Scanty references to Dr. Schubert uncovered in an old diary, long attic-bound, have it that the worthy

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German medico was exceptionally precise in the dispensing of his pills. He had one remedy for rheumatism in the right leg or arm, quite another for the same distemper in the companion members. Shooting pains in the right lung called for pellets from one of his formidable array of bottles; if it were the left lung, Doc Schubert looked grave and uncorked a different vial.

            Faith must have run high with Loyalton's ailing.

            The good doctor shared with a major part of the community—and with the whole life of the gold camps, for the matter of that—a single little weakness : he would get drunk on occasions.

            It was on one of these lapses from strict homeopathic probity that Doc Schubert was entertaining the boys at the North Star saloon with a repertoire of fine old German drinking songs. Somebody slipped out to where Schubert's old bang-tail was standing hitched to the little democrat wagon he used in making his calls over the country and then this wastrel perpetrated a dreadful outrage on that bang-tail.

            The nag was a dirty white and offered a fair canvas for the joker's talents. He unhitched the horse, with the exception of the headstall and reins, and hid the harness. Old Fritz remained comfortably dozing between the dropped shafts while with black paint the trickster executed a rough sketch of the missing trappings on his back and ribs.

            Then a confederate dashed into the North Star to

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tell the Doc of an emergency case over on the Truckee road.

            Half of Loyalton gathered to watch Doc Schubert try to hitch up his bang-tail to painted traces and crupper.

            When the befuddled homeopath came to full appreciation of the Whizzer that had been put over on him he felt himself deeply insulted. So deeply insulted was he that he hired a hay wagon, moved his house onto the body thereof and departed Loyalton for good and all, taking his house with him!

            The spirit of horseplay and the zest for comedy which ran a strong current through all the riotous life of the California gold camps has never been duplicated in any time or community since. Alaska of '98 was too grim a place for foolery. Moreover, even in its present outposts the world has become too sophisticated, too self-conscious to let the play impulse ride high : that play impulse which is deep down in the subconscious of every boy grown a man.

            But in the welter of the diggin's during the Fifties and Sixties, when the whole mass of gold seekers was strongly leavened by the native American character —and that largely of the frontier American from west of the Mississippi—a coltish humor seasoned life everywhere. Perhaps the modern psychologist would diagnose this universal attribute as an "escape" from the enormous preoccupation of chasing Fortune's marsh light. Men with no homes, no re-

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sponsibilities, men worn to the bone with the heavy labor of combing gravel for treasure simply had to blow off steam. When it wasn't done in drinking the explosion took the form of hazing or practical joking.

            From this simple psychological reaction was born the ancient and honorable Society of E Clampus Vitus, the like of which has never been matched since the first mystic Egyptian or Greek made himself a Noble Grand over a group of initiates.

E Clampus Vitus was the noblest wheeze ever launched under guise of a fraternal brotherhood.

            Sam Hartley of Sierra City, "a feller so wild you had to harness him with a pitchfork," is credited with the fatherhood of E Clampus Vitus in 1857. What Sam started there in that raw gold camp lived on for fifty years all up and down the mountain towns, perpetuating Sam's name in increasing bursts of the laughter of men. A half century of joy was Sam Hartley's bequest to the sturdy Argonauts, their sons and even their son's sons.

            Beginning as a specially built Whizzer of the first water to be perpetrated upon a single luckless individual in Sierra City, the joy of a night built upon its own success and became the Society of E Clampus Vitus. With mock solemnity Sam Hartley and his crowd granted dispensations for the organization of "lodges" in near-by camps. The joke spread through all the Northern Mines and even down to big towns

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in the Sacramento Valley which were tied to the diggin's by stage and freight lines.

            Membership in the "Clampers"—convenient foreshortening of the hog-Latin name----became a patent of nobility in the chivalry of the mines. Candidates for governor of the State counted it a political asset. Judges of the county court, district attorneys and—whisper!—even a few dominies went the hard way leading to the arcanum of mysteries.

            Consider the Downieville lodge as typical. Today old tads sunning themselves before the St. Charles House there may be beguiled into a recital, with many chuckles, of the goin's-on in which they had a merry part forty and fifty years ago.

            An abandoned Methodist chapel, which still stands, sway-backed, at the end of one of Downieville's two streets, was the lodge room of the Clampers. Its carefully guarded interior was rigged up with paraphernalia of genteel torture until it resembled a gymnasium or a crypt of the Inquisition block and tackle for hoisting, tank for dousing, spiked racks whereof the spikes were slivers of rubber. A hair-raising jungle for a neophyte to travel.

            Victims of E Clampus Vitus were the casual stranger, the newcomer to town—chiefly drummers. A new salesman would get off the stage and start making his order rounds. Somebody would pass him on the sidewalk with a swift and mysterious gesture of hailing which he did not understand. The first merchant upon whom he called would repeat

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the mystic high-sign; the puzzled drummer, failing to answer appropriately, would be snubbed by the merchant at once—no order. Same procedure at the next business house. Finally, in desperation, "Say, what's the matter with me, anyway?"

            "You're not a Clamper," the local man would vouchsafe grudgingly. Whereupon, if he was a wise drummer, the uninitiate would start prompt inquiry as to the possibility of his joining up. Against seeming reluctance he would win to a part promise that his name might be considered. A committee of inquiry then waited upon him and after sizing up his financial capacity, assessed him what they thought he could stand in the way of initiation fee. This amount, invariably due in advance, was liquidated in terms of refreshment—largely bottled—against the night of the shearing of the ewe lamb.

            The big night! On the steps of the abandoned Methodist chapel the most bellows-lunged Clamper appears with an eight foot tin horn—the "hewgag." On this he sounds three mighty blasts which can be heard away down the cation as far as Goodyear's Bar. This is the call to the massacre, to be heeded joyfully by every member of E Clampus Vitus.

            Later a blindfolded victim, stripped to a pair of trunks and with a heavy leather belt securely buckled about his middle, stands with his conductor before a guarded portal.

            Voice from Within: "Who comes here? Who comes here—and why not?"

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            Guiding Shepherd : "A shivering mortal, drenched in sin."

            Voice from Within: "Fling wide the pearly gates and let the double-ended deletion in."

            Once within the hall of horrors, the initiate is asked if he believes in the elevation of man. Prompted to a "yes," he is straightway elevated by pulley rope and hook attached to a ring in his belt—elevated to the rafters, whence he makes a fearsome drop into an ice tank. And so the poor wight passes from spasm to spasm of congealing terror. Woe betide him if he shows even the slightest hue of yellow.

            And all this to the measured intoning of a ritual which is a gem of ribald literature; it leaps from dizzy heights of mock sublimity into the most Rabelaisian vulgarities. A printed copy of this ritual came to my hands—an Old Timer with an electric torch found it for me in a barrel stored in a building deserted for thirty years—and, reading it, I cannot but speculate upon its anonymous author. Some scholar in red shirt and jack boots writing with his tongue in his cheek and a bottle of whisky right handy; some scholar, I say, gone addled.

            Too bad that this literary curiosity from the Days of Gold cannot be republished. But I fear it cannot be—not even in the Scandinavian.

            When California outgrew the knee pants of its riotous youth and came to the self-consciousness of chambers of commerce and culture clubs, E Clampus Vitus passed. Its last noteworthy activity

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was in the late Nineties when a noble Scottish lord, who had married the daughter of a San Francisco washerwoman and in other ways attracted considerable attention to himself, was made a Clamper. They gave him all three degrees in one flaming night. They nearly killed him.

            It is reported that after all was over his lordship was heard to murmur feebly, "Fawncy! To travel all ovah th' silly world and have to come to Marysville to be made a fool of !"