PROFESSOR JOSHUA CLAYTON.

 

            THE schools do not perfect all the great men, or open for them avenues to travel up the trails which lead to success. They do not supply half the school masters of this world, for now and then there conies one who can teach the masters.

            The heroes do not all appear on the battle line, or on the decks of fighting ships, for the bravest of the brave are those who fight their way through the dark ambuscades of ignorance and poverty and superstition up into the celestial light.

            Joshua Clayton was one of these. Born somewhere in the wild mountainous regions of Georgia, in the heroic squalor which abounded there some four score years ago, where poverty was accepted as a matter of course, but where a fierce manhood would brook no criticisms, nor acknowledge that there was anything to be apologized for ; in those primitive surroundings Joshua Clayton was born and grew to manhood.

            All his life, to his credit, he was proud of the manhood and exalted womanhood of that region, his belief being that it was from such stock that primitive man emerged and from which, when the right germs began to expand, civilization and enlightenment were finally evolved.

            Somehow he learned to read and write, and to obtain the simplest rudiments of an education. We suspect that he owed more to a glorified mother than to all the schools we mean schools taught by men and women.

            But of the other school, that of nature, he was a pupil all his days ; from rocks and trees and stars all his life he drew knowledge which through the chemistry of genius he trans- muted into wisdom.

            He would have been a boon companion of John Muir. Together they would have searched the record of the glacier and discovered the vital energies that set it in flow ; where the earthquake had been upon its march, like camp followers, they

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would have unearthed from the debris it left why it was wakened to life and the object of its campaign.

            He was an omnivorous reader ; a lifelong student, who, after a hard day's toil loved nothing so much, to rest himself, as to spend half the night in working out some scientific problem. He went over the problems that other scientists had solved and tried them to see if they would stand the test of later knowledge, and many a time he pointed out their errors.

            He was one who, had no elements of science ever been reduced to rule and form, would have promulgated the rules and established the forms. Often he would modestly demonstrate by exact figures or illustrations where this or that great man had erred, both in theory and in elucidation, at the same time explaining how natural was the mistake with such lights as the learned men had before them at the time they lived.

            He came with the Argonauts to the west coast, and his years in California were devoted to study, and to obtain means to live upon he worked in the placers and in the quartz mills. He was an expert worker of gold ores.

            Give him a shell and he would at a glance tell you to what age it belonged and how long its former inmate was engaged in building the house in which he lived before

" * * * he was free,

Leaving his outgrown shell by life's unresting sea."

            To his opinions on all these questions, Clarence King, Raymond -- the whole array of scientists, conceded his superiority.

            He loved to sit by the hour where the earthquake had rent the earth's crust, and explain why it was attended by certain profound phenomena.

            He loved to explain why the glacier was but a sublime preliminary in preparing the earth for races of intelligent beings, which at the time and for millions of years thereafter had no existence save in the mind of God.

            Could such a man have strolled quietly into Athens and found Socrates teaching the youth of the city, he would have sat down beside the great scientist and explained that from the

238 AS I REMEMBER THEM.

croppings and other surface indications the old sage was mistaken.

            He was always humble, cheerful, kindly and passionately fond of real friends, but he really needed no society except his hand hammer, his magnifying glass and a mountain crest covered with shells and rocks.

            With these he could summon all the ages around him, all the master spirits of the past, and be at home with them. He became a great geologist; he read surface indications as an open book. In this he never made but one mistake.

            He was prone to tell from surface indications what would surely be found in the deep, and this propensity he could never outgrow. He knew the rock formations were full of faults : that the chimneys in the fissures up which the treasures were drawn were often closed, but he seemed to have a passion for what would surely be found below, and thus made mistakes. He said from the first, as did Professor Frank Stewart, that the natural pitch of the Comstock was to the east, and gave his reasons for his belief in the face of Professor Silliman's judgment, and was right. He was the first, we believe, to call attention to the mighty future which Ely district would have, and in his wanderings he took in every known mining camp of Nevada and passed upon its worth.

            Then he explored Utah and later Montana, and in almost every case his translations of the hieroglyphics which the ages had inscribed upon the rocks, were right.

            When the day's work was completed it was a fascination to listen to him as he recalled his life since reaching California. Before anyone else had done it, he had counted the little records made by the years on the stump of a mighty Sequoia in Calaveras county, California, to make sure of the age of the big tree. He told me that it was 978 years old when King John signed the Magna Charta and 1255 years old when Columbus first sailed for the New World. He sketched for me the work of the glaciers in grinding down the shales and freeing the gold found in California placers. It was a great shock to him when silver was demonetized. 'What are they thinking of?" he said. Then he explained that from the first the increase

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and decrease of the production of the precious metals had marked the ebb and flow of civilization ; that from the first gold had been the money of kings and the rich of the world, that silver had been the anchor of the poor ; that when in Jerusalem "silver was no more accounted,'" the masses of the people were so steeped in poverty and in such despair that so soon as Solomon died, they revolted under unbearable burdens ; that the infusion of silver into Europe from Mexico and Peru at last gave the poor the courage to cry out for freedom and the French revolution was the final explosion. Then he predicted that with gold the only standard in the United States, it would speedily be absorbed by the rich and panics and depression would follow.

            He was an intense American. When in a frenzy his native state framed a secession ordinance, he read the account, growing very white and still, then dropped the paper, sat for a long time in silence, and those near him heard him, speaking low to himself, murmur : ''Father, forgive them for they know not what they do."

            A rare, high, brave, humble soul ; for forty years he made but a doubtful living in the states of California, Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Montana and Oregon, and was finally fatally injured in a stage coach accident. Not one in a hundred of those who knew him half appreciated his marvelous intellect or the grandeur and nobility of his soul.

            They made his grave in the beautiful cemetery that over- looks the city of Portland, Oregon. It is such a place as he would have chosen for a resting place, for there nature is lavish in her splendors, and a hush like the calm of his own soul broods over the place even as when a mother bird gathers under her wings her brood that they undisturbed may sleep.

            Below, the clear Willamette winds through its lovely valley ; in the distance "rolls the Oregon," and Hood, and Jefferson, and Adams and St. Helens and the other sentinel mountains keep perpetual guard around his grave. After his high and blameless life, it is sweet to think of him wrapped in the hush of eternity amid just such scenes as were his rest and delight in life.