A Drift from Redwood Camp

A Drift from Redwood Camp
by Bret Harte

They had all known him as a shiftless, worthless creature. From the
time he first entered Redwood Camp, carrying his entire effects in a red
handkerchief on the end of a long-handled shovel, until he lazily drifted
out of it on a plank in the terrible inundation of '56, they never expected
anything better of him. In a community of strong men with sullen
virtues and charmingly fascinating vices, he was tolerated as possessing
neither--not even rising by any dominant human weakness or ludicrous
quality to the importance of a butt. In the dramatis personae of
Redwood Camp he was a simple "super"--who had only passive,
speechless roles in those fierce dramas that were sometimes unrolled
beneath its green-curtained pines. Nameless and penniless, he was
overlooked by the census and ignored by the tax collector, while in a
hotly-contested election for sheriff, when even the head-boards of the
scant cemetery were consulted to fill the poll-lists, it was discovered
that neither candidate had thought fit to avail himself of his actual vote.
He was debarred the rude heraldry of a nickname of achievement, and
in a camp made up of "Euchre Bills," "Poker Dicks," "Profane Pete,"
and "Snap-shot Harry," was known vaguely as "him," "Skeesicks," or
"that coot." It was remembered long after, with a feeling of superstition,
that he had never even met with the dignity of an accident, nor received
the fleeting honor of a chance shot meant for somebody else in any of
the liberal and broadly comprehensive encounters which distinguished
the camp. And the inundation that finally carried him out of it was
partly anticipated by his passive incompetency, for while the others
escaped--or were drowned in escaping--he calmly floated off on his
plank without an opposing effort.
For all that, Elijah Martin--which was his real name--was far from
being unamiable or repellent. That he was cowardly, untruthful, selfish,

and lazy, was undoubtedly the fact; perhaps it was his peculiar
misfortune that, just then, courage, frankness, generosity, and activity
were the dominant factors in the life of Redwood Camp. His
submissive gentleness, his unquestioned modesty, his half refinement,
and his amiable exterior consequently availed him nothing against the
fact that he was missed during a raid of the Digger Indians, and lied to
account for it; or that he lost his right to a gold discovery by failing to
make it good against a bully, and selfishly kept this discovery from the
knowledge of the camp. Yet this weakness awakened no animosity in
his companions, and it is probable that the indifference of the camp to
his fate in this final catastrophe came purely from a simple
forgetfulness of one who at that supreme moment was weakly
incapable.
Such was the reputation and such the antecedents of the man who, on
the 15th of March, 1856, found himself adrift in a swollen tributary of
the Minyo. A spring freshet of unusual volume had flooded the
adjacent river until, bursting its bounds, it escaped through the narrow,
wedge-shaped valley that held Redwood Camp. For a day and night the
surcharged river poured half its waters through the straggling camp. At
the end of that time every vestige of the little settlement was swept
away; all that was left was scattered far and wide in the country, caught
in the hanging branches of water-side willows and alders, embayed in
sluggish pools, dragged over submerged meadows, and one
fragment--bearing up Elijah Martin--pursuing the devious courses of an
unknown tributary fifty miles away. Had he been a rash, impatient man,
he would have been speedily drowned in some earlier desperate attempt
to reach the shore; had he been an ordinary bold man, he would have
succeeded in transferring himself to the branches of some obstructing
tree; but he was neither, and he clung to his broken raft-like berth with
an endurance that was half the paralysis of terror and half the patience
of habitual misfortune. Eventually he was caught in a side current,
swept to the bank, and cast ashore on an unexplored wilderness.
His first consciousness was one of hunger that usurped any sentiment
of gratitude for his escape from drowning. As soon as his cramped
limbs permitted, he crawled out of the bushes in search of food. He did

not know where he was; there was no sign of habitation--or even
occupation--anywhere. He had been too terrified to notice the direction
in which he had drifted--even if he had possessed the ordinary
knowledge of a backwoodsman, which he did not. He was helpless. In
his bewildered state, seeing a squirrel cracking a nut on the branch of a
hollow tree near him, he made a half-frenzied dart at the frightened
animal, which ran away. But the same association of ideas in