By Shore and Sedge | Page 3

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BY SHORE AND SEDGE
by BRET HARTE

CONTENTS
BY SHORE AND SEDGE
AN APOSTLE OF THE TULES
SARAH WALKER
A SHIP OF '49

BY SHORE AND SEDGE

AN APOSTLE OF THE TULES
I
On October 10, 1856, about four hundred people were camped in
Tasajara Valley, California. It could not have been for the prospect,
since a more barren, dreary, monotonous, and uninviting landscape
never stretched before human eye; it could not have been for
convenience or contiguity, as the nearest settlement was thirty miles
away; it could not have been for health or salubrity, as the breath of the
ague-haunted tules in the outlying Stockton marshes swept through the
valley; it could not have been for space or comfort, for, encamped on
an unlimited plain, men and women were huddled together as closely
as in an urban tenement-house, without the freedom or decency of rural

isolation; it could not have been for pleasant companionship, as
dejection, mental anxiety, tears, and lamentation were the dominant
expression; it was not a hurried flight from present or impending
calamity, for the camp had been deliberately planned, and for a week
pioneer wagons had been slowly arriving; it was not an irrevocable
exodus, for some had already returned to their homes that others might
take their places. It was simply a religious revival of one or two
denominational sects, known as a "camp-meeting."
A large central tent served for the assembling of the principal
congregation; smaller tents served for prayer-meetings and class-
rooms, known to the few unbelievers as "side-shows"; while the actual
dwellings of the worshipers were rudely extemporized shanties of
boards and canvas, sometimes mere corrals or inclosures open to the
cloudless sky, or more often the unhitched covered wagon which had
brought them there. The singular resemblance to a circus, already
profanely suggested, was carried out by a straggling fringe of boys and
half-grown men on the outskirts of the encampment, acrimonious with
disappointed curiosity, lazy without the careless ease of vagrancy, and
vicious without the excitement of dissipation. For the coarse poverty
and brutal economy of the larger arrangements, the dreary panorama of
unlovely and unwholesome domestic details always before the eyes,
were hardly exciting to the senses. The circus might have been more
dangerous, but scarcely more brutalizing. The actors themselves, hard
and aggressive through practical struggles, often warped and twisted
with chronic forms of smaller diseases, or malformed and crippled
through carelessness and neglect, and restless and uneasy through some
vague mental distress and inquietude that they had added to their
burdens, were scarcely amusing performers. The rheumatic Parkinsons,
from Green Springs; the ophthalmic Filgees, from Alder Creek; the
ague-stricken Harneys, from Martinez Bend; and the feeble-limbed
Steptons, from Sugar Mill, might, in their combined families, have
suggested a hospital, rather than any other social assemblage. Even
their companionship, which had little of cheerful fellowship in it,
would have been grotesque but for the pathetic instinct of some mutual
vague appeal from the hardness of their lives and the helplessness of
their conditions that had brought them together. Nor was this appeal to
a Higher Power any the less pathetic that it bore no reference whatever

to their respective needs or deficiencies, but was always an invocation
for a light which, when they believed they had found it, to unregenerate
eyes scarcely seemed to illumine the rugged path in which their feet
were continually stumbling. One might have smiled at the idea of the
vendetta-following Ferguses praying for "justification by Faith," but the
actual spectacle of old Simon Fergus, whose shot-gun was still in his
wagon, offering up that appeal with streaming eyes and agonized
features was painful beyond a doubt. To seek and obtain an exaltation
of feeling vaguely known as "It," or less vaguely veiling a sacred name,
was the burden of the general appeal.
The large tent had been filled, and between the exhortations a certain
gloomy enthusiasm had been kept up by singing, which had the effect
of continuing in an easy, rhythmical, impersonal, and irresponsible way
the sympathies of the meeting. This was interrupted by a young man
who