The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 | Page 2

everything accessible, worthy of consideration, in connection
with mining-camps, it is noteworthy that the Doctor has much to say
concerning the Shirley Letters. Thus (p. 344),--
Fortune has preserved to us from the pen of a very intelligent woman,
who writes under an assumed name, a marvelously skillful and
undoubtedly truthful history of a mining community during a brief
period, first of cheerful prosperity, and then of decay and disorder. The
wife of a physician, and herself a well-educated New England woman,
"Dame Shirley," as she chooses to call herself, was the right kind of
witness to describe for us the social life of a mining camp from actual
experience. This she did in the form of letters written on the spot to her
own sister, and collected for publication some two or three years later.
Once for all, allowing for the artistic defects inevitable in a
disconnected series of private letters, these "Shirley" letters form the
best account of an early mining camp that is known to me. For our real
insight into the mining life as it was, they are, of course, infinitely more
helpful to us than the perverse romanticism of a thousand such tales as
Mr. Bret Harte's, tales that, as the world knows, were not the result of
any personal experience of really primitive conditions.
And in a foot-note on page 345 the Doctor says, in part,--
She is quite unconscious of the far-reaching moral and social
significance of much that she describes. Many of the incidents
introduced are such as imagination could of itself never suggest, in
such an order and connection. There is no mark of any conscious
seeking for dramatic effect. The moods that the writer expresses
indicate no remote purpose, but are the simple embodiment of the
thoughts of a sensitive mind, interested deeply in the wealth of new
experiences. The letters are charmingly unsentimental; the style is
sometimes a little stiff and provincial, but is on the whole very
readable.
No typographical or other changes are made in printing these extracts

from Dr. Royce's history, and as typographical style is involved in
noticing further the Doctor's review of the Shirley Letters, it is proper
to say here that his volume was printed at the Riverside Press,
Cambridge, Massachusetts,--a press that, in the words of a writer on
matters of typographical style, "maintained the reputation of being one
of the three or four most painstaking establishments in the world." Such
places are few and far between, unlike the "book and job printing
establishments" that, like the poor, are always with us, and where no
book was ever printed.
After having so fittingly introduced Shirley to his readers, it is
unfortunate that the Doctor is not always accurate in his citation of the
facts as printed in the Letters. Thus on page 347 of his history, he says
that the wife of the landlord of the Empire Hotel at Rich Bar was
"yellow-complexioned and care-worn." She does not appear to have
been a care-worn person. Shirley says of her (post, p. 39),--
Mrs. B. is a gentle and amiable looking woman, about twenty-five
years of age. She is an example of the terrible wear and tear to the
complexion in crossing the plains, hers having become, through
exposure at that time, of a dark and permanent yellow, anything but
becoming. I will give you a key to her character, which will exhibit it
better than weeks of description. She took a nursing babe, eight months
old, from her bosom, and left it with two other children, almost infants,
to cross the plains in search of gold!
The Doctor says, "The woman cooked for all the boarders herself," and
in the preceding sentence states, "The baby, six months old, kicked and
cried in a champagne-basket cradle." Shirley does not use the word
"boarders." The baby was only two weeks old. With the details of the
birth of this baby omitted, Shirley's account of these matters is (p. 40,
post),--
When I arrived she was cooking supper for some half a dozen people,
while her really pretty boy, who lay kicking furiously in his
champagne-basket cradle, and screaming with a six-months-old-baby
power, had, that day, completed just two weeks of his earthly
pilgrimage.... He is an astonishingly large and strong child, holds his

head up like a six-monther, and has but one failing,--a too evident and
officious desire to inform everybody, far and near, at all hours of the
night and day, that his lungs are in a perfectly sound and healthy
condition.
Dr. Royce (p. 347) tells of the funeral of one of the four women
residing at Rich Bar at the time of Shirley's arrival, which was only a
few days prior to the death, and they had not met. The funeral service
was