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

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 held at the log-cabin residence, which had "one large opening in the wall to admit light." The "large opening" was not, in the first intention, to admit light. Shirley says (post, p. 70),--
It has no window, all the light admitted entering through an aperture where there