men were fluttering their flags in his face and divert-
ing his fury, while the horseman got another lance
and returned to the charge.
Shortly afterwards the footmen laid aside their
flags and proceeded to what is considered a more
dangerous, and consequently more interesting, part of
the performances. They lighted cigars, and were
handed small pieces of wood, with a barbed point at
one end and a squib at the other. Having lighted
his squibs at his cigar, one of their number rushes up
in front of the bull, shouting and stamping before
him, as if challenging him to come on. The bull is
not slow of putting down his head and making at him,
when the man vaults nimbly over his horns, leaving
a squib fizzing and cracking on each side of his neck.
This makes the bull still more furious, but another
man is ready for him, who plays him the same trick,
and so they go on till his neck is covered with squibs.
One of them then takes a large rosette, furnished
in like manner with a sharp barbed point, and this,
as the bull butts at him, he sticks in his forehead
right between the eyes. Another man then engages
the bull, and, while eluding his horns, removes the
rosette from his forehead. This is considered a still
more difficult feat, and was greeted with immense
INCIDENTS IN THE FIGHT. 337
applause, the Mexican part of the audience screaming
with delight.
The performers were all uncommonly well made,
handsome men ; their tight dresses greatly assisted
their appearance, and they moved with so much grace,
and with such an expression on their countenance of
pleasure and confidence, even while making their
greatest efforts, that they might have been supposed
to be going through the figures of a ballet on the
stage, instead of risking death from the horns of a wild
bull at every step they executed. During the latter
part of the performance, being without their red flags,
they were of course in greater danger ; but it seemed
to make no difference to them ; they put a squib in
each side of the bull's neck, while evading his attack,
with as much apparent ease as they had dodged him
from behind their red flags. Sometimes, indeed,
when they were hard pressed, or when attacked by
the bull so close to the barrier that they had no room
to manoeuvre round him, they sprang over it in
among the spectators.
The next thing in the programme was riding the
bull, and this was the most amusing scene of all. One
of the horsemen lassoes him over the horns, and the
other, securing him in his lasso by the hind-leg, trips
him up, and throws him without the least difficulty.
By keeping the lassoes taut, he is quite helpless. He
is then girthed with a rope, and one of the performers,
holding on by this, gets astride of the prostrate
Y
338 RIDING THE BULL.
bull in such a way as to secure his seat, when the ani-
mal rises. The lassoes are then cast off, when the
bull immediately gets up, and, furious at finding a
man on his back, plunges and kicks most desperately,
jumping from side to side, and jerking himself vio-
lently in every way, as he vainly endeavours to bring
his horns round so as to reach his rider. I never
saw such horsemanship, if horsemanship it could be
called ; nor did I ever see a horse go through such
contortions, or make such spasmodic bounds and leaps :
but the fellow never lost his seat, he stuck to the bull
as firm as a rock, though thrown about so violently
that it seemed enough to jerk the head off his body.
During this singular exhibition the spectators cheered
and shouted most uproariously, and the bull was
maddened to greater fury than ever by the footmen
shaking their flags in his face, and putting more
squibs on his neck. It seemed to be the grand cli-
max ; they had exhausted all means to infuriate the
bull to the very utmost, and they were now braving
him more audaciously than ever. Had any of them
made a slip of the foot, or misjudged his distance but
a hairbreadth, there would have been a speedy end of
him; but fortunately no such mishap occurred, for
the blind rage of the bull was impotent against their
coolness and precision.
When the man riding the bull thought he had
enough of it, he took an opportunity when the bull
came near the outside of the arena, and hopped off
his back on to the top of the barrier. A door was
THE MATADOR. 339
then opened, and the bull was allowed to depart in
peace. Three or four more bulls in succession were
fought in the same manner. The last of them was to
have been killed with the sword ; but he proved one of
those sulky treacherous animals who do not fight fair ;
he would not put down his head and charge blindly
at anything or everything, but only made a rush now
and then, when he thought he had a sure chance.
With a bull of this sort there is great danger, while
with a furiously savage one there is none at all so say
the bull-fighters ; and after doing all they could, with-
out success, to madden and irritate this sulky animal,
he was removed, and another one was brought in,
who had already shown a requisite amount of blind
fury in his disposition.
A long straight sword was then handed to the
matadcn\ who, with his flag in his left hand, played
with the bull for a little, evading several attacks till
he got one to suit him, when, as he stepped aside
from before the bull's horns, he plunged the sword
into the back of his neck. Without a moan or a
struggle the bull fell dead on the instant, coming
down all of a heap, in such a way that it was evident
that even before he fell he was dead. I have seen
cattle butchered in every sort of way, but in none was
the transition from life to death so instantaneous.
This was the grand feat of the day, and was
thought to have been most beautifully performed.
The spectators testified their delight by the most
vociferous applause ; the Mexican women waved their
34-0 A CONJUROR.
handkerchiefs, the Mexicans cheered and shouted, and
threw their hats in the air, while the matador
walked proudly round the arena, bowing to the
people amid a shower of coin which his particular
admirers in their enthusiasm bestowed upon him.
I one day, at some diggings a few miles from
Sonora, came across a young fellow hard at work
with his pick and shovel, whom I had met several
times at Moquelumne Hill and other places. In the
course of conversation he told me that he was tired of
mining, and intended to practise his profession again ;
upon which I immediately set him down as either a
lawyer or a doctor, there are such lots of them in the
mines. I had the curiosity, however, to ask him
what profession he belonged to, " Oh," he said, " I
am a magician, a necromancer, a conjuror!" The
idea of a magician being reduced to the level of an
ordinary mortal, and being obliged to resort to such
a matter-of-fact way of making money as digging
gold out of the earth, instead of conjuring it ready
coined out of other men's pockets, appeared to me so
very ridiculous that I could not help laughing at
the thought of it. The magician was by no means
offended, but joined in the laugh ; and for the next
hour or more he entertained me with an account of
his professional experiences, and the many difficulties
he had to encounter in practising his profession in
such a place as the mines, where complete privacy
was so hard to be obtained that he was obliged to
practise the most secret parts of his mysterious science
NECROMANCY IN THE MINES. 341
in all sorts of ragged canvass houses, or else in rooms
whose rickety boarded walls were equally ineffectual in
excluding the prying gaze of the unwashed. He gave
me a great insight into the mysteries of magic, and
explained to me how he performed many of his tricks.
All the old-fashioned hat-tricks, he said, were quite out
of the question in California, where, as no two hats are
alike, it would have been impossible to have such an
immense assortment ready, from which to select a sub-
stitute for any nondescript head- piece which might be
given to him to perform upon. I asked him to show
me some of his sleight-of-hand tricks, but he said his
hands had got so hard with mining that he would
have to let them soften for a month or two before he
could recover his magical powers.
He was quite a young man, but had been regularly
brought up to his profession, having spent several
years as confederate to some magician of higher
powers in the States somewhat similar, I presume,
to serving an apprenticeship, for when I mentioned
the names of several of his professional brethren
whose performances I had witnessed, he would say,
" Ah, yes, I know him ; he was confederate to so-
and-so."
As he intended very soon to resume his practice, he
was on the look-out for a particularly smart boy to
initiate as his confederate ; and I imagine he had
little difficulty in finding one, for, as a general thing,
the rising generation of California are supernaturally
smart and precocious.
3i2 TABLE MOUNTAIN.
I met here also an old friend in the person of the
Scotch gardener who had been my fellow-passenger
from New York to Chagres, and who was also one
of our party on the Chagres River. He was now farm -
ing, having taken up a " ranch" a few miles from
Sonora, near a place called Table Mountain, where he
had several acres well fenced and cleared, and bearing
a good crop of barley and oats, and was busy clearing
and preparing more land for cultivation.
This Table Mountain is a very curious place, being
totally different in appearance and formation from
any other mountain in the country. It is a long
range, several miles in extent, perfectly level, and in
width varying from fifty yards to a quarter of a
mile, having somewhat the appearance, when seen
from a distance, of a colossal railway embankment.
In height it is below the average of the surround-
ing mountains ; the sides are very steep, sometimes
almost perpendicular, and are formed, as is also the
summit, of masses of a burned-looking conglomerate
rock, of which the component stones are occasionally
as large as a man's head. The summit is smooth,
and black with these cinder-like stones ; but at the
season of the year at which I was there, it was a most
beautiful sight, being thickly grown over with a pale-
blue flower, apparently a lupin, which so completely
covered this long level tract of ground as to give it
in the distance the appearance of a sheet of water.
No one at that time had thought of working this
SHAWS FLATS. 343
place, but it has since been discovered to be immensely
rich.
A break in this long narrow Table Mountain was
formed by a place called Shaw's Flats, a wide extent
of perfectly flat country, four or five miles across, well
wooded with oaks, and plentifully sprinkled over
with miners' tents and shanties.
The diggings were rich. The gold was very coarse,
and frequently found in large lumps ; but how it got
there was not easy to conjecture, for the flat was on
a level with Table Mountain, and hollows intervened
between it and any higher ground. Mining here
was quite a clean and easy operation. Any old
gentleman might have gone in and taken a turn at it
for an hour or two before dinner just to give him an
appetite, without even wetting the soles of his boots :
indeed, he might have fancied he was only digging in
his garden, for the gold was found in the very roots
of the grass, and in most parts there was only a depth
of three or four feet from the surface to the bed-
rock, which was of singular character, being com-
posed of masses of sandstone full of circular cavities,
and presenting all manner of fantastic forms, caused
apparently by the long-continued action of water
in rapid motion.
CHAPTER XXIV.
FIRE IN SONORA RAPID PROGRESS OF THE FIRE, AND TOTAL
DESTRUCTION OF THE TOWN THE BURNED -OUT INHABITANTS
DEATHS BY FIRE REBUILDING OF THE TOWN.
WHILE I was in Sonora, the entire town, with the
greater part of the property it contained, was utterly
annihilated by fire.
It was about one o'clock in the morning when the
fire broke out. I happened to be awake at the time,
and at the first alarm I jumped up, and, looking out
of my window, I saw a house a short distance up the
street on the other side completely enveloped in
flames. The street was lighted up as bright as day,
and was already alive with people hurriedly removing
whatever articles they could from their houses before
the fire seized upon them.
I ran down stairs to lend a hand to clear the house,
and in the bar-room I found the landlady, en deshabille,
walking frantically up and down, and putting her
hand to her head as though she meant to tear all her
hair out by the roots. She had sense enough left,
however, not to do so. A waiter was there also, with
just as little of his wits about him ; he was chatter-
FIRE. 35
irig fiercely, sacreing very freely, and knocking the
chairs and tables about in a wild manner, but not
making a direct attempt to save anything. It was
ridiculous to see them throwing away so much bodily
exertion for nothing, when there was so much to be
done, so I set the example by opening the door, and
carrying out whatever was nearest. The other in-
mates of the house soon made their appearance, and
we succeeded in gutting the bar-room of everything
movable, down to the bar furniture, among which
was a bottle labelled " Ouisqui."
We could save little else, however, for already the
fire had reached us. The house was above a hundred
yards from where the fire broke out, but from the
first alarm till it was in flames scarcely ten minutes
elapsed. The fire spread with equal rapidity in the
other direction. An attempt was made to save the
upper part of the town by tearing down a number of
houses some distance in advance of the flames ; but it
was impossible to remove the combustible materials
of which they were composed, and the fire suffered
no check in its progress, devouring the demolished
houses as voraciously in that state as though they
had been left entire.
On the hills, between which lay the town, were
crowds of the unfortunate inhabitants, many of whom
were but half dressed, and had barely escaped with
their lives. One man told me he had been obliged to
run for it, and had not even time to take his gold
watch from under his pillow.
346 THE WORK OF DESTRUCTION.
Those whose houses were so far distant from the
origin of the fire as to enable them to do so, had carried
out all their movable property, and were sitting
among heaps of goods and furniture, confusedly thrown
together, watching grimly the destruction of their
houses. The whole hill-side was lighted up as brightly
as a well-lighted room, and the surrounding land-
scape was distinctly seen by the blaze of the burning
town, the hills standing brightly out from the deep
black of the horizon, while overhead the glare of the
fire was reflected by the smoky atmosphere.
It was a most magnificent sight, and, more than
any fire I had ever witnessed, it impressed one with
the awful power and fury of the destroying element.
It was not like a fire in a city where man contends
with it for the victory, and where one can mark the
varied fortunes of the battle as the flames become
gradually more feeble under the efforts of the firemen,
or again gain the advantage as they reach some easier
prey ; but here there were no such fluctuations in the
prospects of the doomed city it lay helplessly wait-
ing its fate, for water there was none, and no resist-
ance could be offered to the raging flames, which
burned their way steadily up the street, throwing
over the houses which still remained intact the flush
of supernatural beauty which precedes dissolution,
and leaving the ground already passed over covered
with the gradually blackening and falling remains of
those whose spirit had already departed.
There was an occasional flash and loud explosion,
THE BURNED-OUT INHABITANTS. 347
caused by the quantities of powder in some of the
stores, and a continual discharge of firearms was
heard above the roaring of the flames, from the num-
bers of loaded revolvers which had been left to their
fate along with more valuable property. The most
extraordinary sight was when the fire got firm hold
of a Jew's slop-shop ; there was then a perfect whirl-
wind of flame, in which coats, shirts, and blankets
were carried up fifty or sixty feet in the air, and
became dissolved into a thousand sparkling atoms.
Among the crowds of people on the hill-side there
was little of the distress and excitement one might
have expected to see on such an occasion. The
houses and stores had been gutted as far as practi-
cable of the property they contained, and all that it
was possible to do to save any part of the town had
already been attempted, but the hopelessness of such
attempts was perfectly evident.
The greater part of the people, it is true, were indi-
viduals whose wealth was safe in their buckskin
purses, and to them the pleasure of beholding such a
grand pyrotechnic display was unalloyed by any
greater individual misfortune than the loss of a few
articles of clothing ; but even those who were sitting
hatless and shoeless among the wreck of their pro-
perty showed little sign of being at all cast down by
their disaster ; they had more the air of determined
men, waiting for the fire to play out its hand before
they again set to work to repair all the destruction it
had caused.
348 THE MORNING AFTER
The fire commenced about half-past one o'clock in
the morning, and by three o'clock it had almost
burned itself out. Darkness again prevailed, and
when day dawned, the whole city of Sonora had been
removed from the face of the earth. The ground on
which it had stood, now white with ashes, was
covered with still smouldering fragments, and the
only objects left standing were three large safes
belonging to different banking and express com-
panies, with a small remnant of the walls of an adobe
house.
People now began to venture down upon the still
smoking site of the city, and, seeing an excitement
among them at the lower end of the town, I went
down to see what was going on. The atmosphere
was smoky and stifling, and the ground was almost
too hot to stand on. The crowd was collected on a
place which was known to be very rich, as the ground
behind the houses had been worked, and a large
amount of gold having been there extracted, it was
consequently presumed that under the houses equally
good diggings would be found. During the fire, miners
had flocked in from all quarters, and among them
were some unprincipled vagabonds, who were now
endeavouring to take up mining claims on the ground
where the houses had stood, measuring off the regu-
lar number of feet allowed to each man, and driving
in stakes to mark out their claims in the usual
manner.
The owners of the houses, however, were "on hand,"
THE CONFLAGRATION. 349
prepared to defend their rights to the utmost. Men
who had just seen the greater part of their property
destroyed were not likely to relinquish very readily
what little still remained to them ; and now, armed
with pistols, guns, and knives, their eyes bloodshot and
their faces scorched and blackened, they were tearing
up the stakes as fast as the miners drove them in, while
they declared very emphatically, with all sorts of
oaths, that any man who dared to put a pick into that
ground would not live half a minute. And truly a
threat from such men was one not to be disregarded.
By the laws of the mines, the diggings under a
man's house are his property, and the law being on
their side, the people would have assisted them in
defending their rights ; and it would not have been
absolutely necessary for them to take the trouble of
shooting the miscreants, who, as other miners began
to assemble on the ground, attracted by the row,
found themselves so heartily denounced that they
thought it advisable to sneak off as fast as possible.
The only buildings left standing after the fire were
a Catholic and a Wesleyan church, which stood on
the hill a little off the street, and also a large build-
ing which had been erected for a ball-room, or some
other public purpose. The proprietor of the principal
gambling saloon, as soon as the fire broke out and he
saw that there was no hope for his house, imme-
diately made arrangements for occupying this room,
which, from its isolated position, seemed safe enough ;
and into this place he succeeded in moving the greater
350 REBUILDING OF THE TOWN.
part of his furniture, mirrors, chandeliers, and so on.
The large sign in front of the house was also removed
to the new quarters, and the morning after the fire
but an hour or two after the town had been burned
down the new saloon was in full operation. The
same gamblers were sitting at the same tables, deal-
ing monte and faro to crowds of betters ; the piano
and violin, which had been interrupted by the fire,
were now enlivening the people in their distress;
and the bar-keeper was as composedly as ever mixing
cocktails for the thirsty throats of the million.
No time was lost by the rest of the population.
The hot and smoky ground was alive with men clear-
ing away rubbish ; others were in the woods cutting
down trees and getting out posts and brushwood, or
procuring canvass and other supplies from the neigh-
bouring camps.
In the afternoon the Phoenix began to rise. Amid
the crowds of workers on the long blackened tract of
ground which had been the street, posts began here
and there to spring up ; presently cross pieces con-
nected them ; and before one could look round, the
framework was filled in with brushwood. As the
ground became sufficiently cool, people began to
move down their goods and furniture to where their
houses had been, where those who were not yet
erecting either a canvass or a brush house, built
themselves a sort of pen of boxes and casks of
merchandise.
The fire originated in a French hotel, and among
LOSS OF LIFE. 351
the ashes of this house were found the remains of a
human body. There was merely the head and trunk,
the limbs being entirely burned off. It looked like
a charred and blackened log of wood, but the contour
of the head and figure was preserved ; and it would
be hard to conceive anything more painfully expres-
sive of intense agony than the few lines which so
powerfully indicated what had been the contorted
position of the head, neck, and shoulders of the un-
fortunate man when he ceased to move. The coroner
held an inquest as soon as he could raise a jury
out of the crowd, and in the afternoon the body was
followed to the grave by several hundred Frenchmen.
This was the only death from the fire which was
discovered at the time, but among the ruins of an
adobe house, which for some reason was not rebuilt
for several weeks afterwards, the remains of another
body were found, and were never identified.
As for living on that day, one had to do the best
one could with raw materials. Every man had to
attend to his own commissariat ; and when it was
time to think about dinner, I went foraging with a
friend among the promiscuous heaps of merchandise,
and succeeded in getting some boxes of sardines and
a bottle of wine. We were also fortunate enough to
find some hard bread, so we did not fare very badly ;
and at night we lay down on the bare hill-side, and
shared that vast apartment with two or three thou-
sand fellow-lodgers. Happy was the man who had
saved his blankets, mine had gone as a small con-
352 EFFECT OF THE FIRE.
tribution to the general conflagration ; but though
the nights were agreeably cool, the want of a cover-
ing, even in the open air, was not a very great hard-
ship.
The next day the growth of the town was still
more rapid. All sorts of temporary contrivances
were erected by the storekeepers and hotel-keepers
on the sites of their former houses. Every man was
anxious to let the public see that he was " on hand,"
and carrying on business as before. Sign-painters
had been hard at work all night, and now huge signs
on yard- wide strips of cotton cloth lined each side of
the street, in many cases being merely laid upon the
ground, where as yet nothing had been erected
whereon to display them. These canvass and brush
houses were only temporary. Every one, as soon as
lumber could be procured, set to work to build a
better house than the one he had lost ; and within a
month Sonora was in all respects a finer town than
it had been before the fire.
CHAPTER XXV.
THE FOURTH OP JULY THE PROCESSION THE CELEBRATION THE
ORATION A BULL -FIGHT A LADY BULL-FIGHTER NATURAL