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A Tragedy of '49

By William Alfred Corey

HREE loves there are which, with varying intensity, are basic in the lives of men.

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This trinity of loves is the love of pioneering and adventure, the love of woman and the love of gold. Upon these three pegs or passions you can hang most of the facts of history since men began to leave records. Behind every page of the book, back of every date in the chronological tables, beneath every milestone, there was once a man who loved greatly in one or more of these three ways. Every normal man, at some period of his life, sees longingly the purple outline of some distant mountain, or some bewitching feminine face, or some dazzling vision of gold. And, according And, according as his love is wise or foolish, his life is blest or damned. But, wise or foolish, for better or for worse, his love guides his life and helps make history.

All three of these fundamental promptings are involved in the story of Martin Bader, a California pioneer of '49. This story, which John Straub, a Nevada mining man, now visiting in San Francisco, heard when a small boy in Ohio from the lips of Bader himself, is here briefly set forth.

First before the footlights, however, comes Captain John A. Sutter, a typical pioneer: a man born to break new ground, to blaze new paths. A native of Switzerland and a world wanderer, it became the ambition of Sutter's life to found a Swiss colony in North America. With this idea in view, he came to America in the thirties, crossed the continent, visited the Sandwich Islands, explored the Pacific Coast as far north as Alaska, and

finally attempted to land at Yerba Buena, now San Francisco, in 1839.

The Mexican authorities at Yerba Buena not permitting him to land, he sailed for Monterey to seek permission directly from Governor Alverado himself.

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Sutter visited the Mexican Governor and stated his business-that sought a location in California for a colony of his countrymen. Governor Alverado was not in the real estate business, nor was he advertising low colonist rates or otherwise seeking to encourage emigration. Still, he liked Sutter personally, and as his government was land-poor anyway, and a few square leagues more or less made little difference, the upshot was that the Swiss colonizer received a pass to travel over the country and the promise of a grant of twenty square leagues of any unoccupied land he might find that suited him on condition that his colonists should first swear allegiance to the Mexican government. It was probably very much a case of the large hospitality so characteristic of California in the days of the Spanish grandees. Alverado, seeing no possibility of serious results, simply said to the stranger, in effect: "Come in and make yourself at home. If you see anything you want, take it."

And Sutter, being no fool, took it. He explored to the east and north, finally selecting and receiving a grant for the large tract which has ever since borne his name.

But here is where chronology ends and the human element in the story begins. Sutter, having received his grant, at once set about bringing his

A TRAGEDY OF '49.

colonists to settle upon the land. He communicated with his old friends. and acquaintances in Canton Basil, Switzerland, painting in glowing colors the beauties and advantages of the new country and urging them to emigrate.

Among the people with whom Sutter communicated was a family named Bader. Martin Bader, a young man of twenty-two or three, was a son of this family. Young Martin was in love with a servant girl of the neighborhood named Sanftleben. The elder Baders, father and mother, proud and well-to-do people, were violently opposed to their son's union with Sophie Sanftleben as being beneath his station.

The son being persistent in his love, the parents seized upon the colonist scheme as an opportunity to get him away from the despised servant girl. So, shrewdly seeking to keep him unaware of their real object, they enthused over the colony proposition and urged Martin to join it.

But Martin saw through the old people's scheme, and foiled them with one of his own. He apparently fell in with his parents' wishes; married the servant girl on the quiet the night before his departure, and sailed away to the new land with the kiss of conjugal love upon his lips and with his father's money for passage and expenses in his pocket, intending to send for his wife as soon as possible and set up his household gods in the land of promise.

Martin Bader arrived in California in due time from the long trip around the Horn. He found employment, of course, at once. He helped to build Sutter's Fort, became interested in Captain Sutter's various agricultural and stock raising enterprises, and was working on the new mill on the American River when James A. Marshall picked up the famous gold nugget from the mill race on the morning of January 19, 1848.

Then followed the gold excitement, and young Bader dropped his carpenter tools, and, like everybody else, took up the pick and gold pan. And in

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a very few short weeks he had washed out gold enough to make it safe and possible to send for his wife.

This he did, and she arrived as soon as the trip could be made, and they began a happy period of house and home keeping in a little miner's cabin near the original gold strike.

Here, happy and contented, they lived about two years, when, without the slightest warning, the shadow of tragedy fell across the cabin threshold. A scoundrel giving his name as Chalmers had been taken into the home as a boarder and partner of Bader's in mining gold. For months the two men worked together, caching the results of each day's panning in the ground just outside the cabin door. There seemed to be perfect confidence and understanding between the two men.

But one day the shadow fell. Bader returned to his home one evening to find the cabin empty. His wife usually met him at the door with the babe in her arms. But the house was deserted and his wife gone. She could not have gone far, he reasoned, as the door was open and the household work unfinished. Thinking she might have gone to the spring a short way from the house, he walked toward it and found her dead body lying near the path with her baby, unharmed and asleep lying by its side. The woman's throat had been cut from ear to ear.

A posse of miners was organized that night to catch and hang Chalmers as murderer and thief. For it was later found that the cache of gold by the cabin door had been robbed, and the failure of Bader's partner to show up and account for himself branded him as the guilty party. The posse searched the region far and wide, but the criminal was never caught, and he went unpunished except as his conscience, if he had any, punished him. Why he killed the woman, whether he proposed an elopement and killed her on her refusal, or to cover his theft, was, naturally, never known.

His child, and the rough, but real sympathy of the mining community saved Martin Bader's reason. Finally

he mastered himself to a degree, and went dully back to his work in the gulches. He had the baby to provide for. Work is the anodyne of grief. The whip of necessity keeps many a heart from breaking. So with Martin Bader. Want drove him to work, and in work he found once more the cords which bind men and women to life, if not to hope.

But he remained in California only until he could accumulate a few thousand dollars-enough to get away on. Then he started for Switzerland and the old home. But he did not cross

the Atlantic. In Ohio he stopped to visit a settlement of Swiss friends among whom was a man named Detweiler, an uncle of the Nevada man above mentioned. To Detweiler he told his story, and Detweiler prevailed upon him to stay in Ohio. This he did, investing his small fund in farm land, and finally remarrying, raising a family, and dying in 1875. And among his descendants, who still live in Ohio, is the child, now an aged woman, whose mother was so cruelly_killed three score years ago in the California gold camp.

IN A CROWD

Oh, me! how wretched people look,
How very wretched! Never book
Contained so sorrowful a tale
As do these faces worn and pale,
Deep lined by those grim authors three:
Bereavement, Sickness, Poverty.

I pity them, I love them so

That I would share each several woe,

If haply I might ease the strain

On some tired struggler's back and brain,
Or bring an hour of calm relief

To some sad mourner faint with grief,
Stanching her tears' unceasing flow-
I pity them, I love them so!

But oh, thou prater, weak and poor,
Boasting such sympathy, be sure

That those whom God thy special charge

Hath made receive of love so large

And overflowing meed from thee

That cheered, sustained, and blest they be.

Let never cold or angry word

Be by thy mother's children heard,
Let no blood-brother e'er demand

In vain a kindness at thy hand,—

A patient house-mate, do not frown
The plaint of dog or kitten down-

Hast thou thus served thine own? Till then
Thou owest naught to alien men!

JULIA DITTO YOUNG.

Lured by a Phantom Sea

By John Harbottle

A

LONE horseman ambled out of the shimmering distance and up to the group of four who sat Turk-fashion about a lunch of cheese and crackers. He waved a hand stiffly toward the five hundred steers that browsed eagerly at the sparse vegetation around them.

"Howdy, boys." His was the affable greeting of the plains where introduction is not required. "Feeders for the Nebraska corn-belt?" he queried, without waiting for an answer to his salutation. "So? Then don't tackle the Cheyenne Trail. Swing back to the river route." There was a note of warning in his voice.

The two older men looked up inquiringly. "Why so?" demanded Marvin. "Anything wrong overland?"

"See my horse? Ga'nt as a locoed cayuse. I'm just over the trail from Sterling. Grass burnt to a frazzle, and the only open water holes are the springs at Avalo and the Belmont Ranch. Cedar, Springdale, Pawnee and Wild Horse are all drier than a Mexican's string of peppers. You can't get your herd through-don't try it."

As he rode away the two men and their sons looked at each other in consternation.

"Now, that is certainly provoking," exclaimed Mr. Marvin, greatly disturbed. "It's fully a hundred and fifty miles by the Platte-three days farther. It will take us, at the very least, ten days to make Sterling-and our cars will be there in a week."

"Well," replied Mr. Eaton, resignedly, after a short argument, "there's just one way out of it: take the other

route and pay demurrage on our twenty cars. We certainly dare not attempt the overland trail, in the face of what that rider told us; a hundred miles of desert, with water twice, isn't very good medicine for cattle on the way to market."

Reluctantly the four horsemen turned their herd toward the river. From Athol Hill to Sterling, the terminals of their drive, it was exactly one hundred and five miles by the old Cheyenne Trail. The other road took them fifty miles to the nearest point of contact with the river, which then swung out in a great circle of more than twice that distance to their destination.

If to Eaton and Marvin, brothers-inlaw, and owners of the Bar L ranch, the condition of the shorter route was a disappointment, it was a far greater one to their boys. In just two weeks from the morning they had started, Athol Hill began her county fairfour days of the wildest merry-making. Frontier Day, it had come to be called, for every hour from nine till night was filled with racing, riding, roping and a dozen thrilling novelties dear to every lad that loved his life in the open. Mark Eaton and Bob Marvin were both entered in a number of the boys' events. For days, weeks in fact, they had trained the speediest ponies in their fathers' herd, practiced with the rope till they could "down" and "tie" a three-year-old without a hitch, and had punished themselves on the back of every "outlaw" they could beg or borrow from their neighbors, until they were jubilantly confident that from some of the entries they could not fail

to win the prizes. Frontier Day was to them the one event of the year.

Had the original plans for the drive been followed they would have had five days in which to return from Sterling; but now, with the closest calculation, there would be but two-scarcely time to cover the shorter trail. Neither Bob nor Mark complained; they pushed steadily on, determined, however, to permit no needless delay.

Abundant forage along the river allowed them to make good time, so that noon of the tenth day saw the last straggler crowded into the yards of the railroad they had crossed country to reach. But to their dismay the train of twenty cars, after lying in the "hole" until the very morning of their arrival, had been picked up and carried on to another shipper a few miles below.

The men, satisfied with the successful drive, thought less of the delay than did the boys-they were not going back to Athol Hill at once; instead, they were to accompany the feeders and deliver them to the buyer. To Mark and Bob, however, when the first afternoon wore away without a car in sight, it was a matter of grave concern. The anxious hours of another day passed, still in fruitless waiting, and their impatience knew no bounds.

"Confound it!" shouted Mark, climbing down for the fiftieth time from his "lookout" on the corral, "there's the last freight to-day-and not a stock car in it! If we only didn't have to help load-"

"I see our finish-and the last of that prize saddle," growled Bob. "Just our luck, though; we'll pull into Athol in time to see the slow-mule raceand that's about all. We might as well forget the whole thing right now, and sit around with our hands in our pockets, good-naturedly."

"Oh, it isn't that bad, Bob; we've got a little show to make it," replied Mark, in a feeble attempt to be cheerful. "The cars will surely come in tonight. We can load up by noon and still have a day and a half to cover a hundred miles. The ponies are good

for it. What makes me out of sorts is that we'll have to go into things withmighty lucky we got Dave Harter to out a bit of practice for two weeks. It's keep the horses in trim."

night. A noisy, strenuous forenoon The special stock train came in that finished the loading of the nineteen cars needed. The boys waited to see the caboose hooked on, then waved a good-bye to their fathers and rushed back up town.

Ten minutes later the ponies-two were left at the livery stable to await along the dusty street, and soon took the return of the ranchmen-galloped up the Cheyenne trail. They left the valley, and in half a mile climbed a hundred feet to the brow of the plains which stretch away in vast undulating sweeps for scores, yes hundreds, of miles, for the streams that cut them expanse of shimmering prairie. seem but tiny rivulets in the mighty

footprints of dauntless pioneers, traThe old Cheyenne Trail-lasting versed by Fremont in his search for newer lands, the Mormons in their pilgrimage to the valley of New Jordan, the Forty-niners in their wild dash to deep-cut way from Omaha westward the Eldorado of the West-winds its along the Platte to Sterling, and from thence overland to Cheyenne. This last stretch of the fluted road winds, for the most part, over a desert. In dependable camping spots-Avalo the hundred miles there are but two Springs, thirty miles from Sterling, and the Belmont Ranch, forty miles. beyond.

"If the ponies keep up this pace," shouted Bob, "we'll pull into Athol before dark to-morrow night."

thoughtful

Mark, ordinarily more and less impetuous than his cousin, had not noticed that they were dashing along at too merry a speed. The bronchos were homeward bound, and two days of rest had put "ginger" into their blood till they were eager for a

race.

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