He took three views that afternoon while the mules chewed grass and the skinners sat, unspeaking, on a log, passing a bottle of spirits back and forth. Later, they made up a fire and cooked the cornmeal and bacon mush favored by Johnny Rebs in the recent war, which had laid waste much of the old America. Raw emotions, undignified and unadorned by noble causes, had scorched this earth. Could I have articulated my thoughts, I’d have asked Jackson what he saw through his camera lens of the simmering passions of men, buried still in the ruins of Bear River City.
Instead, I asked, “What does Durant want with pictures of a wrecked town?”
“He doesn’t. I’m the one who wants them. Not everything’s for hire, Moran. Maybe what’s best in a man, he gives away.”
Jackson could be as mystifying as Ralph Waldo Emerson, and his riddles annoyed the hell out of someone like me, who thought things were already mysterious enough.
The next morning, we drove the mules eight miles up Bear River, following a trail along the ravine until it came down to a ramshackle mining camp. A yellow field of goldenrod lay, dazzling, on the narrow river’s opposite shore, as if to mock the lust for gold nuggets that had spurred two dozen or so men to rough it on the southwestern Wyoming plain. Standing in river water, they brought to mind Whitman, up to his knees in Sheepshead Bay. How many years ago was it? Nine. Nine years since I was a boy who had ventured no farther from his place in the world than Hell Gate or the Battery. In nine years, I’d gone south by steamboat, traipsed through Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, and ridden the rails from Washington City to Ogden, Utah. Now here I was, in a hardscrabble miners’ camp in what was called the Great American Desert (a desolation bearing no resemblance to the Sahara), without even the Union Pacific tracks to remind me of civilization.
I wondered what the sum of so variegated an experience might mean to what lay inside me, bullying like a sergeant major or coaxing like a woman used to getting her own way. Was there a germ, some indissoluble particle of being that could not be misled, tempted, or turned aside from the thing that made me different from a bug? I never thought much about the soul and, like most soldiers, considered virtue a seal put on young girls, destined to be broken by sweet talk or rough ardor. Virtue was a quality as useless in a man as tits on a hog. That’s not to say some of us didn’t believe in goodness. Only we called it “square dealing” or “being on the level.” When we said a man was “true,” we weren’t referring to an abhorrence of lies, but to an alignment with the common purpose or the common good (which is not the same as goodness, a quality possessed, or not, by an individual), as though a man — or a woman — were no more than a machine shaped and operating according to plan.
The hardest thing in the world to understand is one’s own self. I’m not sure I ever sounded to the bottom of mine. Even now, when I have time to consider what I’ve been and what I am, I doubt I comprehend my humanity, if I can claim so grand a word for my own morsel of life. I might as well be a meteor as a man, for all the difference I’ve made on earth.
Jackson walked down to the river and spoke to a group of men working a rocker box, a kind of sieve to separate gold dust and the occasional nugget from the “placer,” a shoal of black gravel runoff near the riverbank. Upstream, other knots of dirty, ragged men paid rapt attention to rocker boxes of their own—“cradles,” as they were commonly called, though I never heard a lullaby sung in their vicinity. Whether by pan, sluice, or cradle, placer mining is brutal on the hands and back. For every miner who leaves the goldfield rich, a hundred others give up and go home, with less to show for their toil than an asparagus cutter’s wages. Prospectors are a half-crazed, harum-scarum, mostly unhappy lot, who no longer dream of the things they meant to buy with their dust, but only of its extraction. These men were nothing like Bret Harte’s Stumpy or Kentuck; the Bear River digs, a far cry from Roaring Camp, where a rosewood cradle was hauled eighty miles by mule to comfort the foundling Tommy Luck.
Jackson returned, and we set up the tent and readied plates to reproduce, with a ray of light on glass, the gruff and crusty miners. We exposed three negatives the first day and five the next: of men at the cradles, sifting black gravel; eating game and turnip stew washed down with black coffee and rum; sitting in their tents, their tired faces reddened by the setting sun. Only four of the plates were “good enough for Durant”—meaning that the miners had sat still long enough to make their likenesses sharp, while their lifelike quality was drained by the rigor mortis of a lengthy exposure.
“These are for me,” said Jackson, pensively regarding four of the glass negatives, where the faces or some other aspect of the photograph lay in darkness or a hand was caught in motion — a blur of human anatomy caused by a restless subject. Jackson gazed at them as though they were gold and the others — for Durant’s lithographed prospectus — the worthless gravel dumped from a rocker box.
I confess I didn’t see the beauty of those spoiled views.
“Sometimes the truth is revealed when taken by surprise,” he said in that infuriating way of his.
“Your brother would have goddamned them as a waste of chemicals and glass.”
“Edward confuses art with perfection. Never despise the blemish, Moran,”
I was tired and had had enough lessons for one day. My outdoor technique was being refined under Jackson’s tutelage; I had skinned the time it took me to coat a glass with collodion and expose it before it began to dry. I’d begun to “read the light,” which is more changeable and elusive under the big sky than inside the studio. I was pleased with myself and in no mood to be nettled by Jackson’s metaphysics. I sometimes wonder if he missed his calling as a philosopher or a theologian — but damn if he didn’t make some of the most gorgeous images of any I would ever see! In my lifetime, I would learn to take respectable photographs. When I began sending them to Whitman, he wrote to say how fine they were and how what I’d learned to see of the West insinuated itself into his poems. That was praise enough.
Early next morning, I loaded a mule with my camera and darkroom tent and walked upriver about a mile from camp. There, I found George Osler, one of the Bear River miners, originally from Pennsylvania. He was dangling a length of cord from a cut branch into the dark water; on the end of it was a drowned worm threaded on a hook.
“Morning,” he said as I tied the mule to a cottonwood.
“Morning,” I said. “Fishing?”
“There’s an almighty catfish down there, but I’m too lazy to catch him.”
He nodded toward the river, whose bed lay below what the slant of early-morning light through the cottonwoods could illuminate. It occurred to me that a fish unseen on the bottom, dragged up into sunlight, was like a truth surprised into revelation; but the warm June morning was too fine to bother with extravagant notions. I gave myself up to the pleasure of watching an angler enjoying his idleness, without any real ambition to complicate it by extricating the hook from the mouth or throat of a catfish, whose fins can cut a finger to ribbons and inject a dose of venom as painful as a water moccasin bite. He was one of those people who enjoy their pastimes in the abstract. Something stirred in the roots of a willow dug into the muddy bank. I turned in time to see a muskrat jump and disappear beneath the water. When I looked back at Osler, he was raising a monstrous fish, apparently unconcerned by either my opinion of his zeal or the danger of catfish even at their last gasp.
“It’s a humdinger!” he said, admiring the fish juddering in the grass. “It’s almost worth the effort to have caught him.”
He put his boot on the creature’s flank and worked out the hook. Seeing the worm none the worse for its ordeal, I felt the poor fish had been cheated. By rights, it ought to have enjoyed the temptation that proved to be its undoing. I supposed there was a moral lesson to be learned from this small tragedy, a fable of some kind, but the sun made me too lazy to decipher it. Osler’s purpose was far from didactic, however. He brained the fish, slit it from gills to anus, pulled out its entrails, and rinsed it in the river.