Worth going to if one has leave to live
in it according to his liking. It will be tawny gold underfoot,
walled up with jacinth and jasper, ribbed with chalcedony, and yet
no hymnbook heaven, but the free air and free spaces of Shoshone
Land.
JIMVILLE
A BRET HARTE TOWN
When Mr. Harte found himself with a fresh palette and his
particular local color fading from the West, he did what he
considered the only safe thing, and carried his young impression
away to be worked out untroubled by any newer fact. He should have
gone to Jimville. There he would have found cast up on the
ore-ribbed hills the bleached timbers of more tales, and better
ones.
You could not think of Jimville as anything more than a
survival, like the herb-eating, bony-cased old tortoise that pokes
cheerfully about those borders some thousands of years beyond his
proper epoch. Not that Jimville is old, but it has an atmosphere
favorable to the type of a half century back, if not
"forty-niners," of that breed. It is said of Jimville that getting
away from it is such a piece of work that it encourages permanence
in the population; the fact is that most have been drawn there by
some real likeness or liking. Not however that I would deny the
difficulty of getting into or out of that cove of reminder,
I who have made the journey so many times at great pains of a poor
body. Any way you go at it, Jimville is about three days from
anywhere in particular. North or south, after the railroad there
is a stage journey of such interminable monotony as induces
forgetfulness of all previous states of existence.
The road to Jimville is the happy hunting ground of old
stage-coaches bought up from superseded routes the West over,
rocking, lumbering, wide vehicles far gone in the odor of romance,
coaches that Vasquez has held up, from whose high seats express
messengers have shot or been shot as their luck held. This is to
comfort you when the driver stops to rummage for wire to mend a
failing bolt. There is enough of this sort of thing to quite
prepare you to believe what the driver insists, namely, that all
that country and Jimville are held together by wire.
First on the way to Jimville you cross a lonely open land,
with a hint in the sky of things going on under the horizon, a
palpitant, white, hot land where the wheels gird at the sand and
the midday heaven shuts it in breathlessly like a tent. So in
still weather; and when the wind blows there is occupation enough
for the passengers, shifting seats to hold down the windward side
of the wagging coach.
