XXIX In the Trail of the Argonauts
The Creole City at that time swarmed with gold-seekers on their way to or returning from the newly-found Ophir of the Occident. Though the first headlong rush to California was over, it still drew its thousands every month, and Greeley’s famous advice to the young man was followed without having been asked. Lola became infected with the fever. There was much of the gambler in her nature, and her zest for adventure was keener than of old. At this time, too, a positive distaste for civilisation appears to have possessed her. It may have been the vision of a wild, unfettered life in a virgin land that dispelled the sickly hankerings for the cloister.
She sailed across the Gulf of Mexico to San Juan del Norte, or Greytown, as it is now called, the newly opened halfway-house to the gold-fields. Thence the route lay across the beautiful savannahs of Nicaragua to the Pacific shore. She passed the white-walled towns of Leon and Rivas, which Walker and his filibusters two years later harried with fire and sword. This was an alternative route to that across the isthmus of Panama, which she was fabled to have followed in a book by Russell, the war-correspondent, called the “Adventures of Mrs. Seacole.” Lola refers to this mendacious romance in her little autobiography, and quotes the following passage in order to characterise it at the finish as a base fabrication from beginning to end:—
“Occasionally some distinguished passengers passed on the upward and downward tides of ruffianism and rascality that swept periodically through Cruces. Came one day Lola Montez, in the full zenith of her evil fame, bound for California with a strange suite. A good-looking, bold woman, with fine, bad eyes and a determined bearing, dressed ostentatiously in perfect male attire, with shirt collar turned down over a velvet lapelled coat, richly worked shirt-front, black hat, French unmentionables, and natty polished boots with spurs. She carried in her hand a handsome riding-whip, which she could use as well in the streets of Cruces as in the towns of Europe; for an impertinent American, presuming, perhaps not unnaturally, upon her reputation, laid hold jestingly of the tails of her long coat, and, as a lesson, received a cut across his face that must have marked him for some days. I did not see the row which followed, and was glad when the wretched woman rode off on the following morning.”
The incident is a spicy little bit of fiction, such as is so easily invented by the fertile journalistic brain. The adjectives applied to Lola also illustrate, in a mildly diverting manner, the strictly orthodox notions of morality entertained by the newspaper press, and the pontifical confidence with which journalists pronounce on questions of conduct.25
On the long journey to the golden gate, Lola had as a fellow-passenger a young man named Patrick Purdy Hull, a native of Ohio, and editor of the San Francisco Whig. The acquaintance thus formed soon ripened into an attachment. Though, upon her arrival in California, the Countess immediately went on tour among the mining camps, her new victim did not lose sight of her. For the third time Lola went through the ceremony of wedlock. On 1st July 1853 she married Hull at the Church of the Mission Dolores, “in presence,” runs the report, “of a select party, among whom were Beverly C. Saunders, Esq., Judge Wills, James E. Wainwright, Esq., A. Bartol, Esq., Louis R. Lull, S. A. Brinsmade, and other prominent citizens”—all among the most remarkable men in that country, no doubt. “The bride and groom have since visited Sacramento, and are now in domestic retirement at San Francisco.”26
From the reports of remarkable men and prominent citizens shooting each other in the public streets, of bandits raiding the suburbs, of fires and floods, that accompany this announcement, we should imagine that domestic retirement in San Francisco was at that time subject to frequent and unpleasant interruption. On this account, perhaps, Mr. and Mrs. Hull spent much of their time hunting in the valley of the Sacramento. Lola was in search of new sensations, and for the moment the bear seemed a more attractive quarry than the man. But before long a German medical man, named Adler, himself a mighty hunter, came across her path. His prowess excited her admiration, and he at once fell a victim to the shafts from her quiver. Hull was discarded and the German reigned in his stead.
In these American amours we seem to detect the last flickerings of the flame of passion—the woman’s last strenuous efforts to find a real and lasting interest in life. But Lola had played too much with love. That mighty force which she had so often exploited and exerted to the furtherance of her ambitions was no longer at her command. Her capacity for love was exhausted; by passion she was no more to rule or to be ruled.
She had hardly time to tire of her German lover, who accidentally shot himself while following the chase—no bad death for a hunter. It might have been expected that Lola would now quit California and return to more congruous surroundings. But a distaste for men and cities, for the restraints of civilisation, had grown strong within her. Just then she was sick of love and sick of the world. At her best, a splendid animal, with fierce elemental passions, she turned almost instinctively, to draw fresh supplies of vitality from “the green, sweet-hearted earth.” She made herself a home in a cabin at Grass Valley, a lawless mining camp, among the foot-hills of the Sierra Nevada. All her life she had loved animals, and these she now made her special friends and companions, finding in their marvellous stores of affection and devotion ample compensation for the muddy evanescent emotion that men call love. She did not, of course, lead the life of a hermit. We catch glimpses of her in a despatch from Nevada City, dated 20th January 1854:—
“The merry ringing of sleigh bells has been heard for several days past in our city. Several sleighs have been fitted up, and the young gentlemen have treated the ladies to some dashing turn-outs. On Tuesday last, Lola Montez paid us a visit by this conveyance and a span of horses, decorated with impromptu cowbells. She flashed like a meteor through the snowflakes and wanton snowballs, and after a tour of the thoroughfares, disappeared in the direction of Grass Valley.”
There she continued to dwell during the rest of that year, her liking for the simple life unabated. A correspondent of the San Francisco Herald, who visited her on 13th December, describes her as—
“living a quiet, and apparently cosy life, surrounded by her pet birds, dogs, goats, sheep, hens, turkeys, pigs, and her pony. The latter seems to be a favourite with Lola, and is her companion in all her mountain rambles. Surely it is a strange metamorphosis to find the woman who has gained a world-renowned notoriety, and has played a part upon the stage of life with powerful potentates, and with whose name Europe and the world is familiar, finally settled down at home in the mountain wilds of California.”
A strange change, indeed, but no unpleasant life it could have been. What memories, what scenes, must have supplied food for the lonely woman’s musings, as she galloped over the hills, or, seated with her dogs, gazed into her great fire of resinous logs! In communion thus with our great mother, treading these virgin forests, and breathing an air hardly yet inhaled by man, she might have attained to a higher, truer plane of existence than that which she finally took to be firm ground. But luck was against her here, as always. A fire swept away the township of Grass Valley, and with it Lola’s little homestead—the only home that she had ever known. Her animals were dispersed, she was without funds. But she had renewed her stock of vitality at Nature’s fountains. She went on her travels again, reinvigorated: a coarser woman, no doubt, thanks to her contact with miners and hunters, but, perhaps, a better one. She still loved the new auriferous lands. In the track of the sun she would continue to journey, and in June sailed from California across the ocean to Australia.