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An Accident

As a way of mining those origins, I’ll start with how I first experienced “Clementine.” Perhaps it’s similar to your experience. I grew up with the song ever present but I can’t remember where, exactly, I first learned it. As a child, some words were imprinted clearly and permanently, others blurred. In my mind at the time, the lyrics went something like this:

In a cavern, in a canyon,
Excavating for a mine,
Dwelt a miner forty-niner,
And his daughter Clementine

Oh my darling, oh my darling,
Oh my darling Clementine,
You are lost and gone forever,
Dreadful sorry Clementine.

Something something like a fairy,
And her shoes were number nine,
Something something something something
Something something Clementine.

[Chorus]

Drove she ducklings to the water
Every morning just at nine,
Something something something something
Something she fell in the foamy something.

[Chorus]

Ruby lips above the water,
Blowing bubbles, soft and fine.
But, alas, I was no swimmer,
So I lost my Clementine.

[Chorus]

How I missed her, how I missed her,
How I missed my Clementine.
But I kissed her little sister and forgot my Clementine.

Even as such, the song is bad enough, especially if you have sisters like I did: one wrong step and you are dead and forgotten, even by your parents, who will simply transfer their love to the next living body in line. End of story. The song is a mean little introduction to the concept of death as inevitable, utter obsolescence.

The song is also mean little primer about being careful in the woods. Like many kids, I sang “Clementine” at summer camp, and when I crossed the creek between the bunk and craft houses, I watched my step with care and kept Clementine well in mind. It’s no surprise to me that the Boy Scouts of America incorporated the song into their repertoire and, by adding a verse, turned it into a humorously instructive reminder to “Be Prepared”:

All you Boy Scouts take a lesson
From this woeful tail of mine.
Artificial respiration,
Would’ve saved my Clementine!

Nor am I surprised that the Environmental Health Sciences Division of the National Institute of Health devotes a whole page to the song, complete with instructions (for kids an parents both) on how to avoid Clementine’s fate by learning to swim and perform CPR.

This speaks to the level of familiarity that American children and their parents have with the song. It’s also pretty funny.

A Deadly Crossing

Then again, it’s also deadly serious. A few decades ago, near where I grew up, a small boy fell into a rushing canyon creek while trying to cross it on a fallen log. As his family and other siblings looked on, his father jumped in after the boy and tried to grab him. But he could not make contact. The water carried the boy downstream about a half a mile, where campers finally found him in an eddy, his head lodged under a rock. The image of that father reaching out to his son in the swirling water, failing to grasp him, was devastating. I can not imagine experiencing it. Several years later, the same father was on the news again, this time surrounded by his other children and talking about the importance of moving on for their sake. This was also devastating. Clementine!, I thought to myself. I couldn’t help it. At the top of the canyon where I lived and in which this boy drowned is a ski lodge called The Goldminer’s Daughter.

Elderly Miner Named “Daddy” – Image by © Photo Collection Alexander Alland, Sr./CORBIS

“Clementine” is not just a song about a girl, but also, crucially, a song about her father. From his point of view, it tells a story about incomprehensible loss, and the equally incomprehensible but essential-to-survival process of moving on and away – farther and farther away – from that loss. This is a general human interest story – we’re all headed in the same direction, after all. We’re all going to lose our loved ones to the river (or they will lose us first). But with “Clementine,” this is also a specific story, one about how the American frontier was forged at such a deadly price for so many.

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