Time of the Wolves

by Marcia Muller

  Finally the government agreed to peace talks with the Pomo leaders. They were three . . . my uncle, my cousin, and my brother. I remembered my uncle and cousin as violent men, my brother as easily led by them.

  The Army officers had heard of me, Emma Morrissey, who used to be Wonena. They knew I could speak both English and my own language, and that these leaders were my people. The officers conscripted me to accompany them to the talks.

  My husband was against my going. He feared my tribesmen would harm me, or the officers abandon me should trouble arise. But the officers were insistent, and I wanted to help bring about peace. As I said before, I had become more white than Indian.

  At dawn on the day of the talks my husband and I met the officers at a stage stop at the foot of the ridge. They also were three . . . General Shelby, Commander Bramwell, Indian Agent Avery. My husband cautioned them to protect me. He said he would wait at the stage stop for no more than four hours, and then follow us. General Shelby said we would return long before then.

  We set out for the meeting place, an ancient clearing in the forest that was sacred to the tribe. There, three boulders stood in a row, as if cast down by the heavens, as no rocks similar to them existed for miles. I rode astride my horse, trying to remember the faces of my brother, uncle, and cousin, but it had been too many years since I had parted from them. All I could see was stone. Three great stones, hiding three stone faces. And with that vision, the knowledge of what was to happen grew upon me.

  I reined in my horse, called for the others to halt. I told them that, if they went to the clearing, they would surely be killed. They scoffed at the notion, refused to believe me. The Pomos had given their word to the government, the general said. They would not dare break it. I pleaded with the men, told them of my vision. I wept. Nothing I could do or say would stay them. We rode on.

  When we arrived, the clearing was empty. The boulders stood before us . . . massive, gray, misshapen. All around us redwood trees towered, the sun shining through their misted branches. Nothing moved or breathed. The clearing no longer felt sacred, because death waited behind those boulders.

  General Shelby was angry. “These savages have no timepieces,” he complained. He dismounted, began pacing about.

  It was then I saw the barrel of the rifle move from behind the boulder nearest us. It was then I shouted.

  The shot boomed, and a bullet pierced General Shelby’s chest. Blood stained his uniform.

  As the general fell, Commander Bramwell wheeled his horse and galloped from the clearing. He was abandoning me, as my husband had feared the soldiers would.

  Indian Agent Avery was confused. A second bullet from behind a second boulder brought him down before he could take shelter or flee.

  From behind the third boulder my brother, Kientok, stepped. He aimed his rifle at me, but he did not fire. After a moment he lowered it and said in our language: “Another day, Wonena.” Then all three were gone into the forest.

  Weak and weeping, I made my way back to the stage stop where my husband waited. When I told him what had happened, his lips went white, but he said nothing, simply took the reins of my horse and led me home. By the next afternoon he had sold the saloon and loaded all our belongings into our wagon. We journeyed inland, and, when we moved into this house, I found that I could not leave it. If my whereabouts were discovered, soldiers would come for me. Surely Commander Bramwell would want to destroy an Indian woman who could brand him a coward. Men from my tribe might come to exact retribution. I believed that so long as I remained indoors with my loaded pistol at hand I would be safe. But I was not safe from the fear. It became my constant companion. It ate at our lives, as did my husband’s knowledge of what I would surely do after his passing.

  Shortly after my husband and I came to Santa Carla, my tribe was defeated. My uncle and cousin, upon the testimony of Commander Bramwell, were hanged for the murders of General Shelby and Indian Agent Avery. My brother and a number of other men escaped to the ridge, but most of the tribe was removed by the government to a reserve in Oregon. The oil companies drilled their wells on Cape Perdido. Like the wells at Petrolia in Humboldt County, they soon went dry. Oilville, the town that had grown around them, fell into ruins.

  Few of the Pomos returned to their lands after they were abandoned by the white man. The Oregon reserve had become home to them. My brother and his renegade band dwell on the cape, however, and now, my duty to my husband fulfilled, I must return to them and take up the threads of my life. My husband knew I would do so, and this is why he made no provision for my burial at Santa Carla.

  This, young man, is the story of Emma Morrissey. Now the story of Wonena will begin.

  After I left Emma Morrissey’s house that November night, I waited, cold and cramped, behind a manzanita bush in the vacant lot. I was aware that by now my parents had discovered my absence and would punish me upon my return, but it seemed small price to pay to view the conclusion of Mrs. Morrissey’s story.

  I was rewarded when, at half past midnight, a small, shadowy figure emerged from the house and moved down the porch steps. It wore a warm jacket and sturdy boots and carried a small pack that I knew to be filled with provisions for a long journey. Emma Morrissey did not look back at the place that had been her prison for the past twenty years, but merely slipped down the street and disappeared into the darkness as invisibly as her tribesmen had moved across Cape Perdido over two decades before.

  I remained where I was, shivering and wondering if Mrs. Morrissey believed the lies she had told me. Her self-imposed confinement to the house had not been out of fear, but in penance for betraying her own people. And she was not making her journey to Cape Perdido to take up the threads of her former life. Instead, this woman who had become more white than Indian would return to face the retribution that her brother, Kientok, had promised with his final words to her: “Another day, Wonena.”

  The boy to whom Emma Morrissey told her story is, of course, I, Phineas Garry, editor of this newspaper. You know me as a serious, middle-aged man of many words and opinions, most of which have inflamed the more conservative elements of our population. For nearly a decade, outraged readers have asked me why I espouse certain causes, particularly those I support of the rights of our natives.

  I have chosen the dawning of this new century to break my long-kept promise and tell the tale that has shaped my life, in order that Wonena should not have lived—and died—in vain.

  The Cyaniders

  Historians claim that we were the people who broke the wild spirit of the American gold mining frontier, and I suppose in a way it’s true. We came west armed not with picks and shovels but with university degrees in engineering; we rode into the moribund camps and towns not on mules or horses but in hired coaches. And we staged a quiet revolution that changed the mining world forever.

  I changed my particular part of that world—the Knob mineral district in Soledad County, California—more than most of my colleagues. I, you see, was the lone woman among the four men who came there.

  The Knob is exactly what its name implies: a bald, rounded outcropping rising above thick piney slopes, which in the 1860s was host to one of the richest veins of gold in the northwestern part of the state. But when I first came there, it stood as a monument to played-out mines, waste dumps, and near-deserted towns. Its desolation cast a pall over the verdant forest and canons that then, in autumn, were choked with golden-leafed aspen. Its shadow darkened the nearby town of Seven Wells, giving its few remaining citizens pause about spending another hard winter there.

  None of that mattered to me, not then. As I stood looking up at the Knob, far from the mountains of my native Colorado, I saw not the rotting timbers of the mine adits and sluices, but the richness of the autumn foliage and the festiveness of the red berries that hung in abundance on the thorny pyracantha shrubs. Where others saw ruin, I saw opportunity for rejuvenation. The tailings that spilled down the hillside to a nearby creek were a blight, of course, as was
the mill, which had not been stripped of its equipment, but soon the Knob would once more bustle with activity. I took great breaths of the crisp air and knew that I’d come to a special place that would own a part of me forever.

  It was the tailings and the remaining poor-quality veins of ore that had brought the five of us to Soledad County. Some dozen years before, in the late 1880s, three Scotsmen had developed a method by which cyanide was used to leech gold from such unlikely sources. In 1889 the Forrest-MacArthur process was first used on a production basis at the Crown Mine at Karangahake, New Zealand, and now, in 1900, various United States metallurgical teams had reported varying degrees of success with it. The proprietors of the firm for which I worked, Denver Precious Metals, were men who detested being bested by their competitors; they had quickly acquired title to most of the defunct mines in the Knob district and dispatched their cyaniders, as we came to be known, on an exploratory mission.

  I speak with authority about Matthew and Peter Lazarus, co-owners of Denver Precious Metals. They were, respectively, my father and my uncle. Both a love of mining and an unflinching desire to be the biggest and the best runs thickly in the veins of all our family members.

  The town of Seven Wells, so named for its abundant underground springs, lay in a narrow meadow between Soledad County’s thickly forested coastal ridgeline, where logging was king, and the rugged, sparsely inhabited foothills of the Eel River Forest. It once numbered nearly ten thousand in population, and housed two hotels, two general stores, various shops, twelve boarding houses, fifteen saloons, and seventeen brothels. Of these, only the general store, a few shops, and a hotel-and-saloon of dubious repute remained. Small homes fanned out from the town center, but most were abandoned and deteriorating; as we drove along the main street, I saw the same was the case with those buildings that lined it. A few old men sat on benches in front of the store, and three children played ball in the park-like grounds surrounding the stone-walled public well across from it, but foot traffic on the sidewalks was light.

  It had been decided that during our initial stay in Wells I was to board at the home of one Widow Collins; I was delivered there while my colleagues went on to settle into their quarters at the hotel. My father and mother had indulged me in many ways, but they stood firm on the issue of my residing in an establishment that was a former brothel, with four mining engineers who, in my father’s words, were no better than they should be. So up onto the front porch of the Widow Collins’s neat little house I went, carrying a full load of rather dire preconceptions. Fortunately they were all disproved by the pretty, plump woman who greeted me, with a small boy peering out from behind her blue skirts.

  Dora Collins was only a few years older than I, twenty-eight at most. Her brown eyes were warm and lively, her cheeks flushed with excitement at the prospect of a visitor. Her dark hair was in rebellion, exuberant curls escaping from the bun at the nape of her neck. She took my grip and ushered me inside her home, setting the bag down and clasping both my hands in hers.

  “Miss Lazarus,” she said, “you have no idea how honored I am to make your acquaintance.”

  “Please call me Elizabeth.”

  “If you’ll call me Dora. And this”—she nodded at the boy, who was now peering from around a doorjamb—“is Noah.”

  Noah’s response to the introduction was to scamper away.

  “He’s shy,” his mother said, “but in no time he’ll take to you. Now, let me show you to your room, and then we’ll have a cup of tea. I’m ever so anxious to hear about the business that brings you to Seven Wells.”

  It was the beginning of a firm friendship.

  Dora Collins, I learned in the course of our conversation over tea and scones, had been born and raised in the logging town of Talbot’s Mills, some thirty miles to the southwest. She had married her childhood sweetheart, a manager with Seven Wells Mining, and moved there with him in 1890. Three years later, when they were beginning to despair of having a child, the boy, Noah, was born. And the year after that William Collins was killed in a freak accident at the mine site.

  “Why did you stay on?” I asked her.

  “I thought I could do some good here. You see, the mine had been operating at minimal capacity ever since we arrived, the town shrinking year by year. But there were still children who needed educating, and before my marriage I had trained to be a schoolteacher. For the past five years I’ve been conducting classes in my parlor, but now I have only three pupils. Their families will soon be leaving, and so will Noah and I.”

  “To go where?”

  “Back to my family in Talbot’s Mills.” Her eyes clouded. “I don’t really wish to do that. We haven’t been on good terms since my marriage, but a woman in my position has no other choice. But enough about me. How did you come to be an engineer?”

  It was a question I was often asked, so I had a ready response. “My father claims mining is in the family blood. Since I am an only child, it was my duty to carry on the tradition. My mother is herself an educated woman, and felt her daughter should enjoy the same advantages. I attended Colorado School of Mines with their blessing, and, after thoroughly reviewing my academic record, my father hired me.”

  “You must have visited so many interesting places and seen so many wonderful things.”

  “Actually this is the first time I’ve set foot outside Colorado.”

  “And you’ve never . . . ?” She hesitated. “Forgive me if I ask too personal a question.”

  “Please, ask freely.” I knew what her question was.

  “You’ve never married?”

  “No. There was someone, and we had planned. . . . But he was killed in an accident similar to your husband’s.”

  Her eyes moistened with understanding, and she touched my arm. “I am so sorry.”

  “It’s a long time past,” I replied, although the day four years ago that my fiance had died still seemed like yesterday. “And I have my work, as you have your son.”

  The next morning I met with the others at the former assay office on Main Street that was to be our headquarters in town. As we unpacked the record-keeping supplies and laboratory equipment that would enable us to test the strengths of the sodium-cyanide solutions and later the quality of the gold it would precipitate, the men told me about their evening.

  “The saloonkeeper at the hotel says there’s a good bit of resentment over us coming to town,” Adams Horton said. Hort, as he was known, had worked for Denver Precious Metals from the beginning. The big, ruddy-faced, white-haired man was as much of an uncle to me as Peter Lazarus, and he had promised my parents to look out for me during our stay in California.

  “Because we’ve bought up title to most of the mines?” I asked.

  “And because we’re able to extract the gold with relative ease, while the few remaining miners must struggle for theirs. We are outsiders, and the townspeople are afraid we’ll leave the town poorer.”

  “Poorer!” Tod Schuyler snorted. “After the sum we parted with in that saloon last night?”

  Tod was in his thirties, married, but said to have an eye for the ladies. Indeed, he was handsome, but his overly friendly manner and lack of seriousness, to say nothing of his heavy indulgence in drink, did not endear him to me.

  John Estes, a childless widower with a thin, angular frame and sparse gray hair, spoke. “You know what Hort means, Tod. Seven Wells is a dying community. Everyone, from the shopkeepers to the miners with small claims, is bound to resent us.” John was a senior engineer at the company and knew the mining culture well. He was also a kind man who had helped me refine many of the techniques I had learned at the School of Mines.

  “What was the name of that Cornishman?” Uncle Hort, as I called him, asked.

  John Estes paused to think. “Trevelyan. Andrew Trevelyan. He and his brothers came over from Cornwall in ’Forty-Nine. Did well in the Mother Lode . . . the Cornish are talented miners. Then they came here, staked their claim, but it was a poor one, nothing like
the others near the Knob. Trevelyan is old now, and bitter. Angry, too. The saloonkeeper says he’s made threats.”

  “Against us?” I asked.

  “Among others.”

  “Are you worried about them?”

  “No.” He shook his head. “As I said, Trevelyan’s old, and an idle talker. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  I glanced at the fifth member of our team, Lionel Eliot. He was my age, and had joined the company only three months before. A bachelor, he had revealed little of himself on our journey to Seven Wells. Now his lightly freckled face—a suitable companion to his thick reddish hair—was thoughtful. His pale blue eyes met my gaze levelly, and, in the few seconds before he looked away, I saw they were deeply disturbed.

  “What do you know of a man called Andrew Trevelyan?” I asked Dora. It was late in the afternoon, and we were having tea.

  “Trevelyan? What makes you ask?”

  “My colleagues have heard that he’s made threats against us.”

  Dora compressed her lips, frowning. “I would have caution, then. He’s a brutish man.”

  “But old.”

  “And still dangerous. He beat his wife for years, until one of their grown sons took her off to live with his family in Sacramento. And there is a rumor that he killed his own brother in a dispute over their mining claim.”

  “Killed him? How?”

  “No one knows. The brother, Conrad, disappeared. No trace of him has ever been found. And a week later the other brother, Wesley, left town and never returned. They say Wesley witnessed the murder and was afraid for his own life.”