California Gold

by John Jakes

  The jockey circled back and dismounted, and then Mack led the stallion off through the maze of paddocks to the long stable buildings that housed nearly 100 stallions, some 250 brood mares, and an equal number of fillies and colts. Governor Stanford abhorred gambling, but he was dedicated to improving the world’s racing stock.

  Vasco walked along, companionably silent for a while. Then he said, “I notice you’ve gotten good and brown, lad. In a matter of—what is it? Four weeks?”

  Mack nodded. “Now if I can just learn to stay up on a horse—”

  “You handle them well,” the trainer said. “They like you. The riding will come. I watched you in the saddle yesterday— you’re learning just fine.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Vasco,” Mack said, glad to be alive on this bright fall afternoon in California. Glad of it even if he was, according to his newspaper friends, on the payroll of a vain parasite, whom he had so far seen only from a distance.

  The Palo Alto ranch sprawled over 7,200 acres and employed 150 men, 50 of those Chinese. Except for the senior trainers, they rotated their duties. Some days Mack watered or raked one of the tracks. Other days he cultivated part of the 60 acres devoted to growing carrots for the colts, or planted native redwoods or Japanese cedars in a 300-acre arboretum planned to contain twelve thousand trees. Still other days he did chores around the great oak-shaded manor house that had belonged to a family named Gordon before Stanford bought it. But every day, without exception, he was responsible for exercising several of the ninety colts selected by the governor as especially promising future racers. Each horse worked out for twenty minutes.

  One morning he tramped up to the turreted sand-colored house carrying a flat of delicate lady ferns in rich topsoil. He knocked at the shady kitchen door.

  “Come in, please.”

  He’d expected the voice of the chief cook, an enormous Mexican woman, not that of Mrs. Stanford. She was spreading some kind of architect’s rendering on a work table. In a drab old gingham dress, she hardly resembled one of the richest women in America.

  “Why, it’s the young man from the street department—Mack. I saw you the other day. Good morning.”

  “Morning, ma’am. Your gardener sent me up with these.”

  “Right there.” She pointed to a zinc counter next to a sunlit lace curtain blowing in the breeze. Mack put the flat down and glanced at the rendering, a watercolor of some attractive tan buildings with red tile roofs, reminiscent of a Spanish mission. Jane Stanford penciled a note on the corner.

  “This is the university. The one that we’re going to build right out there as a memorial to our son.” The blowing curtain shifted patterns of light and shade over her lined face. Her eyes, notoriously weak, were redder than usual. “You have undoubtedly heard about our son—?”

  “I have, ma’am. Carried off by the typhoid in Italy when he was not yet sixteen. A terrible shame.”

  “Leland junior was our only child. The governor and I were married years before I was able to bring him into this world. We’ve named the school for him. We’ll make it the finest university in the nation. But we’ve faced a storm of criticism. The radical newspapers scoff at a new school because the university at Berkeley can’t enroll even three hundred students. Mr. Huntington, who is not a kind man, calls this ‘Stanford’s Circus.’ ” Her quiet pain touched Mack unexpectedly. “But the governor and I are undeterred. He said it best. Through Leland Stanford Junior University, we will make all of California’s children our children. Recompense for the dear boy who…who…please excuse me.”

  With her hand at her eyes, she hurried from the kitchen.

  “They loved that boy, all right,” Vasco said when Mack raised the subject at supper. “They waited so long for a youngster that when he was born, the governor threw this huge dinner party for his friends, and when they sat down, in came two servants with this great big silver platter and dome. Off came the dome, and do you know what was under it? Leland junior, swaddled and powdered and lying there pink on a bed of flowers and ferns. The governor sat proud as you please while they passed the platter around the table for each guest to admire. After they carried the baby out, everyone ate and drank and celebrated. The governor broke down and cried, he was so happy. I wasn’t there but cook swears it’s true.”

  The story unsettled Mack’s opinion of the governor; he hadn’t imagined that a vain parasite could cry.

  Mack finally met the governor in November, when Vasco invited him along to present performance reports on several of the ranch’s most promising racers.

  While they waited in the library for the governor to arrive, Vasco showed Mack a large book entitled The Horse in Motion. It contained a great number of photographic plates—more or less identical, it seemed to Mack.

  The door clicked, and Vasco snatched his cap off. There stood the tycoon himself, all 270 ponderous pounds—Amasa Leland Stanford, the governor who had held California in the Union during the Civil War. He moved slowly, and he spoke slowly, dropping enormous pauses like lead weights into the sea of every sentence.

  “Does…that…volume…interest…you…young…man?”

  “Sir, this is Mack, a new groom,” the Basque began.

  “I…recognize…him.” Mack silently winced at the labored speech, and began to edit out the pauses in his head.

  The man who had turned earth with a silver spade to start construction of the CP and hammered in the last golden spike at Promontory Point to join the oceans, was a massive, elephantine figure, over sixty, with a high, duck crest of hair and a conventionally large, square-trimmed beard. “I financed publication of Dr. Stillman’s text and Edward Muybridge’s photos,” Stanford said. “I commissioned them, to win one of the few wagers I ever made.”

  “That all four hooves of a trotting horse leave the ground at once,” Vasco explained.

  “Which they do,” the governor said. “Mr. Muybridge, an excellent British photographer now settled in the City, set up a battery of cameras along the track here in 1872. He devised a means to trip the shutters in sequence, and his initial series of studies proved my contention. He has made many such studies since, each more fascinating than the last.”

  Mack was the opposite of fascinated at the moment. Each of the governor’s deliberated sentences lasted an eternity; the Basque’s flickering eyes warned Mack not to smile. The governor himself frowned like an intense troubled child, saying, “Let me show you a curiosity. One which has excited the interest of no less a personage than Mr. Edison.”

  He picked up a stack of equestrian photos similar to those in the book but toned sepia and mounted on thin card stock. “Now—watch.” He grasped the stack at the bottom and flipped the pictures at the top. The horse, caught in a slightly different position in each photo, seemed to be running. The effect was crude, jerky, patently artificial, yet the illusion of motion put a sudden smile on Mack’s face.

  “That’s remarkable, sir.”

  “Yes.” Even one word took forever to enunciate.

  “There ought to be some way to make money from that—”

  “Pictures that appear to move?”

  Mack nodded. The Basque’s lips pressed together, stifling his scorn of such lunacy. Stanford closed the book and regarded Mack with a heavy, unblinking gaze. Irony crept into his voice. “Well, young man, perhaps you are just the one to do it…although…experience…teaches…that…many have dreams, but…few have the stamina…to realize them.”

  Suddenly he thrust the pictures at Mack and flipped them again, like a child showing a prized toy. Mack never forgot the images: Stanford; and the horse that magically began to run.

  Winter came to the meadows of Palo Alto. A miraculous winter, in which sunshine was frequent and temperatures mild. Only occasional rains interfered with work or travel. There was never a snowfall. Mack reveled in it, and grew fit and hard, thanks to the outdoor life. He slept well, in a cozy barracks bunk, despite coyotes that often howled all night. He ate with other grooms at a table wh
ere there was always plenty. During a single supper he’d consume a beefsteak and a chop, fresh yeast bread and hot biscuits, six or eight vegetables, three kinds of fruit pie. For a real treat, he would peel and eat a California delicacy never sampled before, a fat, dripping navel orange from the groves in the cow counties, way down south of the Tehachapi Mountains.

  Mr. Hearst’s Examiner was forbidden on the ranch, but Nellie sent him a letter saying her Receiving Hospital exposé was an enormous success. The entire ward staff and three supervising doctors had been fired.

  Stanford appeared around the ranch from time to time, shuffling slowly, exhaling in a wheeze between each agonizingly considered word. His presence always called up memories of the bitter priest and the bloody remains of the track worker. But while Mack knew Stanford was probably the bandit the Examiner claimed him to be, he felt a certain sorrow for the man. Rich as he was, the governor seemed earnestly unhappy. Mack found his muddled feelings confusing and troubling; he wished it was more clear-cut.

  The Basque foreman liked Mack’s work, his intelligence and energy. So when Mack requested a few hours to himself every Saturday, Vasco, no questions asked, gave him Sunday-afternoon duties to make up the time.

  On those winter Saturdays, Mack traveled by train from Menlo Park to Oakland, then took the ferry to the City and rang the bell at the Olympic Club on Post Street. The first time he showed up, Jim Corbett smiled and said he’d all but given up on his new sparring partner. But over the next several Saturdays, in the club’s boxing arena, a large hall with bleachers steeply tiered on all four sides, Corbett began to teach him the fundamentals of punching, feinting, and scientific footwork.

  On the way home Mack usually looked up Bao Kee and talked for an hour or so. Twice, when the physical need grew intolerable, he visited one of the numerous cribs in Oakland. One time he slept with a cheerful Chinese girl, embarrassingly young, but lusty; the other time, the girl spoke only French, and only what was necessary to make him understand he must pay first and get out fast.

  So the winter passed, and he learned, and saved some money, and grew tan and hardy. All that marred his life was impatience; many a night he lay awake in his bunk scorning himself for not moving fast enough toward his dream.

  He didn’t see Nellie until one fine afternoon in the spring of 1888. He had thought about her a good deal, and, guiltily, about Hellman’s daughter too; steamy thoughts of Carla were most common at night. On two different Saturdays in San Francisco, he’d called at the Examiner but found Nellie gone on some assignment. The second time, he left a note with a harried and surly reporter. Since he received no reply, he assumed the note had been thrown away or lost in the madhouse of the editorial rooms.

  He was exercising a two-year-old stallion named Conquistador by galloping along the edge of an alfalfa field toward Governors Road, the tree-flanked entrance to the ranch. His hair, longer now, stood out like a mane behind him. Suddenly, where the lane of great eucalyptus and walnut trees met the main road, he saw a woman in a buggy. She stood and waved her bonnet.

  “Nellie!” He reined Conquistador and trotted straight over. “You’d better beware. Around here, they shoot people from San Francisco papers.”

  She laughed. “I’m sure of it. I’ll take care to stay out of their way. My, you’re so brown. The work must agree with you.”

  “It does.” He was thrilled to see her and could hardly keep his thoughts or emotions in order.

  “Do you think you could get some time off?” she went on. “A week? Ten days, even? Mr. Hearst gave me a vacation. I’d like to show you some of the real California.”

  “Well, I can try. The foreman likes me. He wouldn’t pay for the time—”

  “Is that a problem?”

  “No, no. I’ve been putting money in Wells, Fargo regularly. I’ll ask.”

  “We’d leave Monday. You should bring some warm clothing. I’ll arrange for the tent and supplies in Stockton.”

  “Stockton? Where’re we going?”

  “Into the Sierras.”

  His mouth grew dry at the thought of traveling with her. Half facetiously, he said, “Will you supply us a chaperon too?”

  “Don’t get any ideas, Mr. Chance. A woman in my profession doesn’t have much of a reputation to guard, but there will be no threat to what’s left. Our trip is for sightseeing only.”

  Their eyes met and then they looked away almost simultaneously. Had he seen disappointment in her face too? He couldn’t be sure.

  12

  THE SAN JOAQUIN SHIMMERED, bright as a sheet of sunlit metal. Mack and Nellie leaned on the steamer’s bow rail, the shoulders of their coarse flannel shirts touching.

  “I’m Russian,” she said. If there’d been no rail, he’d have fallen into the broad, slow river. “My real name is Natalia Rotchev.”

  Hands clasped, brown eyes on the horizon, she told him about herself. She was a native Californian, and a distant relative of the last leader of the Russian colony. Mack had never heard of Russians in California.

  “They had a substantial fort and settlement on the coast north of the City. The experiment failed and they withdrew in 1842, but my father’s father stayed. He changed his name to Ross as homage to his ancestry and the settlement, Fort Ross. It was named that after the mother country, Rossiya.”

  Her father, a competent farmer, had drifted down to the Valley, where she was born. “It was an ideal life in many ways, but Papa was far from an ideal parent. He was extremely old-fashioned. He treated my mother almost like a servant.” Nellie swept blowing hair from her eyes and looked at Mack. “Very early, I saw what a terrible life she led. I decided I’d never be trapped that way—dominated by a man.”

  Near a settlement that became Hanford, Tulare County—“The town was named for a treasurer of the Central Pacific, Mr. Hanford; that’s irony for you”—the Ross family settled on land owned by the railroad. “The railroad invited settlement. Their agents promised that eventually farmers like my father could buy his land for two dollars and fifty cents an acre. Years of work, and a lot of improvements like irrigation ditches helped turn what people once called Starvation Valley into profitable farmland. When the railroad realized how the farmers had improved things, they reneged on their promise. They put our land up for sale at seventeen to forty dollars an acre. On the open market.”

  Hurtful memory hushed her voice. He could barely hear her above the splash of the bow wake.

  “Papa couldn’t afford that. He had everything tied up in stock, seed, equipment. And he felt cheated. He and other farmers organized a protest group called the Settlers League. One day—it was eight years ago, May 1880—the railroad sent men to claim the land. Armed men, with a marshal. The farmers took out their guns and met them. They say the farmers fired first, but I don’t believe it. If they did start it, they were provoked. Seven men died, including Papa. They called it the Battle of Mussel Slough. May of 18 and 80…I was fourteen years old. I saw them carry Papa into our parlor draped in a bloody blanket…”

  Now her hands were like twisted wires, and drained of blood. “That was bad enough. What came afterward was worse. Railroad men seized the Hanford telegraph office so the story couldn’t get out to the newspapers. In the City, Huntington and Charley Crocker went to every editor with their own slanted story, putting all the blame on the farmers. Crocker and Huntington strangled the truth and perverted the idea of freedom of the press. I was just old enough to understand that—and from that moment, there was never any doubt about what I wanted to do with my life. Write. Tell the truth. Destroy the railroad.”

  Her mother, two brothers, and three sisters had been evicted, as had the families of the other settlers. She left home, changed her first name to Nellie, and plunged into the street life of San Francisco. Telling this, she grew a little more animated.

  “I was too young and eager to worry about possible dangers. I had more jobs than I could count. I lived next door to Madam Cora Swett’s bordello. The madam fed me and bec
ame my friend. I met Emperor Norton the First, a kind of crazy king of the streets. I played with his dogs, Bummer and Lazarus—they were pets of the whole city, practically. I listened to Norton describe his big idea for a bridge to Oakland. Other people jeered, but I thought it perfectly sensible. Finally I had enough money to enroll at the University of California at Berkeley—women were admitted there starting in 1870; it’s a very progressive institution. While I was there, I also learned typewriting at night. After I graduated I applied to Mr. Hearst. I showed him sample articles and got a job—probably because I’m a woman. Mr. Hearst is an amorous man. I managed to avoid his embraces while convincing him that I’d do anything, go anywhere, take any risk to be the very best sob sister in town.”

  The steamer’s mate came by. “Stockton in a half hour.”

  “Now you know everything there is,” she finished with a little shrug.

  “I understand why you’re independent.”

  “And why I hate the railroad?”

  “Yes,” he said, “that too.”

  In Stockton they hired a wagon and filled it with a tent, bedrolls, knapsacks, and provisions. Nellie explained what she called ‘division of labor’: She rented or bought their supplies and he in return would provide most of the hard physical work. “There’ll be plenty, so no argument.”

  He laughed. You didn’t argue with Nellie unless you were ready for war.

  They set out southeast, on the Old Sonora Road to the mines of the Mother Lode. “And thence to the Big Oak Flat and Yosemite Toll Road,” she said.

  “You have to pay to get there?”

  “Surely you don’t disapprove, Mr. Chance. The local folk are just getting rich like other Californians.”

  “Ow,” he said. They both smiled.

  They drove past grape arbors, melon patches, pastures, through wheat fields and tiny towns drowsing in the heat. They crossed the Stanislaus at Knights Ferry and climbed into rolling foothills speckled with red cattle and white egrets. Poppies painted whole hilltops the color of gold. The Sierras grew taller ahead, lower slopes dark green with pines and redwoods, high summits snow-whitened still. He had evil memories of crossing those mountains, but now that was softened by the spectacular beauty—or was it the girl riding beside him on the hard seat, taking her turn and handling the team as competently as any man?