California Gold

by John Jakes

  That evening, he volunteered to help with the meal, peeling and dicing some potatoes they’d brought along, then seasoning them in the skillet with onion and a bit of golden bell pepper. Nellie complimented him on his cooking.

  “Pa taught me. If you don’t have a lot of food, he said, cooking gives you more time to enjoy what there is.”

  She laughed.

  He thought of something he’d wanted to know for some time, and asked, “That man Hellman, the landowner—how did he get his nickname?”

  “That’s a strange question.”

  “No, earlier today I was remembering him from the night Greenway fired me.”

  Satisfied, she explained that in 1850 the federal government had passed a reclamation act returning millions of acres of worthless land to the western states. “Swampland, marshland—it was that kind of land in other states, but they made a mistake in California. Here the land just looked worthless after a heavy rain. Actually it was some of the richest land anyone could want. But the state went ahead and sold it for something like a dollar and ten cents an acre.”

  Hellman had been a young immigrant in those days, she said, an apprentice in a Sacramento butcher shop. “I’ve no idea how he got the capital for his first investment, but he was soon battling Henry Miller for this or that piece of land, and both of them were bribing surveyors and assessors to certify that a given parcel was swampland when it wasn’t. Miller and Hellman got rich from the swamp scheme, but Hellman got the nickname.”

  “Interesting.” Mack set his tin plate aside and saw her watching him intently.

  “Now it’s time for you to talk.”

  “Yes?”

  “Why did you really come to California?”

  The cheerful campfire and the camaraderie of a good meal shared with the darkness falling combined to overcome his reticence. Besides, if there was ever a girl to be trusted, Nellie was the one.

  “Well, first of all, I came here because in Pennsylvania I never slept in a clean bed or wore a clean shirt. The air was so dirty around the coal mines, snow turned black an hour after it fell. It was a terrible life. I don’t want to tell you anything that’ll make you sick—”

  She shook her head and gestured him on impatiently.

  “I saw my pa’s friends from the mines come to supper and cough up blood right on the table. I saw eight- and nine-year-old boys bent like old men from sorting coal twelve, fourteen hours a day. I was bent that way myself for a long time. I watched them go down into the mines about age twelve with nothing to hope for except getting out alive at the end of a day spent driving a mule cart in the dark. I saw special police hired by the mine owners break men’s legs with billy clubs because the men wanted to organize for shorter hours or safer work. Jerry Caslin, he was a Molly Maguire—”

  “The secret society. I’ve read of it.”

  “The special police clubbed Jerry so hard, he couldn’t recognize his wife or kids afterward. All he could do was sit in a chair by the window and drool and piss—excuse me, that slipped out. He couldn’t help soiling himself all the time, poor Jerry. Someone finally fed him a tin of rat poison so he could die. Nobody asked who did it, not even the priest. So there are a lot of reasons I came to California, but the biggest reason was my pa. He came out in the Gold Rush, and he failed, and went back, and he was poor all his life. But he still believed in this place. Pa said that if a man couldn’t find any hope where he was, he could always find it in California. He believed it in spite of his own sad life, and because of him, I believe it. I always will.”

  Moved, Nellie couldn’t speak. She reached across the fire to touch his hand a moment. Shyly, he looked away. What a remarkable young man, she thought. Just remarkable.

  Next day he observed that she seemed quite familiar with the roads to the high country. She said she’d traveled them often as a little girl. “I went with Uncle Sebastian, who married my mother’s sister, Aunt Anya. Sebastian was a Basque sheepherder. Every summer he took his flock to the high pastures, and the whole family went along. Aunt Anya was a rugged woman; she worked as hard as he did, and so did their son, Tomás. I worked too, but it always seemed like a vacation. To this day, Tomás is my favorite among all my cousins.”

  At day’s end they passed through Chinese Camp, once overflowing with miners, now sparsely populated. A fading sign advertising sturdy work pants by Levi Strauss produced an eerie feeling in Mack. Maybe his pa had trod this same rough road. He often said he’d been all over the Mother Lode country in his search for a rich claim.

  They were climbing; Mack could feel it in the sharp thin air. But they must go higher still, she said, to find the secret valley to which her uncle had taken her as a child.

  “The Valley of the Yosemite. It’s an old Indian name. The original tribe, the Ahwahneechee, named it Ahwahnee: ‘Deep Grassy Valley.’ White men found it in 18 and 51. The men of the Mariposa Battalion. The militia was out hunting some of Chief Tenaya’s Indians, who, they said, were harassing the gold miners. You won’t believe the place, Mack. Its beauty will make you weep.”

  On narrow Jacksonville Hill, Nellie parked in a turnout among the digger pines and explained that many a gold coach had been waylaid up here in the old days. Along the south fork of the Tuolumne, she taught him how to pronounce that strange beautiful word. She detoured down a smaller road to show him the most remarkable trees he’d ever seen. They were cinnamon-colored with incredible height and girth.

  “Sequoia. Older than man’s memory. They may be the oldest things on earth.” It was hushed beneath them, the kind of hush appropriate to a dim church.

  Before they left Tuolumne Grove they drove to the Dead Giant, a great tourist attraction, according to Nellie. The topmost section of the sequoia was gone, but some two hundred feet of trunk remained, the upper part jaggedly divided into two towering spires, like horns. The road pierced the center of the mighty trunk.

  “Tunneled in 18 and 78,” she said. “Drive right through.”

  The wagon just fit. He laughed aloud.

  “You mentioned tourists. I don’t see any.”

  “It’s early. Summer’s the time. Last year twenty-five hundred people came up to Yosemite. One day we’re going to be fighting hard to save these places. I have a friend, a Scotsman, a kind of wild, wonderful mountain man I met up here when I was a girl, and he’s already fighting.”

  Shortly he saw why. A caravan of six flatbed wagons, each with eight huge tree trunks chained down, rumbled down past the turnout where they’d stopped.

  “Bastards,” Nellie said. “They’ll strip the high country if we don’t stop them.”

  He came out of the white dream thrashing his arms and crying, “Pa? Where are you?”

  Someone tugged him. “Mack. Wake up …”

  His eyes flew open. He felt cold night air on his cheeks, smelled the wild grass and pines, saw the high darkness full of blazing stars…then Nellie, in her long gray flannel nightgown and barefoot, standing between him and the campfire, which had been reduced to embers that sparked and billowed in the breeze.

  He remembered where he was then: in a field near a tiny mountain settlement she called Crane Flat. Across the field, yellow windows checkerboarded the dark, a wooden hotel. He sat up, sleepily rubbing his stubbled chin, his bedroll and extra blanket tangled around him. He’d erected the big fly tent for her, and rolled up on the ground outside.

  She sat on a log, neatly tucking the hem of the flannel behind her bare ankles. Only her small white feet showed, but the sight, and the isolation of the night, filled him with painful yearnings.

  “You were thrashing and calling out. You almost rolled into the fire. What were you dreaming?”

  “A nightmare I’ve had since I was little. Always the same: snow, darkness, death…” He described it in words he felt sure were inadequate.

  She sat with her chin in her hands. When he was through, she stood up and leaned over him. With a deeper tenderness and a greater intimacy than propriety would no
rmally allow, she touched his face.

  “Maybe the California sun will drive out that bad dream one day.”

  He gazed at her, then caught her wrist where it lay against his cheek. The campfire embers reflected in her brown eyes. Her small soft mouth opened as she realized what might happen if they allowed it.

  He started to rise, but she darted forward and kissed his forehead, a light, sisterly brush of her lips. He felt like an iron had seared him.

  “Nellie, I—”

  “Good night, Mack. We must make an early start.”

  She turned and ran to the tent. Before she dropped and tied the flap at the entrance, she looked back, and he saw her eyes saying she wished she could speak the words to invite him into that dark place.

  The canvas fell. Confused, elated, wanting to run to the tent, yet afraid to do it, he bundled up in the bedroll and blanket and watched the stars for an hour. He felt young, stupid, inexperienced, hot, angry. In love.

  The ascent continued. At Gin Flat, they were seven thousand feet above the sea, she said. Soon the road slanted down again, perilously hacked from a mountain’s shoulder. It gave them spectacular vistas of tree-clad valleys and higher granite peaks above and ahead. In shady nooks along the way, pristine snowbanks gleamed.

  At Gentry’s Hotel and Station, fifty-six hundred feet, they paid their toll for a road Nellie called the Zigzag. “Twelve miles into the valley.”

  “The morning’s for up traffic,” the toll collector said. “You have to wait till afternoon.”

  So they pulled over a short way to another turnout. “Prospect Point—but the teamsters mostly call it Oh My Point.”

  He understood. Before him lay a vista of great bald rock masses looming over a forested valley. Waterfalls tumbled from the rock summits all the way to the valley floor. Mack marveled as a cloud of birds swept upward past them; there were thousands of them, wings beating. “Passenger pigeons,” Nellie cried.

  The toll agent put bells on the team to announce their passage down the mountain. Mack drove on the perilous switchbacks carved from the granite. “Italian stonecutters did this,” she said. “An incredible feat.”

  “Don’t talk so much,” he groaned, aching from hanging on to the reins and maintaining constant pressure on the brake. The wheels smoked, inches from the edge, and the smell of scorched wood rose up through the dust. If they went over they’d never survive.

  The scenery no longer existed except as a peripheral blur. The afternoon’s descent, at two miles an hour, took nearly six hours. Sweating and brutally tired, he fought the wagon down at last, bringing them into a glade by the fast-flowing Merced. There he looked up.

  “God above,” he whispered. He wondered if this was how a man felt in biblical times when the Almighty spoke to him in the wilderness.

  The sun speared out of the west, low now, lighting peaks and swathes of forest where it touched, leaving dark-blue shade where it did not. They were deep in the glacial valley riven by the white water of the river. Stupendous rock formations towered on the valley’s flanks. “That’s El Capitan—twice the size of Gibraltar—it goes up three thousand feet from the valley floor. Over there are the Cathedral Rocks and at the far end, Half Dome. The falls of the Yosemite are there on the left, Bridalveil on the right—they’re flowing full now because it’s spring.” He watched the awesome waterfalls plunge down in clouds of sunlit mist. Their roar was constant, primitive; something stirred in his loins again.

  Nellie hugged herself. “Did you ever see its like? I’m glad I’m the one showing it to you for the first time.”

  “So am I.” He put one arm around her and kissed her. She slid her arms beneath his and hugged him, giving a little groan of pleasure.

  A minute later, patting her hair, then her pink cheek, she whispered, “That’s dangerous. I think you’d better drive on.”

  The valley was seven miles long, a mile wide. Beyond the terminal moraine where the last glaciers had stopped twenty thousand years before, the Merced changed to a river of placid green pools and sandbars. They avoided the small raw-frame hotels already busy with a few tourists who sat on the porches in the twilight and made camp in a meadow near thickets of cottonwoods and alders. The trees tossed in a cool wind, their leaves hissing. Nellie could hardly stop showing him things: mistletoe clusters high in the black oak trees, granite lichen darkly staining the great rock formations, glittering eyes that regarded them from the woods.

  “Grizzly bear,” she whispered. “If one ever comes for food, don’t argue—let him have it.”

  The blazing eyes vanished.

  While the light lingered, Nellie ran out among the red columbines and golden poppies in the meadow and began to dance. She was like a sprite, kicking her bare feet high. Mack clapped his hands to keep time. Her face grew flushed and finally, laughing, she collapsed against him. He held her longer than necessary. She pressed his strong arm with her palm and drew away reluctantly.

  The campfire flickered, slices of salt beef sizzling in a heavy iron skillet that Mack held in his gloved hand. He liked the skillet’s feel and the smell of the meat.

  Standing near him, Nellie said, “You really do have a talent for that. You’d make a fine chef for the Palace Hotel.”

  “Not enough money in it,” he joked. “I enjoy cooking. Sometimes it seems like woman’s work, though.”

  “Mr. Chance, you have very conventional, not to say primitive, attitudes about male and female roles.”

  “Seems to me that most of the world shares my—”

  A halloo interrupted him. Through the dusky meadow, a tall wiry man with nondescript clothes and a knapsack strode toward them. Hair hung to his shoulders and his gray beard was long and thick enough to shelter more than one bird’s nest. Nellie waved and started to move toward him.

  “You know that man? He looks like a tramp.”

  “He is, in a way. It’s my friend John Muir. I didn’t know he was up here.”

  After Nellie and Muir had embraced warmly, Mack shook Muir’s hand, which was brown and strong. He looked about fifty and his eyes were a startling blue. “Pleased to know you,” Muir said. It came out “know ye”; he spoke with more than a trace of a Scot’s burr.

  “Can you stay the night, John?”

  “Aye.” Muir flung his knapsack down, then his brown sugar-loaf hat. “There are tourists here a’ready.”

  She nodded.

  Mack said, “Anyone would want to see this place.”

  “Aye, and we’ve had our share of visitors since I first came upon the Valley in 18 and 68. I met Jessie Fremont up here, and Susan Anthony.”

  “Bierstadt painted Yosemite,” Nellie said. “Mark Hopkins came before he died: Emerson, and Barnum…it’s a long list.”

  Muir sat down and leaned back on both hands, the fire deepening the ruddiness of his weathered skin. “Sometimes the visitors forget to respect what God and nature put here. If enough of them do it, d’ye ken, there’ll be nothing left for the next generations.”

  “John is a staunch protector of the valley,” Nellie said.

  Muir sighed. “It’s a fight. Never ending.” He explained to Mack that in 1864, Lincoln, with great foresight, had deeded Yosemite and a nearby stand of big sequoias called the Mariposa Grove to the state of California. “So it’s a protected preserve. But the protection’s not strong enough. We have jackleg lumbermen up here. And the damned sheep. A quarter million in the high pastures last summer. They leave no grass or foliage; they strip the earth. I herded sheep up here myself until I saw the damage it did.”

  Mack offered the salt beef. Muir picked up two pieces for his tin plate. “How would you protect the valley, then?”

  “Put it under the Interior Department. Name it a national park, like Yellowstone. Control the tourists, and sequester all these natural treasures so the damned rapacious exploiters can’t get to ’em.”

  “But look, sir, there are valuable resources up here. I’ve been told that the mountain snowpack could ir
rigate the whole Central Valley—maybe even provide water for the coastal cities, if pipelines were built.”

  “Pipelines. Great God, son, what else would you allow?”

  The scorn irked Mack. “What’s wrong with the idea? Water from up here could make the whole state bloom.”

  “That idea is hateful,” Muir said. “If you allow a little to be despoiled, all will be despoiled eventually. Nellie my lass, your friend seems to be one of those apostles of progress who mean to reduce this place to a private preserve for profit.”

  “I don’t share his ideas, John.”

  Mack dropped his plate with a clatter. “And dammit, that isn’t what I said.”

  “I am opposed to any development that interferes with the ordered state of nature,” Muir declared.

  “So am I,” Nellie said.

  “Are you required to talk that way to play the role of independent female?” Mack snapped at her.

  “You don’t like that role, Mr. Chance?”

  “Not much.”

  “Well, that just demonstrates how perfectly stu—” She bit it off, then whirled away toward the trees to compose herself. Mack glowered at the fire.

  Muir packed his old pipe with tobacco and lit it with a twig from the fire. “I did na’ mean to start a row in this camp. A man’s entitled to honest views. It’s just that I am passionately opposed to the one you expressed, sir.”

  “I don’t know that I believe every word myself. I’m new to California. Trying to puzzle things out.”

  Muir’s blue eyes said he’d try to be tolerant, which undoubtedly meant giving Mack a few more years to discover his error and mend his ways.

  In ten minutes Nellie was back. “I didn’t mean to lose my temper.”

  “Nor I.”

  Somehow, though, the evening was spoiled, and the travelers passed the rest of it with little conversation and long moody silences.