Zachary's Gold

by Stan Krumm

  I passed the first day in laying out a base camp and my temporary domicile—a lean-to hut constructed from a tarpaulin and existing willow trees. Three more days I used to map out the terrain all the way from the ridge meadow to the bottleneck in the canyon that I felt to be the limit to my territory. Anything below that spot I mentally acknowledged to be in the sphere of influence of Greencoat.

  In one hand I took an inkpen and in the other a goldpan, and by week’s end I had a large, albeit roughly sketched map of the territory and a corresponding set of notes. Nowhere did I find what one might call an indication of rich paydirt, but each pan yielded at least some colour. I was averaging twenty to thirty cents, which I considered promising enough to proceed further with my explorations. Only one channel on the north, closest to my downstream boundary, was lacking in any appreciable show of gold.

  As had always been my practice, I did not attempt to accomplish much the next day, as it was Sunday, and although I am not a deeply religious man, the habit of a Sabbath rest has proven to be a good one, I think. Towards evening I did, however, shoot a bear, who had come to inspect my residence without invitation, and was forced to drag that carcass upstream and away as far as I could manage, as the meat was too wormy for me to eat. No such inhibitions applied to the coyotes though, whom I heard up there having a tremendous funeral party through much of the night. Their howling sounded most mournful, but I am sure there wasn’t much honest sorrow on their part at the demise of the big black fellow, which suggests that even creatures of the wild may tend towards hypocrisy.

  Monday morning I started early for Barkerville with an empty pack on my back. I wasn’t yet in the proper mood to begin mucking in earnest. I did not wish to be hasty in my choice of a claim as long as competition was slim, so I decided to purchase a full complement of supplies and study the possibilities at leisure before I specified my piece of ground.

  At the bottleneck, I crossed the creek and followed a game trail for a while, so as to bypass Greencoat’s property, then angled down to meet with Antler just below the junction, crossing the Chinamen’s claim as I went. There were indeed three of them, each with his own shelter, and they nodded me politely past in a most neighbourly fashion.

  The route to town was much easier on a pleasant day with an empty pack, although the level of the creek had risen noticeably in the few days since I had been through, and in more than one spot the creek bed was flooded and I was forced to detour through the trees. I covered the distance in good time, though, arriving in the early afternoon with time to buy my supplies before the stores began to close. From a blacksmith I bought two pounds of nails and a piece of iron grating I would use for cooking purposes. At a general store I purchased foodstuffs, paper, ink, candles, fishhooks, a swede saw, an adze, and miscellany. Lastly, after checking my finances, I moved on to a dry goods store where I allowed myself the luxury of another blanket. I was close enough to a future flow of income, I thought, to run my savings low.

  Since the day I left home I have always kept a brief daily journal, including a record of my earnings and expenses, and the entries made in those Barkerville days are quite remarkable, prices being unconscionably high for any product whatever. Flour was thirty-five cents a pound, coffee a dollar, and my two pounds of nails cost me four dollars American. Quite astonishingly, the storekeepers and miners alike carried on at great length about how low the prices were, now that so much of the road had been completed. I had heard the same sort of talk from fellow travellers on my journey north, regarding the road itself. “How wonderful,” it was said, “that the highway north is now so easy! What a marvel of workmanship!” For my part, I thought the roadway was treacherous and crude, and the cost of living, while perhaps understandable, was no less disgusting.

  I now possessed only a few dollars of my savings, which had once seemed so expansive, and I realized that soon my payments must be made in gold dust. That was not such a frightening idea to me, though, and I dispensed another nickel to have a hotel keeper watch over my goods while I walked to Richfield, where I visited the gold commissioner’s office. I passed a pleasant half hour examining the official map of the area around my property. Then I returned to Barkerville.

  At dusk, when the lanterns were being lit and the workers began to straggle in from the goldfields, tired and exhilarated, hungry and thirsty, Barkerville was truly a sight to behold. It was a beehive of organized confusion and as strange an admixture of humanity as you could wish to see. On the one hand, every nationality in the world seemed to be represented—Englishman and Scot next to Oriental; Frenchman, Italian, and German babbling in musical polyglot. Conversely, there were almost no women in that crowd, and an equal scarcity of both the very young and the elderly. It was a cracker barrel jammed full of young men, bearded and dirty for the most part, and every one in a hurry.

  I took my dinner of cured ham and store-bought bread that night on a bench on the boardwalk. There I met and made conversation with a trio of fellows, as yet with no claim of their own, who were squatting in an unused cabin down the creek and hoping that the owner would not reappear before the first of June, so they could take over his workings. We drank a glass of beer together and they invited me to their temporary dwelling, where I spent a more comfortable night than in my usual home under the grocer’s floorboards.

  That night, I did an unusual thing among miners, for I told them the truth about my own endeavours, although I did not name the location, of course, only that it was some distance to the north and east. They told me with the confidence of the well-travelled and experienced that I had no hope whatsoever. By now I was feeling much more confident of my surroundings, though. I had heard a few local stories myself, and I countered with the remark that before Billy Barker and John A. Cameron had the audacity to search downstream, no one believed for a minute that gold existed on Williams Creek below the canyon. This, of course, was quite true. For that matter, several years went by when local miners never bothered to venture deeper than the blue clay layer they encountered at about fifteen feet, supposing it to be a solid bedrock. Then one day on the Abbott and Jourdan claim, while Jourdan was travelling for supplies, Abbott dug beneath, and had three thousand dollars in gold to show his partner two days later.

  These stories seemed marvellous and the figures astronomical at the time. I was not the sort to even dream that one day soon I would experience such things as would make them all seem pale.

  The trio had their own set of stories, statistics, and superstitions, and we talked long into the night. I enjoyed the conversation so much that I had half decided to spend another day with my new-found companions, until one of them happened to mention that an acquaintance of theirs had been suffering from stomach cramps for two days, and there was a possibility that it was influenza.

  I was on the path out of town down Conklin Gulch within the hour. I would take no risk with any form of sickness while I was living alone in the cold and damp, and a town overcrowded with unwashed peasants was an invitation to disease. Who could say what sort of poisonous vapours were filtering up from those honeycombs of shaftwork?

  On my return to Binder Creek, as I cut across the back side of the Chinamen’s claims, I noticed a minor change in the laying out of things. One of them had left the others and had laid stakes at a new location, closer to my own area of exploration. Whether he had a falling out with his partners or was simply taking their interests to a new locale I didn’t know, but I decided to monitor the situation closely, as I had not yet done my own pounding and paperwork, and did not intend to hurry unless forced to. My hope was that either the Negro barber was very selective in giving out his recommendations or that no one but myself would put stock in his words.

  I have never led an easy life, but those six weeks rank as the hardest I have ever spent. I panned the gravel every twenty feet or so, washing away what seemed like tons of mud in the freezing water until I thought my hands would never melt and my knees never straighten. Each result was carefully
plotted on my tattered map. At a half-dozen promising spots, I went deeper into the ground, panning out the muck from the pit, level by level, and analyzing my finds. It was back-breaking work, and though my little poke of dust and nuggets was beginning to swell a certain amount, it was scarcely enough to light the fires of excitement I needed to keep me warm and full of steam.

  In addition to the toil of prospecting, I had to put in some long hours of other work to maintain my survival. Wood had to be chopped, game had to be shot if I wished to eat meat, and planks had to be laboriously sawed from green timber if I meant to build implements such as sluice boxes or a wheelbarrow.

  I set up my first sluice box near the top of the main channel in early July. I had been greatly excited to find two nuggets, each the size of a thimble, in a pan of dirt from one of the pits I had dug at about the four-foot level. I felt the fever of expectation upon me, and I pushed myself unmercifully, washing the equivalent of about two hundred pans from that pit, dragging it up one shovelful at a time. After all my exertions, I found nothing more than a small puddle of shiny dust.

  More than once, feeling I was on the verge of hitting real paydirt, I experienced this rush of optimism, only for it to bubble away, with myself none the richer. I had expected to find excitement by following the gold rush, but there was now nothing for me but hours of drudgery, punctuated by these frequent disenchantments.

  I have failed so far to mention one other of the great joys of living in that wild wonderland—the insects. Once the weather became warm enough to sustain a decent form of human life, it also gave birth to a myriad of species of flies—most of which seemed to be both gregarious and carnivorous. There were horseflies the size of robins, mosquitoes as big as butterflies, and tiny black flies that bit like terriers. Even the ones whose appetites did not lean towards man-flesh seemed to wish to swarm about as spectators or explore the inner regions of my ears and nose. The hum of tiny wings served as my lullaby at night and greeted me with every new morning.

  For long periods I became numb to the dreadful creatures and of necessity learned to ignore the stinging pinpricks, but from time to time the song of the black cloud would suddenly impinge upon my senses, and a brief claustrophobic panic would cause me to scream and run down the creek bank for a few seconds of relief.

  As I have said, it was a time of great labour and hardship for me, and my moods would sometimes fall into a sullen melancholy, when it was impossible to make myself work. I would be forced to conjure up unlikely fantasies of sudden wealth and dwell on them for some time before I once again felt sufficiently interested in my claim to recommence the tedious task of shovelling gravel. It is sometimes postulated that hard manual labour teaches a man the truth about himself. The only things I learned were that I hated to work with a shovel and that my feet deteriorate badly when they are kept constantly wet.

  A very short entry in my journal dated July 28 (although my exact figuring of dates was inaccurate at that stage) brings back less than fond memories for me. It says simply “Spoke to Greencoat,” and I had no heart then to expand on our meeting.

  I had reached the five-foot level of my sixth and last exploratory pit, beside the junction of the main stream and a lower tributary, across the way from the one the Chinaman was working. I was seated on the sluicebox, poring over my figures, when I suddenly became aware of the other man’s presence at the edge of the bush behind me.

  “You’ll be getting close to ten dollars out a hundred pounds right through here, I imagine,” he said, as if we were in the middle of a discussion already. I was somewhat taken aback, as that was almost exactly what I myself had figured. I wished immediately that I could mutter something threatening and order him off, but both my rifle and revolver were back in my shelter. Besides, I was only prospecting there—I had no legal authority over the premises.

  I nodded and shrugged noncommittally.

  “There’s better, farther along,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “A little, but not much. Up on the northernmost corner, close to the swamp, where the slate runs parallel to the surface, the gravel is good—good as where I’m at, I suppose, but that’s as rich as this gully gets.” He had approached me casually and was now staring at the chart on my lap. “I see you’ve got it all marked down. That’s good.”

  I folded the sheet quickly and stood up.

  “Fine-looking map,” he continued. “You’ve put a lot of work in, stranger.”

  “I don’t suppose I need your comments or advice, thank you. I’m quite aware of the lay of this land.”

  “Could have told you what was there for the finding if you’d have asked, you know.”

  I found that comment both deflating and annoying.

  “Yes,” I said, “if I’d managed to ask you without getting shot.”

  “True,” replied Greencoat thoughtfully. “True enough, there would be that to consider.”

  I wasn’t sure whether he meant to mock me, but I had enough of his talk.

  “You’re no longer on your claim, sir, and any rash talk might lead me towards my rifle.”

  He shrugged.

  “Nor are we on your claim,” he said with a philosophical tone. “I don’t think you’ve staked one, have you?”

  “When I do,” I growled, “I might easily drag your body to the edge of my boundary to bury you as a claim jumper.”

  He didn’t answer, but strolled away in the direction from which he had come, leaving me frustrated and angry. Granted, there was no real reason for me to have spoken in such a bellicose fashion, but Greencoat’s arrogance, combined with his confirmation that I was not about to unearth the motherlode, had sunk me to the very depths of disappointment and disillusionment. I never doubted that he was telling the truth. It was a little as if he had already used my dreams once, and now they were soiled goods.

  For two days I did nothing but hunt, stare at my map, sleep, and wander about. Sitting on the crest of the ridge above my camp with my telescope and my rifle, I would leaf through my options over and over.

  I could choose the best hundred feet of Binder Creek and carry on my work as dutifully and systematically as I was able, but that would leave me with only a few hundred dollars—perhaps a thousand, by winter. It seemed scarcely enough to justify a hellish winter camping in ten to twelve feet of snow, nor again the thousand miles of hard travel it had taken to reach it, should I decide to return south before the real cold hit.

  I could pack up, call my past weeks of prospecting a bad venture, and try a new location, but chances were that whatever new gulch or gully I moved to would be no more kind to me than this, and I would only have wasted the time I had already spent preparing my camp and building my tools.

  Neither of these choices was very desirable, and the third was not much better—namely to return to Barkerville and see what other opportunities arose. For a while, I persisted with the coarse, dull work of gold mining, but my thoughts began to return more and more to this last possibility.

  There must, I thought, be other ways to earn a good living in this country than shovelling muck. Where ten men can become wealthy digging up gold, one more must be able to draw good pay looking after their needs in some endurable way. There would not be much call for dockworkers, Pinkerton agents, or student lawyers in Barkerville, but I decided that before I committed myself to working a claim in that isolated little valley, I would see what work was available in the great gold-rush city.

  I believe it was the first day of August when I started for town.

  I SUPPOSE THAT MY RETREAT to the relative civilization of Barkerville was due to boredom more than anything else. We human beings carry on a strange relationship with the unknown that allows it to control us in both positive and negative fashions. It is the unknown that fills us with the greatest fear, and again it is the unknown—the gambler’s unknown, and the explorer’s—that spurs a man on to strive for more than the bare necessities.

  Once Binder Creek had become to me a
known quantity, I found it difficult to keep her as my wife and only love. I had no plan to abandon her, but the joy of the place had gone with its mystery. Nonetheless, when I arrived in town, my first stop was the gold commissioner’s office in Richfield, where a government clerk—tall and very dour—had me sign a form, give descriptions of the terrain, and trace a location on a counter map. I assured him that my stakes were carefully placed in an obvious location, although I had completely forgotten to put them in before I left. I promised myself to do so immediately on my return.

  I next proceeded to the far end of the active section of Williams Creek, where I looked for the three friends I had made on my last trip in. I found instead that the owner of the claim had returned from his winter absence and was now alone there, carrying on his work. He was a polite and friendly Scotsman who seemed to bear no ill will toward the fellows he had found on his territory. In fact, he was able to inform me that one of the trio was, to the best of his knowledge, working in a mine on Stout’s Gulch. I got the impression from the man that he had been taken on as a partner, which was an impressive achievement, as the claims along Stout’s Gulch were, as a rule, more than decently rich. Since most men were not interested in working for wages in the goldfields, accepting a partner was sometimes the only way for an operation to get help.

  I looked him up there—the oldest of the three companions, a man named Carl—and waited for him to quit for the day. The other two were brothers and had returned to Upper Canada after receiving news that their father had passed away.

  Carl had the build of a bulldog—low to the ground and very muscular, with a decisive spring to his step, even when he was at his ease. He wore rather thick spectacles, which he tied behind his ears with string, making his blond hair stick up like a rooster’s comb. He was not yet in fact a partner in the Stout’s Gulch operation, but had agreed to work for wages for one year with the promise that he would become a full partner the next season. This would still be a good arrangement, he thought, as the mine showed no sign of being depleted at all, so five or six months of work would leave him with several hundred dollars in his pocket and a sixth part of a prosperous enterprise.