The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (Arbor House Library of Contemporary Americana)

by Robert Lewis Taylor

  That first night down it was deathly cold in the desert. Mr. Coe slept in our tent, and Po-Povi and Jennie in the Brices’. It was really cold, and one reason was, we were hungry. It was necessary to ration both Sour and bacon, they said, so we had little to eat before we turned in. Off and on during the night we woke up, and once, while talking, my father said he’d put a piece of jerked buffalo in a sack, several days ago, and now he was blessed if he wasn’t going to gnaw it, to keep from freezing. He mooched around in the sack, after kicking the tent pole with his bare foot, and said he’d found it, finally. He offered us some, but we declined.

  “I didn’t count on it having any flavor,” he said, munching away, “but it does seem uncommonly tough. I don’t know when I’ve ever encountered meat so conspicuously painful.”

  So he struck a light, and what he was chewing was a moccasin, but he’d only eaten just the toe out, so he said it probably wouldn’t kill him, but it gave him some powerful stomach cramps during the rest of that night. We heard him taking on. I wasn’t surprised; those were a very poor grade of moccasin; I’d worn out two pairs already.

  Next day we met another Government wagon, but this time it was for people going through the pass. They refused to sell us anything, food or blankets. My father said, for Government people, he wouldn’t “make a poor mouth and beg,” so we plodded ahead, the sun rising higher, and hotter, giving us more trouble this way than the cold did at night. No matter how you viewed it, this was mean country; we were dust all over: in our hair, our mouths, our eyes, and our ears—in every part of us, and the women said the same. Our clothes were “varnished” with it, as my father claimed.

  We passed a bunch of people with scurvy; their legs were swoll up and blotched and their joints were practically too stiff to move. A pair of Government wagons had refused them food, so we handed out some dried apples, and my father advised them to eat any berries or greenery, even grass, that they could find at a water hole. Near one swampy place we found a grave, a pile of rocks with a headboard that said, “Clayton Reeves, from Tennessee. Shot by Indians. He straggled.” With this curious last line at the bottom, “He had more than a dozen arrows in him.” Even so, we ourselves never saw any Indians along here; we were lucky that way.

  That same day we bought some “pinole” corn meal, no sugar in it, from a wagon and cooked fried mush, which tasted all right but hadn’t any strength; I was tired out again in an hour. And that night we bought two loaves of pilot bread, coarse and hard, from an emigrant family which had little more than we did, I’m afraid.

  When we got to the Feather River, close to the gold camps, a Government wagon gave us six pounds of beef, without charging anything at all, and later we traded half for bacon, even swap, pound for pound.

  On May ninth, my father made this entry in his Journals: “Have at last arrived in Sacramento Valley. Thanks be to God.”

  Suddenly, everything changed. The weather turned mild, the green grass grew all around, there was water a-plenty to drink and bathe in. We stopped to rest and celebrate. The men toasted each other in cups full of fresh water, with brandy sprinkled in, and the women cried and then fixed up their appearance.

  We were in California at last, the way we imagined it, but we cut the celebration short, because we hadn’t any food and must push on.

  It was like wallowing in pleasure, to roll along in this green, pleasant valley, with a soft breeze on our cheeks. And as for the mules and oxen, we almost had to fight to keep them from stopping every few feet to graze in the thick, rich grass.

  At Davis’ Rancho—nothing but a few rude log buildings—they were practically out of food, too. Wagons were expected from Sacramento, but they hadn’t got in yet. A lot of Indians around were selling wild grapes put up during the past winter, as preserves, along with acorns that Davis’ cook made bread from. This Davis had a cook, a yellow-haired woman that swore like a sailor, who he paid fifty cents for every meal she served, and she said she made thirty dollars a day. Mr. Coe insisted that we have supper in the dining room, with him as host, but it wasn’t much better than what we could do ourselves, reduced as we were.

  So next day we pushed on, after a breakfast of acorns and bacon rind, heading toward Big Butte Creek and what they called “the lower mines,” twenty miles distant. Along the way we ran into some men who had “washed” for a day and a half and taken out $123 among them. “It’s scarce,” they said. “A man’s got to scratch like a chicken for worms.” But when they gave us two pounds of flour, we stopped and cooked it on the spot, dividing it into four cakes. We passed a big family of Indians that tried to sell us four boys between the ages of five and nine. What they wanted in particular was red flannel shirts.

  I felt embarrassed about Po-Povi, but she only stared at them, her face tight and grave. Mr. Coe patted her on the shoulder, and both Jennie and Mrs. Kissel went out of their way to be motherly all the rest of that day. And in the evening, before supper, my father took the girl and me into his tent and said:

  “Child,” meaning her, “I don’t want that scene back there to upset you. Let’s understand now and for all—I don’t own you any more than I do my own children.”

  “You bought me, doctor,” she said. “By the Indian custom, I am your property, as much as the blanket was.”

  Mr. Coe had kept up his lessons all winter, so she could talk as well as anybody now, though with a kind of Englishy accent. Mr. Coe said I spoke better, too, but I supposed he was joking, because I’d never talked Indian, and so didn’t stand to improve.

  “That’s nonsense. I ‘bought’ you, as you insist on calling it, because you seemed unhappy and because we wanted to make you part of the family. Is that clear?”

  “If you leave me behind, I must come back. It is the law,” said the girl. She had exactly the same kind of mule head as Jennie. I could see that now, and wondered why I hadn’t noticed it before.

  “Nobody’s going to leave you behind. We love you and want you with us. Listen carefully: I now un-own you. Savvy? You catchum?”

  My father, as I once remarked, could be unusually blockheaded for such a smart man. He continued to take the line that Po-Povi understood mainly Indian talk, and whenever he couldn’t get some harebrained notion across, he fell into ridiculous gabble like “catchum.”

  “Only if you sell me to another.”

  “Great jumping Jupiter, child! I’m not planning to sell you. I’m not going to own you, either. All right, I’ll sell you to Jaimie. How much do you offer? Makee offer.”

  “I can speak English,” I said. “I’ve spoken it since I was a baby. For that matter, so can she.”

  “Yes, yes, of course. I was only joking. But let’s shuck off this property bugaboo. You offer your barlow knife, all right?”

  It seemed silly, but to humor him I handed it over, and he made a show of tucking it in his pocket. Then he told Po-Povi, “Now, you see. Tradee. No longer own you. I no longer own you.”

  “Jaimie owns me.”

  “All right, it’s gone far enough,” I said, “I don’t own anybody. I wouldn’t care for the responsibility.”

  My father chuckled and started to leave, saying, “You children hash it out between you. You’re brother and sister now.”

  “Hold on,” I said. “I’d like to borrow back my knife. I need it.”

  “What security can you give?”

  The whole thing was such a farce that I said, “I’ll put up the girl.”

  “Fair enough,” said my father, and produced the knife. Then he went out, still chuckling, as if he’d had a very good time.

  “He’s a fool,” I said. “But he means well enough. He’s just old. All old people act silly one way or another.”

  “What do you wish me to do?”

  It was the first time I’d noticed how she’d grown. And she was only two years younger than me. Then it occurred to me that my birthday, my fourteenth, had gone by and nobody remembered it, not even myself. I couldn’t help it; it made me feel
bad.

  “How’s that?”

  “You own me, now.”

  “You own yourself, you poor fish. I’ve got enough to do to take care of a horse and a goat.”

  “Men always buy Indian girls for a reason.”

  To tell the truth, I couldn’t figure whether she was pulling my leg or not. She was that deep.

  “First chance we get, I’ll have a lawyer draw up a quit-claim deed,” I said.

  “Would you like to go to the stream and have me give you a bath? Squaws bathe the braves in the Cheyenne tribe.”

  “See here,” I said, “let’s stop the fooling. We’ve had some fun, playing together and all, making medicine for my father, exploring around in the woods, but this thing’s beginning to get on my nerves. Are you trying to make me mad?”

  Her face changed, and she smiled. She had a nice smile; her eyes crinkled up at the sides and the blue part changed color, turning almost purple.

  “No, I’m not,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Let’s go find some berries.”

  “I’ll find them, you carry them.”

  She’d had her turn joking me, so I said, “You just think you’re smart because you’re an Indian.”

  “I’m not an Indian now; I’m your sister.”

  That’s what I mean. I can’t stand women; they’ve got an answer for everything.

  Chapter XXXVI

  In two days we reached the Feather River mines, or diggings, buying and scavenging food all along, and such another uproar none of us had seen, even on the trail at its worst.

  Jennie said the scum of all creation must have spilled into California. For the most part, they were Americans, of the very roughest kind, but there were lots of Mexicans, and Chileans, and some Australians and English and French, as well as others. Many of these people had come by ship, making a portage across at Panama, and there were even some that had come around the Horn, wherever that was.

  Though starved down, we were in high good humor, because the long, long journey was over. Whatever was going to happen to us in California was about to happen. We felt especially fortunate when we talked to others who had fared worse, also when we heard about a party led by Mr. Donner, which was caught by winter storms in the Sierras three years before. A Mr. Montague, who had been with the Fremont expedition but had stayed on to farm, and then to prospect for gold, showed us a clipping from the California Star, of April 10, 1847.

  “A more shocking scene cannot be imagined, than that witnessed by the party of men who went to the relief of the unfortunate emigrants in the California mountains. The bones of those who had died and been devoured by the miserable ones that still survived, were lying around their tents and cabins. Bodies of men, women, and children, with half the flesh torn from them, lay on every side. A woman sat by the side of the body of her husband, who had just died, cutting out his tongue; the heart she had already taken out, broiled, and ate! The daughter was seen eating the flesh of the father—the mother that of her children—children that of father and mother. The emaciated, wild, and ghastly appearance of the survivors added to the horror of the scene …

  “After the first few deaths, only the one all-absorbing thought of individual self-preservation prevailed. The fountains of natural affection were dried up. The cords that once vibrated with connubial, parental, and filial affection were rent asunder, and each one seemed resolved, without regard to the fate of others, to escape from the impending calamity. Even the wild, hostile mountain Indians, who once visited their camps, pitied them, and instead of pursuing the natural impulses of their hostile feelings to the whites, and destroying them, as they could easily have done, divided their own scanty supply of food with them.

  “So changed had the emigrants become, that when the party sent out arrived with food, some of them cast it aside, and seemed to prefer the putrid human flesh that still remained. The day before the party arrived, one of the emigrants took a child of about four years of age in bed with him, and devoured the whole before morning; and the next day ate another about the same age before noon.”

  When we read this, we began to think we got off easy, even though we had taken some losses. My father said it was a sign we would strike it rich in the mines, which I thought was farfetched but no worse than the generality of his remarks. We camped on a branch of the Feather River, near some other emigrants, not far from a collection of huts called Marysville, where the Yuba River came into the Feather. Sixty miles farther down, this latter emptied into the Sacramento, and the town of Sacramento lay about twenty miles below that. Then, to complete the picture, San Francisco was on down, at the end of the Sacramento, another seventy miles, and across the big San Pablo Bay. That’s where we were: up these rivers in Northern California, deep in the middle of the diggings where the gold came from.

  Talking to people, we heard how the hullabaloo began. The gold was discovered first by accident, at the mill of a Johann August Sutter, a Swiss gentleman who had come to California by boat in 1839, built a fort and gone into farming. He set up a whopping establishment, fighting Indians singlehanded, then hiring them to work in his fields, and by 1847 he had five hundred employees-farmers, blacksmiths, carpenters, tanners, gunsmiths, vaqueros, gardeners, weavers (for weaving blankets), hunters, sawyers, sheep-herders, trappers, and a millwright and a distiller. He was in business in a pretty large way, and devised most all his methods of doing everything. For instance, when it came time to harvest, he turned four hundred Indians loose in a field with pieces of hoop iron, and for threshing, he drove wild horses into a corral where he had grain piled as high as a church. They stomped it and threshed it out.

  This Sutter was an important man, filled with energy and resource, my father said, but he lost all his employees overnight. And being extended for credit, he found himself in a first-class pickle. What happened was, his wheelwright, a man named Marshall, recognized gold in Sutter’s millrace. We met this Mr. Marshall during our stay on the Feather River, and he said (as my father copied it in the Journals):

  “While we were in the habit at night of turning the water through the tail race, I used to go down in the morning to see what had been done through the night; and about half-past seven o’clock on or about the 19th of January—I am not quite certain to a day, but it was between the 18th and 20th of that month—1848, I went down as usual, and after shutting off the water from the race I stepped into it, near the lower end, and there, upon the rock, about six inches beneath the surface of the water, I DISCOVERED THE GOLD. I was entirely alone at the time. I picked up one or two pieces and examined them attentively; and having some general knowledge of minerals, I could not call to mind more than two which in any way resembled this—sulphuret of iron, very bright and brittle; and gold, bright yet malleable; I then tried it between two rocks, and found that it could be beaten into a different shape, but not broken. Four days afterwards I went to the Fort for provisions, and carried with me about three ounces of the gold, which Capt. Sutter and I tested with nitric acid. I then tried it in Sutter’s presence by taking three silver dollars and balancing them by the dust in the air, then immersed both in water, and the superior weight of the gold satisfied us both of its nature and value.”

  That was how it started; now we were in a sweat to get our share. People were strung out up and down all streams, because it was supposed to be there, and in canyons, gulches and ravines. The ravines were favorite places to work, being easy to get at and moderately free of underbrush and rock. A good many “companies,” or parties, of men kept passing through. These formed together, pooling their money, and went into the wildest kind of mountains, taking things like provender, cooking utensils, blankets, tools and firearms loaded on mules. If a hole was dug that delivered as much as a quarter’s worth of gold, they called that place a “good prospect,” so that the word prospecting came out of that. But if the pan showed only very fine grains, too small to save, that was called “finding the color” and wasn’t worth pursuing, though it was i
nteresting as a clue.

  We parked our wagons, staked out our livestock, set up our tents, and made ready for the grand search. But first my father and Mr. Kissel and I went into Marysville to get supplies—mostly mining tools, since the ones my father bought in Independence had burned with the Kissels’ wagon—taking almost the last of our money. Mr. Coe wrote on his book.

  This Marysville was no more than temporary structures, a few rough shells of framing, some weather-boarded with clapboards, covered on the inside with domestic cotton, sides and top, over a wood frame. But most of the dwellings were tents, holey and ragged, and lean-tos made of zinc sheets. We came back with lots of stuff packed on mules, after my father had jawed considerable about the prices. To start off, we wanted a good gold washer, with a sieve, but the man asked forty dollars for a secondhand one that had a hole in it where the original owner, now deceased, he told us, “failed to entirely stop a bullet with his stummick” My father blew up; he said you could buy a new one back home for twelve dollars.

  The trader, a very smart-aleck-looking fellow with a patch over one eye, said, “I hadn’t heerd a man could purchase a new stummick at any price. What locality do you hail from?”

  “I mean a washer,” said my father sourly. He and Mr. Kissel settled for an ordinary tin washing pan, costing ten dollars, which made him mad all over again. He said you could buy this article in a Louisville store for seventy-five cents.

  It was an interesting argument. You probably could buy a new gold washer for twelve dollars back home, but what good would it do? You could sit on the Ohio River bank for two years, washing out mud, and if you got as much as an old turtle shell you’d be lucky. Or suppose you sent for a washer; wrote back home, had a man buy it, bring it out and deliver it. The trip alone would run as high as two hundred dollars, if he made it at all, and by the time he got here, there wouldn’t be enough gold in these hills to stuff a tooth with.