GOLD RUSH DREAM

by Billie Sue Mosiman

  “Come on,” he said, standing and holding out his hand to her. “We’ll get out of here and find a place to camp. Tomorrow we’ll come back and start asking around for your uncle.”

  It took them an hour to maneuver the crowds in order to get back to their horses and the donkey at the stables east of town. It was sundown by the time they’d retraced their way to the edge of the woods where they could find a place to set up camp. The cold came with nightfall, bringing frost on the grass. Travis built a large fire and he and Rose huddled beneath blankets near it. The sky was clear and bright with stars, but down a slope through the woods they could see the torch-and-gas lit city of Sacramento. It was a total contradiction. Travis had seen women in back-east style silk dresses, their hats festooned with ribbons and feathers. And he had seen little street urchins going barefoot, their pants torn and ragged, shirts hanging loose on thin bodies. The richest and the poorest lived alongside each other, passing on the streets as if the other didn’t exist.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Travis said of the town.

  “Me either. It’s exciting, but scary too.”

  “It’s blame crazy.”

  “Put your arm around me, Travis.”

  He drew her close as they stared into the fire.

  “Don’t be worried,” she said. “At least we made it here.”

  “I know, but I can’t help worrying. I was never scared crossing the desert or the mountains, but this is…it’s just wild, it’s just not…right.”

  “I guess it’s the birth of a new city and we’ve never seen that before. Maybe all cities start this way,” she said.

  “Well, maybe so, but I don’t think so. I don’t think Austin or Galveston started this way. I think it’s the gold. It’s driven people mad. When the price of a room costs a man’s monthly wage and a potato costs as much as I used to get for a bear hide, things are out of hand.”

  They sat together quietly for a while before going into the tent to sleep, each lost in his own thoughts. Travis wondered if there was any game left in the forest. He wondered if there was any beaver or fox. If they were abundant, he could trap for a living and sell the furs. After all, trapping was all he knew how to do, really. He suspected the surrounding wildlife had taken off for safer climes. He’d have to go directly into the mountains to hunt and trap. But first, he had to find Rose’s uncle. That’s what he’d said he would do and, if it were humanly possible, he would fulfill his promise.

  #

  Broken Bear steeled himself and entered the river. He recognized he smelled like a wild animal and he couldn’t go into the white man’s town that way.

  Both north and south of him on the river there were miners, crazy men who hacked at the riverbed and spent their days praying for a glint of gold. Here along this stretch of river, however, no one had yet made a claim so it was free of desecration.

  The water was cold as ice. It made Broken Bear stiffen and hold still while the water swirled around his legs. Stiffening, his shoulder throbbed where he’d been shot. He touched the spot gingerly. Swollen to the size of a child’s fist was a festering scab. All around the old wound the skin had turned an angry red-purple. Broken Bear had thought he’d healed himself by cauterizing and packing the wound with herbs, but it might have gotten infected again, or the infection had hidden deep in his flesh, waiting to erupt. If it did not heal soon, he knew he’d have to dig out the infection with his knife.

  Sighing, staring down at the river, Broken Bear plunged into the water and rose up again shaking himself like a bear. He cupped the freezing water and rubbed it over his scarred arms, his chest, and his face. He was particularly careful not to press against the swollen area on his shoulder.

  He scrubbed hard at his privates and along his legs and even rubbed river sand over his feet and between his toes. He stood in his loincloth and now began to scrub at the soft deerskin leather with his knuckles. His hair was oily but he did the best he could to wash it as he dunked beneath the water.

  When he walked out of the river he thought he must smell at least a little better now. He stood before a fire and dried himself, turning front and back while shaking himself free of water droplets.

  He had eaten his first cooked meal in months. It was just a river rat he caught in a tangle of tree roots near the bank, but skinned and roasted, it tasted like the best buffalo steak. Travis and the Red Hair were camped up on the hill and farther east. With all the people in the area and all the campfires, they wouldn’t notice one more.

  Broken Bear had begun to dream of his home he’d left so far behind. Every day and every night, he was plagued by dream. He saw his Texas tribe, a nomadic people who moved from forest to plain, depending on the game and the season. He saw the chief, a man twice Broken Bear’s age, a stern leader who had admonished him more than once for losing his temper.

  He dreamed again of the cliff face where he’d accosted the brown bear. The beast stood with its back to the cliff, rising high on its hind legs, pawing the air and growling like thunder. It was cornered and would rush him as soon as its paws hit the earth. He had one chance. There were no places to hide or trees near enough to climb. He was too much in the open. He’d never get an arrow notched and on the fly before the bear hit ground. He had no chance against its great heft and height with a knife.

  All he could do was drop his bow and rush the bear before the bear rushed him; he had to make the preemptive strike. Without thinking further, without weighing the danger, he was on the run, streaking forward over the ground between them. The bear’s paws were on the downward swing. It roared, its eyes black and menacing, the sharp teeth dripping saliva.

  Broken Bear ducked his head and angled his shoulder. His momentum carried him right into the bear’s belly, knocking the beast just for an instant back on the heels of its feet. Broken Bear fell to the ground so close to the bear he expected it to swipe with a downward motion to take off his head. Then the bear was teetering, roaring and off-balance, paws scrabbling at the air for purchase. Crawling back, Broken Bear looked up and saw the bear topple backwards and disappear over the cliff edge. He hurried to the rim and looked down. The bear screamed as it hit the stony bottom of a chasm.

  It didn’t move.

  Miraculously, he had killed the bear.

  Barehanded and with only his small weight matched against the massive target, he had knocked the bear back enough to send him sailing out into the wind.

  He climbed down the rock face and took the bear’s claws, ripping them one by one from the paws. He hacked at the head, skinning back the lips to get at the teeth. It took him hours and he was covered with the bear’s blood when he finished. At last he sawed off one paw to show how large the bear had been.

  When he brought his evidence back to the tribe, he was greeted as a hero and awarded as a full warrior with all the privileges of other warriors. He was given his name. “You have broken the back of a bear,” the chief said proudly. “From this day forward that is your name, Broken Bear.”

  He had been a young man then, younger by ten years, and since that day it seemed his whole life had gone downhill. He might as well have been mauled by the bear for all the good it had done him to defeat it. It was as if his courage and quick thinking had only given him a respite from a predestined slide toward dishonor. During raids on homesteads that began dotting the landscape, he was never the warrior leading the charge, nor was he as clever in killing the whites as some of the other warriors. When he tried to give an opinion on anything of import, the other braves ignored him into silence.

  None of this would have mattered so much, but nothing Broken Bear did appeared to work out right. The young females in the tribe began to shun him. They looked away when he passed through the village. He thought it might be that he was ugly, but even ugly men found women willing to mate them. He thought it might be that he didn’t wash as often as the other men, but when did a little grime made a man a pariah?

  Or it could have been his temper,
always out of control. Once he leaped across a campfire and struck another brave in the face because he had made a joke about the brown bear—hinting that the bear must have been sickly and fell over the cliff without any help from Broken Bear. He might have been joking, but it didn’t seem that way to Broken Bear who took it as an insult.

  The chief reprimanded Broken Bear for taking insult to blows. This only served to stoke his anger and to set him apart from the others.

  After that he got into arguments and fights more often, some of which he lost, some he won. Again he was called to the chief’s teepee and told he was walking a narrow line. He thought if his mother and father hadn’t died of the white man’s disease during one extremely cold winter, he might have been given more respect, more power. But he knew the real truth. There was something fundamentally wrong with him that he couldn’t fix.

  It was the anger that spiraled out of hand. It was an anger that had saved his life when he’d confronted the bear on the cliff. But used against his people, it looked cruel and unyielding. When he saw the Red Hair and was mesmerized by her magic, he knew the tribe wouldn’t miss him if he pursued her. This knowledge made him sad, but it also freed him. He did not need them, did not need anyone. He didn’t even need the Red Hair, but he wanted her. He wanted her the way he’d wanted to be respected by the tribe, the way he’d wanted the love of his dead parents who even before their death looked upon him with pity and foreboding. He had crossed a continent to get her, only to lose her and have to get her back again.

  Travis was the brown bear standing in his way. All he had to do was duck his head, turn his shoulder, and rush forward. That way he would win the battle. That way he would get what he wanted.

  When morning dawned, he circled the campsite where Travis and the woman slept. He walked down into the white man’s town, excited to see what all the commotion was about. At the edge of town he ran into a drunkard, a white man with a bushy beard and red-rimmed eyes. The white man pushed him in the chest, tapping his fingers there. “What are you doing here, you lousy redskin? You can’t come into town half naked.”

  His words were slurred, but his face was stony with hate. Broken Bear passed by him, but the man followed on his heels, now poking him in the back. Broken Bear saw a slim passage between two wooden shacks and headed there. The white man followed, just as Broken Bear hoped he would.

  Once they’d turned the corner and were hidden from sight of the street, Broken Bear turned, knife in hand. He buried it up to the hilt in the other man’s protruding stomach. The white man grunted and stepped back with the sudden thrust. He looked down as Broken Bear withdrew the knife. He put both hands over the blood welling there and turned horrified eyes on the Indian. “Why, you damned red…”

  Broken Bear stepped forward and buried the knife again. This time the man fell, first to his knees and then to his face. He lay unmoving on the dusty street.

  Hurriedly, Broken Bear slipped off the man’s woolen best and slipped it on, buttoning the clothing in front. He dragged off the man’s pants. Because they were so large, he had to use the man’s suspenders to hold them up. He didn’t know how the suspenders worked, so he threaded them around his waist and tied them in a knot in front.

  It was over in minutes. When Broken Bear stepped back into the street he was dressed like one of the white men’s Indians, one of the people who was hired as a scout for the army or the wagon trains. He no longer looked like a wild thing, half-naked and threatening. As disgusting as he found the white man’s garb, it was great camouflage.

  He was careful to keep his gaze trained on the ground and did not meet the white men’s eyes. He felt suddenly that what he’d just done was beyond the pale. The drunk had insulted him, but not mortally. He had killed him for the sake of his clothes, really, not because he was drunk and quarrelsome. What kind of brave warrior was he? How crazy had it been to attack the man so mercilessly? He shook his head and kept walking. He had this debate with himself constantly now. The ghosts of the dead haunted him. The moments he’d committed murder returned periodically throughout his waking hours. The decision to kill the boy who had wandered from camp near Galveston’s ferry. The moment he loosed the arrow that killed the mountain man. And now the abrupt death he had dealt to the drunk. He felt madness like a fever that came and went, boiling his mind with turmoil.

  He wandered all over the city, amazed by the hubbub and noise, the muddle of unusual scents, the sight of rich ladies and men in suits mingling shoulder to shoulder with gold miners who hadn’t bathed in a month and drunks begging for coin.

  The river was the most sobering sight of all. Broken Bear felt himself fill with helpless fury as he gazed upon it. Ships hugged the banks and it was obvious some of them had been abandoned. Their sails were ripped by wind and the decks stood empty. Cocking his head in thought, Broken Bear decided the crew had scurried from the ships like rats to join the wave of immigrants and optimistic dreamers who hunted for gold. Refuse floated on the river like a skim of deadly seaweed. The whole place stunk of decay and dead fish.

  This was no way to treat the mother that was the earth. Not only had the white man gashed out the land to build roads and bridges, not only had he killed off the buffalo, but in his cities he brought down whole forests and he defiled the rivers and streams.

  Broken Bear turned his back on the ruined riverfront and moved back through the crowds. On the road leading to town, he waited for Travis and the Red Hair. Within the hour they rode in, stabling their horses, and going on foot. He stayed far enough to their rear not to draw attention. He watched the couple go into a small building. He recognized the sign hanging over the door as belonging to the white man’s medicine man. Was the Red Hair sick? She looked different to him. Fatter, rounder. She might have a big tumor growing inside her. He had seen one of his tribe die of that malady, the stomach swelling beyond all proportion until the man’s limbs withered and he turned gray and died groaning so loudly he was given drinks of fermented corn to soothe him. He hoped she wasn’t sick. He couldn’t abide a sick woman. It would so unfair to lose her that way after all his effort.

  After visiting the medicine man, the couple wandered the streets, stopping in various places to question people. Broken Bear wasn’t close enough to hear the conversations. He did find it curious and tried to sidle close enough to pick up words, but he feared, too, they’d recognize him so he was circumspect in the extreme.

  All during the day he shadowed the couple, but did not find out anything. They must have spoken to two dozen strangers, from passersby to establishment owners. He wondered if they meant to stay in the city--- if Sacramento had been their destination all along. He fervently hoped not. It was an awful place. He would have to spirit away the Red Hair quickly if that were the case. He didn’t think he could stand the town more than a couple of days at most.

  He felt like a fool in the white man’s clothes, stalking through the white man’s chaos. It made him want to rush up to every person he saw and stab him in the chest. His murderous rage and the nightmare of the haunting daydreams served to turn him into a quivering mass of insanity. He continued down the streets of Sacramento fuming and seething with repugnance at the human race with the lily white skin.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Through sheer tenacity and blind luck, Travis found a shopkeeper who remembered dealing with Douglas Feadley, Rose’s uncle. After Rose described him a light came into the shopkeeper’s eyes. “I remember him,” he said. “It’s a miracle since we’ve had thousands come through the store buying our goods, but he’s a regular customer and trading partner. He just came in a couple weeks ago, if I recall.”

  “Did he ever say where he lived?” Rose felt her excitement rising. She and Travis had questioned people in every building along the street and for hours they’d come up with nothing. She was about to despair when they finally came into this particular general merchandise store to query the clerk.

  “Feadley’s got a farm across the river and ten mil
es north along the trail where the gold miners travel in from the east. He shouldn’t be too hard to find.”

  “A farm?” Rose felt her hopes slip. Her aunt’s letter had said they were going to California to mine gold. “I thought he would have a gold claim.”

  The shopkeeper waved his hand in the air, dismissing the idea. “Not Mr. Feadley. He’s not crazy like the rest of these bull-headed miners. Said he tried the fork of the river for a while and came up with nothing but a nugget or two and they weren’t no bigger than a fleabite. Said he had laid claim to some good bottomland and was putting up a cabin. We get a lot of our corn from him for the mill where they turn it into meal we sell to the miners.”

  Now Rose smiled. Yes, that sounded like her uncle. If he had found the hunt for gold an unlikely adventure, he would change direction and do something to make a better living. Once again he was farming as he had done in Ireland.

  As Rose hurried with Travis back to the stables for their horses, she bubbled with exhilaration. “I knew we’d locate them. Uncle Douglas is a fine farmer, or at least he was before we all came to this country. If it hadn’t been for the potato disease, he’d still own the largest farm in Calgary County.”

  “It’s a disappointment it’s so hard to find gold,” Travis said. He hadn’t said much in the store and he wasn’t saying much now.

  “Oh, that won’t matter, Travis. We’ll work with my uncle and do all right. He’ll help us out for a while, don’t worry.”

  “I haven’t ever farmed, Rose. I don’t know a thing about crops or anything like that.”

  “You can learn. I’ll help out. We can start a whole new life.”

  Travis seemed to grow more morose as they gathered their horses and set out for the trail north of Sacramento.

  “I really wish I could find some of that gold,” he said. “Surely some of the miners are finding it, else why would there be so many people here looking for it?”