by Scott Graham
“He was one of the three prospectors trapped on the far side of the river from the camp, right?” Janelle asked.
Chuck nodded. “The five surviving prospectors figured the three others were goners. According to Grover, Rose even hollered as much to them, telling them to get out of there and save themselves.”
“But then, miraculously, he survived.”
“Not only did he survive, he prospered. With the deaths of Sherburn and Tudor, he took sole possession of the gold mine the three of them had owned together, and, according to Grover, sold it and disappeared.”
A group of hikers in heavy leather boots passed Chuck and Janelle, crossing the valley the opposite direction. The hikers spoke German to one another as they tromped across the span, led by a guide flying a red, black, and yellow flag on an aluminum staff above her head.
When the clomping of the hikers’ boots on the bridge receded, Chuck flipped to the last page of Grover’s account and paraphrased Rose’s return to the gold camp, his avoidance of the other surviving prospectors, and his sale of the gold mine he’d co-owned with Sherburn and Tudor.
“In his account,” Chuck explained to Janelle as they made their way through the meadow on the far side of the river, “Grover points to a very clear motive for Rose to have either murdered his fellow mine owners or arranged for their murders. Grover even indicates that Rose might have encouraged the warriors’ attack. That’s what the people from the Indigenous Tribespeople Foundation are wondering. After leaving camp and crossing the river, Rose could have killed his two partners himself—one of the two was killed with a blow from an ax of one of the prospectors, after all. Then, with his partners dead, he could have shot at the warriors, who would have retaliated while he slipped safely away on his own. Or he might simply have paid the tribespeople to initiate the attack on the prospectors while ensuring his own safety. Remember, according to Grover, Rose was the only one among the prospectors who spoke the tribal language.”
Taking the printed sheets from Chuck, Janelle studied them as they walked across the valley floor. “Who figured this out?”
“An ITF researcher, fulfilling the foundation’s mission. Tribespeople were accused of all sorts of atrocities during the settling of the Old West. For the most part, the accusations were true. The settlers and the Army and local militias committed genocide as they came west. They slaughtered the indigenous tribespeople and took the tribes’ lands by force. It was only natural for the tribespeople to respond with savagery of their own. In addition, though, the absence of the rule of law in the Old West presented opportunities for settlers to falsely accuse tribespeople of having committed crimes the settlers actually committed among themselves. The Indigenous Tribespeople Foundation works to right those false accusations—or, at least, call them into question.”
Janelle handed the sheets back to Chuck. “I don’t see what you or anyone else can do to prove something like this after so many years.”
Chuck folded the papers and slipped them into his pocket. “When it comes to archaeology, one-hundred-percent proof is virtually impossible to come by, whether thousands of years or, as in this case, 150 years later. Instead, Clarence and I are looking into whether we can add validity to Grover’s account. Any additional evidence we find will be used in the foundation’s case regarding Rose’s motivation in the deaths of his business partners.”
“Wouldn’t the best evidence be the record of the sale of the mine?”
“If anything like that existed, yes. But hardly any financial records were created during the California gold rush. ITF researchers haven’t found a deed or any other recordings of the mine sale referenced by Grover in his account.”
“Sounds pretty hopeless.”
“Archaeology is all about playing long odds. But it’s also about looking into history with the possibility of revealing the past in a new, clearer light. In this case, based on the uncertainties exposed in Grover’s account, there’s a lot to be said for digging into the past with an eye toward uncovering a wrong and making it right—or, at the very least, raising questions, in this particular case, about the accepted indigenous-people-assavages narrative that runs through so much of the history of the Old West.”
“I’m beginning to understand why you were so excited when Rosie found the projectile point yesterday.”
“And why so I’m anxious to get back up there.”
“Despite the boulder.”
“Almost, if I’m being truly honest, because of the boulder and what it says about how interested others might be in what else could be up there.”
“The arrowhead isn’t enough?”
“It’s a great start. But we didn’t get to check things out very much before we had to get out of there. The shallow burial depth of the projectile point tells me no one else has conducted a formal search beneath the bluff. If they had, the point Rosie kicked up would have been long gone.”
“Which means . . . ?”
Chuck’s cheeks grew warm as his face flushed with excitement. “. . . anything else dating back to Grover’s time is still up there, waiting to be found.”
They reached the dirt shelf beneath the overhanging granite nose thirty minutes later.
“I can’t believe we’re up here again,” Janelle said, her eyes darting around her as she caught her breath.
Chuck stood on the ledge beside her. “The boulder came at us from way around the corner.”
“Don’t remind me.”
“We’ll be fine here, just like the prospectors, under the nose of rock.”
He faced the bluff, the outcrop directly above him. At his feet, the projectile point rested in the divot created by Rosie’s boot. The dirt ledge at the foot of the granite bluff ran fifty feet from the projectile point in each direction, giving way to trees and brush at both ends. To the east, the shelf narrowed to nothing at the steep drainage down which the boulder had tumbled yesterday. A hundred yards beyond the west side of the ledge, a tree-studded, brush-choked hillside came up against another section of vertical granite looming above the valley floor.
Chuck turned from the outcrop and pointed through the trees at the meadow in the valley below. “They camped down there somewhere, on the near side of the river. The tribespeople were on the far side.” He angled his finger to the southwest. “There’s where they would have retreated, trying to get to the Mariposa Trail. But they were cut off, at which point—” he swung his finger up the steep slope to the dirt ledge upon which they stood “—they made their way here, per Grover’s description. Or, at least, that’s what Rosie’s find appears to indicate.”
He pointed west along the bluff. “How about if you have a look that way? I’ll head the other direction, toward the drainage. Then we can trade, so we’ll both have examined the entire ledge.”
“Can I kick at the dirt, like Rosie?” Janelle asked.
“It’s fine to use your hands. That’s what I’m going to do. We just can’t do any full-on digging with shovels and trowels, per our contract.”
Janelle set off west along the ledge. Chuck took a moment to absorb the scene, casting his mind back a century and a half. He envisioned Stephen Grover and the other prospectors huddled together here, beneath the granite prow, injured and bleeding and convinced they were about to die.
As Grover reported in his account, the prospectors had held off the tribespeople with their two rifles, determined to “sell their lives only at great expense.” They’d probably made their stand until dark right where Chuck stood on the ledge, directly below the outthrust granite nose. That would have put them far back beneath the rock outcrop, out of range of tumbling boulders—and right where Rosie had uncovered the projectile point.
Chuck knelt next to the sliver of obsidian and raked his fingers through the dirt. He worked his way east along the shelf in methodical fashion, gouging shallow, overlapping finger tracks through the dusty soil as if contouring the grounds of a Japanese bonsai garden with a round-toothed rake.
&nb
sp; Moving sideways as he worked, he furrowed the dirt with his fingers from the base of the sheer face of the bluff outward to the edge of the four-foot-wide ledge. He’d moved along the dirt shelf less than ten feet when his gouging fingers turned up a second projectile point buried in half an inch of soil.
He held the point up to the afternoon sunlight flooding the ledge. This one, twice the size of the one uncovered by Rosie, was smoky gray at its center; it, too, had been scorched before it was flaked.
Chuck exhaled in elation. A single projectile point could, conceivably, have been from an indigenous hunter firing at an animal on the ledge. But no animal would have waited around for a hunter to take a second shot at it. Rather, the second projectile point indicated some sort of greater conflict had occurred here.
Grover’s words came back to Chuck: “I fully believe—could I visit that spot even now after the lapse of all these years—I could still pick up some of those flint arrow points in the shelf of the rock and in the face of the bluff where we were huddled together.”
“Yowza,” Chuck muttered to himself. He’d barely begun his contracted work for the ITF, and already he’d justified the foundation’s decision to examine the prospectors’ movements in the valley.
He sat back on his haunches. If someone knew what was waiting here to be found, that could explain why they’d rolled the boulder down from above yesterday, trying to scare Chuck and Clarence away from their contracted work.
But that idea didn’t make sense. If anyone knew what was up here, they’d have absconded with the finds long before now.
He twisted his mouth, perplexed. Something else was at play here, something he couldn’t quite figure out. Not yet, anyway.
He set the projectile point atop the dirt where he’d uncovered it and continued sideways on his knees, sifting the soil with his fingers. Ten minutes later, he found a third projectile point. A minute after that, near the end of the ledge, he uncovered a fourth.
He met Janelle back in the middle of the dirt shelf.
“I found three more points,” he crowed. “Can you believe it?”
“I heard you cheering yourself on. I figured it was good news.”
“Any luck at your end?”
She dusted her palms against one another. “Not a thing.”
Chuck eyed the west end of the ledge, where the bluff fell back from the dirt shelf. “They must have huddled from the middle of the ledge to its eastern end, toward the drainage, where they were more protected by the overhang.”
He used his phone to snap preliminary pictures of the three newly uncovered projectile points and their locations, then he and Janelle swapped sides. Kneeling, Chuck raked his fingers through dirt already tracked by Janelle’s fingers as he worked his way westward. He uncovered no projectile points until, nearing the west end of the dirt ledge, he heard Janelle draw a sharp breath at the far east end of the shelf.
He spun on his knees to see Janelle standing before the granite bluff at the back of the ledge. She reached a hand into a crevice in the bluff, her eyes locked on the rock wall in front of her.
19
“What’s this?” Janelle asked, her voice filled with wonder.
Chuck shot to his feet and hurried along the dirt shelf to her side, stepping around the four uncovered projectile points along the way.
He expected to see yet another arrowhead in her fingers when she removed her hand from the crevice in the rock wall. But she withdrew from the cleft an object too shiny to be a projectile point. When Chuck reached her, she centered the object in her palm, holding out for their mutual inspection a circle of gold metal sparkling in the afternoon sun.
“It’s a ring,” she murmured.
Chuck extended a finger and gave the golden band a reverent touch. “I didn’t think to check the rock face,” he told her admiringly.
Janelle stared at the gold ring. “The prospectors were surrounded up here, outnumbered. They thought they were done for.”
“That’s what the ring proves. I’m sure of it,” Chuck said. “The settlers and militiamen were extremely savage to the tribespeople they killed—scalping them and, awful as it sounds, even cutting off their genitals and parading them as war prizes. The tribespeople scalped and mutilated settlers they killed, too. They also took anything they could use from their victims, particularly anything made of metal, which they often refashioned for body decoration.”
Chuck plucked the ring from Janelle’s palm and held it up between his thumb and forefinger. “The owner of this ring was cornered here, arrows flying at him from below, boulders rolling down from above. He couldn’t stand the idea of his ring falling into the hands of the warriors, or, worse, the idea of a warrior slicing off his finger—maybe even while he was still alive—to get at it. So he shoved it in the crevice instead.” He held the ring higher. “In the 1800s, the most common form of ornamentation among male settlers in the Old West was rings made of brass. See the—?” He stopped.
“Huh,” he said.
He turned the ring, studying it. “This has been exposed to air—to oxygen—for more than a century. It should be stained green on its edges from oxidization, but it’s not.”
“What does that mean?” Janelle asked.
“That means it’s not brass.” Chuck stared at the ring, fascinated. “The only other thing it could be is gold.”
His stomach churned with excitement. He rotated the ring, catching the sun and revealing faint etching inside the band. He brought the ring close to his eyes but couldn’t make out the inscription. “What does it say on the inside?” he asked, handing the ring to Janelle.
She held it up and squinted. “Initials. Two capital letters, a G and a P. And a date.” She looked at Chuck. “1849.”
“This is unbelievable!” he rejoiced. He wrapped his arm around her. “You’re unbelievable. You found the golden ticket. The P stands for Peabody. It has to. He was one of the prospectors. His first name must have started with a G—George or Gregory or something. According to Grover’s account, Peabody was wounded in the neck and arm at the start of the attack. Trapped here on the shelf, he must have been convinced he was as good as dead.”
Chuck kissed Janelle on the cheek, a quick, celebratory peck, the ring in her hand pressed between them.
“I have to believe G. Peabody was one of the Peabodys,” he said. “If I’m right . . .” He stopped, gulped, started over. “This is . . . this is absolutely incredible.”
He kissed her again, on the lips this time, soaking in the moment.
He stepped back, took a breath, and explained. “You’ve probably heard of the Peabody coal mining empire. They’re known for their strip mines and for lots of other mining around the world. They’ve been around since the 1800s as a big corporation, mostly digging coal out of the ground in West Virginia, Kentucky, places like that. But they got their start out West. The first time I read Grover’s list of the prospectors who came into Yosemite Valley looking for gold with him, the Peabody name stuck out to me. I did some checking online and learned the Peabody name was connected to some early Sierra mining, right at the start of the gold rush in 1849. It makes sense that a Peabody might well have been among the prospectors exploring the last valleys of the Sierra three years later, in 1852.”
“That would be a big deal?”
Chuck turned the ring over in his hand. “It would be a huge deal. If this ring really is pure gold, and it was owned by a member of the Peabody family, then it’s worth a fortune.”
Janelle stared at the ring, her eyes wide. “Really?”
“Yep. Something like this, if it can be traced back to its origin with a strong degree of certainty, tells the kind of story collectors go wild over. It’s like finding a shipwreck at the bottom of the ocean. People love that sort of thing. And the involvement of a company like Peabody adds that much more value to it.”
“Why’s that?”
“The value of any archaeological discovery—a shipwreck, King Tut’s tomb, whatever�
�is the value society places on it.” He proffered the ring. “A company like Peabody and all the wealthy Peabody heirs almost certainly will see this as valuable to their namesake and their corporate history. They’ll be willing to throw big bucks at it, which will make other collectors want to throw even bigger bucks at it, just to try to snatch it away from them. Which might well make this thing—” he raised the ring in the palm of his hand like a chalice “—worth millions.”
“Millions?” Janelle’s mouth fell open. “Of dollars?”
“At least one million, anyway. Maybe two. Depends on how big a play the Peabody family decides to make for it—assuming, that is, its provenance turns out to be ascertainable, which I fully expect it will be.”
“Provenance?”
“A quick look at the ring under an electron microscope will prove, first, whether it’s pure gold, and second, if so, its precise mineral composition. That composition will be traceable, within a few miles, to a specific place on the globe—that is, most likely, to a specific part of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, probably where a Peabody-owned gold mine was located. That wouldn’t entirely prove true G. Peabody ownership, but it would be more than enough to set off a bidding war.”
“Won’t the Peabody heirs simply be able to claim it’s theirs, since it belonged to their great-great-grandfather or whoever?”
“Not without something in writing. It’s like all the artwork looted by the Nazis during World War II. After the war, the paintings and sculptures that had clear trails of ownership went back to their rightful owners or their heirs. But everything else went up for auction. Not exactly fair, but that’s the way the world works.”
“Who would get the money for the ring?”
“It’d probably be split between the park service and the Indigenous Tribespeople Foundation. Or maybe the park service will find a way to hold onto the ring, with funding from the Smithsonian or some other deep-pocketed organization. Regardless, everybody’s going to love you.”
