Bound for Gold--A Peter Fallon Novel of the California Gold Rush

by William Martin

  I wanted nothing more than to get away from the men who had surrounded me for so long, to wander, to observe, to become the all-seeing eye for sights never yet seen. (Yes, I had read my Emerson.) And San Francisco was surely the grandest theater of the new to be found anywhere, a singular place if ever there was one.

  So I declined invitations from Christopher Harding and Matt Dooling and let the men of the William Winter go barging off in every direction. I went alone.

  And by nine o’clock that night, I had seen enough.

  But I needed to set it all down because the mail steamer California was leaving on the morning tide. If I did not put a dispatch aboard, it would be weeks before I might send out news of our safe arrival.

  So I wrote on a barrelhead in front of the solidest building in town, the three-story Parker House. It dominated Portsmouth Square, and at sixty dollars a night, its rooms were surely the most expensive in San Francisco, probably in America, and perhaps in the world. But the hotel did not put a price on the light falling from its windows. So I angled my notebook to catch some of it, pulled out a pencil, and with one eye on the swirl of humanity around me, I began to fill pages.

  After posting, I would return to the ship, which seemed much the safest place to sleep, for while San Francisco simmered deliciously with life, bubbling pots often overflow. Everywhere were grifters, gamblers, rapscallions, scoundrels, whoremongers, drunkards, aspiring drunkards, and sharpers of every ilk, the kind of men who come to any conversation as if it were a financial transaction rather than a simple human interaction. And everything was for sale … at an outrageous price, of course, whether you hoped to buy a fresh-cooked chicken leg or glimpse a fresh-powdered female leg, which I admit to paying for in the Parker House Saloon.

  The lady reclined as a living tableaux above the bar. She wore a satin dress slit at the side to reveal most of her leg and scooped at the neck to show the tops of her breasts. I bought a brandy at the outrageous price of fifty cents, I sipped, I gazed, and when she moved slightly, so that a bit more of her glorious breast revealed itself, I gasped, along with half the men in the room.

  I put all this in my dispatch, for I had determined to tell all and let Sam Batchelder decide what to delete in deference to the delicate sensibilities of our Boston ladies.

  Thus did I also report on Ah-Toy’s House of Happiness, a tent-and-shack arrangement on an alley off Clay Street, just above Portsmouth Square. A sign listed prices: one ounce of gold for “a two-bittee lookee,” two for a “four-bittee touchee,” three for a “six-bittee do-ee.” I was tempted. I had paid once or twice but had found the experience … disappointing. So I stood outside and observed others give their money to a Chinese man, then step under the flap.

  When a miner emerged looking as if he had just seen the face of God, I asked him what—or who—was Ah-Toy. He said she was “a Chinese goddess in green and gold silk, prettier than color in the bottom of a pan.”

  Her husband had died on the voyage from Canton. So Ah-Toy—twenty-one, tall, beautiful—had made herself paramour to the captain. In San Francisco, she had taken an old road to riches, selling something even more treasured than gold. Ah-Toy, however, never engaged in the “do-ee.” She left that to the women she hired. She remained, as the miner told me, “an Oriental mystery … givin’ up no more than a goggle of that silky black-haired China cooch ’fore snappin’ her fingers, bringin’ down the curtain, and settin’ you to diggin’ in your pouch for more gold to buy another look.”

  Yes, women, or the lack of them, seemed to be on every man’s mind, including a lawyer named Reese Shipton.

  He was a drawling, golden-haired South Carolinian with a trimmed goatee, a white suit, and a sullen Negro slave named Dingus. After reading a law book, he had written the words Lawyer, Justice of the Peace on a shingle and hung it on a post in front of a tent on Washington Street. He said that business was good because lawyers made their living off arguments, and human beings were an argumentative species, so business would only get better in a city filling so fast with so many. In July alone, the U.S. Customs House had recorded the arrival of 3,614 souls, bringing the population to almost 6,000. More importantly, only 49 of the new arrivals were female, and their scarcity guaranteed that they would become a lucrative source of argument.

  As for religion, it appeared to play little part in the life of this place. I saw no steeples, although I listened to a preacher in Portsmouth Square call down hellfire on all who tempted the Lord’s anger. He did not proclaim heavenly displeasure at those of us who had been staring at women. Nor did he abjure against the sin of drunkenness, as common as women were scarce, as evidenced by a fellow who staggered up to him, deposited a bellyful of beery vomit at his feet, and staggered away. No. Greed was this preacher’s great evil … and this city’s great engine.

  Greed was everywhere, in every form and every fashion.

  So were rats, rats as big as cats, brazen rats scurrying and scuttling about in daylight and dark, rats from Boston and New York and South Carolina, and native rats, too. And many of these rats walked as upright as apes.

  Consider Big John Beam, dried and fresh-dressed after his encounter with Captain Trask. He stood at his sign-up table in Portsmouth Square, looking like the big-bellied king of rats, and gave Matt Dooling and Jacob Foote his pitch, after which he dropped a pouch of gold before them, a “bonus” for whoever signed and brought two more along.

  Seeing Foote waver, Matt Dooling said he was a fool to give up his share in the Sagamores. But Big Beam dangled another pouch of gold before his nose, telling him that he should have it when he brought four more men with him. This big scheming rat was happy to break our Boston company into pieces so that he could build his own in San Francisco. But Jacob Foote signed and promised to deliver.

  Beam then asked them to say honestly if there were women on the William Winter. A boatload of women, he said, “would make us all rich.”

  I drifted away from such base ambitions and wandered until I came upon the Brighton Bulls, all gathered around a miner who was saying that the biggest strikes were to the south, at a place called Sutter’s Creek.

  The chief Bull, Fat Jack Sawyer, said, “Then that’s where we should go.”

  I had already listened to a similar discussion between Samuel Hodges and two Spaniards in crisp, flat-brimmed hats. These Californios, as the original inhabitants were called, said that they had heard of great strikes in the north, near Mormon’s Bar.

  Hodges had thanked them in Spanish and asked if there were wagons to let in Sacramento, for that was where the William Winter would head.

  And in those two conversations, new seeds of dispute were sown.

  All that afternoon and into the evening, I observed members of our company lurching from saloons to gambling halls to peddlers’ shops, drunk with excitement and rotgut. I watched Sagamores skinned in street-side games of three-card monte. Even sober Attorney Tom Lyons dropped thirty dollars.

  I stopped on Kearny Street at a makeshift table—two boards on two barrels. The man behind the table wore a beaver hat, a fine cravat, and a paisley vest. I would have thought him a gambler until he tried to sell me a contraption made of wood and wire resembling a divining rod. He called it a gold finder.

  “Guaranteed to point down at the least little glimmer of yellow in the ground, or your money back, friend. Just sixteen dollars.”

  That amount, or rough multiples of it, seemed to be the cost for just about everything, perhaps because it was the value of an ounce of gold, give or take.

  The peddler tried to put his contraption into my hands while looking into my eyes with a kind of forlorn desperation. He had once been someone … somewhere. The vest and cravat said as much. But the stains on the vest and the rum blossoms on the face told another tale. Then his eyes widened at something behind me.

  A man was approaching, a walking bag of rags, a great mat of beard and hair. He smelled like a ship’s hold after the hatches have been battened and the vermin
smoked to death. Without a word, he smashed the peddler in the face. The peddler’s hat flew off. His head flew back. And his feet flew into the air. When he landed, his wide eyes had rolled back to some faraway place … Connecticut, perhaps.

  The puncher knelt and extracted a sack of gold dust from the peddler’s pocket. He measured out about an ounce and said, “Them things don’t work. This feller promised a refund, but he wouldn’t give it. So I’m takin’ it.” Then he disappeared into the crowd.

  I looked around to see if someone would detain this man. Only one miner stopped and only to say, “Don’t trouble yourself, mister.”

  I asked where the law was.

  “There’s a sheriff. The Spaniards call him the alcalde, but he does his best to keep out of trouble. And a few judges who spend most of their time drinkin’ with the lawyers. Truth is, the only real law between here and Missouri is Miner’s Law, and by Miner’s Law, that peddler got what was comin’ to him. He was sellin’ bum goods.”

  Thus ended my introduction to San Francisco and my first dispatch from California. I folded the sheets, stood, and was struck by the ethereal evening light, the glimmer of thousands of lanterns filtering up through the tops of the canvas tents, like votaries to the God of Gold.

  * * *

  IF THAT GOD WAS looking down just then, he saw a gang bursting into Portsmouth Square from the Clay Street corner: five men—an American, a Mexican, and three Chinese—chasing our Negro cook, Pompey, and a fast-moving Irishman whose fast-talking seemed to have failed him.

  As they raced toward me, Pompey slipped in a puddle of beery vomit, flew into the air, and landed on his back with an ugly splash.

  Michael Flynn stopped, looked over his shoulder, and shouted, “Get up!”

  One of the Chinese was swinging a weapon over his head. It looked like a threshing tool, two long sticks held together by a chain.

  Flynn glanced at me, and as quick as the glance, he grabbed a pistol from my belt and waved it in the air.

  That stopped his pursuers in their tracks, and passersby turned to watch, not because they might intervene but because here was a new form of entertainment.

  Flynn told me, “Pull the other one.”

  “The other what?”

  “The other gun. In your belt. Pull it.”

  “It’s not loaded,” I said from the corner of my mouth.

  “No need to shoot it. Just aim it. Aim it at the Chink with the sticks.”

  As my hand went to the belt, the white man and the Mexican pulled their guns, too. Hammers clicked and cylinders clacked. Lines were drawn in dust and drunken puke.

  I pulled the pistol out and pointed it in the general direction of the Chinese.

  The white man put his pistol to Pompey’s head and said, “Stand up, nigger.”

  Pompey did as he was told, professing his innocence all the way.

  “You ain’t innocent if you run with that Mick,” said the white man.

  Flynn pulled back the hammer on my pistol. “Just let my friend step away, and we’ll all be friends.”

  “We’re friends now, Mick. ’Cept friends don’t cheat friends.”

  The Mexican, shorter, darker, with a blanket over his shoulder, took two steps up to me and pointed his pistol right at my face. “I am nobody’s friend, señor.”

  Flynn said, “Don’t let him scare you, Jamie.”

  There was advice offered too little too late.

  “Just make sure you shoot him first,” Flynn added, “not them ignorant Chinks.”

  “Iggorant? I no iggorant!” said the Chinaman. “You thief!”

  “You cheat Keen-Ho,” said the white man. “You cheat Miss Ah-Toy herself.”

  The Chinaman said, “Twenty-four dollar! You gimme twenty-four dollar!” He wore baggy trousers and a long plaited queue down his back. I had heard these Chinamen referred to as “Celestials,” since they hailed from what was called the Celestial Empire, and they appeared so other-worldly on these dirty streets that it was as if they had come from some outpost in the heavens. But Keen-Ho Chow was worldly enough to know the value of an ounce and a half of gold.

  While keeping an eye—and a pistol—on the Mexican, I said to Flynn, “You owe these men money? Because of a whore?”

  “No whore,” said the Chinaman. “Courtesan. Too good for him. And he cheat her. So no touch-ee for him. And no do-ee. Never do-ee.”

  The white man said, “If you cheat the Chinks at Ah-Toy’s, you cheat the man who sells ’em the whiskey they sell to you. That’s me. And you cheat the Mexican who sells ’em tortillas. That’s him.”

  The Mexican grinned, as if he would consider it a pleasure to shoot me to pieces.

  I did not grin back. I knew what whiskey was. I did not know what a tortilla was. Perhaps it was Mexican slang for what Ah-Toy was selling.

  Flynn said, “I admit to spendin’ more than I come with. Some temptin’ games of chance around here. But—”

  “No sad stories.” The white man pointed his pistol at Flynn. “Give over an ounce and a half, or twenty-four dollars in Yankee coin. Otherwise, it’s Miner’s Law that—”

  “If I owe anything,” said Flynn, “it’s half an ounce. And if I give anything, I want to go back, ’cause I never got to touch her.”

  “Look-ee one ounce,” said Keen-Ho. “Touch-ee one ounce plus one half. You pay one look-ee. You get one look-ee. You try sneak touch-ee, you pay again all over.”

  “Why, you old swindler,” said Flynn. “I’ll see you hang.”

  I feared that we might all hang—those of us who were left—if someone started shooting, so I lowered my gun.

  Flynn said, “What are you doing?”

  “What civilized men do. Negotiating.” I gave the Mexican a nod, but he did not lower his pistol. Then I said to the taller one, “If my friend gives you half an ounce and doesn’t demand the touch-ee, can we all be on our way?”

  “I ain’t doin’ it,” said Flynn. “Besides, I got no more to give.”

  “Yeah,” said Pompey. “Lost it all bettin’ on the game with the wheel. So he borrowed my money to get a look at that Ah-Toy. I was next in line when he come stumblin’ out the tent shoutin’ for me to run.”

  Flynn shrugged, as if to say he was a weak man and the temptations were strong.

  The white man shook his head. “Can’t let boys be sneakin’ free touch-ees, or the next thing we know, they’ll be sneakin’ free drinks.”

  I swallowed the dryness in my mouth and offered a compromise: I would pay eight dollars, and Flynn would walk away, or I would pay twenty, and Pompey would get his look-ee.

  All around us, drinkers and gamblers and walkers were watching, including a few familiar faces from our own company. The sight of them gave me an idea.

  “It’s a good deal,” I said. “But on the other side of the square, there’s a man from Boston who’s mad at the world. He’d love to use his new gun on something other than a wooden target. He’s a friend of mine. Next to him is a man who’s nobody’s friend but can shoot the eye out of a needle and wouldn’t hesitate to shoot yours, just for sport.”

  The white man looked over his shoulder at Christopher Harding and Deering Sloate.

  I raised a finger in Harding’s direction, and he tipped his hat. Sloate put his hand on his pistol, as if anticipating a bit of fun.

  The white man said, “Bostoños, eh?”

  “Hard bargainers,” I said. “But fair.”

  And we made the deal. I delivered twenty dollars from my pouch. Keen-Ho took it and went away grumbling in Chinese, followed by the white man and the Mexican.

  As Pompey broke into a grin of pure reprieve, Flynn gushed out congratulations for a man who could so skillfully talk his friends out of trouble.

  I suggested that it was my money and the danger of a Boston crossfire that proved more persuasive than my wit. I added that while Pompey could go back and get his reward, the now-penniless Michael Flynn would do well to return with me to the ship.

 
This Flynn counted a fine idea. So he gave back my pistol and got to talking. He talked all the way to the post office, extolling my skills as a negotiator, complimenting me on my willingness to back up my talk with threats, telling me I might make a good banker, one who carried a pouch filled with ten-dollar Gold Eagles to loan out on the spot.

  At the post office, he stood beside me in a long line of homesick miners waiting to send letters that would assure loved ones far away that their Gold Rush adventure continued, even if it didn’t. I pulled out my coin pouch and paid the outrageous sum of ten dollars to post my dispatch and a single letter to Janiva. Then we made our way down to the water, where our longboat was arriving with Sean Kearns at the tiller.

  Doc Beal stood aloof from a gang of waiting Sagamores, observing various stages of inebriation as if they were stages in the process of infection or healing.

  Selwin Gore and Hiram Wilson, the schoolmasters, appeared as drunk as upright men ever had. Scrawny Selwin had a wet stain at his crotch. Wilson was bawling a saloon song: “What was your name in the States? Was it Thompson or Johnson or Bates?”

  As soon as the boat bumped against the pilings of Long Wharf, about a dozen of us scrambled in, stumbled in, or fell in over the side.

  Wilson was so drunk that he almost missed the boat. But he kept singing: “Did you try to abscond with a beautiful blonde?”

  Doc Beal grabbed Wilson by the belt and pulled him aboard. “You won’t be singing in the morning.”

  Wilson grinned and kept up: “Such minor offenses we tolerate!”

  Kearns looked into the shadows and said, “All right, push off.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Where’s Flynn?”

  Kearns called out his name … but no answer.

  I said, “He was right behind me.”

  “He ain’t now,” said Kearns.

  Michael Flynn had disappeared into the darkness.

  Wilson groaned, “Oh, what was your name in the States?” Then he passed out.