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

by William Martin

  As the longboat slipped through the fog, I looked up at the light dancing above all those glowing tents and wondered if I would ever see Flynn again.

  As I undressed in my cabin a short time later, I felt for my coin pouch and knew that I would never see him again … or my coin pouch.

  The Irish son of a bitch.

  August 3, 1849

  Rebellion

  I slept fitfully. I had grown used to the rhythmic rocking of a ship under sail, but we were now at anchor. So the William Winter rode up slowly, then down, then up, then slowly down, down a bit more, then … a movement so intermittent and unpredictable that it vexed rather than soothed.

  Add to that my anger at Michael Flynn. I had resolved before falling asleep that I would see him again. I would go through the town and find him before he boarded the boat for Sacramento with all the money I had.

  And Hiram Wilson’s damned song kept running through my head. So what was my name in the States?

  But each time one of these annoyances woke me, I sensed that something more was amiss. My instincts were no better than any man’s. However, the sighs and groans of a ship at anchor were augmented by other sounds … the creaking of grates, the clanking of oarlocks, the murmur of voices, the bumps, thumps, and thuds of small boats ferrying men ashore or bringing them back.

  Then louder voices roused me from my penumbra: Sloate was saying something, and Hodges was answering, “Goddamn them. Goddamn them all.”

  I pulled out the watch that Flynn had the decency not to steal and held it to the light slipping through the door slats: ten past six. I tugged on my breeches and boots, tucked in the flannel shirt that I had slept in, and stepped into the saloon.

  Hodges loomed before me, looking uncharacteristically unmade, half-dressed, hair askew, nightshirt tucked into his trousers, stubble sprouting on his chin. He said, “We’ve been sleeping through rebellion, James. Arm yourself.” He reached into his cabin and pulled out a well-oiled fowling piece.

  * * *

  THE SKY WAS BRIGHTENING but the fog pressed upon us like cotton batting on a wound.

  The cargo grate lay open, and a pallet of barrels, boxes, and hogsheads hung in the air. Three Willis men were holding a line that suspended it above a raft tethered to the side. Charles Collins was ordering that they lower away “and be quick about it.”

  Hodges blasted his gun into the air, startling the men enough that they let the line slip and the pallet dropped onto the raft, just as Collins wanted.

  Hodges shouted at Collins, “Stop! Stop now, or Sloate will put a hole in you.”

  “Belay that.” Captain Trask appeared on the quarterdeck as a splatter of spent birdshot rained down.

  Did Willis choose this moment, after the company had enjoyed a night in San Francisco, knowing that drunken stupor would have replaced sleep? Or did he think that the ordinary comings and goings on the ship would mask sounds of deceit? And was Trask part of it, a merchant captain ready to work with the budding San Francisco trading house? Or was he simply trying to maintain order? He said, “Take your disputes ashore or I’ll turn the swivel on you.”

  Hodges looked at Collins. “Where’s Willis?”

  “Ashore,” said Collins, “guarding supplies and waiting for you.”

  Hodges spun back to the captain. “Who opened this hold?”

  “Look to your own,” said Trask.

  “It was Jacob Foote,” said Sloate.

  “Foote was loyal to us.” Hodges seemed more perplexed than angry. “We counted on him to build sluices. We’ll need sluices.”

  “San Francisco needs carpenters,” said Collins, “and Big John Beam pays in gold.”

  Hodges goddamned Collins and Big Beam and appeared ready to goddamn everyone on the ship.

  “When Foote and his friends opened the hold and took their supplies,” said Collins, “they opened Pandora’s Box.”

  “Willis is waiting for me, is he? Waiting for what?” asked Hodges.

  “To talk.”

  “If I go ashore, I’ll do more than talk.”

  Attorney Tom Lyons asked the captain, “Why didn’t your watch stop this?”

  “Reduced watch in liberty port,” said Trask. “Only two on duty, plus your carpenters, supposedly protecting your goods. They tied up one sailor. The other one deserted with them. My second mate, Mr. Kearns.”

  “Goddamn them,” said Hodges.

  “I’ll see that God gets the opportunity,” answered Trask. “Kearns is a dead man.”

  More Sagamores were coming on deck now. The Brighton Bulls emerged from the forward companionway. Selwin Gore and Wilson and several others were stumbling up amidships, rubbing eyes, holding heads, blinking stupidly in the brightening fog.

  Fat Jack Sawyer came forward and said, “We breakin’ apart, Hodges?”

  “No, goddamn it. We’ll put a stop to this and be on our way.”

  “To where?”

  “The gold fields, you goddamn fool.” Hodges said it as if he did not have time for travel planning when there was rebellion to put down. He looked around at the rest of us and said, “I’ll brook no opposition, here or ashore.”

  “Well, sir”—Fat Jack put himself in front of Hodges—“there’s fifteen rivers up in them mountains, west-runnin’ rivers drainin’ along a line that’s two hundred and fifty miles long, north to south. A lot of places for diggin’. So I’m askin’ you again, which way is this ship goin’? North or south?”

  “The big strikes are north,” said Hodges. “I have it on good authority.”

  The conflict had germinated overnight and was already bursting from the soil.

  Sawyer said, “We heard the big strikes are in the south. We seen gold nuggets from a place called Sutter’s Creek. And seein’ the truth is better authority than hearin’ it.”

  “We’ll talk about this later,” said Hodges, “after I save your goods.”

  “Mine ain’t been stole,” said one of the other Bulls. “And I’ll be fucked if they are.” He shoved two Sagamores aside and made for the hold. “I’m takin’ what’s mine and headin’ south.”

  “Like hell, you are,” said Hodges.

  At the same moment, Hiram Wilson got in front of the Bull. “I’m loyal to Sam Hodges, and I say you go no farther.”

  This Brookline schoolmaster had been a companionable shipmate. The sun had browned his Boston-sallow skin. The sea air and exercise had invigorated him, which had caused him to grow more assertive. He had also drunk so much the night before that he was still drunk, which enhanced his assertiveness but made him weak-legged as well.

  All it took was a shove and Wilson went stumbling backward, tripped on the hatch coaming, and fell into the hold.

  Scrawny Selwin, standing nearby, took an ill-advised swing, missed, and spun halfway around. Fat Jack grabbed his collar and flung him into half a dozen Hodges men.

  Hodges turned to Sloate. “Shoot that bastard.”

  But Pompey skulled Sloate with a belaying pin. “You heard the cap’n. No more shootin’.”

  Then another fist flew. It did not matter from whom, because everything was coming suddenly and completely undone. Another body tumbled into the hold. Another man went overboard. Everyone began to shout.

  Christopher Harding took a swing at Fat Jack that missed and bounced off the side of Matt Dooling’s head, which enraged the blacksmith, who grabbed Christopher and threw him overboard.

  Pompey retreated to the quarterdeck, where he and the captain watched the riot erupt among the Hodges men and Willis men and Brighton Bulls and independents, all smashing, punching, pushing, falling into the hold, flying overboard, grappling for goods and …

  … our brave New England experiment came to a swift and ignominious end.

  * * *

  HAD THIS RIOT HAPPENED where there was no Trask or Doctor Beal to exert physical or moral authority, the men might be fighting still. But those two combined to restore order and bring the company to a place where negotiation replaced
fisticuffs, cold words supplanted shouts and curses. Trask used musket fire. The doctor spoke common sense.

  As the fog burned off, an uneasy peace settled onto the William Winter. Men were angry. They were sullen. They were bruised inside and out. But none were for lingering.

  The Brighton Bulls demanded their shares. They would go on their own.

  Matt Dooling and some of the others formed small groups for the same purpose.

  Collins debarked with the pallet of goods and promised to send back for more.

  Hodges said that they would get nothing more until Willis returned to negotiate. Though he tried to project authority, he seemed stunned, like a man struck on the head by a flowerpot falling from a second-story sill. So he pulled around him his loyalists—Sloate, the soaking Christopher Harding, Attorney Tom Lyons, and the rest—sat on the forward deck, and, most uncharacteristically, listened. But he listened with little or no comment. He did not even notice when I left the ship.

  * * *

  I WALKED THE WHARVES where Sacramento-bound schooners took on passengers and freight. I climbed the hill to the Parker House and watched the men watching the woman above the bar. I watched the table where they played the game with the spinning wheel. I watched a gambler dressed like a New York actor dealing cards to dirty miners. But I spied no Michael Flynn. So I went to Ah-Toy’s and asked Keen-Ho if the Irishman had come back. Keen-Ho may have laughed or may have scoffed. But I was sure by then that Flynn and my money were gone, probably on the first boat for Sacramento that morning.

  So I went back down the hill and out onto the new wharf at the foot of Washington Street. The planks and pilings, shipped from Oregon, smelled clean, with the fresh-cut tang of green wood. I inhaled and tried to drive San Francisco out of my nostrils, for on top of everything else, the stench of garbage, tide flat, and human waste was as thick as the fog.

  The beach and wharves, connected by a waterfront wagon rut called Montgomery Street, swarmed with boats, carts, and men, as they had swarmed the day before and probably every day since the Rush began. Pallets of goods rose, and barrels formed tight battle squares, and men stood guard around them or within them, and carts clattered up to them and loaded on cargo and went struggling and straining up the hills and down.

  The town was booming. But my spirits were not. I sat on a piling, disconsolate and confused, with my elbows on my knees and my chin in my hands and not a coin in my pocket, and I watched the cold fog pouring across the Bay.

  Around five o’clock, I noticed Hodges riding the incoming tide with Sloate and half a dozen others. As soon as the longboat struck the shore between two of the wharves, he bounded over the bow and stalked up to a supply pen on Montgomery Street, where Willis had pitched a large tent. He and Willis exchanged a few sharp words in the open, then disappeared into the tent.

  My hope rose that they might settle their differences. Being a good distance away, I could not hear what they said. But after a few minutes, they emerged and Hodges stalked back to the longboat, shouting over his shoulder, “This is not the end of it.”

  Willis shouted back, “We will have the rest of our goods and have them now! And that will be the end of it.” Then he ordered half a dozen men to seize the longboat.

  Hodges spun back. “By God, you won’t touch that boat.”

  “We’ll fill it and bring it back,” said Willis.

  A man named Morrison, a logger from Berkshire County who carried an ax the way other men carried pistols, said, “We’ll take what’s ours by right.” Then, holding the ax at his side, he stepped toward the boat.

  What happened next was shocking, sudden, yet somehow appropriate in this brutal new world. As Morrison hefted his ax, I could not tell if he was preparing to place it on his shoulder or deliver it directly into Hodges’s head. But a plume of white smoke jetted out of Sloate’s gun, and its report reached me half a second later.

  Morrison staggered, looked down at a hole in his side, then dropped to his knees.

  The waterfront went silent. Everything between the wharves stopped, carpenters in mid-hammer, stevedores in mid-lift, drummers in mid-bark.

  Hodges shouted, “You all saw that. Self-defense. He was comin’ at us.”

  Collins rushed forward as Morrison fell facedown in the mud.

  Hodges leaped into the longboat. Sloate, still holding the pistol, climbed in after.

  “The law will be coming for you!” cried Willis.

  “There’s no law here but this—” Sloate holstered his pistol.

  And a familiar voice whispered in my ear, “Someday, somebody’ll have to kill that Sloate. Hodges, too.”

  I turned and looked into Michael Flynn’s face. “You? You Irish son of a bitch.”

  “Did you know that every company started in the East falls apart in California?”

  “I don’t give a damn. You stole my money.”

  “You give a damn. You’re sittin’ here askin’ yourself what to do, now that all your fine Yankee friends is showin’ themselves to be no better than anybody else.”

  Down at the water’s edge, Morrison was wailing in pain. Collins and three others picked him up and carried him to the tent.

  I said it again. “You stole my money. I did you a favor, and you stole my money.”

  Flynn pulled my purse from his pocket and dangled it in front of my nose. “I borrowed it.” Then he dropped it into my hand. “It’s heavier than it was. I pay interest.”

  I looked into the pouch: gold dust, nuggets, Golden Eagles. “How did you get this?”

  “By doin’ what everyone does in California, playin’ the great game of chance.”

  “Chance?”

  Flynn turned to the sound of Morrison’s agony. “That feller’s gut shot. But there’s a chance that he’ll live, just like there’s a chance that Willis gets rich in San Francisco, and a chance that minin’ pays off for all the fellers headin’ for the hills. I took a chance last night that I could hold my own when I took your coin pouch to a card table.”

  “You gambled my money?”

  “And won. Took me all night, but I won yours and mine and then some. Made enough to get more than a look-ee. Even made enough for two of these.” He handed me a piece of paper on which was printed: SAN FRANCISCO SCHOONER COMPANY, PASSAGE ON THE ANNE-MARIE, DEPARTING CLAY STREET WHARF FOR SACRAMENTO. And handwritten: $30. August 4, 1849, 6:30 AM. Flynn said the ticket was for me.

  “But I’m for Hodges.”

  “Then you’re a fool.” He snatched the ticket back. “Hodges is a beaten man. And beaten men goes one of two ways. Either they curl up and die, or they get mean and bitter. And he’s pretty mean to begin with.”

  I said that I owed it to my editor to see which way Hodges went.

  “Did you like how it went just now, then? Or how it went this mornin’, with all them fine Yankee gents havin’ their New England town meetin’ … San Francisco style?”

  Morrison’s wailing distracted us for a moment, but the rest of the world was already getting back to buying, selling, yelling, hammering, building, hauling.

  I said, “I thought we’d be different.”

  “You thought you’d be different.” Flynn repeated my words with a fine Irish sneer. “You Yankee boys think too damn much of yourselves. You’ve heard of the California and Boston Joint Stock and Minin’ Company, have you?”

  I had. They were mostly Harvard men. They had named their ship the Edward Everett, after the college president. He had even given them all Bibles when they sailed.

  “Best-equipped company yet,” said Flynn. “Sailed all the way up to Sacramento. Got off the ship and lasted a week. The whole company come apart like a rotten wheel.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I took one of them for a hundred and fifty last night. He said it was all his profit from when the company dissolved … his profit on a three-hundred-dollar investment.”

  “That’s only fifty percent.”

  “Not quite so good as what them ha
rpies was promisin’ yesterday, is it?”

  “It doesn’t matter. My job is to chronicle the Sagamores.”

  “But there ain’t no Sagamores now, just a bunch of squabblin’ Yanks who forgot all the high-flown sermons the minute they got here, just like I said they would … and got flogged for sayin’ it.”

  “But—”

  “Your fat-guts Boston editor don’t want stories like that. You need to get out on your own, James, and I need a pardner.”

  “Pardner? You mean you’ve jumped ship?”

  “The whole damn crew’s jumped, but for two … the Portagee steward and the nigger Pompey. So there’s nobody to sail that ship. So we’ll have a mean and bitter captain, too. So I’ll be on me way before he can run me down. And you need to be on your way before the law gets round to arrestin’ Hodges and Sloate for what we just seen. You don’t want to be stuck here, waitin’ to witness in some rump court while everyone else is off for the diggin’s.”

  I said nothing. I thought next to nothing. I did not know what to think.

  Flynn leaned against a piling and shoved his hands into his pockets. “Loyalty’s a fine thing, James, but a man needs somethin’ to strive for. He needs a goal, like.”

  “I can guess yours.”

  “An easy guess. To find a big strike and sift out every goddamn grain of gold there is. Then go back to Boston, pay me back rent so I get that daguerreotype of me mother, and buy that fuckin’ club of yours.”

  “And mine?”

  “A rich boy’s dream. To see life … lived large and rubbed raw. To see what you’ll never see again, once you settle into your Boston parlor with your pretty wife. What you want to see is up there”—he jerked a thumb toward the eastern hills—“up where the gold is, up where the stories are, stories to write down and make you famous.”

  I did not admit it, but he was right.

  “Your dream has its head in a cloud, James. Mine’s rock hard. Between the two of us, we could make a fine team. So”—he put the ticket into my breast pocket—“sleep on it. If you see the sense of what I’m sayin’, meet me at dawn. Just remember, travelin’ is for friends, and Hodges may act like he’s your father, but he ain’t your friend.”