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

by William Martin

  Cletis laughed. “Now we got two fellers wantin’ the same pretty Chinese girl.”

  She did not know what we were saying, but she accepted the candy, which she handed to her brother. Then she took the box and held it forward.

  Chin translated as she spoke: “My sister say she make for special times. Maodan.”

  Flynn looked into the box and said, “Eggs! Hard boiled?”

  “Pickled special egg,” said Chin. “Maodan.”

  Flynn reached for one and Mei-Ling slapped his hand.

  “First one go for man who speak for us,” said Chin.

  Mei-Ling now held the box to me. “Maodan. Good.” She nodded and made a gesture as if to have me take an egg.

  I lifted one from the box, looked at Chin, who gestured for his sister to help me. She took the egg and, with a dainty touch, removed its top. I expected to see white, but instead, I saw a beak, and bulbous, blackened eyes, and the little pea-sized brain of a cooked embryo.

  Flynn said, “Now that’s what I call hard boiled.”

  “Feathered egg,” said Chin. “Great delicacy.”

  My face must have turned gray at the prospect of eating it.

  Cletis whispered, “You turn down their fancy food, and all the good you done speakin’ up for them won’t mean a damn thing. You’ll never get to touch them little titties.”

  Chin said to Cletis, “That never happen.”

  “Certainly not by Harvard,” said Flynn.

  Chin aimed a dagger-eye at Flynn, too.

  But Mei-Ling continued to smile and nodded for me to eat.

  So I took the egg, then she raised her finger to stop me. I thought I had been saved from my fate. But no. She took a pinch of salt from the box, then a pinch of pepper, then a dash of something red from a bottle. Then she made a drinking motion.

  “Down the hatch, Jamie,” said Flynn.

  I raised the egg in a toast to the Chinese below. Then I brought it to my lips. If I could have held my nose, I would have. But I closed my eyes, and down it went. I refused to gag. Even when the feathers tickled the back of my throat and the beak scratched the roof of my mouth. I concentrated on the salt and pepper masking the taste of cartilage, bone, and cooked organs. I swallowed, breathed hard, held it down, and was done.

  Mei-Ling smiled and nodded. Good, no?

  I took another deep breath and said, “Delicious.”

  Cletis grinned. “Surest way to a man’s heart is through his belly.”

  “Delicious,” said Chin. “And good for man who spend time in fuck tent.”

  Flynn said, “You mean eatin’ them little cooked chicks’ll make you stiff?”

  Chin nodded.

  “In that case.” Flynn grabbed the other egg and sucked it down, much to my relief and his distress.

  Mei-Ling did not stay. At a look from her brother, she bowed her head and scurried back down the bank.

  Wei Chin picked up the two sacks and said, “Inside? We talk? We talk inside?”

  So into the cabin we went. I took a swallow of tea to wash out my mouth. Flynn threw back a shot of whiskey.

  Chin dropped the sacks onto the table. “I pay you to watch this.”

  “What is it?” asked Cletis.

  “From the way it thumps,” said Flynn, “I think it’s gold.”

  “Our gold,” said Chin. “Chinee gold from piles white men leave. Sixty pound in two bag. You keep safe. Bury with yours, under big rock.”

  “How do you know where we bury our gold?” asked Cletis.

  “I look. I think. And I think, if Miner Council come, they maybe try take our gold. Like they do to Frenchmens at Mormon Bar. If they give us five minutes to go, how we save our gold?”

  “By payin’ whatever the tax is,” said Cletis.

  “No pay. No pay tax. No pay ’less you pay,” answered Chin. “Or him.” Chin jerked a thumb toward Flynn. “He foreign, too.”

  “Got a point there.” Flynn burped. “Damn feathers.” He tapped his chest to coax another burp, then said, “If we bury their gold, we charge five percent.”

  “Five percent? You rob me,” said Chin.

  Cletis shook his head, “Don’t matter. We ain’t doin’ it. I don’t want any more trouble than what you Chinee boys brought on us yesterday. If not for them gals comin’ in, we’d have been in a fight for fair. Nope. This is dangerous damn business. So we all need to agree. We need to be anonymous.”

  “Unanimous,” I said.

  “That too.” Cletis grabbed his shovel and headed for the door. “So the answer is no. I ain’t stickin’ my neck out again. I ain’t buryin’ Chinese gold.”

  Chin did not wait for us to say more. He threw the sacks over his shoulder and stalked back down the bank.

  Flynn said, “I knew they was sittin’ on somethin’ rich.”

  “We should protect his gold,” I said. “Put it with ours under Big Skull Rock.”

  “And if somethin’ should happen,” said Flynn, “like the Chinks get driven out so fast that they can’t come get it, well, we’d just have to hold it, and invest it, and—”

  “That’s not why we’d hold it.”

  “Why then?”

  “It’s the right thing to do. If you don’t know that, why did you came back?”

  “I came back for gold, Jamie. I came back for a river of gold flowin’ through this promised land of California. I came back for gold and I mean to get it, however I can.”

  In the days that followed, the passions of the men dissipated between the legs of Big Beam’s women. Moreover, the mining was good, the Chinese were docile, and Hodges seemed to have delayed his plan to expel foreigners. But what were the men of the Triple MW up to? James Spencer decided to find out.

  Cletis counseled against it, but Spencer considered this his job. And he had four stitches for Doc Beal to remove. So he made sure that his pistol had fresh loads, sealed with clean grease. He told Flynn to stay behind, so as not to provoke Hodges by his presence. And he emptied his bladder, so as to be certain that he would not piss himself from fear.

  A few hours later, he returned and sat to write:

  The Mother Lode runs two hundred and fifty miles, north to south, in a wide band that begins as the ground rises from the Sacramento valley and butts at last against the granite wall of the Sierra. There is ample room for men to come and go and never see each other once they have separated.

  Thus, I had little expectation of encountering the Sagamores again, but I have the pleasure of reporting that I was wrong. They have united with others and created the Massachusetts and Missouri Mining and Water Company, establishing a claim comprised of many contiguous claims on the upper Miwok, where the river turns north and cuts between two hills formerly covered in tall pines.

  In my capacity as Yr. Ob’t Correspondent, I took the road that comes up from Broke Neck, runs past our claim, then carries across a long ridge, rising gradually, to a promontory from which you may look down on the entire Triple MW operation.

  I stopped there to take it in: three cabins and a longhouse; fresh stumps stubbling the landscape; new logs piled in pyramids atop the hills; muleskinners driving skids of logs along the bank; men in a saw pit cutting logs into boards; others digging a ditch beside the river or collecting dirt in wheelbarrows and delivering it to a sluice beside a flutter wheel; half a dozen women, as rock-hard as their men, washing clothes, stirring pots, sweeping dirt out of the cabins.

  Then I heard a ragged volley of pistols, four or five going off nearly at once. My eyes traced the rising plumes of white smoke to a target range where Deering Sloate, formerly of Dorchester, was giving pistol lessons to a handful of men. On the voyage, he had promised, “Every man a marksman.” Perhaps by this, he sought to make good.

  Then Christopher Harding startled me with his appearance from the nearby brush. He said that he had been watching me up the road, as it was his task to guard this approach to the camp. He is an old friend and a true gentleman, despite the bristle of weapons protrudi
ng from his belt, and he bid me follow him.

  As we descended, men stopped in their labor to give me a greeting or glance. Some appeared curious. Others glared with open hostility. But I presented a cordial expression, despite the four stitches under my right eye, which gave me a fiercer look than the readers of Boston might remember.

  Stopping first at the tent of Doctor George Beal, I sat while he quickly and painlessly removed the stitches, displaying all the skill we would expect from a graduate from Harvard’s Medical Annex.

  Then Samuel Hodges received me in the biggest cabin. He has seen the inside of many a Boston boardroom and knows how to present himself. So he was sitting behind a table, with a roaring fire on the stone hearth and an American flag hanging over the mantel. But I did not approach him with the awe that he once inspired. Experience in this country has changed us both.

  He complimented my courage for riding into a camp where I have more than one antagonist.

  I said I did not count Doc Beal in that number and was thankful for his ministrations after my altercation with Moses Gaw, the Missouran now allied with Hodges.

  That alliance, announced Hodges, was soon to be affirmed, in that he was betrothed to Moses Gaw’s daughter. Yes, you disappointed ladies of Boston, Samuel Hodges intends to take a California wife, a young but plain woman named Hannah Gaw, who will presumably mother his two daughters when Hodges sends for them at last.

  He explained that his alliance with the Missourans had strengthened all of them. “And joining with a woman in holy matrimony strengthens any man. That is why we have partnered with family men. They are already strong, reliable, and responsible and seek to settle the land, not merely exploit it.”

  Was that why they were cutting so many trees, stacking logs, sawing lumber, gathering rocks, piling dirt, and digging a long ditch beside the river, I asked.

  “We plan to divert the Miwok and control it,” he said. “As the Lord has given us dominion over the birds and the beasts, he wishes us to have dominion over the land and the flow of the rivers.”

  Hodges explained that soon, they would dam half the river and run the rest through a wooden flume controlled with a sluice gate. And for what purpose, this massive effort of engineering and labor? Why, for gold, of course. To expose the riverbed for mining, to generate a strong, continuous flow to run pumps that would keep the bed dry, and to drive flutter wheels for washing the gravel. The dam would also create an upstream pond from which to sell water to the dry diggings at Rainbow Gulch. It was a measure of how seriously they took this work that they were doing it in March, when the river was far more difficult to control than in August.

  I suggested that all this might cause resentment downstream.

  Hodges said, “The law favors us. I won’t let downstreamers stand in the way of progress. The man who builds a textile mill cannot bow to the woman who runs a loom in her parlor. The corporation that lays iron rails cannot bow to the whims of he who makes wagon wheels. I’ve told you before, we are remaking the earth here, not just digging for gold.”

  I asked if he was also hoping to remake our society with his promise to implement a foreign miner’s tax.

  He gave a sage nod as if to signal how much thought he had given to this matter. “We will be informing the foreigners soon, giving them the chance to leave and avoid paying. But we will implement the tax only when we receive word of its official passage from the assembly in San Jose.”

  Moses Gaw had joined us by now and said, “In the long run, the law will benefit us. If it doesn’t, we’ll change it.”

  Hodges added, “Those who do not pay will be treated like the French at Mormon Bar.”

  “America for Americans. That’s our motto,” said Moses Gaw.

  Hodges gave another nod, as if to show his approval of such comments, even if he found them to be no more than a film on the surface of his own deep lake of thought. He said, “Tell them in Boston that men who have known disappointment, defeat, and despair have rallied around us and our vision.”

  My response to my old mentor was that he had become a dangerous man. If this discomfits any who knew and loved him in Boston, I am sorry. But his answer was characteristic of the man I now knew. He told me that if I was not prepared to be dangerous, I should go back to Boston, “where you can believe what you want at ease, because your beliefs will never be tested.”

  Yr. Ob’t Correspondent

  The Argonaut

  March 1, 1849

  Before the Mail

  I allowed my pardners to read my dispatch when we broke off work at midday. Our lunch was beans and coffee and the prose of James Spencer, which I flatter myself had a kind of flow and rhythm not unlike the wheel turning in the river.

  But nothing that Flynn or Cletis read made them happy.

  Cletis said, “They’re plannin’ to take our water.”

  “Can’t take it all,” I said. “The whole district will rebel.”

  “If they clear out the Chinks and Greasers at the same time as they’re takin’ the water, it might be enough to keep the boys happy.”

  “Oldest trick in the book, that,” added Flynn. “Offer a little with one hand while takin’ a lot with the other.”

  “Well, boys, I been thinkin’”—Cletis stood—“gold veins go dry as fast as youth goes by, and our color’s gettin’ thin. May be time to pull up stakes.”

  “Pull up stakes?” said Flynn. “On a payin’ claim?”

  Cletis spat and went down the bank. “Can’t stay here forever.”

  Flynn and I sat in the midday sun and watched the wheel, thumping and turning, thumping and turning, as Cletis took to shoveling.

  Flynn said, “I think the old boy’s losin’ his nerve.”

  I did not answer, perhaps because I was beginning to wonder if pulling up stakes might not be the best course. Was water really worth a fight? Was the dwindling supply of gold? Were the Chinese, who would have to learn to fend for themselves?

  Flynn must have sensed my thoughts. He was good at reading people. He said, “You know, Jamie, Hodges is right.”

  “About what?”

  “About gettin’ dangerous, or goin’ home.”

  Flynn was right, too. I had come to write about this world, but I could not stand aside while others struggled to create a society. Still, I was no fool.

  I said, “No matter how dangerous we are, Hodges has twenty men or more. Those are bad odds.”

  “Jamie, me lad, odds don’t matter to me one damn bit.” Flynn stood and brushed the dust from the back of his breeches. “If they did, I’d be back in Galway, hoein’ spuds. But all me life, I had men tellin’ me I couldn’t do this or couldn’t say that and best keep me place, no matter who said what to me. It’s why I come to California. Any man can get a piece if luck favors him here, no matter where he come from and no matter how many stripes he has on his back. And I won’t let any one man take that away from me … or any twenty.”

  “So if Hodges takes the water, you’ll fight?”

  “If I have to. But I been learnin’ from you, Jamie. You always think before you fight. It’s a fine trait. So”—Flynn tapped his head—“I been doin’ my share of thinkin’.”

  “Thinking can be dangerous, too,” I said.

  “Especially if you do it right.” Flynn disappeared behind the cabin. A few minutes later, he was back, leading our two horses. “Let’s go for a ramble.”

  * * *

  WE HEADED ACROSS THE roadless hills, traveling south by southwest, studying the terrain, marking the places where the slope would be strong and give weight to water, noting down the places where we would need a wheel, perhaps, to move it along, or a wooden sluice to guide it all the way to Rainbow Gulch.

  About halfway there, Flynn said, “I wish we’d brought Chin. He might see things we don’t.”

  “He’d see how hard it is to dig a trench six miles.”

  “That’s for fuckin’ sure,” said Flynn, “but if we make deals in Rainbow Gulch and get them
boys water before Hodges can, we’ll have standin’ amongst them when Hodges steals our flow.”

  From what I had seen, miners sided with the men who made it easy for them to mine. And if the Triple MW sluice reached Rainbow Gulch a few weeks after ours, with a better flow at a better price per miner’s inch (the measure of water hereabouts), the men of Rainbow Gulch would shift their allegiance to Hodges as easily as they would shift their attention from an old hag to a young beauty. But like two quixotic knights we rode on, seeking salvation in sharp thinking and square dealing with men whose only goal was to wash dirt.

  At length, we came to the little graveyard where Hiram Wilson would sleep until the Second Coming. We stopped and looked down on Rainbow Gulch, bathed now in the high, hopeful spring sunshine. Hundreds of miners worked the claims at the bottom and along the gulch. But they would not be working for long, for the water was already drying up.

  Some were anticipating this. Half a dozen wagons were rolling west out of the ravine. And over on the plateau on the south side of the gulch, two men were busy with shovels, but they were not mining. They were planting. It looked as if they were planting grapevines.

  Flynn said, “Do you reckon they got a Miner’s Council here?”

  “We can ask Scrawny Selwin, if he isn’t dead yet.” I spurred my horse, but Flynn remained, staring out across the ravine. I stopped and asked him what he was doing.

  He said, “Doin’ like Chin. Lookin’. Thinkin’. Wonderin’.”

  “Wondering what?”

  “Why there’s so much gold here, so far from any runnin’ river. Where did it come from? Another river, maybe? A river that dried up?”

  “We could ask Chin, if he wasn’t still angry that we wouldn’t bury the Chinese gold with our own.”

  “If that’s all it takes for him to give us that sharp Chinese eye, then we should hold his gold for nothin’.”

  “And give it back to him when he asks.”

  “My only thought,” said Flynn. “Bury it. Bury it deep. Bury it safe. Just like our own.”