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

by William Martin

  “An epidemic,” said Meg Miller. “Most were males in their twenties and thirties. Half came from New England.”

  “A lot from Massachusetts.” Peter pointed out three or four names. Then he saw Christopher Harding, age 26, Boston, Mass. Cholera. And he felt a chill. The past was reaching right off the page. He said, “That’s what a guy gets for killing an albatross.”

  “Albatross?” said Meg Miller.

  “Like the poem. Christopher Harding killed an albatross and was cursed.”

  Meg Miller gave him a long look, as if wondering how he knew this.

  But aside from Christopher Harding, there was no mention of any other Sagamore, no way to get beneath the surface of that daguerreotype or cross the bridge of time to James Spencer and the major players of 1849.

  So what next? Peter Fallon was on a fishing expedition. So he threw out a bit of bait. “A lot of these guys left journals or diaries, right?”

  “A literate generation, having their grand adventure. They called it ‘seeing the elephant.’ We actually have dozens of their journals.”

  “Back in the Arbella Club in Boston, there’s a portrait of a man named Thaddeus Spencer. He had a son who—”

  “So that’s why you’re here.”

  “What do you mean?” Peter made an innocent, wide-eyed face, but he could tell, from the way she folded her arms, that she saw right through him.

  “Big-time Boston dealer with a rep for finding things that lots of people are looking for? You don’t just wander in off the streets of San Francisco.”

  “Busted.”

  Kim Hally came through the room again, stopped to check something, gave them a sidelong glance, as if to ask her boss if she needed any help, then returned to the stacks.

  Meg Miller waited until she was gone, then she said, “If you’re trying to find the lost journal, remember, it’s ours. If it surfaces, the historical society lays claim to it.”

  “The family would be happy to find it and return it. So would I.”

  She pulled out the chair and sat next to him. “All right, how can I help you.”

  “How was the disappearance discovered?”

  “We received a grant to digitize a lot of the old journals, including the Spencer transcription, which came to us right after the earthquake. About nine months ago, we went to the box where it had been stored, and it was gone.”

  “And the last time it was seen?”

  “A woman named Maryanne Rogers doddered in here one day about a year ago and wanted to read it. This was a few days after the Proud Pilgrim had been uncovered in the landfill during excavations on Clay Street.”

  “What’s the Proud Pilgrim?”

  “A Gold Rush ship. It sank into the Bay, and the city was built over it.”

  Landfill burying history? Peter Fallon had been down this road before. He said, “So it disappeared after she saw it? Do you keep records of who looks at what material?”

  “Only for six weeks. I remember Mrs. Rogers because she was a big donor. But San Franciscans are protective of their privacy. Who reads what in any library—that’s a sensitive area.”

  “Do you remember anyone else? Any other names? Manion Sturgis?”

  “The wine guy?” She shook her head.

  “Johnson Barber, the lawyer? Or LJ Fallon, his assistant, who is also my son?”

  No and no.

  Here was one that Peter had been thinking a lot about: “Willie Ling?”

  “Wonton Willie, the Tong guy? Wasn’t he shot last night at the Mark Hopkins?”

  Peter nodded. “Why would Chinese tongs start shooting each other over this?”

  Meg Miller thought a bit, chewed her lip, stumped.

  The names Michael Kou and Jack Cutler got the same answer.

  He asked, “Did you ever read the document?”

  “Only the first chapter. There’s so much material here that—”

  Then he threw out a name. “Did a woman named Sarah Bliss ever ask for it?”

  “Bliss.… Bliss.…”

  “A great San Francisco name for a woman who looks like an old hippie and happens to be the heir to a nice chunk of the Spencer estate.”

  And that one worked. Meg Miller remembered the lady in the peasant skirt.

  Next stop, Sausalito.

  * * *

  PETER TOOK THE FERRY from Pier 33.

  Lots of folks heading home. Business people, shoppers, a few tourists, even a Chinese kid wearing a hoodie and carrying—yes—a small-wheeled Dahon folding bike. But … there are kids like that everywhere. And it was a nice way to commute, especially when your destination was the upscale town under the Golden Gate Bridge.

  Peter followed the Gate 5 Road along the waterfront to Waldo Point Harbor, then walked out onto the Liberty Dock, named for all the Liberty Ships built there during World War II. Now it was lined with places that ranged from center-entrance colonials on barges to converted railroad cars to ramshackle collections of this and that cadged from whatever was floating around.

  In the old days, all the houseboats could come and go under their own power. They took their water from hoses and got their sewage treatment courtesy of the twice-daily tide. Now water and sewage lines were permanent hookups. Nobody had engines. And the houseboats, known to their inhabitants as “floating homes,” formed a fine exhibit in the living museum of California funk.

  At the corner of the wharf, Peter saw the sign TREE HUGGER. As he expected, it was one of the more eclectic vessels, a ramshackle thing that looked like three or four other things all nailed and spliced and welded together.

  He had called ahead, so Sarah Bliss was waiting outside with her Giants cap pulled low, shielding her eyes from an outbreak of afternoon sun. She was reading National Geographic. She looked up, “It says here that we used to have grizzly bears, right along the shores of San Francisco Bay.”

  “Hence the beast on the state flag.” Peter looked around. “Nice neighborhood.”

  “Great scenery. Friendly people. We all keep keys under the doormats so neighbors can come in and borrow sugar or salt or rolling papers when we’re not home.” She waddled to the door. “Where’s the pretty lady?”

  “Doing her own thing.”

  “That’s good.” Sarah gestured for him to follow her. “That’s the way relationships last, when you let the lady do her own thing. Isn’t that right, Brother?”

  A voice from within said, “Oh, yeah, baby. Whatever you say.”

  “I didn’t know you had a brother,” said Peter.

  “I don’t.”

  Peter followed her into the cool interior, a single giant space, a multi-level collection of dining areas, sitting areas, and sleeping areas, with windows popped in here and there like cookie cutters hanging on the walls of a bakery.

  Everything had a kind of Dumpster chic about it … the 1950s kitchen set with the red vinyl seats, the coffee table made from an old cable spool, two recliners from a 1970s La-Z-Boy ad, posters of Che Guevara and Jimi Hendrix—Che on a red background, Jimi the centerpiece of a psychedelic pinwheel that was supposed to make the heavy drugs that killed him look mind-bendingly cool. And speaking of drugs, three marijuana plants thrived beneath a skylight.

  Sarah introduced her husband. She actually called him her “old man,” as if this was some kind of Sixties commune. But he really was old. His tie-dyed shirt covered a big belly, and his bushy beard and glasses made him look like Jerry Garcia, if Mr. Grateful Dead had been in a wheelchair, tethered to an oxygen tank, and angled so he could see out the open slider onto the boat channel.

  He turned the chair. “I’m Benson Bliss. But people call me ‘Brother,’ Brother B., for Brother Bliss, brother of the downtrodden man, the rising-up woman, and the nature-loving human.” Then he chuckled, as if he liked his own wordplay.

  And Peter knew already that he was going to like this guy.

  Sarah offered Peter a cup of tea. “Or something stronger?”

  Peter said, “I have a feelin
g that the tea is stronger.”

  “She makes a great marijuana tea,” said Brother B. “I drink it all the time now, but let the record show that I never once appeared high before a judge.”

  Sarah chuckled. “That you know of.”

  “We fought the good fight to keep the city for the people, not the developers, and to protect the California environment from here to the High Sierra.” Brother Bliss gestured to another photograph that Peter had missed: two men standing on a cliff above the Yosemite Valley: John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt.

  “America’s greatest naturalist and the conservation president. Aside from Lincoln, TR’s the only Republican I ever let in the house.” Brother B. gave Peter a scowl. “You’re not a Republican, are you?”

  “Unenrolled,” said Peter.

  “Even if he’s a Republican,” said Sarah, “he’s from Massachusetts, and you know what they call a Massachusetts Republican in Texas?”

  “What?”

  “A Democrat.”

  Sarah and Brother B. had a chuckle over that. Nothing like an old couple laughing together. They probably needed to entertain each other, considering that he saw no pictures of children around. No sons or daughters. No nieces or nephews.

  Peter said, “So you two have been fighting the good fight for a long time?”

  “Too long,” said Brother B. “I just wish my heart hadn’t given out. Congestive bullshit. That’s why I got ankles like baloney rolls.”

  Sarah jumped up and said, “Tea time.” A pot on the stove was staying hot. She went over and grabbed it and brought back three mugs. She poured for her husband and herself, then waved a cup at Peter. “You won’t regret it. I use a nice coconut oil to extract the THC from the leaves. I even add a little raw sugar.”

  “It makes me happy,” said Brother B., “and not much does these days.”

  What the hell, thought Peter. If he joined them, it might loosen them all up.

  And yeah, Sarah’s marijuana tea was delicious, even if Peter didn’t feel a thing after a cup.

  She refilled it and said, “You’re here because of that Gold Rush journal, right?”

  “The codicil is bullshit,” said Brother B. “Holding up everybody from getting their money is a cheap game.”

  Peter sipped the tea. “Whose game?”

  “Barber’s. And you’re helping him,” said Sarah. “Why?”

  “My son asked me.”

  “Good dad,” she said. “But who asked him?”

  Peter said, “Barber.”

  “So Barber asked your son to play his game and your son asked you,” said Sarah.

  “So you’re helping Barber to screw us,” added Brother B.

  Peter sipped some more tea. “Unh.… yeah. I … I…”

  “Have you asked yourself why?” asked Brother B.

  “Why what?” Peter felt his buzz growing buzzier, and the circularity of the conversation wasn’t helping. Maybe that tea was stronger than he thought.

  It didn’t seem to be bothering the old folks, though.

  Sarah said, “Why would a shithead like Barber, with a long list of nasty clients like big chem companies that make insecticides that kill bees and soft-drink companies that pump California groundwater in the middle of a drought, so they can bottle the water and sell it back to Californians at a thousand-percent profit, why would—”

  “Don’t forget the Chinese banks,” said Brother B.

  “Yeah, them, too,” answered Sarah. “Why would he want to reconstruct an old Gold Rush diary, Mr. Famous Boston Bookseller? Why? Answer me that.”

  “Wait … what?” said Peter. “Did you say Chinese banks?”

  “He damn sure did.”

  Brother B. said, “The banks are the tools of the Chinese government, and they’re funding Chinese companies that are on a commodity-buying spree all over the world.”

  “The Chinese are no fools,” said Sarah Bliss. “They know that if they buy the ground that holds the minerals, and leave them there, the minerals only rise in value.”

  “Like gold,” said Peter.

  “Gold, oil, iron, manganese, copper. They’re into everything.”

  Peter felt things getting away from him. He tried to pull them back. “All I know is that somebody stole the diary out of the California Historical Society, and you, Miss Sarah the Teamaker—”

  Sarah snickered. Her own tea was getting to her.

  “—you were maybe the last to see it. That makes me think you’re the one who stole it and doesn’t want anyone else to read it.”

  “You feelin’ a little buzz?” said Brother B.

  Peter nodded. He liked the buzz. And he liked that he felt safe with these two. It was the first time he’d felt safe outside of the hotel room since he got to San Francisco.

  “A little buzz is nice,” said Sarah.

  “At some point, it’s all we got,” said Brother B. “So why deny us? Why delay us with this journal business? I want that estate money so I can hire a few more lawyers to fight another good fight for weed against the Feds.”

  “A high goal,” said Peter, and they all laughed a lot harder than the joke warranted, as if any of them, straight, would dignify it as a joke.

  And the laughter must have put Sarah in a better mood because she went over to a messy, paper-piled desk in the corner and came back with an ancient notebook. She dropped it on the table in front of Peter. “Drink your tea, then read this. It’s the only part of James Spencer’s Gold Rush journal that I know a damned thing about. And I don’t care if it sends you off lookin’ for gold that isn’t there.”

  “You mean, this is the section that starts another gold rush?”

  “That’s bullshit. Geologists have been over every last square foot of the Mother Lode. There’s no more easy gold, no matter what Jack Cutler wants you to believe.”

  That name again, thought Peter, the rogue geologist.

  “No more getting rich quick.” Sarah gestured to the folder. “Read all about it.”

  Peter knew right away, even with a little buzz, that he was looking at the original article, in James Spencer’s own hand, written on rag bond, folio’d foolscap, in ink that splotched as Spencer wrote, with few misspellings or scratch-outs, without the filter of transcription or Microsoft Word, a real bridge into the past. So he took another sip of the tea and started reading.

  He still wasn’t sure what he was looking for, but wandering the hills with James Spencer was like exploring them with Wild Bill Donnelly. Peter would know what he was looking for when he found it.

  The entries for March 1850 spoke of calming tensions. Men moved up and down the Miwok, following strikes from below Broke Neck all the way upstream to the valley where the Miwok turned and the Triple MW was building a dam. Anti-foreign sentiments seemed to calm, too, especially when half a dozen Chileans packed up and left of their own accord. Now, only a few Mexicans were working west of town and, of course, the stubborn Wei Chin and his relatives, still squatting upstream of Broke Neck.

  By late March, the claims at Big Skull Rock were playing out. But the river flow was good. So Cletis bought into the plan for selling water to Rainbow Gulch, as it “might be worth more than gold.” Then the new government in San Jose issued a decree.…

  The Journal of James Spencer—Notebook #5

  March 27, 1850

  The New Law

  Today—beneath a cool blue sky—they brought the law to Big Skull Rock.

  They rode down the north bank, crossed the river by the first flutter wheel, climbed past the second flutter wheel and the new sluice, climbed all the way to the trench we were digging at the top of the hill.

  We had made deals at Rainbow Gulch. We had given Scrawny Selwin a commission on every miner he signed to buy Big Skull water. And the race was on. If Flynn believed that by bringing water to Rainbow Gulch, we could gain allies and avoid violence, I would try it. And Cletis, for the moment, was going along.

  I had followed a deer trail over the hills to spy on
the Triple MW camp. Even as one shovel gang was building the wing dam, another was digging two trenches, one southwest toward Rainbow Gulch, another due south in the direction of Broke Neck.

  I had no doubt that they had spied on us, too. They might even have heard us because we had used Flynn’s gunpowder to blow rocks out of our path, and the echoes had rolled like thunder up the valley and down.

  But our progress had been slow. Wei Chin, who saw this as a safe way to prospect, had overcome his anger and brought Little Ng along, too, all for a price. But as we dug, Chin would stop often to reconnoiter the route or puzzle over the presence of random gold flakes in some dry gulch. And Flynn would repeat his suspicion that there must be a lost river of gold somewhere nearby, an underground river, just flowing and flowing. And it would fall to me to urge the work forward.

  In college, I had read about the Roman aqueducts that delivered water across hundreds of miles. So I knew that in a slope of just one foot per mile, in a conduit three feet wide and three feet deep, we could create a velocity of seventy cubic feet of water per second. Even Cletis was impressed. But before we went too far, we needed to test our design.

  That was what we were doing when the men from the Miner’s Council came riding up the bank.

  Cletis and Chin had paced out eighth-of-a-mile increments along the trench. Little Ng, shirtless and shoeless, stood below, waiting for our signal to engage the second flutter wheel, which would lift water from the old sluice and drop it into the new one, which ran ten feet above the ground on skinny stilt legs, like a giant, wooden centipede. Flynn and I stood at the crest of the hill, well above Big Skull Rock, and waited to open the gates on the trough that would fill from the upper sluice. If we could raise water from the river, then start it running downhill with the requisite force, it would run all the way to Rainbow Gulch.

  Little Ng was playing his flute when the Council men approached. His sweet tune ended like the song of a dying bird, and he crouched, as if he could hide behind the wheel.

  The horses snorted and snuffled and came crunching over our tailing piles, the Gaw brothers in the lead, followed by Sloate and Attorney Tom Lyons. When they reached the top of the hill, they stopped with the sun behind them.