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

by William Martin

  Sam Brannan shouted, “We are duly authorized and will not be stopped!” Duly authorized by themselves, perhaps, but a dozen committee men raised their guns, and the Kenney men backed off. The Vigilantes were now the law of San Francisco.

  I said, “Sam, we don’t have to do this.”

  Brannan turned on me. “We damn well do. It’s set in stone. Tonight we take back our city.”

  There were others swirling around, too, dark men, thugs and growlers, the Sydney Ducks, threatening our committee men, shouting from the shadows, “We have your names!” “We know who you are!” “You hang our boy, Jenkins, we’ll find you out, and kill you, then burn down the fuckin’ city!”

  Brannan shouted into the darkness at them, “We’ll kill every last one of you sons of bitches. Every last one, so get back to Sydney Town or die tonight.”

  Off at the edge of this mob, a scuffle started. Then the Ducks were running down Kearny. Someone shouted, “Chase them! Get them! See they don’t start another fire!”

  And Flynn fell again, unable to keep up on his splintered leg. So Matt Dooling, all powerful arms and shoulders, lifted him to help him along.

  Flynn whispered, “Remember, Matt, Michael Flynn never forgets a favor.”

  “Just put in a good word for me when you get where you’re goin’,” said Dooling.

  Then Flynn sang a few bars of that hymn from the day we sailed, “I am bound for the Promised Land. Oh, who will come and go with me? I am—”

  I held Janiva’s hand to keep her close. I would not lose her in the crowd pushing and surging across the greensward, up to the front of the city hall and those convenient cruciform beams.

  Then the ropes flew up and over the arms of the cross, bringing a roar from the crowd. John Jenkins started shouting that he was innocent. Reverend Hunt appeared from somewhere with the Bible in his hands and the 23rd Psalm on his lips. But Flynn had gone silent.

  He was looking out over the crowd, out beyond us to something that made his eyes brighten. I followed his gaze to find Chin, Little Ng, and Mr. Ah-Sing. And … did Flynn see Mei-Ling? Hope may have filled his heart, for he loved her as surely as I loved Janiva, and the sight of her would have given him a last moment of happiness. But after searching, his eyes lowered, his hopes faded.

  Then he looked at me and gave a bitter laugh. “Like I was sayin’ … there I was, standin’ on that windowsill, overlookin’ the great Broadway in New York, kind of like tonight, with the crowd shoutin’, and the, the … ah, Jamie, what a fuckin’ waste.”

  Half a dozen men grabbed for Jenkins, but Nathan Trask would admit of no interference in noosing Flynn. He pushed me aside, knocked off Flynn’s hat, and passed the rope over his head. His sallow face, yellowed all the more in the torchlight, was a cold mask, a completed work. He yanked the noose and said, “Michael Flynn, for the crime of desertion, I execute the sentence of death. May God have mercy on your soul.”

  To which Flynn responded, “Better than servin’ chowder to a lot of Yankee swells in some snooty Boston club.”

  Then, suddenly, Kenney and that gang of political men came rushing back with reinforcements, so Brannan shouted, “Every lover of liberty and good order, lay on!”

  Vigilantes pressed forward and grabbed for the ropes as Trask raised his hand, then dropped it. In an instant, Michael Flynn and an Australian criminal known as the Miscreant rose into the air, their legs reaching for the earth that would soon cover them.

  I turned Janiva away, dragged her through the crowd, and we never looked back. Only later did I see that, somehow, she had picked up Flynn’s hat and brought it with her.

  * * *

  I PAID TO BURY my friend in the graveyard at the end of Powell Street, where Filbert ran in. Reverend Hunt gave a reading and led us in the Lord’s Prayer. He was reluctant, considering that the following Sunday, he preached cold justification of the Vigilantes: “Actual incapacity, or gross corruption on the part of rulers, may sometimes justify, or even require, a people to take power into their own hands.…”

  I threw dirt onto Michael Flynn’s grave, as did Janiva, Matt Dooling, and two “soiled doves” named Roberta and Sheila.

  Turning away, I happened to glance up toward Telegraph Hill and the semaphore that had announced our arrival eighteen months before. And there, standing beside the skeletal tower like a skeleton himself, stood the black figure of Nathan Trask.

  * * *

  THE NEXT MORNING, NIKOLAI Budrovich arrived at Coffee Stand to roast the beans that began the day for San Francisco. And as was his custom, he walked first to the end of the wharf, there to contemplate his great good fortune in California.

  And in the rising light, Budrovich noticed something strange on one of the ships. When he realized what it was, this Roman Catholic blessed himself and wished that he had a crucifix to hold up, so as to ward off the evil spirit he felt floating over the bay.

  A black-shrouded figure was hanging by the neck from the bowsprit of the William Winter, dangling like a lure before the wooden face of the good reverend himself. The bringer of death had died.

  We would never know what strange misery Nathan Trask inhabited in the stern cabin of his rat-infested ship. But for him, the death of Michael Flynn must have seemed the end of his work in California and in the world. He would never sail the William Winter back into Boston, never round the Horn, never command again, so he hanged himself, alone and unmourned.

  April, 1853

  A Journey

  For two years after that, business consumed me. It is fair to say that I became my father. But with Janiva at my side, and a daughter arriving a year after James, Jr., I became the proudest father that ever had been.

  From time to time, I thought about Flynn and his dreams. But my river of gold was like the Gulf Stream or the great Pacific Gyre, a mighty ocean current carrying goods south from Boston, north to San Francisco. Shovels, picks, pans, Ames plows, and all the other products of New England manufacture … these were the nuggets and dust giving color to our sluices and fulfillment to our dreams.

  * * *

  SAN FRANCISCO GREW SO fast that by 1853, the city fathers decided to extend Powell Street through the old cemetery, thereby to enhance the neighborhood known as North Beach. It was reported that a contractor, hired to move the interred bodies, had treated them with marked disrespect, exhuming them haphazardly and shoveling them into carts to be hauled like mere carrion across town to another burial ground. Rotting coffins were burned, good ones sold for firewood.

  I determined that Michael Flynn would not be so badly treated. He should spend eternity in a place he had dreamed about, the place where I had once jokingly promised to bury him.

  So, a few days later, I stood amidst the piles of dirt, the open graves, and the burning coffin boards, enveloped in the gaseous exhalations of the ground itself, and watched his coffin rise from the earth. To my relief, it was intact with few signs of rot.

  I had authorized the building of an outer box—oak and copper lined—into which his was deposited directly, along with sprigs of sagebrush that would reduce escaping odors. Then the outer box was sealed before my eyes and brought by wagon to Long Wharf, to be loaded aboard the Senator.

  Leaving our children in the tender care of Matt Dooling and his wife, now arrived from Massachusetts, Janiva and I steamed for Sacramento. We spent much of the night on the bow, enjoying the breeze and submitting to our awe at the starscape above us, an expanse of existence that could not but make a man or woman feel insignificant, while reminding them at the same time of their place at the center of the moral universe, especially if fortune had offered them each a hand to entwine with their own.

  We reached Sacramento in the morning and hired a team and a driver. I promised Janiva that I would introduce her to Mark Hopkins when we headed back. But we could not linger, for no matter how well sealed, Flynn’s coffin must not be exposed to the elements too long. So we passed through the town, went by Sutter’s Fort, now fallen to ruin without t
he benevolent presence of Sutter himself, and soon were riding east through the country I had dreamed of so often in my San Francisco bed.

  The sun was gentle and warm, the vista green and glowing, awash with great orange lakes of California poppy. When we came to a dip in the road and Janiva glimpsed the distant white mountains for the first time, she gasped, for in all her New England days, she had never seen anything so majestic.

  It was spring, and we were in the very springtime of our lives, with the brightest days yet ahead. So I did not point out the bloody clump of oaks where we first met Cletis Smith. Nor did I mention the hanging tree some distance beyond, from which still dangled a long strand of rope. But I did direct her gaze to the south, to the red tiles and white adobe walls of a distant hacienda, no longer strange and exotic to my New England eyes, but a natural part of this landscape, just as Señor Vargas had been.

  From time to time, we passed groups of miners. Most went afoot. Some piled their gear on the backs of burros or mules. Others rode in wagons or carts. But the rush to the diggings was over. These men would get there when they got there. So we moved steadily with the Cosumnes on our right, then passed over the river and approached the sprawling town of Michigan Bar, most westerly of the placer mining sites.

  A plume of water was arcing into the sky above the road. It glimmered and shimmered in the bright sun, but there was little of beauty in it, for it was shooting from a great nozzle called a monitor, and while some men directed the stream that cut like a liquid knife into a hillside, others worked below the flow of cascading debris, forcing the mud, muck, and mess into long sluices that ran into the gullies that ran back to the river.

  This was my introduction to a new form of devastation called hydraulic mining. It would take hold here because men had discovered the gravel of an ancient river winding through these low, grassy hills, and the easiest way to get at it was to wash away the ground that covered it. The Cosumnes River by itself could not deliver enough pressure. So an enterprising water company had dug the Michigan Ditch down from the high country, thereby empowering men to destroy the work of eons in an afternoon, all to get at the gold in the gravel.

  In time, hydraulic mining would choke our vast deltas with mud and silt. Rich bottomland would flood because our rivers were no longer deep enough to carry off the rains. Collapsing hillsides would bring down trees and boulders and destroy the watershed itself. And dams, built to hold back a foul after-product called “slickens” would burst, releasing their filth into the valleys in horrible avalanches of ruined earth, rock, and mercury-laced effluent.

  But all this lay in the future on the day we carried Michael Flynn’s body through Michigan Bar. We had planned to stop here for a meal, but Janiva insisted we keep going. She said she could not stay an hour in a place of such destruction.

  * * *

  BY SUNSET, WE REACHED Broke Neck, now a small hamlet that seemed no longer to spin on the axis of a turning earth. No miners swarmed Grouchy Pete’s. No warm aromas of sex or stew floated in the air. No pack mules stood before Emery’s Emporium awaiting a burden of beans and bacon. The assay office was gone, as were both the assayer and the gold.

  But the Emerys seemed happy for the quiet. We found them sitting on their porch, rocking, humming, enjoying their own company and the shade of the big oak beside their store. They invited us to stay with them in the cabin that George had built up behind the Emporium, and we gladly accepted. I had no desire to travel to our claim and old cabin, for too many harsh memories remained.

  Over dinner, Janiva and I described the hydraulic operations we had seen.

  George Emery suggested that Rainbow Gulch might be a good place to prospect for similar gravel deposits. I told him about a turn in the land, where Flynn had thought there might be gold. And George told me about an assay he had done on a quartz outcropping he had found just three miles south of Broke Neck.

  He was ready to stake a claim and sink a hard rock mine. He offered to cut me in, if I would do the same at the place we soon took to calling Flynn’s Bend, above Rainbow Gulch. So we agreed. If we could get the permission of the Croatian winemakers, we would prospect on their land.

  But Janiva made us promise never to engage in hydraulic mining, no matter what. And in some things, she was not to be argued with.

  The next morning, well rested and hopeful, we turned southwest, and in company with the Emerys, we took the little-used road. We followed the rolling path across hills and through stands of trees. We bumped over the Rainbow Gulch water trench and came finally to the north rim of the ravine …

  EIGHT

  Saturday Afternoon

  “AND THAT’S WHERE IT ends,” said Peter Fallon through the headset.

  The helicopter was veering south over the San Rafael Bridge, cleared for landing on a perfectly blue October day.

  “Just ends?” said Evangeline. “Before they bury Flynn, the journal just … ends?”

  Peter had skimmed much of it on the ride, noting all the references to Rainbow Gulch, the bags of Chinese gold, and the ancient rivers of it.

  “Why didn’t Spencer finish it?” she asked.

  Peter’s voice dropped with the helicopter. “Maybe he ran out of energy.”

  “Or died,” said Wild Bill Donnelly.

  “So,” said Evangeline, “Barber asked you to find the original because the last notebook answers some unanswered question that the transcription apparently doesn’t?”

  “But he couldn’t just say, find Notebook Seven. That would have been too obvious,” said Wild Bill.

  Peter said, “Spencer and Emery may have done the only real prospecting at the so-called Flynn’s Bend, especially if Janiva was against hydraulic mining.”

  “Also possible,” said Evangeline, “that the whole journal is just a good story. A tale of immigrants making their way.”

  “Well, it’s no treasure map,” said Wild Bill. “Geologists keep telling us about undiscovered ore bodies—”

  “Geologists like Jack Cutler,” said Peter.

  “But he never discovers them,” said Wild Bill. “And he could never convince Manion Sturgis to allow core sampling.”

  “Can’t disturb the precious grapevines,” said Peter.

  “Manion doesn’t care about gold,” said Evangeline, “or money.”

  “Easy not to care about money if you have a lot of it,”said Peter.

  “I’m on the goddamn helicopter with you, Peter. Kill it with the sarcasm.”

  Peter knew enough to back down, always the best course, epecially in the midst of a crisis. “Yes, Ms. Carrington. You’re the common sense on this whirlybird.”

  “You’d better say that.” She turned back to the transcription in the gray archival box. “And common sense says we have what everyone’s fighting for, so—”

  “So the question is,” said Wild Bill, “how do we use it to help your son and his future wife?” And he started running down the names: “We got LJ Fallon, Johnson ‘Jack’ Barber, Wonton Willie—”

  “I’m sorry he’s gone,” said Evangeline. “He was a character.”

  “Too much character will get you killed in Chinatown,” said Wild Bill. “You stand out, people notice. They don’t like it. They frown on flamboyance.”

  “What about Kou?” asked Peter. “Nice, conservative. The perfect m.o.”

  Wild Bill nodded. “And Christine Ryan, FBI, who says there’s someone on the inside, other than your son, so—”

  As the helicopter touched down, Peter received a text from LJ: “On the move. Call ASAP.” He hurried out of the prop wash and placed the call.

  It went to voice mail. Voice mail.

  Wild Bill said, “They’re probably moving quickly. Stay calm.”

  “But why are they on the move at all? I told them to stay put.”

  * * *

  JUST BEFORE THEY BOARDED the ferry, Wild Bill got a callback from his SFPD contact, listened, clicked off. “They whacked Willie in front of Good Mong Kok on Stockton. Ev
ery Saturday morning, he buys a pork bun, an egg tart, and a cup of black tea. He sits on the hood of his limo, meets his peeps, buys the local kids dumplings, and just as he bites into his pork bun, two guys come by on those Dahon folding bikes, both in hoodies—”

  “Hoodies on Dahons,” said Peter, “all over town.”

  “One comes up the street, distracts the bodyguard, pops him. And as Willie turns, the other guy rockets down the sidewalk, gives him two in the hat, and zips away.”

  “Bulletproof vest is no good against a head shot,” said Peter.

  “A Detective Immerman on the case.”

  “We met her the other night, the first time they tried to whack Willie.”

  “The question is,” said Wild Bill, “who is they?”

  Once aboard, seated on the lower deck, Peter checked his phone. No texts from LJ. He called again. Voice mail.

  Evangeline saw the look on his face. She gave his hand a squeeze.

  “Stay calm,” said Wild Bill, which he did by flipping through his emails.

  Then Peter got the text he’d been waiting for: “We’re OK. Will call soon.”

  That made everyone feel better.

  Then Wild Bill got an email and said, “Wow.”

  That made everyone feel worse.

  “What?” said Evangeline over the roar of the ferry engine.

  “Check your email from Larry Kwan, subject line: ‘Dai-lo laid low.’”

  “That Larry … such a jokester,” said Evangeline.

  The email read: “Driving back with Cutler. Before we left, saw smoke north of Rainbow Gulch. Sent drone to investigate. Watch.”

  On the attached video, the drone flew over Rainbow Gulch, past the little fenced-in cemetery, then northwest toward a column of smoke rising from what Wild Bill said was Lost Gulch Road. It cut along the southern boundary of the Boyles’ property and meandered around the Emery Mine, tracing the twists and dips of that timeless, brown-grass nowhere. Just another back road in the rolling hills of Amador County …

  … except for the big blue SUV on its side about half a mile from Highway 49. It was burning. And the landscape around it was spreading into one of those scary late-season brush fires. But Amador emergency vehicles were everywhere, red-and-yellow, black-and-white, flashing lights, water streams.