Blood Gold

by Michael Cadnum

  I nodded, trying to appear in command. I was thankful to be alive.

  “Are you all right, Willie?” called Captain Deerborn. I gave a wave with my whip, and the mere shadow of the lash caused the horses to start forward.

  “Up ahead a good way is Putah Slough,” said Johnny, when he had caught his breath. “That is the really dangerous part of the trip.”

  CHAPTER 33

  My body was sore, every sinew and every bone, and the reins had cut into my hands.

  But we were safe, and the horses, sweating and laboring, were unhurt.

  “Putah is a Spanish word for ‘whore,’” Johnny was reporting confidingly, pronouncing it hoor. “Sometimes a bandit waylays a wagon here,” he added, with the air of someone with privileged knowledge. “And shoots every passenger.”

  “That’s a lot of trouble,” I said, trying to give the impression that those tidings did not bother me a bit. In a way, I would have welcomed a robber as a bit of variety at that point. “Wasteful of time and powder—why doesn’t he just chop them up with an ax?”

  “There they are!” said Johnny.

  I was in a virtual trance just then, late-afternoon shadows flowing over the team of horses. I was beyond weariness, beyond aching joints and matter-of-fact terror, and nearly—very nearly—enjoying myself.

  “Bandits!” said Johnny excitedly, with an air of satisfaction, perhaps eager to see what an expert whip like his new companion would do.

  California had been populated by a graceful, Spanish-speaking people before the rush for gold—cattle ranchers and horse breeders. This scattered population had been overwhelmed by the burgeoning hordes of Americans, but here and there you could see evidence of their way of life: a darkly mustached individual on a glossy, spirited horse, or a dark-eyed woman under a shawl.

  Or in this instance a trio of adventurers in sombreros, making no secret of their presence, pistols thrust into their belts. They looked every inch like stage actors set forth to represent romantic brigands.

  The tallest of the three raised a hand, and I hauled on the reins, the team coming to a halt accompanied by a creak and rattle from every joint in the carriage frame.

  “Don’t dally with those lawless vagrants, Willie,” called out Captain Deerborn from far behind.

  The leader said something to me in Spanish, and stepped to the side of the carriage, trying to inventory our stock through the well-lashed canvas tarpaulin.

  “What do you have, my friend?” he asked in heavily accented English.

  “Mining tools,” I said, as noncommittally as possible.

  I had to admire the sashes around their waists, and the silver buttons on their shirts. For some reason the three dashing men made me only the least bit uneasy, perhaps because I had used up all the terror in my constitution earlier that day.

  The tall Californian slapped a hand against the tarpaulin, and the cargo gave a muted iron chime.

  Captain Deerborn was breathing heavily, hurrying up on foot, protesting, “No, you aren’t stealing any of my shovels.”

  The tall man turned to one of his companions, and, after a moment’s consultation, produced a pair of spurs. He ran his fingers over the rowel of one of the implements, spinning it, and said something in Spanish that meant, by all indications, that he would trade this set of spurs for a Yankee shovel.

  The spurs did not gleam, and the leather fastenings appeared toughened by use. Nevertheless, the objects spoke of another world—of stallions and ballads, a finer, almost noble existence compared with our mercantile, Yankee manner of dress and speech.

  Captain Deerborn’s shoulders slumped with regret, one hand half lifted in temptation.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, “I’ll never have any use for anything so horsemanlike.”

  Maybe Johnny made a sigh—or maybe it was me.

  Captain Deerborn gave us a glance.

  “Well,” he said, after a long moment. “Well, my friend,” he added with a smile, “if it keeps you and your fellows from carving us up.”

  CHAPTER 34

  Three days later Johnny and I climbed a rocky trail beside the American River.

  Johnny was proving a lively companion, and while I missed Ben’s knowledge and enthusiasm, California was a place where old friends were replaced by new ones and the past was at times hard to remember.

  The rapids, when I stepped in them, were cold, my feet numb inside my boots. Every gold seeker we passed worked frantically. The water was already high, the first rains of the wet season having lashed the hills. Soon the river would run hard and cold, frustrating nearly every system of separating gold from dross.

  The two of us traveled a dirt road strewn with carpetbags, coffee mills, lap desks, saddles, and an assortment of other debris, including fowling pieces and lamps, signs that the last vestiges of refinement were being abandoned as men wearied with the uphill climb. Johnny carried as much as I did, each of us laden with blankets and a small amount of dry corn bread and jerked meat—we had speculated whether the flesh had belonged to a cow, a horse, or a wizened hunting dog.

  We had left Captain Deerborn beside a huge mining camp, a city of auburn mud and similarly colored tents, stained from bottom to top with wet. He was hawking his hardware in his stentorian voice, and a long assembly of customers was lining up—whether to make a purchase or to be entertained by the captain’s ringing oratory on the quality of his wares, it was difficult to say.

  While newspapers in the East had extolled the opportunities for individual enterprise, every mining camp we passed was an example of cooperative effort, one volunteer frying bacon while his mates shoveled sand and gravel into a cradle. These cradles were the most common mining device. Also called rockers, all such contraptions involved shoveling gravel into a hopper, a rough sieve where shaking and stirring allowed the finer grit to fall below, into a long wooden trough.

  Water was poured or directed from a stream over these assorted minerals. A long canvas belt allowed the lighter quartz and granite to flow out the open end of the trough, catching the heavy gold-bearing pebbles in the rockers’ wooden ribs. Other mining endeavors involved straightforward panning for the treasure—a simple but surprisingly effective system, swilling water and dark sand around and around, until all that was left in the tin pan was the precious element. One burly Welshman we encountered employed the even simpler method, straining black sand through a woolen blanket. He had, according to Johnny’s admiring reports, a strongbox crammed with pay dirt.

  Johnny continued to be eager to prove his knowledge, and it was very much in the Gold Rush spirit of cooperation that he and I traveled together. At night the sounds of singing echoed down the ravines, and men entertained themselves with fiddles and other musical instruments, while companions played at dominoes or cards. Many camps had posted the names of their outfits, Elmira Mining Enterprise or Bangor Mining Company, along with the names of the presidents or treasurers of the small but booming corporations, and perhaps a copy of their weather-stained bylaws.

  “Spanish Bar is still uphill a day or two,” Johnny would say, and he seemed to know his way. He predicted that soon we would come upon a camp of Chinese, and sure enough we did, rounding a corner and finding a crew of Asian laboring men, overseen by one of their countrymen. He gave us a wave, but said not a word.

  We greeted a camp of Chileans, and another of Swedes, each group identified by Johnny, who prided himself in knowing which camp had a few scarce women and children, and such arcana as which camp had succeeded in killing a wildcat, and where a nugget “the size and shape of a roast potato” had been found under a log.

  Even the food arrived from unfamiliar places. Potatoes and coffee hailed from the Sandwich Islands across the Pacific, as did nearly every other vegetable we saw, down to the wrinkled, time-wasted beets one miner was slicing into his frying pan. Sandwich Islanders had joined the other throngs of seekers from around the world, brown-skinned, portly men wrapped in blankets against the unfamiliar chill.

>   Gold camps had hasty, piratical names: Gouge Eye, Sucker Flat, Red Dog, and You Bet. Most companies were called nothing at all, and the ones we passed by were too preoccupied with pick and shovel, bucket and cradle, to give us much more than a casual glance. We met brief smiles and hurried greetings. Sometimes I took a moment to ask about a red-haired man named Murray and his two companions.

  “Red-haired Murray,” a miner would say, running the name and description quickly through his mind. “I doubt it,” he would offer at last, or “I don’t think so,” as though a definite no was somehow impolite. Offhand courtesy was another characteristic of the Forty-niners. Outright unfriendliness was too much trouble.

  And so, apparently, was real violence. Men argued, and swung the occasional fist, but as I had already observed, altercations soon lost their importance. Johnny had exaggerated the threat from bandits. A few highwaymen were rumored to have waylaid shipments of gold near a town on Deer Creek named Rough and Ready, but robbery was uncommon—as were homicide, assault, and most other crimes except public drunkenness. Everyone was too busy to bicker for any length of time, and even chronic drunkards labored blearily beside their sober brethren, shoveling ore.

  But men were injured along the river, and there was little doubt that they could be killed. A Frenchman named DuClou sported a slowly healing gash in his forehead—an ax head had flown off its shaft, and nearly taken his life. Other people had nearly drowned crossing the ever-rising river on makeshift bridges, ropes suspended across the current and traversed hand-over-hand.

  A Norwegian miner had lost his grip near Welsh Flat the week before, and vanished.

  As we approached one shadowy camp that chilly afternoon, Johnny fell silent and looked pointedly away from the lone miner who worked that claim, a tall individual with a shiny bald head.

  This solitary man looked vaguely familiar to me, as he stooped to gather up a large firearm.

  “This is Dutch Bar,” said Johnny in a guarded voice.

  “And who’s that?” I asked.

  “That’s Jeremiah Barrymore,” said Johnny, in a low voice barely audible over the sound of the tumbling rapids nearby.

  My heart leaped at the sound of this familiar name.

  “He works all alone,” Johnny continued. “Folks expect that he’ll shoot whoever trespasses on his claim.”

  “How much farther to Spanish Bar?” I asked, light-heartedly considering my chances against a murderous Barrymore.

  “We’ll be there if we keep going,” said my companion. “But,” he added with a strained truthfulness, “it’s still a good long way.”

  “How far?” I insisted.

  His gaze dropped. “I think we could get there by midnight.”

  “If we were owls, and could fly, you mean.”

  The surly-looking man with the bald head surely did not resemble any of the other busy but cheerful miners we had passed. But the sound of his surname stirred friendly feeling in me—and more than a little curiosity. Besides, I was tired, and had long since begun to associate the Barrymores with a variety of flinty friendliness.

  “William, don’t go up there,” cried Johnny.

  I made my way up the rocky slope.

  CHAPTER 35

  One of the principal arts of shooting is to measure the distance correctly before you pull the trigger.

  Jeremiah’s eyes played over me as I approached.

  I made myself an easy target, walking up to him like that, but Jeremiah had the good manners to keep the double-barreled gun pointed in the general direction of the pine needles on the ground.

  The shotgun is the only reliable firearm, in my view, scattering so many pellets that at least part of the target is likely to be hit. The forefinger on Jeremiah’s left hand was bound with a yellow bandage, but his trigger finger looked healthy. Smoke from a heap of half-consumed firewood rose up around us, and stung my eyes.

  I introduced myself, and I introduced Johnny, too—he crept along behind me despite his warning. Jeremiah said nothing, and settled one foot ahead of him, like a man getting ready to throw his gun to his shoulder.

  “I met up with members of your family in Panama City,” I said.

  If anything, this news brought a frown to his features, one eyebrow tightening and his lips pressing into a thin line.

  “Nicholas and Timothy,” I said, hoping the names would act like charms. “And Florence.”

  Saying her name made me miss her suddenly—a sharp feeling of longing that surprised me. Whatever her character, she was a young woman full of the unexpected. Elizabeth back home was lovely and peaceful—but in my years of drinking tea with her, she had almost never surprised me.

  Jeremiah’s eyes did seem to soften just a little at word of his relations.

  “I took their leave in Sacramento City,” I added.

  “Are they all right?” he asked in a hopeful voice, setting the butt of his scattergun on the ground.

  Jeremiah told us he had some coffee in the pot, and this time I accepted a Barrymore offer of such refreshment without delay. My feet were cold and sore, and I had not had a taste of the beverage for so long I had a stab of the keenest nostalgia, recalling my aunt putting honey into a bright blue cup.

  The gold camps I’d passed generally used the same campfire methods, lighting a fire in the predawn and keeping it going against the autumn chill, a black coffeepot dangling over the coals. Jeremiah’s coffee had been cooking all day, and it was thick and bitter. He stirred some brown sugar into it with a stick, and I drank the thick syrup down. I could have sworn that it was the best beverage I had ever tasted.

  Johnny was quiet in our host’s presence; this was the longest silence I had experienced from my companion in two or three days.

  “I crushed my finger,” said Jeremiah, in a voice without self-pity.

  I expressed sympathy, and he shrugged.

  “Your family should be here very soon,” I said.

  “I welcome the news,” he responded, and I realized that Jeremiah had spent so much time in solitude that his conversational powers had rusted over.

  “You work Dutch Bar alone?” I asked.

  “The Indians quit.”

  Some miners, I had heard, hired Indians to work the diggings, generally members of the Miwok or Ohlone tribes. Pay disputes arose when miners tried to pay the locals in glass necklaces and fake pearls.

  “Solitude can be a hardship,” I ventured.

  Jeremiah surprised me with a gentle smile. “I grow a little used to it,” he said. “But I think our natural condition is to have human company, and plenty of it.”

  Jeremiah had a pig of lead beside the mound of embers—a large brick of the soft metal. He had been working in the shelter of an outcropping, springwater splashing down the granite escarpment. He had been about to make bullets—buckshot, judging from the mold sitting on the damp earth.

  “If you don’t mind me making an observation,” I said, “your shot mold is wet.”

  If you pour molten lead into a wet mold, the hot metal will sputter and splash dangerously.

  “You try making do with one hand,” said our host, with just a trace of testiness. “It isn’t easy.”

  I said that I would make him some buckshot, if he would let us bed down near his fire and share just a little of his corn bread. It was the sort of cordial barter that typified the gold country, and Jeremiah saw the fairness of it.

  As we gazed into the campfire, sparks ascending into the mountain dark, I asked if he had seen a red-haired gentleman and a couple of companions heading upriver recently.

  Jeremiah was cooking our evening meal. The corn bread was frying in a big black skillet, an operation that took some concentration. Bacon sizzled as he turned it over with a stick. Real bacon was prized by gold diggers—even the most leathery rind of ham flavored the bread fried alongside it, and gave a delicious savor to the smoke. The remnants of preserved meat Johnny and I had been chewing on recently had been rank, and tough as razor strops.
r />   I assumed Jeremiah had not heard me, and I was about to ask again, when he responded, “How can I tell a gentleman from a working man, up here?”

  “By their boots,” said Johnny, one of the first statements he had made since we had arrived at this camp. “And their guns.”

  “Is that right?” said Jeremiah dryly.

  “Gentlemen have calfskin boots, and English pistols,” said Johnny. “And when they talk they say, ‘I have to admit’ and ‘I’m of the opinion.’”

  Jeremiah and I laughed at the accuracy of Johnny’s observation.

  Johnny went into the briefest of sulks.

  Jeremiah said, “I have to admit I watch every man who passes this camp. I don’t recollect any three travelers like that.”

  The bacon was delicious, and the fried corn bread, too, our supper washed down with a little whiskey mixed with American River water. Jupiter and Minerva on their thrones did not dine any better.

  I shared a taste of the Dutch gin from the flask in my breast pocket, introducing it to Jeremiah as proof against fever. It was a good thing the tonic was good for our health—it tasted bad, and as a result there was plenty left in the container even now.

  I was weary enough to sleep well, a mindless, deep slumber that ended abruptly.

  A step woke me.

  As I watched, Jeremiah knelt by the fire, gazing down toward the river. He wore a blanket like a cloak, the glowing coals illuminating his profile.

  I asked him what he had heard.

  “What business do you have,” he asked, “with three men traveling upriver?”

  “What did you see?” I asked.

  Gold miners often used language to forestall communication as well as give it. If you asked how successful a man’s claim was, he might offer a friendly but vague remark: “Not too bad” or “Could be worse.”

  Jeremiah was no different. “It’s hard to say.”

  “Did you see them?” I insisted.

  Jeremiah considered. “I think I did. Making slow progress along the river trail in the dark.”

  I peered downslope, all the way down to the white water of the river, a source of reflected starlight.