We didn't know much about geology but we'd learned that gold was easiest to find in gravel bars where the river widened and bent or where it once did. Gold being heavier than other minerals, the flakes and nuggets would settle in, sometimes near the surface, and sometimes down deep.
The gold wasn't hard to recognize. There was the color, of course, and the soft way it felt when you bit a nugget in your teeth—not that we found many nuggets.
The gold was there, that was for sure, but getting enough of it out of the ground to make a living was back-breaking, soul-bleeding work that was much harder than farming. But gold fever kept men like Hank going in a way that farming never could. There were too many people striking it rich all around us for him to ever stop believing that it could happen to him. The fever blinded him to the pain, futility, poverty, and hardship.
I didn't have the fever. But I had a marriage and a man that I loved. Keeping them both healthy and strong was what kept me going.
We lived in a tent so we could move wherever the gold was. I kept house, cooked our meals, and sometimes patched and sewed up clothes for some of the other prospectors in exchange for necessities, while Hank worked our claim.
A man had to pan half an ounce to an ounce of gold a day, about sixteen dollars’ worth of color, if he wanted to survive and set a little aside for the lean days.
But we rarely panned more than six dollars a day worth of color, roughly six pinches of gold dust, and with molasses at one dollar a bottle and flour going for fifty cents a pound, we could barely keep ourselves fed.
Most of the time, our bag of flour was worth more than our pouch of gold.
I tried to convince Hank to give up on prospecting and try something else. We argued about it for most of that first year until I finally just gave up and resolved to do my best to support him, no matter how wrong-headed I thought he was. That was what I'd been taught a good wife was supposed to do.
Two years of panning in the cold river water, day in and day out, bowed Hank's back and swelled his joints. It got so bad that he couldn't stand and could barely breathe. And even then, with all those ailments, his biggest ache was the desire to pan for more gold.
They say it was rheumatic fever that killed him, but I know better.
It was the dream of gold that did him in.
His death left me alone, but not without assets. I had our claim, our tent, and his tools, but they weren't worth a sack of potatoes. What I had that was worth something was my body.
Women were scarce in Trouble, so the instant Hank was buried, I became as rare and valuable a commodity in those parts as gold.
There were a couple of ways I could mine that value.
I could marry a wealthy man, of which there were few, most of whom were living in their San Francisco mansions while others toiled for them in the mines.
Or I could become involved with many less-prosperous men, of which there were multitudes, most of whom were willing to pay a pinch or two of gold to enjoy a woman's affection for a short time.
Women who engaged in that sort of barter were called sporting women and lived in rooms behind the saloons. They were generally held in higher regard than such women back East, perhaps because the population in Trouble was made up mostly of lonely men in desperate need of their services. That might also explain why vices that weren't tolerated back home were taken so casually in the mining camps, whether it was drinking, gambling, whoring, or murder.
A few of the sporting women did all right, made enough money to support themselves until they could find a man with plenty of gold, and low moral standards, to marry and move on. But it seemed to me that most of the women died young, taken by syphilis, abortions, or suicide by laudanum.
I tried to survive instead by sewing and laundering for the miners. But there weren't many men willing to part with their hard-earned gold dust on something as frivolous as clean clothes that were just going to get dirty again the next day. They felt their gold was better spent on whiskey, food, and sporting women.
However, there was one peculiar and extraordinary man who valued cleanliness and order above all else.
I'm talking, of course, about Artemis Monk, Trouble's only assayer.
I've heard it said that assaying—analyzing stones and such and determining the mineral content—is the third oldest profession, after doctors and sporting women.
Every prospector and miner came to Monk with their rocks so that he could determine how much gold was in them, the quality of the gold, and estimate the potential yield of their claims. That made him easily the second or third most important man in Trouble.
There was either something very unusual about the geology of Trouble, or unique to Monk's calculations, because the various minerals in the samples he analyzed always showed up in even amounts. He attributed it to the “immutable balance of nature,” but if that was so, the rest of the world was unbalanced.
As odd as that was, the fact remained that Monk always turned out to be right in his estimates of the worth of a claim, and anybody who ever questioned his conclusions eventually found that out for themselves the hard way.
But even if you never had business with Monk, you certainly knew who he was. Monk stood out. He was the only clean-shaven man in the camp, his hair was neatly trimmed, and he bathed every day, which in itself was astonishing. He always wore the same thing—a derby hat with a domed crown and a flat, round brim, a long-sleeved white shirt buttoned to the collar, a sleeveless vest with four pockets and four buttons, wool pants, and fine black boots.
His clothes were always clean. I know, because I was the one who cleaned them, not that I ever found a speck of dirt or the tiniest stain on them. He brought me his clothes neatly folded. They looked as if they'd never been unfolded, much less worn, but I figured if he wanted me to wash clean clothes, so be it. I was in no position to turn down work.
Monk seemed very pleased with my laundering and came back to my tent by the river almost every morning. I never saw him on a horse or even near one. He seemed repulsed by the animals. He got where he was going on foot or by railroad.
One day when he showed up at my tent I was gone and my tent was empty, so he searched the town for me. He found me outside of one of the saloons with my trunk at my side.
I was trying to swallow down my misgivings and enter the sporting life. It must have been obvious to him what was going through my mind.
"You can't do this,” he said.
"I don't have any choice, Mr. Monk. It's the only thing of value that I have to sell."
"You are excellent at laundering,” he said. “Nobody here has ever done it better."
"I can't survive doing that."
"But I need you,” Monk said.
"And I need food, a warm place to sleep, and a roof over my head."
"Done,” he said.
I turned to look at him. “What do you mean?"
"I'll hire you,” Monk said. “You can live in the spare room in my office."
I eyed him warily. “What do you expect in return, Mr. Monk?"
"Not what you are prepared to give in there, Mrs. Guthrie,” he said, tipping his head towards the saloon. “I need an assistant to keep my life clean and orderly. It's becoming too much for me to handle alone and still do my work."
We settled on a price, one that would sustain me and allow me to set a little aside so that I could someday return to Kansas.
He accepted my terms so quickly that I wondered if I'd set my price too low. But I was grateful for the opportunity and I moved in that day.
It was a purely chaste arrangement, though I'm sure nobody believed that.
I didn't care what they thought. All that mattered to me was that I wouldn't have to become a sporting woman, at least not yet.
I soon discovered that keeping his life clean and orderly involved far more than simple housekeeping and that his skills, and service to the community, extended beyond detecting minerals in rocks.
Artemis Monk solved crimes.
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* * * *
The commerce in Trouble relied almost exclusively on gold dust, which people carried around in leather pokes tied to their belts. A pinch was worth about a dollar and just about everybody, from the clerk at the general store to the sporting women, had a set of scales.
It was usually the seller who did the pinching, and it was common for them to engage in some trickery to gain a few extra grains of gold in the transaction.
Most of the bartenders, shopkeepers, barbers, and sporting women in town kept their nails long, the better to capture dust in a pinch, and in their spare time, rolled rough pebbles between their thumbs and index fingers to create indentations in their skin to trap more dust.
The shopkeeper at the general store went a step further. He was known for his abundant, and slickly greased, head of hair, which he smoothed before every transaction and then raked his fingers through afterwards as the customer was leaving. According to Monk, that was because the gold stuck to his greased fingers during the pinch and was wiped off in his hair afterwards. Each night the shopkeeper washed his hair into a gold pan and made more than most prospectors did squatting beside a river.
But I suppose it all evened out in the end, since many prospectors and miners were known to salt their gold with pyrite and brass filings to give their poke a little more volume.
Monk didn't bother himself with those petty crimes, but he did catch plenty of the more ingenious thieves.
I remember one situation in particular, because it happened in the first few weeks that I was working for him and because it also happened to be the first murder I'd seen him solve.
It was a warm morning in September and I was indexing samples and updating his assay ledgers in the front office of his large, perfectly square cabin.
Monk kept a representative sample of the rocks that were brought in for him to test. He placed the sample in a jar and labeled it with the date it was tested and index numbers that corresponded to entries in a ledger he kept of the various claims, their locations, and the owners. The ledger also contained the results of his assays. It was part of my job to maintain those records.
The shelves in the front office were neatly organized with sample jars, reference books, maps, and various rock specimens. His prospecting tools were carefully organized according to size, shape, and function. The tools rested on pegs in the wall specifically fitted for the individual implements.
The cabin was divided into four equal sections—the front office, which doubled as our kitchen and communal living area, the laboratory, Monk's room, and my room.
Monk spent most of his time in the laboratory, where he worked at an enormous desk that he somehow managed to keep dust-free, even though he regularly worked with rocks and dirt. The shelves were filled with the specialized tools, chemicals, crucibles, microscopes, and balances required for his trade.
The rear of his laboratory was reserved for the crushing of rock samples into dust, which he would then fire in the two-deck clay furnace in the back as part of some complicated process I don't pretend to understand. All I know is that when it was done, and the pulverized rocks had been melted, poured into cupels, cooled and cleaned and chemicals added, he could separate the gold from everything else and tell you how rich or poor your claim was likely to be.
Monk was in his lab when a young prospector walked into the front office. I immediately stopped him at the door and led him back outside to the porch.
"I need to see Mr. Monk,” he said.
"You can't come in here like that,” I said.
"Like what?"
I could tell he was a greenhorn, fresh off the boat, train, or trail and eager to make it rich in the gold country. He had the same feverish look in his eye that my Hank, and hundreds of other men, had. But it was more than that.
His wool shirt was still a recognizable shade of red, his trousers weren't patched, but both were covered with dirt. He had the blistered hands and stumbling gait of someone unaccustomed to working with a shovel and pick, or the long hours squatting in the cold river, swishing gravel around in a pan. He was thin from lack of good food and possibly a touch of land scurvy too. His whiskers were mangy but not yet obscuring his youthful features, and his hair was long but not yet wild and matted.
"You're too dirty,” I said. “Mr. Monk only allows people inside who are freshly washed and dressed in their clean Sunday best."
"This ain't no church, and I don't want to marry him. I just want him to look at my rocks."
"What is your name, sir?"
"Nate Klebbin,” he said.
"You can give me your samples, Mr. Klebbin, and I will take them in to Mr. Monk. You may wait here on the porch if you like,” I said, motioning to the guest bench. “Or I can fetch you in the saloon when Mr. Monk is finished."
"I'll wait here.” He handed me his sack of rocks and took a seat on the bench.
I went inside and carried the sack to Monk, who greeted me at the doorway of his laboratory.
"You have a new client,” I said.
"I know,” Monk said. “I could smell him from a hundred yards away."
"You say that about everybody except me."
"Because nobody except you in this town bathes and wears fresh clothes each day,” Monk said. “And many of them regularly sit astride filthy beasts."
"You mean horses."
"That's what I said.” Monk took the bag from me and retreated to his laboratory, closing the door behind him.
"I'd ride a horse if I could afford one,” I said.
Monk never rode horses and believed they should be prohibited from the streets. If he had his way, everybody would have to hitch up their horses in a corral outside of town and clean up after them.
He emerged again a few hours later, a bewildered look on his face.
"Is there an animal being slaughtered on our front porch?"
Monk was referring to Nate Klebbin, who'd fallen asleep the instant after he sat down on the bench and had been snoring loudly ever since.
"That's the fellow who brought in the sample for you,” I said. “He's sleeping on the porch."
"It sounds like he's being murdered, and yet it smells like he died two weeks ago."
"I'm sure he'll be flattered to hear that,” I said.
Monk opened the door and stepped out onto the porch, where Klebbin was snoring away. “Mr. Klebbin?"
The man was too deep asleep to be stirred by the mere mention of his name. So Monk reached back into the cabin, grabbed the broom, and poked Klebbin in the side with the handle.
Klebbin jerked awake. “What are you poking me for?"
"I'm Artemis Monk, the assayer. I've finished studying your sample."
Klebbin sat up straight, his eyes flashing with excitement. “Did you find color?"
"I did,” Monk said.
"A lot of it?"
"Enough to indicate the possibility of much more to be had with hard labor,” Monk said.
"Yee-haw!” Klebbin said.
"I wouldn't yee or haw just yet,” Monk said. “Where is your claim?"
Klebbin reached into his shirt for a folded sheet of sweat-stained paper, which he held out to Monk. “It's right here."
Monk took a step back as if he was being offered a dead rat. “I mean, where is your parcel located?"
"In a gulch west of Juniper Creek,” Klebbin said. “I bought it from Clem Janklow. You know him?"
Monk knew Clem, and so did everybody else in town. Clem was a prospector who scraped by but never struck it rich and what gold he did find he quickly spent at the saloon. He was always broke and perpetually drunk and relieved his prodigious bladder wherever, and whenever, the urge struck him.
This, of course, disgusted and infuriated Monk, who demanded that Sheriff Wheeler lock Clem up or throw him out of town. But Wheeler was reluctant to do either.
"If I lock him up, then he'll just piss all over my jail,” Wheeler said. “And if I drove out everybody who pisses in the street, the town would b
e deserted. Besides, Clem can't help it. He's got a kidney ailment."
"The ailment is whiskey,” Monk said.
But Clem claimed it was more than that, but that he couldn't afford the medicine that would lessen his need for alcohol and relieve his kidney problem. Monk talked to Dr. Sloan, who confirmed Clem's account and recommended an elixir known as Greeley's Cure, which was used to treat syphilis, alcoholism, opium addiction, and digestive troubles.
So Monk made a deal with Clem. He'd pay for the medicine himself if Clem agreed to stay out of the saloon and not to relieve himself on the streets.
Since then, Clem hadn't relieved himself once in public and stayed away from the saloon. The bottles of Greeley's Cure cost Monk several dollars a day, but he figured it was a small price to pay to save a man's life and keep the community clean.
Now Monk's face was turning beet red with anger.
"Why did Clem sell you his claim if it was still producing gold, Mr. Klebbin?"
"Clem told me he's too sick and feeble to work it anymore but it ain't played out yet,” Klebbin said. “He's got some kind of kidney problem from too much rot-gut whiskey. It's got so bad, he's pissing day and night all over the place out there. You wouldn't believe the stink, but I don't mind if there's gold."
Monk shivered. “You've been swindled, Mr. Klebbin, and so have I."
"But you found gold in them rocks, didn't you?” Klebbin said.
"Indeed I did,” Monk said. “Stay here while I get the sheriff."
Monk marched away and I hurried after him to Main Street. He kept his head down, watching the planks as he stepped on them.
"I don't understand the trouble, Mr. Monk. Everything Clem told Mr. Klebbin is true."
"That's what makes it so infuriating,” Monk said. “The audacity of the crime."
Monk stopped and pointed to a warped plank. I bent down and marked a big “X” on it with a piece of chalk so that the wood could be replaced later. I carried the chalk with me at all times for exactly that purpose.
He took another step and pointed to another plank. This one was cracked.
EQMM, November 2009 Page 11
