Orphan Hero

by John Babb

  Until Wilcox could travel to San Francisco, Doc McDaniel rigged up an elaborate protection for him out of an old beaver hat. He stuffed it with cloth packing, and then created a fitted space in the packing for the knife to rest in. He then affixed the hat firmly to Wilcox’s head with a piece of rawhide tied under his chin. The patient was ordered to sleep sitting upright and to wear the hat twenty-four hours a day, no matter what.

  As might be expected for such an oddity, every miner in Placerville wanted to see for themselves that a knife could actually be stuck in a man’s head and he could survive. Everywhere that Wilcox went, he was asked to remove his protective hat. For a few days he obliged this sick curiosity, as he was not able to speak and thus talk his way out of it. But on two occasions, he had to draw his pistol to prevent curious observers from grabbing the knife to see if it indeed was stuck in his head. From that point on, he stayed completely away from town.

  A few days later, Patrick Hoolihan was in town with the bad news. His first day back in their mine shaft, Wilcox had bumped his protective hat on a wooden beam and instantly dropped dead as a wedge. Some said Hoolihan was not above thumping the protruding knife himself so he could take over sole ownership of the mine. No one would ever know the answer to that except Hoolihan. But within a week, he was back in town again.

  Yukon had been in the Pot o’ Gold when Hoolihan came in, and he repeated the conversation as he overheard it. “That Hoolihan was trying to sell his claim on the mine him and Wilcox had. He said he cain’t stay there no more, that the place is haunted. Says every time he goes down in the mine, he hears that sound like Wilcox made—something like the sound a door makes that needs to be greased—a long squeaking sound. Says he figgered it was just his imagination ’til he saw Wilcox sitting on a bucket—still with that pig-sticker in his head, and him sitting there making that terrible noise. The man done had the bejesus scared out of him.”

  Mary, who usually said nothing about the shenanigans discussed in the store, could not contain herself on this particular subject. “Does the idjit think that somebody’s gonna buy that mine with a ghost livin’ down there?”

  Yukon was only too happy to give her the latest news. “Irish Dick gave Hoolihan fifty dollars for the claim on the spot. Then he went up on Oregon Ravine and sold it to three Chinamen for three hunnert dollars.”

  Sadly for Irish Dick, his name came up again all too soon. Once more, Yukon served as their source of the news. “I was just up at the El Dorado Hotel watchin’ a card game betwixt Irish Dick and two young miners. Dick was winnin’ most every hand—took them fellers for every dollar they had. So the red-headed one throws his cards on the table and says to Dick, ‘Ain’t no way you can pull that king of hearts three times in four hands. Yer waxin’ them cards mister.’”

  “Dick got that mean look on him and kinda talked with his teeth all set. ‘If you’re calling me a cheat, I’ll cut your damned heart out, ye ignorant hillbilly.’”

  “Dick is the kind of feller who’d give you the shirt off his back—just afore he steals your coat! Everbody knows you don’t mess with Dick when he gets riled, but this kid was either too new to know any better or dead set on bein’ stupid, so he says to Dick, ‘There’s two of us, and one of you, and I’m sayin’ yore a low-down cheat.’”

  “Dick was always fast—he had his bowie knife in his hand before I could blink—and he jumped at the kid and stuck that big knife in his chest. The kid stared down at the knife with this ridiculous look on his face, and Dick says to the kid ‘I’m going to cut you up like boarding house pie.’ So he just yanked his knife out and stuck it in him again. This time he twisted it around before he pulled it out. A great gush of blood come out on the table, and the kid pitched over face first right in all that gore. Dick looked over at the kid’s partner and he says, ‘Now I believe those odds are even.’”

  “The kid’s so-called friend ran backward so fast he was hid behind the bar before Dick finally ran out of the hotel and off into the woods. They called in a bunch of miners to help look for him, and there wasn’t no shortage of volunteers. Dick took a lotta dust off these miners the last couple years.”

  “Anyway, they found him holed up over at Coffee’s Tavern, hiding in the Duchess’s room whilst she was gettin’ a horse for him. I just come by here for a quick bite to eat. They’re gonna hold his trial in about fifteen minutes. I doubt you’re gonna have any customers this evening. Everbody’s gonna be at the trial.”

  When B. F.’s waiting customers heard the news, they decided their hair could wait another day and departed to join the crowd in front of the El Dorado Hotel. The news had spread from one end of town to the other by the time B. F. and Yukon arrived, and they had to settle for a spot across the street, and just barely in hearing distance.

  Like previous judicial decisions meted out in the old Hangtown, there was little time spent on formalities in the new Placerville as well. The only question that seemed out of place was an inquiry of the accused. “Say Irish, what’s your given name, anyhow?”

  “Dick Crone,” was the response, and the trial began in earnest. They heard testimony from six men who claimed to have been eyewitnesses to the murder in the El Dorado, and per Yukon’s memory, a couple of them hadn’t even been in the hotel at the time. They heard from two men who had examined the deck of cards. There was no wax on the king of hearts, but they did point out that the card had been marked by somebody.

  They gave Dick Crone a chance to defend himself. Never let it be said they weren’t fair-minded men. “Sure and ’twas self defense—two idjits against the one of me. It was no choice I had in the matter with the both of them armed and rarin’ to have a go at me!”

  “Do you have anything else to say in your defense, Irish?”

  “My mam warned me when you wallow with pigs, you should expect to get dirty. For sure, she was correct today. I believe twas that fat Englishman, Samuel Johnson, who said ‘the prospect of hanging indeed tends to concentrate the mind.’ But no, self defense is all I have to offer. If the court is fair minded, you’ll leave my precious neck alone.”

  A verdict was called for, and five hundred voices supplied it. A noose was provided, and Irish Dick Crone had skinned his last miner.

  The hanging tree was used again the very next week to deliver justice to Junior Dyer for the most heinous crime ever committed in the town. The evidence was clear that Mr. Dyer had shot and killed the lovely Miss Monique Orleans in her room at the Pot o’ Gold. It seems he had been wildly in love with Miss Orleans for the previous three weeks, and was distraught when he entered the establishment on the evening in question and was told she was already entertaining another gentleman. It was easy to understand that Mr. Dyer was smitten with her, for no miner would disagree with the fact that she was a woman whose many fine characteristics had been visible for all to appreciate.

  It was also understandable that it might have been the honorable thing for Mr. Dyer to shoot her gentleman caller, but for him to also take the life of one of the few women in the town, not to mention one that had been willing to share so many tender moments with a majority of the members of the jury—well, that was unforgivable.

  Some speculated that Miss Ilsa, the Swedish Princess, would be forced to work overtime, due to the sudden departure of Miss Orleans. And several men pointed out that she seemed to lose all enthusiasm for her job when she worked overtime.

  For his evil deed, Junior Dyer was hung twice—once until he was almost dead and then a second time just to give him time to reflect on his terrible deed. They decided to bury Miss Orleans in the shade of a tall ponderosa pine, overlooking the gold fields on the edge of town. Two volunteers were found to dig her grave late that evening, and the task began just as the sun was setting. Thankfully, they were able to finish sometime after dark and just before a sudden downpour forced them to take cover.

  Word of Dyer’s cowardly deed traveled quickly, and Miss Orleans’ funeral the next morning was widely attended, with at least
three hundred genuine mourners. At the service, many a tear was seen to roll down the grizzled cheeks of the miners in attendance. The procession to the gravesite was somber, in keeping with the occasion. But as the heartbroken pallbearers set the coffin beside the grave for the final prayer of departure, all four men spied what the rain had revealed from the night before. The bottom and the sides of the grave almost danced in the sunlight, for they were covered in nuggets!

  Two of the pallbearers forgot themselves completely and jumped into the grave to start stuffing shiny nuggets in their pockets. The other two started picking up gold from the mound of dirt piled beside the grave. As realization set in, within seconds men from the crowd were elbowing one another and grabbing for the shiny stuff. Two others staked the area on all four corners and proclaimed the site their claim. Quickly, others staked directly above, below, and on either side of the gravesite. The two who had staked the area that included the grave were forced to draw their pistols in order to stop the two pallbearers from stealing their gold down in the hole.

  There had previously been no real digging this far away from the river, and recognition ran through the crowd that here was new ground to be worked. Other stakes went into the earth, while picks and shovels began to clink as they struck the dirt. Miss Orlean’s final rest would just have to be relocated to a less lucrative location.

  Mary and Jane lived in a world composed almost entirely of men. The few women in town were not the sort that Mary would allow Jane to talk to. It’s true that there were a few women who came with their husbands to the gold fields, but they generally stayed away from town because they were treated as such oddities. Mary and Jane had been around long enough and were such a known entity that they really did not have many problems with the miners. Only rarely did they encounter a new man who didn’t know who they were, and in those cases, they sometimes had short-term problems. Short-term, because invariably a group of miners who did know them would quickly step in and pull the new man aside for a quick education on how he was to act around the Fitzwaters.

  Some of the women at the mines were treated poorly by their menfolk, being expected to live under extremely arduous conditions with little appreciation for their work and sacrifices. A story began to circulate around town that a woman over at Angels Camp had been mistreated by her husband for weeks on end, with that abuse only getting worse as the man’s lack of knowledge in mining techniques became obvious to all, and this was illustrated in his continued poor luck in finding gold. But it seemed that the woman, Alma Fogg, had recently made her case to all the miners surrounding their campsite that she was the one in the family in possession of mining skills.

  One afternoon, Mr. Fogg made quite a stir over having a terrible case of the green apple quick-step, so he told his wife he was heading into town, “to fetch a bottle of Doc McDaniel’s Ox-Bile Extract to ease my bilious innards.” When he dragged back into camp the next morning he was a bit out of sorts with the world, wore some rather incriminating red rouge on his shirt, and was very loud about demanding his breakfast.

  Missus Fogg went about her task of preparing breakfast while he continued to berate her. His neighbors had heard this kind of behavior all too often from him in weeks past, and they were about ready to take the domestic matter into their own hands. After all, a woman was too rare a commodity in Angels Camp to be treated that way. And several miners were quick to point out that they were willing to overlook Miz Fogg’s backside, which closely resembled that of a Percheron horse, if she would but consent to keep their bed warm on cold California nights.

  But it seems that Missus Fogg resolved the issue herself when she presented the breakfast skillet to her husband. The cast iron pan did not contain his usual bacon and corn mush, but rather a huge hunk of gold, which she had discovered in their mine the evening before while he was in town for his “medication.” The monster ingot weighed a full sixteen pounds. No sooner had Mr. Fogg begun to exclaim to his neighbors over his new found riches, holding it up for all to see, but what the little Missus dealt him a resounding blow to his head from the aforementioned skillet. She looked down at her unconscious spouse. “I sure hope that settles yore digestion, ye low down whoremonger!”

  Twenty-Four

  The Pickled Head Has Straight Hair

  Placerville, California 1852

  Their third year in California the population of Placerville reached just over 5,600 souls. And there were almost a hundred smaller gold rush towns up and down the Sierra Madre foothills. Men paid in gold more often than they used money. Everything was so expensive that it was unhandy to carry enough money around to pay for their purchases. Also, the bank charged ten percent just to weigh and assay their gold before turning it into cash. So gold was commonly the method of exchange.

  This led to Mary and B. F. beginning to have a problem with gold. They didn’t know what to do with it. Even after paying rent to Yukon, purchasing a second cast iron cookstove, improving the appearance of their businesses, and paying ridiculous prices for supplies, they were still accumulating a significant amount of gold. Mary often cleared fifty dollars a day in her restaurant, while B. F. himself was saving at least fifteen dollars a day.

  Both of them had several bags of gold hanging beneath the floorboards or in hiding places in the walls of the store. They did not completely trust either of the two banks that had sprung up in town. The banks had printed their own private bank notes, secured only by the individual bank, which they would then trade to miners for their gold. In the first few years of the gold rush, access to enough United States coin and currency to keep the gold towns in business was just not possible, given their great distance from a U.S. Mint. The alternative had been for local banks to print their own private paper notes.

  The stories of bankers absconding with hundreds of thousands of dollars in gold from two new banks in nearby towns were often objects of discussion in Placerville. Although the two bankers in Placerville seemed like straight arrows, a significant number of people would not do business with them just as a matter of principle. Mary had accounts in both banks, in which she continued to put a small amount of money every week. But this was only to prevent people from assuming that she kept her gold on the premises, and these accounts represented only a small portion of her holdings.

  With all of the shipping traffic coming through San Francisco, she began to see Spanish gold coins—doubloons—and most recently the new U.S. twenty dollar gold piece—the double eagle—among her customers. So she and B. F. began to hoard gold coins in their hiding places. And when she went to the local banks, she asked to trade gold dust for coins, “So I can pay them suppliers without having to do all that weighin’ and hagglin’.”

  They were frequently reminded of just what a good idea it was to conceal their gold—and their wealth. The presence of great wealth held by others, and the greed of some men to find ways to relieve them of it, was a recipe for thievery, larceny, and murder.

  One Saturday afternoon, B. F. was as busy as he had ever been in the barbershop, as miners were bent on putting their best foot forward to get the attention of a new arrival at the Pot o’ Gold. Miss Cordelia Clapp had created quite a stir among the miners when she arrived in town less than a week earlier. The creator, in all his wisdom, had decided that Miss Clapp should be the recipient of unbelievable physical endowments. And her special gifts were packing the house at the Pot o’ Gold.

  Two Mexicans who he had never seen before entered the barbershop, and with a single look from the younger of the two, the miner who had patiently been waiting for over an hour, immediately vacated his chair. B. F. started to make a remark, but something about the Mexican made him think better of it. The man was very handsome, with black, extremely wavy hair that really did not need to be cut, a pencil-thin mustache and a square chin. His clothes were much nicer than what was commonly seen in Placerville, and included a beautiful red and brown serape thrown over his left shoulder.

  The other man was a few years older, of
smaller frame, with the nose of a hawk, eyebrows that looked like two fat caterpillars, and graying hair. Both men had a look about them that ensured they would not be interfered with.

  “Señor, may I help you?”

  The younger man seated himself in the chair. “A shave and a trim for the benefit of Señorita Clapp.”

  B. F. recognized that the man was handsome, but the ego behind the demeanor and the remark was hard to take. He complied with the request, and at the conclusion of the haircut, he was replaced in the chair by the older man—who really did need the assistance of a barber. As his second customer removed his kerchief, B. F. noticed that he only possessed a thumb and two fingers on his left hand, with a terrible looking scar replacing his absent little finger and ring finger.

  B. F. noticed both men seemed to be interested in the amount of business going on in the store, as well as the location of the cash register. “I think you have a good bizness, sí?”

  “Every now and then we are busy. I guess the miners are coming to town to see the new lady at the saloon.”

  “Ah, yes, Señorita Clapp! Maybe Señor Joaquin will want her all to himself!”

  B. F. laughed, then realized the man was not joking, and changed the look on his face. He was uneasy with them in the store, and after the men departed, he told Yukon about it.

  When Yukon heard about the three-fingered man, he gave a low whistle. “B. F., you just cut the hair of Joaquin Murrieta an’ Three-Fingered Jack.”

  B. F. looked skyward, pressing his memory. “I heard of them.” “I reckon you have. Murrieta and his brother come to Hangtown about three years ago. They had a mine up at Shingle Springs, but the other miners run them off and jumped their claim when they made a little strike. To get even, Murrieta and four other fellers—including Three-Fingered Jack—started robbin’ an stealin’ an murderin’ all over the gold fields, callin’ themselves The Five Joaquins. Wonder why they’re here in town?”