Orphan Hero

by John Babb

  Twenty-Eight

  We’re The Ones Who Call Ourselves Civilized

  Columbia, California 1854

  B. F. stashed the two bags of gold dust in the back of the wagon under two shovelfuls of manure and mud, but kept a single small bag of gold coins in his travel bag that he could give up in case he was robbed. He then placed Jane’s quilt on the wagon seat, hid his pistol underneath, and sat on it.

  He turned his wagon, not toward San Francisco, but to the south out of Placerville toward the town of Columbia. Gold had first been discovered there in 1850, but unlike many other locations, it had not quickly played out. He had heard reports of large nuggets being found near Columbia over the last few months, and knew that hundreds of miners had moved their operations down there as a result.

  As a thirteen-year-old boy, perhaps he didn’t fit the usual description of someone traveling with a lot of money or gold, or maybe he was just headed in the wrong direction to pique the interest of any potential thieves. Probably they were operating between Placerville and San Francisco. At any rate, he made the fifty-mile trip to Columbia by afternoon of the second day without even as much as a suspicious look along the trail.

  The weather was damp and cold, although not quite so sharp as in Placerville. His new destination was at a lower altitude, and he saw no snow on the mountaintops to the east of the town. But what was all too familiar was the wretched appearance of the town, the mines, and the miners, as well as the absence of the milk of human kindness.

  He stopped at Will Dugger’s General Store, hoping for a repeat of his last arrangement, but the store was small and packed from floor to ceiling. He saw no opportunity there, but he did speak to the proprietor. “I’m new in town. Is there a barber hereabouts?”

  “I think there’s one up to Cosumnes River.” Mr. Dugger scratched the top of his bald head, having long since reconciled with only the thinning gray hair over his ears. “I ain’t had enough hair to worry about it for about five years. You don’t look like you need one yourself neither.”

  “Well, I’m a barber myself. I was wondering if there was much competition hereabouts. Any idea if any stores in town have some extra space for a barber?”

  Dugger thought for a minute. “Not really . . . leastwise unless Doc Butterfield would give up the space in his office that belonged to the dentist.”

  “What happened to the dentist?”

  “Why, Doc run him off. The dentist was fond of that laudanum. Sometimes a feller with a toothache would have to wait a half a day for the dentist to sleep it off. About a month ago, the dentist was so befuddled from laudanum, he pulled four teeth on a man before he got the one that was causing his toothache. When Doc heard about it, he chased that tooth cobbler around the office with them big pliars, hollering at him the whole time. You’d thought the dentist was gonna get all his own teeth pulled—maybe would have if Doc had caught him. Anyways, the dentist departed our city that same day.”

  Doctor Ezra Butterfield was a short, barrel-chested man of about fifty. To B. F., he seemed to be a quiet, reserved fellow who must have been mightily provoked to run after the dentist with a pair of dental pliars. He had a short, gray beard, a head full of hair, and two extremely bushy eyebrows that greeted each other above the middle of his nose.

  He’d had a medical practice in Philadelphia until 1850, when he’d talked his wife into going on a grand adventure to California. They had traveled by ship to Panama and then across the isthmus by donkey. His wife, Ruth, had died on the beach of the Pacific Ocean, apparently from some kind of tropical fever Doc had never seen before. He had decided to follow through on his trip, even though there was nothing grand left in it. After a bit of inquiry in San Francisco, he had come to Columbia because there was no doctor in the area. Also, he said he hated birthing babies, and figured there would be very few of them born in a mining camp.

  My story. On January 3, 1854

  I arrived in Columbia on windy, cold day, and in no time made arrangements to set up my barbering operation in the home of Doctor Ezra Butterfield. This man appears to be a completely different kind of doctor than Doc McDaniel back in Placerville. He’s a very educated man, with an actual medical degree up on the wall from back in Philadelphia.

  Doctor Butterfield is giving me free room and board, and he won’t even charge me rent for my barbershop. But he says there are conditions in our agreement. If he has to perform surgery, I am to be his assistant. If he’s called out in the evening with a patient, I’m expected to drive his buggy. If he has to sit up all night at a sick bed, I have to do my share of the sitting. It doesn’t sound so bad.

  Doc had neglected to mention all of the “conditions” of their arrangement—that he would also expect B. F. to help him in preparing medicines, cleaning up after his surgeries, applying bandages of all kinds, and harvesting herbs and medicinals from his own botanical garden.

  Within three months, B. F. had helped set several fractures, used alcohol to extract heart medicine from the digitalis leaf, rolled thousands of pills, used a suppository mold, made up hundreds of powder papers, mixed up a number of creams, ointments, and suspensions, gave various mixtures of belladonna leaf or goldenseal root to settle the bellies of hundreds of men with the “hell-roarin trots,” and administered more calomel concoctions for constipated miners than he cared to remember. He feared his barber operation was generally regarded by Doc Butterworth as a totally unimportant part of his day.

  In order to prevent the theft of his wagon, B. F. removed the rear wheels and kept them propped behind the door in the barbershop. It made him uneasy to think that there was over $24,000 sitting behind the building in his wagon bed, but there was no good solution to his problem. He certainly wasn’t about to disassemble the wagon and put his gold into the First Columbia Bank. The only two men he had seen working in the bank appeared to be the kind that had a spare ace of hearts hidden in their sleeves. In fact, both of them spent a significant amount of time—and money—engaged in games of chance. He had no desire to find out the hard way that they were betting with his gold.

  B. F. was beginning to show signs of the man he would become. He was neither tall nor short, but already had shoulders that were as wide as those on some men. He had begun shaving a few months previously, and had the kind of facial hair that promised to dull a razor in the not too distant future. Like his pa, he made it a point to stand as straight as he could. He might not be tall, but the impression people were left with was that he was someone who looked taller than others his age. Although he had been subjected to all the twangs—both harsh and soft—of every dialect in America over the last five years, most would say he had no accent that would identify him as being from neither here nor there.

  He was particularly appreciative of the books owned by Doc Butterworth—both professional and otherwise—and had begun to work his way through the library. He had lost much of his humor. Perhaps some of that could be laid at the door of what he had faced the last several months in Placerville. It wasn’t that he was depressed, but more like a piece of him—the one related to joy—was missing.

  Many an enthusiastic and energetic young man came to the gold fields—most believing they were just one shovelful of clay away from striking it rich. Only a few, like B. F., believed that the most predictable way to wealth was to plod on every day, gradually—but consistently—accumulating their pot of gold.

  One afternoon while B. F. was finishing a haircut, Doc Butterfield stepped in his doorway. “B. F., come in my office. You need to see something.”

  That could mean he would be gone for five minutes or five hours. There were two men waiting for a haircut. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll be back in just a few minutes.” He hoped that was true.

  In Doc’s examining room sat an Indian woman accompanied by three children. They appeared to be from about two to ten or eleven years old, and were sitting at her feet. Doc was talking to her. “Missus Mondoc, you’re sure it’s only been two days since you and your ch
ildren came into contact with the two men?”

  “I sure. You number three doctor I ask for help. The others say no help. I hear from miners that doctor can stop smallpox.”

  Doc’s jaw tightened, but he held himself in check. How could any doctor refuse to help this family? “I can help you.” He noticed B. F. and explained. “This woman, Missus Mondoc, is from the Siskiyou Tribe up north of here. Last week, her husband got sick in the gold fields, and his brother brought him home for treatment, but by the time he arrived, the husband was dead. The brother became so sick on his trip that he tied himself to his horse. By the time the brother arrived, he had to be carried from his horse. He had a high fever and was covered with weeping pustules.”

  B. F.’s eyes shot toward the woman, then to Doc Butterfield. “Then, you’re saying. . . .”

  “Yes. It sounds like both he and his brother had smallpox. Missus Mondoc traveled two days with her children because she had heard a doctor could prevent the smallpox.”

  “But, I thought. . . .”

  Doc held up his hand. “Smallpox can’t be cured once you have it. The only thing you can do is hope you survive. But it can be prevented if we act quickly. From what Missus Mondoc says, we have enough time. I want you to see how this is done.”

  Doc retrieved two glass plates, one on top of the other. He separated the two and put no more than eight or ten drops of water in the center of the glass. “On this glass plate is a dried specimen which I took from the last person I vaccinated about a month ago. For us doctors out here in these wild places, we have to keep our own smallpox source going. I scraped some of the pus from that man’s vaccination a week after he was treated. Then that pus was dried between these two glass plates, and that’s what I’ll use on Missus Mondoc and her children. The water reactivates the dried smallpox.”

  He turned to the woman. “Missus Mondoc, you understand that you have to come back here in seven days so I can use your vaccination for the next person?”

  The woman had a determined look on her face. “I unnerstand.”

  B. F. interrupted. “How long does that dried up smallpox last?”

  “I think about two months is the maximum. I tried some after almost three months, and the man I gave it to didn’t get any vaccination sores. If you don’t get the sores, then it probably didn’t work. So I have to vaccinate somebody at least every two months to keep it viable.”

  Doc pulled out three small white instruments that he called ivory points. They looked like very fine, curved pieces of ivory that were about an inch long, pointed at one end, and hollow. He used one of them to thoroughly mix the dried exudate on the glass plate with the water he had added. Again he turned to the woman. “I’m going to vaccinate you in three places, one on each arm and one on the back of your calf. To do that, I’m going to make two small cuts with a knife on each spot, then I’ll rub in the vaccine, and put on a bandage. Do you understand?”

  The woman nodded.

  Again Doc turned to B. F. “In England, they vaccinate in five spots, but in Philadelphia they say three places are enough.” He pulled up her sleeve. “Watch these two cuts. They don’t need to be deep—just enough to draw blood.” He picked up the ivory point that he had used to mix the smallpox mixture. “Then I rub this ivory point into the blood and on the cut. That transfers enough of the vaccine to the site. Next I put a wire guard over the spot and wrap a bandage around her arm.”

  “Why the wire guard?”

  “The places seem to heal better if they get air circulation, but if you don’t cover them, people start scratching the vaccination with their fingernails, and then get it in their eyes or nose or mouth. If they do that, they can end up with terrible sores. Some have even lost their eyesight after getting sores in their eyes.”

  He finished the other two spots on the woman, then turned to the eldest child. “Why has this child got black stain streaked on her face?”

  Missus Mondoc turned her eyes down. “To keep men from stealing her.”

  Doc said no more and completed his task on down to the youngest. “Now, Missus Mondoc, you must come back in seven days. You should not bathe these places on the children, or even get them wet. Leave the bandages right where they are. If one of the children breaks out in a rash outside the three spots where I put the vaccine, you bring them back right away. And don’t go back to your village. It takes several days for this vaccine to work and for them to be safe.”

  The woman pulled out a small bag that was tied inside her dress and handed him a nugget almost as big as his thumbnail. He had not really expected to be paid, but recognized the woman deserved her pride. “Thank you, Missus Mondoc.”

  He cleaned up his ivory points and his scalpel with water, put the glass plates back together, and then thoroughly washed his hands. “If you handle smallpox, you have to make sure you don’t leave any on you. If I rubbed my own eye or mouth or nose before washing up, I could end up in trouble myself—or I could accidently pass it on to the next patient I see here in the office. One more thing before you go, B. F. Have you been vaccinated?”

  B. F. pulled up both sleeves to show the raised scars. “Yes, sir—when I was little. My aunt almost died of smallpox, so she made sure I was vaccinated.”

  “That’s good. If we had it show up here, plenty of these men would get it. Particularly the ones who didn’t come from back east, where most doctors recommend it.”

  Later that evening, Doc spoke again about the Indian woman. “There’s lots of these tribes that have been wiped out by smallpox and measles. They claim that in 1847 there were one hundred seventy thousand Indians in California. Now there are less than a hundred thousand.”

  “The story I keep hearing is that it was really a couple of Indians that first found gold at Sutter’s Mill. By the summer of 1848 there were about four thousand Indians and no more than two thousand whites panning on the American River. But as more people arrived, the Indians got pushed out. There’s hardly any mining now. Between disease, slavery, prostitution, and just plain murder; we’re wiping them out and taking their country away from them.” Doc continued. “Do you know why that Indian girl’s face was stained black and she had her hair hidden under a cloth?”

  “Not really.”

  “The miners steal these young girls and either keep them for theirselves as slaves or sell them as prostitutes. I hear that in some of these mining camps away from town, quite a few miners have young Indian girls hidden in their mines. And even if one of these so-called law officers wanted to do something about it, the Indian can’t testify in court against a white man. So Missus Mondoc was trying to hide her daughter’s looks when she came into these mining towns looking for help.”

  Doc went on. “Hell of a note. To find help, she had to ride at least seventy miles, went to three doctors before she found someone that didn’t turn her away, and had to risk losing her daughter to slavery. And we’re the ones that call ourselves civilized.”

  My story. On July 6, 1854

  It seems like my days are full and most nights are too. It’s seldom that someone doesn’t knock on the door at some unholy time of night. Doc is educated—with a diploma and everything—but he is no miracle worker. Men still die with great regularity around Columbia. The ways they die are not so much different here than they were in Placerville, but here it seems worse, because I know about every one of them.

  The acts of violence are the most interesting, but the majority of men die from things you can’t see—cholera, typhoid, pneumonia, consumption, and just plain starvation. Given that almost every miner works in underground operations; cave-ins, flooded mines, and freezing to death are responsible for their share of deaths as well.

  Because these men are underground for at least twelve hours a day, they exist in a place where the air is so clogged with dust and grit that you can easily see it suspended in the air in the light of a coal oil lamp. I know—I’ve seen it myself when we’ve had to go down in a mine to see a miner that was too sick to get o
ut. Doc says this same dust mixes with the moisture in their lungs, and they clog up with this sludge-like mess. Most of them start having breathing problems that could eventually kill them, or at least leave them in such a state that they can’t carry on a normal life. He says they’ll spend the rest of their days struggling to move enough air through their lungs to keep them alive.

  They’ve all heard of various miracle cures for their breathing problems, and they badger the Doc for one of these quack remedies all the time. He tells them there is no cure except to get out of the mines to keep from getting worse. Only a few men listen.

  Because his time was so divided between working with Doc Butterfield and his own barbershop, B. F. did not make anywhere near as much money as he had in Placerville, but he didn’t complain very much. Unlike almost every other man in the gold fields, he had a warm, dry place to sleep, relative safety, an opportunity to learn new things most days, and a chance to actually help somebody every now and then. Still, he did miss putting away five double eagles a week. Now he was lucky if he averaged two.

  Twenty-Nine

  The One-Legged Easter Boy

  Columbia, California 1856

  It was not an odd occurrence to hear gunshots on a fairly regular basis in Columbia. Usually it just meant that someone had a bit too much to drink and he was firing a pistol for attention or celebration. But from time to time, the shooting meant Doc Butterfield had to be summoned.

  Late one afternoon, B. F. heard at least three gunshots in rapid succession from somewhere close by, and within five minutes, two men carried a young fellow into the office. “Where’s the doc? Wilbur Easter’s boy been shot.”

  B. F. hollered for Doc Butterfield and directed the men back to his office with their cargo. “What happened?”