by Terry Grosz
Before daylight the next morning, the two men mounted up and headed down the Beckwourth Trail toward their first stop at Bucks Ranch. There they holed up for the night, sleeping in a bunkhouse with the snoring and smelly hired hands. Again rising before daylight, they headed down the mountains toward what was called the French Hotel, some twenty miles farther west. There they had a bath and an evening meal of bear steaks, biscuits with homemade blackberry jam, and a hot apple pie fresh out of the wood stove. Following their routine, they were again gone before daylight en route to Peavine Ranch, some nineteen miles away. There dinner consisted of a piece of meat later discovered to be porcupine, one stale biscuit, and a cup of black coffee that could have floated a mule’s shoe! After a restless night’s sleep in the barn, the men were awakened by the tinkling of many small silver bells. Hurriedly getting dressed and peering out from the barn, they saw a mule train of about forty-five animals stopping in front of the ranch. Four mule skinners were hurriedly unloading numerous packs from the mules and spreading some of their wares out on the ground for the now arriving local groups of fellow ranchers, miners, and woodsmen. The first shopper in line was the wife of the ranch’s owner, and soon great smells began emanating from the open kitchen door. These aromas foretold better food soon to come than the previous night’s fare. Soon Jacob and Martin were treated to fresh trout, fried eggs, pan-fried spuds, biscuits, and coffee that tasted like real coffee, all courtesy of the mule pack string and its supplies fresh from the large mining town of Oroville.
Leaving the Peavine Ranch behind, the two men continued moving down the ridge trail until they arrived at what was known as the Mountain House some nine miles away. Observing approaching storm clouds and fearing a wet afternoon on the trail, they stopped and had a lunch that was one of the best meals they had eaten in over two years! Much to their surprise, five miles down the trail, they were so sick from eating apparently tainted food that it soon had them bailing off their saddles and running at both ends!
Stopping after making only fourteen miles and weak from their bouts with food poisoning, the brothers holed up at the Berry Creek House, going to bed early in the adjoining bunkhouse. Come daylight, they awoke famished because they hadn’t had anything to eat that had stayed down since their lunch the day before. At the breakfast table they discovered flapjacks by the small mountain, homemade jams of several kinds, fried ham steaks, small mounds of spuds fried in bear grease, biscuits, and coffee that was out of this world. They fell to and soon could hardly move. However, they did find room for a wonderful freshly baked blackberry pie, consuming the whole thing between them at one sitting!
Finding themselves at the Mill House some eight miles from the Berry Creek House around noon and discovering that it was the last eating house before Oroville, the men loaded up on what that establishment had to offer. Realizing they were possibly headed for a night on the trail, Jacob and Martin purchased some cold fried venison and biscuits to take along. Then they headed toward Bidwell’s Bar, a wild gold mining camp on the Feather River. Arriving late at night, they boarded their animals and then, not trusting the local hell-raising, drunken mining inhabitants, slept in the barn with their stock.
They were awakened the following morning by the cracking of whips and jingling of many horses in their traces. Rolling out from their buffalo robes, Jacob and Martin were surprised to see a Concorde Stage rolling to a stop in front of their livery. It was being pulled by a three-span of good-looking but heavily sweating horses and was loaded to the gills with people, including a number who rode on top of the coach with the luggage. Soon the area was alive with stagehands unhooking the team and leading another team of fresh horses into their traces for the eight-mile run to the next stage stop. The change was accomplished in a very short period of time by a practiced stage-stop crew.
“Load up!” shouted the shotgun as the passengers began stumbling from the stage-stop kitchen with cups of spilling coffee and buttermilk biscuits in hand. Soon the stage was nothing but a cloud of dust, jingling trace chains, and a memory swaying up the road toward Hearts’ Mill for the official breakfast stop, still some eight miles away.
Saddling their horses and repacking their mules, Jacob and Martin led them to the tie-up in front of a clapboard shack doubling as an eatery. Walking inside, they were met with the smells of overboiled coffee, burned biscuits, and meat frying in a pan without enough grease. Martin and Jacob just looked at each other, turned around, and left. Fishing out some jerky, they rode away from Bidwell’s Bar on the trail toward Oroville. A short way down the road, they were confronted with a suspension bridge crossing the Feather River. Never having ridden across such a swinging contraption, they dismounted and walked their nervous horses and mules across before remounting.
Later that evening the men pulled into the booming mining town of Oroville. Even at that hour, the scene was a madhouse. There were gas lights flickering everywhere, sounds of off-tune, clanking pianos emanating from each saloon, streets crowded with noisy or drunken miners, and the occasional smell of Chinese cooking, which was foreign to their senses. Mingled with that was the smell of human offal and animal manure thickly deposited in the streets and the sounds of barking dogs, squealing pigs running loose in the alleys being kicked by an angry miner, wagons moving to and fro, and loud, happy sounds coming from all places selling liquor. Grinning at such exuberance, the two men pulled into Jason’s Livery, which happened to be across from Ma French’s Boarding House and Eatery. Giving the liveryman a dollar to curry down and grain their animals, the men took their saddlebags and leather pokes of gold nuggets and carefully walked around all the manure left by the mule and oxen trains going to the mines, across the street and up the steps to the boardinghouse.
“That’ll be fifty cents for each of you for one bed,” said a bored, half-asleep clerk after Jacob inquired about lodging.
Not having any coin, Jacob laid down a small gold nugget, which the clerk’s greasy hand instantly plucked off the counter so he could eye it for authenticity.
Satisfied, the clerk said, “That’ll be room 101 at the head of the stairs and to the left.”
“Where can a man get some good eats at this time of the night?” said Jacob.
Pointing to an open door to the left, the clerk said, “Through that door is some of the best grub in Oroville.”
Thanking the man, the brothers entered an eating area and took a seat at a table. They soon were visited by a Chinese waiter who told them the only thing available from the kitchen this late at night was bacon, eggs, warmed-over spuds, and coffee.
“That be fine with us,” said Jacob. “Oh, and by the way, can we have a bottle of whiskey?”
The waiter nodded and soon returned with a bottle, glasses, and their silverware.
As they drank whiskey from dirty water glasses, Jacob said, “Brother, we must find a place to cash in some of our gold for money. I don’t like the idea of giving away our nuggets for the attention it brings. Plus, I am not sure what they are worth and if we are being taken advantage of.”
Martin nodded as he took a long pull of whiskey from his water glass and then refilled it from the bottle.
“Right now, brother, all I am interested in is some grub and a couple of quiet hours in bed to get rid of this flattened-out saddle feeling from my last part over the fence,” Martin replied with a grin.
“I know how you feel. Right now I feel like I am married to the backbone of my horse,” Jacob replied, grinning as well.
Early the next morning the two brothers visited the Pacific Bank and Trust on Third Street. Spilling out about five pounds of nuggets from one of their elk-skin pokes, they waited and watched as the bank clerk weighed out their gold on a fancy set of scales.
“That will be $1,280.50 at $16.00 an ounce,” the clerk announced. “I won’t be able to give you all that back in U.S. coin, but I do have some gold slugs minted by respectable assay houses in San Francisco and Sacramento. They are just as good as any U.S. coin in th
e hands of a merchant.”
“That be fine with us,” said Jacob as he closed off the end of his poke in order not to spill out any more gold nuggets for everyone with eyes and a nosy streak to see. Leaving the bank, the men retrieved their livestock and, after getting directions from the liveryman, they headed down the trail as directed toward the towns of Marysville and then Sacramento.
In their travels to Sacramento, they had the opportunity to see wildlife everywhere in abundance. They saw grizzly bear, tule elk, thousands of ducks and geese on every spot of water, and mule deer everywhere in between. They were also passed by many stagecoaches and mule trains, empty and packed, as they headed for the gold fields or returned for more goods to deliver to the miners. They were amazed at the frantic activity of the miners in the Oroville area and on the Feather River. Entire sections of the river had been blocked off with a temporary dam and a flume, which took the waters below the obstruction. The miners were like ants in the bottom of the emptied riverbed, hauling out the large rocks and stacking them in huge piles along the banks so they could get to the bedrock and mine the leavings. They also saw many streams being mined where the water ran dark brown with the flow of muddy effluent from the busy mining activities. They just shook their heads at the land’s destruction by men acting crazy in the head to get at the yellow metal.
Days later found the men in Sacramento, parts of which proved to be just as wild as Oroville. They spent several days in Sacramento, resting their livestock and themselves. During that stay, they visited John Sutter at Sutter’s Fort. He was a tough old man from a country called Switzerland, and he drove a hard bargain, but soon the brothers had arranged to purchase two thousand head of cattle, ten bulls of breeding age, forty brood sows, and five boars from his hock farm. They also purchased ten milk cows and two dairy bulls along with eight heavy-load-carrying wagons and teams with a promise of teamsters and cowboys to assist them in their travels back to Sierra Valley. When the bargaining was finished, the brothers were surprised to still be in possession of one set of saddlebags containing gold nuggets and over a thousand dollars in gold coins.
They also discovered that a series of steam packets plied the nearby Sacramento River and could take them straight to San Francisco and the Pacific Ocean. Agreeing to return in two weeks, the brothers left their newly purchased livestock in John Sutter’s care, booked passage on a boat plying the Sacramento River for San Francisco, boarded their horses and mules, and boarded a steam packet for the Bay area the following morning.
Having paid for first-class passage on the steam packet Micky O ’Brien, the brothers were surprised at their accommodations: a spacious cabin with hot and cold running water, three meals a day with real linen napkins, and river scenery to rival much of what they were used to in the mountains. There were pairs of waterfowl everywhere on the river, bald eagles in many of the huge cottonwoods along the river, fishermen pulling giant white sturgeon and the smaller green sturgeon from the river, and numerous herds of tule elk watering along deserted shorelines in the mornings and evenings.
This sure is a far cry from watching out for the Lakota on a daily basis so they didn’t lift one’s hair, Jacob thought with a relaxed smile.
Several days later, the Micky O ’Brien pulled into a set of docks in San Francisco by what the boys soon learned was called the Embarcadero. As the boat anchored alongside many other steam packets and dozens of sailing ships, the brothers stared in awe at the spectacle. The docks were a frenzy of activity. There were carts with sweating men pushing loads of goods to individual docks to be unloaded and just as many men pushing their carts dockside with goods offloaded from the sea of ships at anchor or tied alongside the wharfs. The stevedores shouting, cries from whirling gulls overhead, the smell of salt water, and the smell of rotting fish associated with such an active waterway, assaulted the men’s senses. For several hours all they did was wander around and stare at a scene they had never even dreamed about. Then it was off to Market Street in a horse-drawn carriage and then up to Geary Boulevard and west to the Pacific Ocean.
Upon arriving at the shoreline, Martin got out of the carriage, took off his moccasins, and walked briskly into the surf. For a long time he just stood there. Then he turned and said, “Jacob, you don’t know how long I have waited to do this. Ever since the mountain men at the rendezvous talked about this big, salty pond, I have wanted to see it. Now I am here, and it is everything I hoped it would be and then some!”
Jacob smiled at his brother’s child-like antics, then took off his moccasins and joined him. It was a personal moment between two brothers and the realization of a dream. The cold water finally numbed their feet, and the men walked out of the water, cleaned the sand from their feet, put on their moccasins, and got back into the waiting carriage.
“Carriage man,” said Jacob, “take us to a part of San Francisco where my brother and I can celebrate our arrival, have a drink or two, and get something good to eat.”
The carriage man got a twisted grin on his face and clucked his horse into action. Shortly thereafter, he stopped the carriage in a rough-and-tumble section of San Francisco known as the Barbary Coast. Raucous-sounding bars lined the streets, and sailors were everywhere, walking arm in arm with obvious fallen doves. In between was every kind of street vendor. Gun and knife fights erupted at least once per block, and the gutters were lined with men who had fallen from blows in a fight or from imbibing too much John Barleycorn.
Grinning at the opportunity for entertainment, Martin paid the carriage man, and the brothers looked around for a place to start. A large, brightly painted bar named Maggie’s of Ireland caught their eye.
“What say you, brother? Shall we go forth and see what San Francisco has to offer?” asked Martin with a grin of anticipation.
Jacob nodded, pleased with his brother’s playful attitude. After all, Martin had always backed his hand, and now it was time for Jacob to let down his guard and allow Martin the chance to see a part of the world he had always longed for. Without a backward glance, the two brothers entered a rather rough- and-tumble bar in which, from the sounds inside, everyone was having a glorious time. Stepping over a drunken sailor lying on the floor, the two men settled down at an unoccupied table. Soon they were visited by several rather rough-looking young ladies, obviously looking for more than a free drink. Remembering their pledges to Amanda and Kim, the brothers demurred and asked for some of the establishment’s best whiskey. Within moments, a barkeep approached with a bottle of whiskey and two glasses. The two brothers laid their rifles across the table, toasted their safe trip across the Western reaches with the wagon train, and then ordered dinner off a menu scrawled in chalk on a wooden board. Soon a corned-beef-and-cabbage dinner arrived, and the two men fell to as they watched the happenings around them in amusement. They witnessed ladies plying their trade among the young sailors, lumbermen trading punches with seafaring men, fishermen trading some of their freshly caught wares for those of the ladies, and everything else in between. After dinner the brothers ordered a plum pudding for dessert and another whiskey. After that drink, they decided to leave and try another establishment. Wobbling out and singing an old mountain-man ditty, they staggered into a bar across the street advertising freak shows. Sitting down in front of a stage, they ordered several more drinks and watched in disbelief as a man swallowed a sword and then took it back out without dying or bleeding all over the place! Then a burly sailor approached and asked if they were looking for a stint at some good sea duty.
Jacob answered, “Not really; we are nothing but cattle ranchers out for a good time, and we’re not interested in going to sea.”
That was the last thing either man remembered as they were struck from behind by two other unseen sailors! The next thing Jacob knew, he was being bound and gagged as he lay in the slop in the bottom of a dinghy heading out into the harbor toward a square-masted rigger. Squirming around and squinting through the pain in his skull, Jacob could see his brother and another man l
ying with him in the bottom of the boat. Looking up, he observed two men rowing the boat while a third manned the tiller. Remembering the bar scene, Jacob realized that the man steering the boat had been the one in front of their table, distracting the brothers with his seafaring question before they had been hit from behind. Then a boot came crashing down on his head from one of the men rowing the boat, and the lights went out once again.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Shanghaied and Sea Duty
The next thing the brothers knew was the pitching and rolling of a ship under way. They heard numerous orders being shouted above the hold where they were lying. They also became aware of the stench of rotting things, their dry throats, and the crushing ache at the backs of their heads where they had been struck by belaying pins. That was quickly superseded by the nausea that comes from being a landlubber experiencing his first bout of seasickness. Soon the men were violently retching. As Jacob vomited for the fourth time, he was glad their captors had removed their gags and damn unhappy he had feasted earlier on the rich, greasy corned beef and cabbage dinner.
Martin rolled over after retching for his fifth or sixth time, and there was fire in his eyes! “I will kill the first man I get my hands on for doing this,” he uttered through clenched teeth and a beard splattered with pieces of vomit.
“Careful, my brother,” said Jacob. “Let us see what the odds are and what circumstances we now face before jumping into something we can’t handle.”
Martin understood the wisdom of Jacob’s words, but he had never been bested on the field of battle and sure as hell was not going to start now! A murderous hatred was boiling up within him—as was more puke as he retched deeply once again.