by Dutchman
Stunned at such audacity from Waltz and realizing he needed to pacify his partner, Weiser backpedaled. “Listen here, Waltz. While you was relaxing in that jail cell, I spent my entire evening looking for you. I was worried sick. And then, when I finally found you, you got mad. I’m just looking for a little appreciation from my partner, that’s all.”
Weiser’s absurd claim was enough to make Waltz want to belt him again. But he knew that wouldn’t help him in the long run. Waltz held his tongue and resumed walking.
Weiser watched him go, shrugged, and headed for Portsmouth Plaza. As he walked, his spirits rose at the prospect of a convivial evening away from his tiresome, albeit temporary, partner.
FOUR
Prospector’s Luck
As the sun rose the next morning, the small but optimistic group of Jacob Waltz, Jake Weiser, Oscar Hutton, Gideon Roberts, Abraham and Adam Peeples, Matt Webber, Joe Green, and Coho Young rode east out of San Francisco headed for Sutter’s Mill. They were a motley crew from their headgear to their boots. Most of the men adopted the broad-brimmed straw sombreros worn by Mexicans, but Joe Green wore a brown derby with a dome-shaped crown; Weiser sported a low, soft felt hat with a curled brim; and Oscar Hutton had the fanciest hat of all — a black military hat trimmed with a black ostrich feather and a gold cord terminating in two tassels, a brim looped on the left side, and a feather on the side opposite the loop. Their jackets were various shades of dark wool, worn with or without vests, depending on the weather; their slim-legged trousers were black or navy or tan; and their calf-covering boots laced with stout leather thongs.
It was a mild spring morning, and the road was a sea of men, each one expecting to fill his carpetbag with gold. Horses and mules and wagons were packed so tight men on horseback could go no faster than those on foot. Any man who fainted was swept along until he either revived or dropped and was trampled.
The group expected to reach Sutter’s Mill in six days, but the going was so slow it took them three days just to reach the old settlement of Vallejo at the northeast end of San Francisco Bay. That night, Waltz went to Roberts and said, “We’re going too slow. At this rate it’ll take at least two weeks to get to Sutter’s Mill!”
“What do you want to do?” Roberts asked. “Change our plan?”
“Maybe we should consider it,” Waltz replied. “I keep thinking about a couple of men I overheard talking in a San Francisco saloon. They’d quit their jobs because they’re going up to Marysville to prospect.”
“Sounds like a reckless thing to do,” Roberts responded.
“That’s what I thought,” Waltz said. “But their job was selling mining supplies, an’ they’d sold their entire stock to the little mercantile store up there.”
“So you think we should change our plan?” Roberts repeated.
“I do,” Waltz replied firmly. “There’s already so many men going to Sutter’s Mill, all that’ll be left is tailings by the time we get there.”
Unlike Waltz, Weiser was not the least bit concerned about the crowded roads and the throngs of prospectors. They only confirmed his opinion Sutter’s Mill was the place to get rich. He’d done the math the night before and knew the life he lusted after didn’t come cheap. His $50,000 ante for Wells and Fargo had to be accompanied by $50,000 for clothes and a posh apartment, plus another $50,000 to cover social events. In his mind’s eye, he saw himself strolling into the private offices of Misters Henry Wells and William G. Fargo. “I’ll be wearing a hand-tailored suit an’ carrying a suitcase filled with gold, an’ they’ll stand up to welcome me,” he said softly to himself. “It won’t be long until the name on their door will be ‘Wells, Fargo & Weiser.’ ”
Ten tedious days later, they reached the outskirts of Sacramento and the much smaller road toward Marysville. Without a word, Gideon Roberts turned onto it and stopped at the edge of a meadow fragrant with newly planted alfalfa. A swift-flowing stream rushed by, swollen with spring runoff from the snow-covered mountains in the distance.
They watered their horses at the stream’s edge, but instead of climbing back into the saddle, Roberts said, “I’m changing our plan. There’s too many men goin’ to Sutter’s Mill. There’s placer gold in the rivers around Marysville, an’ that’s where we’re going.”
Weiser turned to Coho Young and whispered, “That’s ridiculous! Marysville’s nothing but three houses an’ a general store. We don’t want to waste our time piddling around there when we know Sutter’s Mill has the biggest strike in the world.”
“Why don’t you speak up an’ say so?” Young whispered back.
“Because Marysville is Waltz’s idea, an’ I don’t want to cross him,” Weiser replied. “He has a terrible temper an’there’s no telling what he might do to me. But if you speak up, he won’t dare come after you.”
Roberts saw this exchange and asked, “Do you have something to say, Mr. Weiser?”
Weiser nudged Young and whispered, “Go on, tell him you don’t want to change our plans. Say you want to go to Sutter’s Mill, an’the rest of the men will agree. They just don’t have enough nerve to speak up.”
With that encouragement, Young said, “Some of us don’t want to waste our time going to Marysville.”
“Is that right?” Roberts replied, raising his left eyebrow and looking intently at Young and Weiser. “Well then, I’m going to Marysville with Waltz, an’ the rest of you can come along if you want.”
“Wait a minute,” Weiser said. “You can’t just go off an’ leave us.”
Roberts leaned forward and replied, “I’m the leader of this group, Mr. Weiser. We’re going to Marysville an’ we’re leaving in five minutes. If you choose not to come along, that’s your decision.” Roberts looked around at the other men and said, “Does anyone else want to get back in that crowd going to Sutter’s Mill?”
“Not when you put it that way,” Young said. Green and Webber nodded in agreement.
Inwardly fuming at being marginalized, Weiser let out a long, deep, audible breath and said, “All right Roberts, I know when I’m licked.”
As Roberts and Waltz started toward Marysville, Roberts said softly, “Why do you put up with that bastard?”
Waltz sighed heavily and replied, “I owe him a lot. If it wasn’t for Weiser, I’d still be in Germany making barrels. He got me started in my boxing career, an’ it was his idea to come to America. So even if Weiser is selfish sometimes, he’s still my partner.”
The road they followed north was scarcely more than a trail, but there was so little traffic they covered the forty miles to Marysville before dark.
The next morning, they bought picks, shovels, pans, and a donkey to carry them. On a tip from the store’s owner, they followed the South Fork of the Yuba River east toward the Sierra Nevada.
After twenty miles, their primitive road left the river and took them over a rise to a lush, green, river valley that was a mile wide and seven miles long. A handful of prospectors were up to their knees in icy water scooping gravel into buckets. Others were at the water’s edge, sloshing the gravel in pans until gold settled and they could pick it out. Frequent shouts of “Eureka!” meant another man had a sizable gold nugget in his gravel.
Waltz tethered his horse, grabbed a bucket and shovel from their mule’s packsaddle, and strode confidently into the water. Weiser chose the lesser discomfort of squatting at the river’s edge and panning. By late afternoon, even Weiser had put over a pound of gold in his bucket.
A few miles upriver, a small settlement hunkered on higher ground. Known as Caldwell’s Upper Store and Deer Creek Dry Diggings, this community of a hundred men lived in a mixture of small cabins, canvas tents, and shacks nailed together from scraps. A large log building and a hotel were under construction. Roberts and his group pitched their tents, content to stay at Caldwell’s and placer mine as long as their daily take of gold was as good as the first.
Word of Green Valley’s gold spread fast, and by July Caldwell’s Upper Store was a
booming community of six thousand people, with a sawmill, four churches, and twenty saloons. In August, they celebrated their community’s coming-of-age by changing its name to the more dignified title of Nevada City.
Jacob Waltz had never been happier. Each day, he awoke with the dawn, pulled his pants on over wool flannel drawers, tossed his bedroll into the corner of a tent he kept his things in, and greeted the nippy morning air. Waltz reveled in his work, hauling cumbersome buckets of sodden gravel from the icy river as if they were filled with feathers. Each load of ore brought him closer to his own little farm.
Jake Weiser, on the other hand, delayed the start of his day by snuggling down in his cozy bedroll and imagining ways to spend his anticipated wealth. Champagne, fresh oysters, and Cuban cigars were high on his list of priorities. Making no secret of his discomfort, Weiser filled his workday with a few hours of halfheartedly hunkering on the riverbank sifting piles of Waltz’s gravel and, when no one was looking, stuffing an occasional nugget into his pocket. In Weiser’s mind, he deserved it — he had, after all, saved Waltz from a miserable life with a nagging wife and a hovel full of snot-nosed children. Weiser stayed at the river until the pseudo-pain of his old ankle injury gave him an excuse to hobble up to Caldwell’s Store and play a little poker.
For his part, Waltz rarely went to Caldwell’s. He had other business to tend to, as he searched for the mother lode that fed their river its gold-laden placer. Success depended on finding gold and mining it before another prospector beat him to it. And he was more content than he’d ever been, surrounded by towering ponderosa pines and tiny wildflowers in the forest’s glades. He came across small meadows, where deer looked up briefly from their evening graze as he passed, undisturbed by his presence. A tawny cougar followed Waltz as well, blending in with the foliage and stepping so softly he was unnoticed by Waltz. But Waltz posed no threat and so was allowed safe passage.
Weiser knew that Waltz was after a mother lode and would probably find one. He tried to revive his pretense of partnership, but Waltz wanted none of it. For Waltz, Weiser at Caldwell’s was preferable to Weiser at his side.
One August evening, a barn owl’s screeeeeeeech broke the forest’s silence, startling Waltz and causing him to stumble. Steadying himself, he took a closer look at the rock that had tripped him. It was an outcropping of quartz, so heavily veined with gold that it glowed softly in the twilight.
Carefully marking his trail, Waltz returned to camp and did his best to behave as if nothing unusual had happened. If word of his discovery got out, strangers would swarm to it like bees to clover and steal it from him.
Waltz was known as an early-to-bed man, and no one was surprised when he left the campfire after just one cup of coffee, flung his pants on the ground next to his sleeping bag, and slid in. But despite his outward calm, Waltz was too excited to sleep. His mind raced between believing his gold-streaked quartz was genuine and fear that its glow was a cruel trick of the fading light. His feet itched to run back to his rock and his arms ached to crack it open and see how much gold really ran through it.
As soon as morning’s first light crept over the mountains, Waltz dressed and hurried into the forest. Following the path he had marked the night before, he reached his precious rock, only to see nothing special in its appearance. His heart sank at the ordinariness of it.
He turned away in disappointment, but couldn’t resist a parting glance back. And as he gazed sadly at the cruel rock that had robbed him of a night’s sleep, the rising sun’s rays caught the unmistakable glow of genuine gold. Was there any depth to it? Attacking his rock with the unleashed fury of a man so long denied his dream, Waltz hacked and chiseled and broke chunks from it, prying his way toward its heart.
When he was finally satisfied this vein ran deeply into the hillside, Waltz carefully placed a finger-size piece of it in the deepest pocket of his inner shirt. Then he painstakingly restored the surrounding area to conceal all signs of his activity, and made his way back to camp.
Gideon Roberts was standing by the campfire, drinking coffee. Without asking, he poured a second cup for Waltz and sat down on a log. Waltz spooned sugar into his coffee, sat down beside Roberts, and looked around. Satisfied they were alone, Waltz took the new nugget from his inner pocket and handed it to Roberts.
Roberts’s eyes widened as he examined the nugget.
Waltz held a forefinger to his lips and said, “Let’s go for a walk. There’s something I want to show you.”
“Can it wait?” Roberts asked, surprised at Waltz’s secretive manner.
“No,” Waltz insisted, “you must come right away.”
Intrigued, Roberts followed Waltz to his quartz rock and helped push aside the fallen fir limb Waltz had used to conceal his digging. It looked like a mother load, all right. “You’re going to be a hero!” Roberts said, slapping Waltz on the back.
“No,” Waltz said. “I can’t register a claim because I ain’t a United States citizen. This time you have to be the hero, and register adjoining claims for all of us.”
Eager to begin working this vein and see where it led, they hurried back to camp, where everyone except Weiser was up and ready for a day’s work in the river bed. After checking to see no outsiders were nearby, and cautioning the men to keep their voices low, Roberts showed them Waltz’s nugget.
The men crowded around, all talking at once and marveling at the quality of it.
“Where’d you get that?” Young asked.
Green’s eyes were as big as saucers as he stared at the nugget. “Ain’t seen nothin’ that good in the river,” he said.
Peeples just grinned and patted Roberts on the back.
Awakened by the commotion, Weiser stuck his head out of his tent. Seeing the crowd around Roberts, he pulled on his pants, ran over to see what was causing the excitement, and asked, “What’s going on here?”
“Roberts just found gold back in the woods,” Peeples answered. “Maybe you ought to come with us, for a change.”
When the murmuring abated, Roberts said, “Before we go, I want us to agree to work it like adjacent claims. That way we can follow whichever direction it goes into the hillside.”
The men agreed, and Roberts said, “All right, then, let’s go!”
Hoping to keep this new strike to themselves, the men casually gathered up their picks and shovels and followed Roberts and Waltz into the forest.
Sensing this was something special, Weiser wanted to be in on it. Much as he disliked digging, he picked up a shovel and went along.
By mid-afternoon, they had their claims staked on the first major strike in Green Valley. Waltz had truly found a mother lode, and it wasn’t long before they were taking in anywhere from twenty to two-hundred dollars’ worth of gold a day.
When word got out about this new strike, Nevada City and Centerville grew like mushrooms after a rain. Prospectors poured into the valley, and soon there were enough small mines for an enterprising Mexican to set up a crude, drag-stone mill to crush their ore. Miguel, the proprietor, charged a fee of one percent of the gold recovered, and even tight-fisted Waltz admitted it was well worth the time it saved.
Weiser spent most of his time at Caldwell’s Store, even though he despised the uncouth men who hung around leaning on cracker barrels and making rude jokes. Their cheap tobacco, mingled with the stink of sweat and unwashed clothes, offended his sensibilities, but not badly enough to keep him from playing poker with them and taking their gold.
One afternoon, as Weiser passed their mine entrance, he overheard Roberts and Waltz talking. Waltz said something too softly for Weiser to hear, but Roberts laughed and said, “Don’t sell yourself short, man. You’re the one who found the gold.”
Weiser froze in his tracks as he realized the truth. “I should have known Roberts didn’t find any gold,” Weiser said to himself. “Roberts wouldn’t know gold if he tripped over it.” Shaken by the implications of Waltz’s deceit, Weiser’s mind reeled. “We were partners before Rob
erts and his gang came into the picture. Are they scheming to cut me out of the money? That’s not like Waltz, but he’s been acting mighty peculiar lately. An’ I never did trust Roberts.”
Weiser backed away from the mine, his mind racing as he made his way down to the saloon. Inside, the air was filled with smoke and noise, a welcome contrast to the dreary drizzle that hung over the valley. The only available chair was at a table where Webber and the others were playing blackjack. To his surprise, Webber looked up and signaled Weiser to join them.
Wary of Webber’s motive, Weiser sat down and picked up the cards Webber dealt him. After a few hands that Weiser won easily, Webber met his eyes and said, “You’re pretty damn good with the cards, Weiser. But you should be, with all the time you spend here. I bet you come out ahead most of the time.”
Curious as to where this was going, Weiser replied cautiously, “Win a few, lose a few, Webber.”
“You wanna know why I’m asking?” Webber said. When Weiser didn’t reply, Webber continued, “I’m asking because you been drawing a equal share of our gold without setting foot down in the mine, an’ I’m thinking it’d be only fair for the rest of us to get a share of what you take in up here, sitting on your ass playing cards.”
Weiser’s brows drew together and his lips pursed slightly, as if in pain, as his clear grey eyes met Webber’s. “I wish it was that simple, Webber,” Weiser said softly. “To tell the truth, there’s nothing I’d like more than to go down in that mine with you men. But my ankle just ain’t strong enough ever since I broke it back in Spartanburg.”
Weiser’s answer made Webber push his chair back so hard it fell over. “You’re a goddamn freeloader, Weiser, an’ you better start pulling your share if you know what’s good for you!”