by Tim Champlin
Wiley, Cathy, and Curt joined me a couple of minutes later as the riders were leading the team and the coach back up toward us and the Wells Fargo stage station.
50 Dakota Gold
I glanced back at the door of the Golden Eagle Saloon and saw Burnett directing the four soldiers up the street, evidently toward the doctor's office, as three of them half carried the wounded, white-faced Arnold up the boardwalk. A bloody blue bandanna had been tied around his thigh inside the slit pants leg.
As the coach was led past us, we saw a hatless, black-suited man sitting on the box holding the reins. From the way he looked and the way he handled the lines, I knew he was no driver. His face was drawn and white with fear, and his gray hair blew around in his eyes in the swirling wind.
The four of us automatically followed the coach, and others joined the parade until, when the red Concord was brought to a halt in front of the stage station, the lathered horses stamping and tossing their heads, a sizable crowd had collected.
Everyone was yelling at once, about half of them asking what happened and the other half shouting for them to shut up and let the driver talk. In the midst of all this confusion someone climbed up and set the brake, took the reins from the black-suited man, and hooked them around the brake handle. Others helped the man down. He looked as if he were going to collapse. Then we saw why the driver looked so shaken. The bodies of the regular driver and the shotgun messenger were lying under his feet in the boot. Several willing hands lifted the two dead men down and laid them out on the boardwalk. One of them had a neat hole in the center of his forehead, and the other's vest and shirt were a mass of blood. I looked away, feeling a little queasy.
A man with a sheriff's badge and someone I took to be the express agent were questioning the black-suited man. As we crowded in closer, I could hear snatches of the conversation.
"… hit us while we were changing horses at Ten-Mile Station. Yeah, yeah—Fitzgerald's place. No, no warning. They must've been inside the station."
"What about the gold?" someone yelled. A buzz went through the crowd, as if this information were not general knowledge.
"They got the strongbox, if that's what was in it," the black-suited man said.
"God! A month's worth of dust—gone!"
"Is Wells Fargo going to reimburse me for this?" someone else yelled.
"Let's get up a posse!" a man near me shouted.
A chorus of seconds greeted this proposal.
The four of us had seen enough and slipped back out of the crowd.
"This isn't our problem," Curt said. "Let's go. We need to locate a good campsite before dark."
Cathy mounted the horse; her brother led the pack mule while Curt and I walked. After several hundred yards, I looked back at the excited crowd that still surrounded the coach. It struck me that the clump of buzzing humanity looked strangely small and insignificant in proportion to the surrounding hills rising above the buildings. From this perspective, their fighting over the shiny yellow metal shrank to the grossest absurdity.
But we were all going out looking for this same metal, I thought as we turned a bend in the street and the crowd was lost to sight.
We followed the road out of town and tramped along for an hour or so as the easy grade wound along the bottom of the canyon. We spoke very little. I think everyone was thinking over the events of the day and the past few days, wondering what lay ahead.
"What's wrong, Curt? You look worried," I said as we walked a few yards ahead of the Jenkinses.
He looked up blankly. Then his face became animated, as if he were coming back from a long way off. "Worried? Oh, no, no. I was just thinking about that gunfight." He paused.
"Yeah?"
"I'm just a little shaky, I guess," he said quietly, almost as if he were ashamed of the feeling.
"Well, it was a pure case of self-defense," I reminded him, aware of his strong aversion to killing. This aversion had caused him to end his army career only the week before.
"I know, I know. That's not what bothers me."
"Then what? You only wounded him. And it didn't even look too serious."
"That's it. I wasn't trying to wound him. I was just trying to hit him—anywhere. It never entered my mind at the time to try to wound him."
"Don't worry about it. Everybody has the instinct for survival. And you're no professional gunfighter, so you haven't had much practice with a handgun at close range —especially with somebody shooting back."
He pondered that for a few seconds.
"Guess you're right," he finally conceded. "I was probably lucky to hit anything, because I remember jumping to one side just as we both drew."
"I know one thing."
"What's that?"
"He was sure aimin' to drill you dead center."
"He was either a mighty bad shot, or just too drunk—or both."
I grinned. "As drunk as he looked, he may not have even hit the back wall. I was probably in more danger than you were."
Curt's face relaxed into a grin. "You're probably right. By the way, since it was my bullet that knocked out Burnett's front window, I left him ten dollars to help pay for it. Told him if it came to more than that, I'd reimburse him later."
"Does he own the place?"
"Yeah. Said he'd have to order the glass, so he'd just board it up in the meantime."
"Reckon we shoulda reported that shooting to the sheriff?" I asked.
"Naw. Nobody was killed. And besides, he's got more important things on his mind now. From what I gathered, the population of that town is reduced by one or two every night anyway, and as long as it's not out-and-out murder, nobody else gets too excited about it. The law isn't too strong here, and apparently the vigilantes haven't gotten organized yet."
Even as we walked along at a relaxed pace and talked, I noticed Curt's eyes constantly sweeping the wooded hills on either side of the road. Then I recalled what Burnett had told us about the Sioux' killing so many prospectors in the area, and the dark green, scented trees around us suddenly became the ominous hiding places of hostile eyes. I almost felt a chill in the hot, sparkling sunshine of the September day.
After consulting the crude map Burnett had drawn for us, we decided to strike off the road toward the west. We blundered into a couple of blind canyons and had to back up and detour. It was rugged going for about two hours, up and down steep, rocky ridges. I was glad we were off the road and traveling cross-country: whether it was true or not, the cover of trees and boulders gave me a feeling of security from ambush by hostiles or robbers.
I guessed it was about four o'clock when we slid down a steep, shale-covered hillside and descended into a shallow, grassy valley. A mountain stream flowed down from a cleft in the granite ridge at the southwest end of the valley and ran, splashing and gurgling, down its center until its flow was quieted by the level valley floor. Fir and pine rimmed the valley and grew about a third of the way down the slopes before they thinned out and grass took over.
Almost as one, we stopped and stared at the beautiful pastoral scene before us.
"Looks like a good place to start."
The feeling was unanimous.
"Even if there's no gold here, it'd be a beautiful place to camp," Cathy remarked as we started toward the far end of the valley where the stream cascaded down out of the trees. The valley was narrow—only about four hundred yards across—actually a grassy canyon. Nor were we the first to discover this Eden. There was a thin column of smoke from a campfire and the tiny figures of two men moving in and out of the trees along the stream.
As we led our animals along the bank of the stream, the figures disappeared into the trees, and I got the same skin-crawling feeling that had come over me when we were approaching the hidden war party of Sioux along the Belle Fourche. The feeling of unseen muzzles trained on me was something I could never get used to.
When we approached close enough to be seen clearly, two men stepped out from behind some big pines with rifles leve
led at us. We stopped.
"What're y'all up to?" a tall, lean, hard-eyed man demanded. His shirt was dirty and too short in the sleeves, revealing big bony wrists.
"Just doing a little prospecting, like yourselves," Curt answered, casually indicating the rocker in the edge of the stream.
"Just come out from Deadwood?" the man asked, still eyeing us suspiciously. He lowered his Winchester slightly. His shorter companion, who wore a black felt hat with the brim bent down all around, kept his rifle steady.
"Yeah," Curt answered.
"We got a claim staked here," the big man continued, still unsmiling, but not sounding hostile now. "There's our lower marker. You're welcome to prospect anywhere below that."
He turned away abruptly and his partner with the hat followed without a word. They leaned their Winchesters against a tree within reach and returned quickly to work, almost as if we had wasted some of their precious, gold-seeking daylight. And I could understand their feeling; in spite of the sun, there was a smell of fall in the air.
We unpacked our mule and set up camp on the grassy slope about seventy yards below, where the curve of the slope began to gentle out.
"Hope they haven't got all the gold," Wiley said, digging into the pack for a pan. "They may have worked this section before they staked their claim."
"I doubt if they got it all. Besides, there are creeks all through these hills."
"Yeh. But how many of 'em are gold-bearing?"
"That's what we're here to find out. Gold is where you find it. Nobody at first thought there was any color as far north in the Hills as Deadwood Gulch. Now look at it."
Cathy and I carried some small rocks from the timberline and the creek to make a fire-ring, while Curt and Wiley got right down to business and began panning up and down the stream. When we had our gear pretty well arranged and a fire laid, Cathy and I joined in and we all hunkered down, swirling the sand and gravel of the stream bed, straining our eyes for the telltale glitter, or for the slight trace of yellow residue of black dirt and sand. But we found nothing.
"Oh, man, this is killin' my back!" Wiley groaned, straightening up and shaking out his pan. It was growing too dark to see, and we hadn't found the slightest trace.
"We know there's gold washed down from that ridge, or those two above us wouldn't have bothered to stake a claim."
"You're right."
We all pitched in with renewed energy, but darkness shortly forced us to quit. We cooked supper and rolled into our bedrolls, exhausted from the day's toil.
It was late the next afternoon before we struck our first color,
CHAPTER 6
It was Curt who first found it. Instead of the trace of dust we were expecting, the elusive gold appeared in the gravel of his pan in the form of a small nugget about the size of the tip of his little finger. It had tiny veins of white quartz running through it, but had been scoured smooth and nearly round by the action of the stream.
This renewed our enthusiasm, but our next three hours of constant labor were rewarded with only the slightest traces of dust, worth no more than a dollar or two, we estimated, based on the current twenty-dollars-per-ounce price.
"The way I figure it, the heavy metal dropped to bedrock higher up; the water wasn't flowing swift enough to carry it down here," Wiley said as we were preparing for supper.
"You forget that we're talking about thousands, or probably millions, of years. No telling what kind of changes, upheavals, and erosions have taken place. This hill didn't always slope just the way it does now," Curt said. "That's the fun of prospecting: Nobody—not even the mineral experts and geologists—know where it is. They can only speculate, based on what types of formations it's been found in before."
"Well, if you ask me," Wiley answered, "gold prospecting is like fishing: It's only fun if you're having some luck."
The next morning we were up and at it early, and stayed at it until dark without pausing for anything but a drink of water now and then. But the day's labor again proved almost fruitless. Our day's take of dust amounted to no more than two or three dollars. We estimated our total take, counting the small nugget, at about fifteen dollars.
Our aching backs told us that at this rate we would never make it in this prospecting business.
"But that's just it," Wiley argued as we sat around our campfire that night. "Prospecting isn't a business. It's a gamble. Maybe that's why I like it so much already, in spite of the way my back feels." He shifted into a more comfortable position against the saddle he was leaning on. "If I were working for wages, I wouldn't put in one more minute at this. But, just think"—he leaned forward to emphasize his point—"the next panful of gravel may be a ten-dollar or a twenty-dollar one. We know the gold is here and there all around us in these bills. All we have to do is find it."
"Oh, is that all? How simple!" Cathy said sarcastically.
"Yeah."
"I don't know how you got so optimistic all of a sudden," she rejoined.
"Well, 'Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed,"' Curt quoted.
"Where did you hear that?" Wiley asked.
"Ben Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac," he replied. "And don't look so surprised. They teach other things besides engineering at West Point. And I've done a little reading in my time, too."
"Well, I expect something and I'm not planning on being disappointed," Wiley said with finality.
"I tell you what," Curt suggested, "why don't we scout around tomorrow and see what other streams may be in this area. It can't hurt. We can always come back here if we want to."
After some discussion, this was agreed on and we turned in.
The next day Wiley and I took the horse and mule and set off westward, leaving Curt and Cathy, with most of the arms, to continue working the stream.
We must have ridden seven or eight miles vertically, but only about three or four horizontally, that day. About midafternoon, we came upon another little valley, about half the size of the one we had left. And this one, too, had a promising little stream that was doing its patient work of carving the little valley deeper.
It took us only a few minutes to unlimber our gear and start panning. I struck a little color in the very first panful. Wiley had started about fifteen yards upstream from me.
"Yeow! We've hit it! Matt, look!" He threw his hat on the ground and splashed out of the edge of the water, holding the pan out for me to see. I ran up as he set the pan down and began clawing out the larger rocks and debris. "Here, let me wash it down a little finer and you can see."
He stooped and scooped up a little water and carefully swished it around in the shallow pan, letting a little more of the sand and water flip over the rim with each swirl. I watched eagerly over his shoulder, my heart pounding with excitement. As the lighter dirt and sand was sluiced off, the finely ground yellow metal spread itself in a glittering fan across the dark bottom. We both caught our breath at the sight.
We carefully sifted the dust into our rawhide poke, and tried several more pans full at different points along the creek. In less than an hour we had collected at least an ounce. Our pans varied from point to point and sometime came up empty, but this hardly dampened our enthusiasm.
"This has gotta be a fifty-dollar diggins," Wiley said.
Since it was already late afternoon, we continued panning until dark and then made camp for the night, being careful to build our small fire up close to one steep hillside of the narrow canyon. We scraped away the dry pine needles and made a rock fire-ring before building our small fire under a huge pine where it would be least visible.
Whether it was because of the gold, or because we felt so isolated, we took turns standing watch that night. I didn't want to be surprised by anyone, especially not the Sioux or Cheyenne, who may have been roaming the Hills.
During my watch, sometime after midnight, the good weather finally broke. I had moved out from under the big pine with my rifle, to have an unobstructed view of the valley
. But "view" is the wrong word, since the moonless night was inky black. The only way I could distinguish anything was by looking up at the sparkling array of stars overhead. They seemed almost close enough to reach. The air was sultry and still—unlike the crisp night air we had experienced in the Hills so far.
The first indication I had of an approaching storm was a faint flicker of lightning just above the northwest rim of the valley. It was followed a few minutes later by another, brighter, flicker, and then a distant grumbling of thunder. The lightning began to come more and more frequently, and the thunder grew gradually louder. The longer blazes of approaching lightning revealed a towering thunderhead, billowing thousands of feet into the sky. Then the flashes flamed out, and the night was blacker than ever. While my eyes were still temporarily blinded, an earthshaking boom of thunder seemed to rattle the very boulder I was perched on. It was an awesome display of nature. Finally, the first faint puffs of air cooled my face as the wind from the storm reached down into the protected valley. I had seen summer storms like this before when sailing on Lake Michigan near my Chicago home. And the sight of one of these approaching storms had always given me a cold chill when I was out on the water. But now I watched with a relaxed fascination. However, about ten minutes later I was forced to take shelter under the pine tree as the storm broke over the valley in a fury of wind and rain. Thunder shook the hills and echoed back and forth in deafening crashes. Lightning and thunder followed each other without pause and the rain lashed down, driven by a gusting wind.
Wiley was sitting up and had wrapped his blanket and poncho around his shoulders, even though very little water was penetrating the thick downsweep of overhead boughs. Only a fine mist was blowing in on us from underneath. I had always avoided standing under trees in a thunderstorm, and this giant pine was at least a hundred feet high. But, I reasoned, the chances of lightning's striking this particular tree were not any greater than the chances of its striking any of the hundreds of other trees in the area; the trees on the ridges were much higher.