Heyday: A Novel

by Kurt Andersen

  “You are welcome to stay here in Kanesville, ma’am,” Truman said as she put a second piece of fish on her plate, “as long a while as you wish.”

  Kane had been rechristened Kanesville. It occurred to Polly that these makers of new communities, from James Danforth at Glee to the Mormons’ leader Brigham Young, were as fickle as little girls about naming and renaming their creations.

  Suddenly someone knocked on Truman’s door. Given the small size of the cabin, they could feel the heavy raps.

  “Whatever it is you have frying in there, Codwise,” called a young male voice, “could not smell finer.” The man had an English accent.

  Polly and Priscilla exchanged a glance and a thought: Ben Knowles.

  “Lawrence,” Truman and Billy both shouted as they rushed to the door. All three hugged and whooped and laughed and cried some more.

  Billy Whipple, Lawrence Grafton, and Truman Codwise had been friends in Nauvoo. The Mexican War began in earnest just as the Saints came west, and the army had offered to let the squatters remain on the Indians’ land at their Winter Quarters for the duration—but only if five hundred of their young men would enlist to form a Mormon Battalion and fight in Mexico for a year. Thus the newlywed Grafton joined up, gave his forty-two-dollar army clothing allowance to his pregnant wife, and marched west in the summer of ’46. He had turned eighteen as a private in southern California, he said between bites of catfish, while they were occupying the Mexican town of Los Angeles, and had turned nineteen as a laborer in the northern California hills, camped last fall and winter with four dozen other mustered-out members of the battalion on the American River, a day’s ride from Fort Sutter. “The Indians in that part are very tame,” he said. “We worked right with them, digging and sawing and hammering for our dollar a day.”

  What Lawrence was most excited to describe for Truman and Billy, however, was his journey of the last two months. As soon as the spring melt had allowed, he’d started riding back from California to Iowa to rejoin his wife and baby daughter. He had reached the Great Salt Lake in June—on the very day, he said, a great flock of white gulls flew into the valley and started eating the crickets that had plagued the Saints’ six thousand acres of new wheat and corn, and driving the rest of the insects into the lake. And every morning, Lawrence said, the white birds returned to battle the crickets. “I tell you, if that was not a true holy miracle I witnessed, boys, a happy message from the Lord to the Saints, then I am a fool or a maniac!”

  And the biblical pageantry had continued as he rode east and passed company after company of westbound brothers and sisters who had left the Winter Quarters for their New Jerusalem. At Fort Bridger, he had seen the seven other surviving Whipples. “Your sister,” Lawrence said about Jemima, who was exactly Priscilla’s age, “has become a woman since you saw her last.”

  Lawrence had returned only this morning, but had already signed up as a bullwhacker to help lead the last westbound company of the year, leaving Wednesday next, meaning that he and his family should celebrate Thanksgiving at Salt Lake.

  Truman was grinning. “Brother Lawrence, I hesitated to say so before, but I am riding with the company leaving Wednesday as well—we are going to Zion together.”

  There was another round of hugs and whoops and laughter and tears.

  As Lawrence prepared to return to his cabin for the night, Polly asked him about California. After describing its diverse terrain and gentle (but changeable) climate, he mentioned, as an afterthought, shaking his head, that during his final weeks there, “an unholy rumpus developed.”

  “A rumpus of what sort?” she asked him.

  “Oh,” he said dismissively, as if he were talking about children’s shenanigans, “some boys building a mill found itty bits of gold in the river, some gold gravel, and then they scrabbled up some more in another place not far away, and in no time everyone was boiling with greed, nearly all the brethren as well as the gentiles. By the time I rode out, there was some new stranger or two appearing every day, men from San Francisco and Monterey, hot to find their fortunes.

  “You remember little Azariah Smith?” he asked Billy and Truman. “He was right there building the sawmill when they found the first teeny bit. He held it up next to one of his army five-dollar pieces and said, ‘Uh-huhnhh—gold.’” The three laughed, because back in Nauvoo, Azariah Smith had always answered questions “uh-huhnhh” and “uh-unhhh” instead of “yes” and “no.” They proceeded to reminisce about other mutual pals and enemies from their youths on the Mississippi, but after a while Polly could no longer contain her curiosity.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Grafton—”

  “Lawrence, ma’am.”

  “—Lawrence, I am curious about the gold you mentioned earlier. When you say they simply found it in the water, you do not mean that they…actually plucked it out with their fingers, like pennies from a fountain?”

  “I surely do, ma’am, yes.”

  “But it will run out soon, surely. The area will be picked clean.”

  “I don’t know. Just before I left, some of our boys from the battalion found a whole fresh sandbar full of it. There was more to dig and wash than there were men to do it.”

  “And who owns this land?”

  “Out there in the Coloma? Nobody, I guess. Quite a few Indians live close by. But now since America won the war, the States owns it all, everyone figures. All of us own it. Nobody and everybody.”

  “And those who went searching,” Polly asked, “found how much gold in a day of looking?”

  “Oh, anybody might pick up, oh, fifteen dollars in a day. The end of my time there I helped a couple of the boys use what they call a rocker to sift gold out, and we took a pound of dust. Nearly three hundred dollars. In those five days I got as much as I earned for my year in the army.” From his pocket he pulled a leather purse, and into his palm he carefully spilled out a small mound of golden flakes and gravel.

  Everyone stepped close to Lawrence’s open hand to stare. Priscilla grinned. The men shook their heads and whistled, sincerely impressed that Lawrence had resisted temptation, choosing his wife and baby and a new life in Zion over the prospect of more easy wealth.

  And Polly was hatching an idea. “Lawrence,” she asked, “may I keep you just a few minutes more? I am very curious about California.”

  Illinois

  WHEN THEIR STAGECOACH arrived in Springfield in the afternoon, Skaggs had once again pleaded that they stop and rest overnight to gather their strength for the final rush to the border, and to allow him to look up some friends from his years working at the State Register. Ben was persuaded only when Skaggs suggested they could make up any lost time by taking a railroad train most of the way to the Mississippi River—the most westerly train line in the States—the next morning.

  “If you are so fond of this town, Skaggs, why did you leave it?”

  “Why? Are you serious, Knowles? There are only a couple of thousand people living here. And half of those,” he said, pointing across the street at the grand new limestone state capitol, “are politicians, politicians’ wives, favor-seekers, bribe-payers, and lawyers. I left because I was offered a position back in New York at double my salary—and because around the same time I was informed that a certain overzealous and stiff-backed Hoboken prosecutor had died. Which freed me to end my exile and return at last to the vicinity of New Jersey.”

  Skaggs left Ben and Duff at their hotel, crossed the street to Tinsley’s dry-goods store, and walked up to its third floor, where several attorneys kept offices. Before he gave himself over to the pleasures of Springfield society—to pals at the Register, and to a loose young Swedish seamstress whose company he’d kept—he needed to square an account. He needed to seek forgiveness.

  “Good afternoon, sir.”

  “My Lord, is that Timothy Skaggs? The scoundrel has returned! Alive and well! And in a beard.”

  “Yes, Mr. Herndon, my hair has waxed, while I see that yours”—he pointed at the balding pa
te of his twenty-nine-year-old friend—“has waned.”

  They shook hands warmly. Seven years ago, Billy Herndon had studied his law books every morning in the same tavern where Skaggs had written his articles for the Register, and the two young men had become friendly. Standing at Herndon’s desk now, Skaggs explained the odd circumstance of his visit.

  “Billy,” he said as earnestly as he knew how, “I have come here to see the congressman this afternoon, if he’ll see me, so that I might make my apologies for the things I wrote and said about him.”

  Herndon was dumbfounded.

  “The congressman” was Herndon’s law partner. When Skaggs had moved to Springfield, the congressman had been a Whig state legislator on the make, and Skaggs had attacked him relentlessly in the Democratic Register. He had taken up his paper’s standard critique—that the Whigs were squandering public money on railroad lines. But in the case of Herndon’s man, Skaggs’s ridicule had gone well beyond fiscal disagreements. He’d accused him in print of “practicing the cynical and nauseating politics of the gutter” for trying to besmirch President Van Buren’s support of Negro suffrage with the fact that his vice president kept a black mistress. He’d written that Herndon’s partner was “a remorseless bully” after the fellow caused another young politician to cry and run off a public stage by impersonating his peculiar manner of speech in front of a hooting, laughing audience. Skaggs had also suggested that the fellow’s teetotaling caused his well-known mental depressions, and called his notoriously difficult wife “Scary Mary, Quite Contrary.”

  “Your apologies!” Herndon said finally. “Have you got religion, Timothy?”

  “No, I have just—I have been exceptionally impressed by everything I have read of him this last year, Billy. No one in Washington was more sensible about the war.” Amid the patriotic jubilee last winter over the U.S. victory in Mexico, Herndon’s law partner, as a first-term member of the House, had dared to call President Polk’s prophylactic invasion unnecessary and unconstitutional and “half insane.” “On the slavery question as well,” Skaggs added, “I am strongly on the free-soil side. And by the way, I am a temperance man—”

  “No!”

  “—more or less, yes, lately. And in the morning I shall be a westbound passenger on his own beloved railroad line.”

  “Your news is all as gratifying as it is surprising, Skaggs. I am sure he should be very surprised and pleased to hear it too.”

  “And where is he? At luncheon?”

  “He is in Washington still, I am afraid.”

  “Drat! But I read that he was not seeking reelection…I meant to congratulate him for that as well—retiring from the House and from office-seeking altogether, leaving the District of Corruption for good.”

  “Oh, he is, he has. He’s rejoining me here shortly—Lincoln & Herndon endures.”

  “Hurrah, then. Please do convey to Mr. Lincoln, Billy, the sincere regret of a man no longer so youthful or benighted or dog-hearted as I once was.”

  They shook hands again. “You know, Timothy, your appearance in town today will shock people—we had heard that you’d left the States to seek your fortune, and…had died.”

  “Really? Wishfulness! You seem to have mistaken me for George and Jake Donner.”

  “Skaggs. That is a travesty in appalling taste, even for you. My nephew Noah was a teamster with those poor people.” Two Springfield families had formed a wagon train to California in 1846 and become snowbound in the high Sierras for months. A little more than half of the eighty-three lived, half of those by roasting and eating the flesh of a dozen of their dead companions.

  “Yes, I know—and young Noah was one of the lucky survivors, I was interested to read, now a famous man, no doubt, living a happy life in California. Please send him my congratulations as well.”

  August 22, 1848

  AS THEY CROSSED west into Hancock County on the Sangamon & Morgan Railroad, Skaggs was recounting for Ben and Duff the excitement of his one and only visit to these parts four years before.

  In June of 1844, dissidents in the Mormon town of Nauvoo had published the first issue of a newspaper in which they’d called their prophet and founder Joseph Smith a tyrannical organizer of “whoredoms and abominations.” In response, Smith had declared martial law and ordered his thugs to sledgehammer the dissidents’ press and burn their papers.

  The moment word of this battle reached Springfield, Skaggs had hired a surrey and raced across the state to report on it for the Register.

  Meanwhile, the Hancock County authorities had arrested Smith on charges of treason and jailed him in Carthage, the county seat.

  And Skaggs happened to arrive in Carthage just an hour before a mob of armed citizens had stormed the jail to deal with the tyrant freak themselves.

  “I saw Smith jump from the second story of the courthouse, as if he thought he was going to fly away on angel’s wings. On the ground, he pleaded for his life, but the gentlefolk of Carthage shoved him up against the wall and shot him, point-blank. I had never seen a man murdered.” The Register ran Skaggs’s eyewitness scoop—and after he published an even more purple dispatch on the lynching in the New York Evening Mirror, he’d been offered the job that returned him to Manhattan.

  “So Mr. Smith’s end,” Ben concluded, “was a new beginning for Timothy Skaggs.”

  Duff nodded. “Destruction and creation,” he said softly.

  IN THE CITY of Quincy, Ben and Duff went to inquire about their ferry across the Mississippi to Hannibal, and the stagecoach schedule west from there. Skaggs, minding the luggage on the docks, encountered a bachelor gentleman he had known during his time in Springfield. Kenner Loring, it turned out, was now an investor in the reconstituted local railroad—the railroad on which Herndon’s partner Abraham Lincoln and his partisans had so enthusiastically spent the public’s money. Loring and his associates had just bought the bankrupt million-dollar line from the state for twenty-one thousand dollars.

  Skaggs congratulated him. “Capital, you sharper, absolutely capital. And I see your fortune has made you exceedingly well fed.” Loring had gained fifty pounds since Skaggs had seen him last.

  “‘The righteous shall still bring forth fruit in old age; they shall be fat and flourishing,’” Loring replied.

  Both men laughed, and Skaggs pointed at the three large trunks on the dock. Loring explained he was visiting a lady in New Orleans whom he had met last spring.

  “On my annual vacation through the South, with some fellows from Chicago, bucks of the blunt—your type of rover, Skaggs. We book a private steamer from St. Louis, and stop at the best places along the river, Memphis, Vicksburg—and New Orleans, of course. Is there any American city more devoted to pleasure?” He grinned, winked, then leaned close to Skaggs and whispered, “We also have our little slaving spree. Very naughty, very jolly.”

  “What is that, sir—a ‘slaving spree’?” Skaggs was sincerely mystified.

  “Shhhhh,” he said, lowering his voice even more. “This city is a hotbed of ultras,” by which he meant abolitionists. “We visit the dealers in St. Louis—the respectable ones—and then proceed down the Mississippi with…our enlarged crew.” He was still smiling.

  “Do you mean to tell me you and your friends go south on an expedition to buy slaves? For sport?”

  “Skaggs, I don’t expect sanctimony from you. You know, in New Orleans, I discovered, there are thousands of Negro slaveholders. In any event, I assure you that our little troop treats them well, very well, even affectionately, I daresay. Not one has ever attempted to escape—for the coloreds it really amounts to a month of vacation as well. For us, you see, it is only a hobby, not any true deal of business. As one of the fellows says—he’s a collector of art—‘I can buy a marble statue of a man in Rome or a man in St. Louis, costs a thousand dollars either way.’ And we do not keep them, for goodness’ sake.”

  Skaggs only stared.

  “Indeed,” Loring continued, sounding proud, “we hav
e established a means by which they can win their freedom. A contest. On our way back upriver at the end of the journey, we dock in St. Louis and hold a banquet, a gala to mark our last night all together in slave country. And after dinner our ten or dozen darkies put on the most amazing show—singing, juggling, acting, joking, hilarious dancing, acrobatic leaps. And at the end of the evening, we vote as a jury on who has performed best. And the prize for that lucky man is manumission. He is put into a skiff and sent off to Illinois, free and clear.”

  “And the others?”

  “Sold back to the dealers. At a discount from the purchase prices, naturally…although the firms do pay the insurance for the time we have possession, a dollar and a half per month for each sambo…”

  By the time Ben and Duff returned from their errand, the bellowed name-calling back and forth—fanatical bastard, vile poltroon, un-Christian pig, barn burner, drunkard, New Yorker, sinner, criminal, fool—had subsided. Loring was red-faced with embarrassment and anger but also from the smart slap Skaggs had given his cheek the instant he’d uttered sambo. At the height of the donnybrook, Skaggs had knocked his hat off, and as Loring had run in vain to catch it before it flew into the river, he’d tripped over one of his steamer trunks. And none of the amused spectators had interceded when Skaggs picked up Loring from the dock by his necktie, like a noose, twisting it tight around his throat.

  As Duff and Ben approached Skaggs, the crowd expected an all-out tussle and scuffle, with eyes gouged and ears bitten. One of the quarrelers might even demand satisfaction. But no duel took place. The fellow in blue eyeglasses straightened his waistcoat and, without a further word, turned and walked off with his seconds.