Heyday: A Novel

by Kurt Andersen

  “And do you know, by the way, sir,” the captain asked Ben, “that it was Sir Archibald himself who rechristened my ship this past spring? She was launched the John Wesley, but before we cleared Plymouth she became the Caroline.”

  “Indeed?” Skaggs asked cheerfully, turning to Ben. “After your late King George’s homely German slut of a wife, Queen Caroline?”

  Caroline had been the name of the fourth and last Knowles child, Ben’s baby sister who’d died when he was small. “No,” he answered, “I believe Queen Caroline is not the ship’s namesake.”

  51

  October 1848

  in the Great American Desert and Rocky Mountains

  UNLIKE THE ALGERIANS, the Indians had a religion that permitted them to booze openly. But like the Algerians, these brown American savages apparently lacked any scruple about intimacies among men. At Fort Laramie, Drumont had watched each of several Indians drink mouthfuls of whiskey in turn and then spit the liquor in a fine stream into the open mouth of a friend.

  Lawrence Grafton said the natives seemed to him childish and imprudent and tragic. Take their overdependence on hunting bison. “The Indians are the Irish of the New World,” he said, “doomed by their single-minded bisonmania the way the Irish have been undone by their dependence on the potato—and don’t both races love liquor and storytelling too much?”

  “At least the Irish bury their dead,” Truman Codwise countered. All the Saints had been disgusted when the train passed an Indian corpse lying hacked and bloody at the bottom of a large, lonely poplar—a Dakota Sioux, Grafton surmised, defiled by a band of Crow after a natural death and funeral. However, it was not the desecration but rather the Sioux custom of ceremonially arranging their dead in the boughs of trees, out in the open air, which had struck the company as the most unfathomably savage of the savages’ habits.

  The plains were so devoid of incident that the occasional detritus of death and defeat was not entirely unwelcome. Any remnant of humanity was pretext for conversation. They discussed whether a grave, marked by a sawed length of wagon board with only the letters of a surname, BYARS, burned on with a hot iron tip, contained a man or a woman, an adult or a child. Where they crossed the Sweetwater, they saw a dozen pieces of large, fine furniture dumped like trash by wagoneers who had judged that pulling their tons of oak and mahogany treasure across another river and over the Rockies was, finally, an unaffordable vanity. A large looking glass lay flat, silver side up, in shallow water near the bank, a glowing, dazzling rectangle of reflected ripples and sun and sky. On a sandbar were velvet-upholstered chairs, and two Chinese porcelain pots shattered into pieces. Drumont was reminded of the barricades in Paris last February.

  Billy Whipple returned from gathering firewood one evening carrying an enormous dark brown bone five feet long with two-foot-wide fanlike knobs at each end. It was unlike anything any of them had ever seen, and prompted a conversation among the whole camp the rest of the night. Priscilla thought it looked like a bone from the paw of a dragon, and wondered if it might be a giant relative of the little lizards that sneaked across her bedroll at night.

  She sometimes felt as foreign as the Frenchman in this company. But she was content to stare in silence at each splendid new sight. The morning she’d first seen snowcapped mountain peaks on the horizon, she’d grinned. The air had been scented with lavender. “This is perfect,” she’d said to Billy. She remained happily free of all murky hunches and inexplicable forecasts. She stared up at the sky only to examine a cloud or an eagle or the stars. She got goose bumps the same as everyone else—at night, from the cold.

  As they came down the last Rocky Mountain through the canyon of the Wasatch Front into the valley, a light, slow snow was frosting the pine boughs and red sandstone ridges. Back in New York City, winter had always been a special tribulation. But here, even the season of dying was gorgeous.

  “We arrive now?” Drumont asked, waving toward a distant fort, miles of straw-covered fields, and, on the far western horizon, the shore of a vast lake. “This is your place?”

  52

  October 20, 1848

  Chicago

  THE LAST LETTER Pinkerton had received from the loquacious Mr. Prime was six pages long. All of the man’s roundabout language, however, had amounted to a single command: I no longer care about the girl, but—“as for my outstanding charitable proposal”—I very much want you to retrieve my offspring.

  By contrast, Drumont’s latest communiqué from Iowa—“Miss Christmas she go west now, far west, & I go after her”—carried brevity to an extreme. Somewhere in the two million trackless miles of the western half of North America, a Frenchman in his employ, supposedly a detective, was chasing after a fourteen-year-old New York City whore, supposedly pregnant.

  But in fact, Pinkerton thought he knew exactly where in the “far west” everyone—Priscilla Christmas, the baronet’s son and his beloved, now Drumont—was bound. Since news of the gold had appeared in the Tribune, it seemed as if half the men his age in Chicago were scheming to go west, right away by steamship to Central America or overland in the spring. He felt the pull himself. What robust young man would be numb to it? He had fled Britain and traveled thousands of miles west to find fortune and freedom in America. If not for his own babies, and if not for his own schemes to give up public policing in favor of private investigations, Allan Pinkerton himself would be en route to San Francisco.

  It was merely a hunch about all of them going to California, but it was a sensible one. And today he had developed another suspicion. He was being paid to track only Priscilla Christmas and her hypothetical infant, and he didn’t care about most of her companions—not the Englishman nor the actress nor the daguerreian, all of whom had disappeared from New York around the same time. But he had his own worries about Miss Lucking’s untoward brother, Duff, and his intentions in California.

  Duff Lucking had been an accomplice of the late arsonist Francis Freeborn. It seemed likely to Pinkerton, therefore, that Duff Lucking had also been part of Freeborn’s June blackbirding crew at Mrs. Gibbs’s house. And when Pinkerton had looked into Lucking’s past, he’d discovered that the boy had been one of the San Patricios in Mexico—that is, a righteous scoundrel with a violent history.

  Yesterday the Tribune had printed an article about the appearance among the gold miners in California of Negroes, fugitives as well as freedmen. They were starting to gather in their own camps—Negro Bar, Negro Slide, African Bar, Nigger Tent, Nigger Hill. And so now Pinkerton had an awful boding that Duff Lucking was on his way to California not only in search of gold but also of runaway slaves to capture or kill. It was just another hunch, a hypothesis, but it was certainly worth forty cents’ postage to test out.

  “Dear Mr. Drumont,” Pinkerton wrote in care of the post office at San Francisco, “I trust this letter finds you well after your long journey west. I write concerning some slight alterations of your previous assignment. Mr. P—of New York no longer demands the return of Miss Christmas herself, but his interest in rescuing and returning any offspring remains strong…”

  in the Pacific off California

  THEY HAD VISITED the pilothouse of the Caroline often during the trip from Panama. The inescapable ammoniac fumes were almost tolerable there. The price, though, had been listening to Captain Owen’s disquisitions on guano. (“Each bird, you see, drops an ounce of dung each month…earning your father’s enterprise eleven pounds sterling per hundred birds per year…plucky Peruvian tykes pick it up off the ground like garden candy at an Easter party…”) But now, at last, a new subject presented itself.

  “Port the helm,” Captain Owen ordered the man at the wheel, then turned to Benjamin Knowles and his party and pointed over the starboard bow toward the rocky shore. “Frémont’s Golden Gate.”

  Polly smiled at Ben. “Here we are,” she said.

  Pushed by a good breeze from the west and a tidal current flooding through the rocky gap, the Caroline fairly flew into San Francis
co Bay. John Charles Frémont had named the strait the Golden Gate only a few years earlier, before he was an international celebrity, and before any white man knew that the hills and streams nearby were fraught with gold.

  It was late afternoon, and the light on the hills enclosing the bay was tawny and resplendent—that is, golden. They saw red deer wandering the hillsides, and tents pitched above the town. The ship sailed in and out of a cloud hovering just over the water.

  Frémont had renamed the cliffs, and last year other Americans had renamed the town San Francisco, as the Americans named and renamed almost every place when they arrived.

  “The Mexicans called it Yerba Buena,” Captain Owen said.

  Duff translated. “‘Good grass.’” He was eyeing the adobe buildings on the shore to the right. The captain said it was the presidio, which the U.S. Army had occupied since the start of the war. “It means fort in Spanish,” Captain Owen said, although Duff knew the precise translation was ‘military prison.’ This presidio was nearly empty, though. Most of its soldiers had deserted, and headed for the hills.

  To Duff and the others, San Francisco appeared sweet and soft, downright luscious, especially after living for weeks (as Skaggs had said more or less daily) “cooped up in a hundred-foot cask atop a million pounds of bird shit.” They watched cloud shadows race ahead of them over the bay and across the town and the hills behind, like an armada in a wonderland where their earthbound barque was bringing up the rear.

  “Such perfection,” Ben said.

  “Yes indeed,” Skaggs agreed, “assuming I shall be able to dine tonight on a meat other than tortoise. But in any event, if it should turn out not to be the perfection of which we have dreamed, please spare me that truth for as long as possible.”

  Captain Owen remarked on the sixteen ships at anchor, twice as many as he had ever seen there before. He was even more surprised to spot the clipper Curious, which he had seen leaving Valparaíso, in Chile, three months earlier, bound for San Francisco and then Canton. Why was she still here? It did not occur to him or to anyone else aboard the Caroline, as they furled their own sails, that most of the vessels had been abandoned at their moorings by the men who had sailed them through the Golden Gate last week or last summer, that the crews and even most of their officers had scrambled off into the enchanted woods and ravines like overexcited boys, running away from regular employment and duty and order to camp out and play at being back country loafers, to run wild, live free, and get very rich very quickly.

  Polly had finally worked out her reply to Skaggs and Ben. “As for finding perfection,” she said, “I believe the task is to use our good sense and good fortune to make our part of the earth more perfect. Is that not, after all, the idea behind our—the foundation of, of the whole…” As she searched for the words, she fluttered both hands toward land.

  Ben finished her sentence: “Of America.”

  “Yes.”

  53

  October 21, 1848

  San Francisco

  IN THE DARKNESS of the liquor and gambling saloon in the City Hotel, a homesick diner noticed Ben’s accent (as well as Polly, the only woman in the place) and joined their table. Jory Hardison, a vicar’s son from Cornwall, had been second mate on the clipper Curious. Along with half his crew, he had jumped ship almost as soon as they’d docked at the beginning of August. He had spent his last two months at the diggings, and had now returned to San Francisco for the first time to buy winter provisions and sleep on sheets and eat restaurant meals for a few days. He answered all of the neophytes’ questions clearly and straightforwardly. His absolute lack of hyperbole made the account all the more amazing. His sourness and doubts only kindled their excitement.

  The area around Sutter’s Mill, he said, was “completely dug out over the summer, done and finished.” And the gold region was both more distant (a week’s ride) and much larger than they had understood before. It was no longer a “small zone around the mill,” as Lawrence Grafton had said, but a fifty-mile-wide swath of central California “half the way up to Oregon and south all the way to Santa Barbara by now, I don’t doubt.”

  “Why, that’s twice as large as the Home Counties,” said Ben, referring to the south of England, encouraged by the expanse Hardison had intended to seem daunting.

  The Spanish names pleased Duff. Sacramento meant “sacrament.” “Santa Barbara?” he asked Hardison hopefully. Saint Barbara was his patron saint.

  “Spanish town,” Hardison said. “With a fort full of American soldiers,” he added.

  The essential choice for miners, he explained, was between the hard labor of “freezing your shins digging and sifting river gravel ten hours a day for the gold dandruff, as I do,” or else hunting in the mountains “on the risky gamble that you’ll come across the lode.” By common reckoning, he said, there were fifty new miners a day arriving “to find your fortune before you do,” and the rainy season was about to hit, which would make the work much more difficult. “And it’s getting almost as deadly as London around here,” he added. Two weeks earlier, the region had had its first murder—a miner living inside Sutter’s Mill itself, stabbed to death by “an Irishman too drunk and too stupid to find gold.”

  Hardison explained that during his first weeks at his first placer claim, working alone and with only a pan, he had taken no more than an ounce and a half of color a day and sometimes less than an ounce. Ever since he and three other men of the Curious had formed a company and constructed a good, large cradle, however, they had been rocking out an average of a pound every day—no less than eleven or twelve ounces, and occasionally two pounds. Placer, he explained, was the Mexican word for a patch of ground that had gold buried in it.

  “But placer,” Duff said, pronouncing it as a rhyme with “affair,” “in Spanish means ‘please,’ ‘to be pleased.’”

  “That does not surprise me,” Hardison said, nodding ruefully. “Another troublesome feature of this place.” He lowered his voice. “One cannot even trust these Mexicans to tell the truth about their own language.”

  Ben realized that none of his party knew the fundamental fact concerning their prospective enterprise. “How much, sir, is an ounce of gold worth here, in dollars?”

  “Ah well, there you are. Not as much as it was even in August. It was nineteen dollars when we started at it, but here today at Mellus & Howard”—a San Francisco dry-goods emporium so new that the mortar between the bricks was still wet—“they’re giving no more than sixteen an ounce. There’s too many of us now taking out too much of the stuff. Flooding the market, as they say. Twice as many men back at the mines now as when we started.”

  Skaggs was calculating and recalculating quantity times price…“What?” he finally cried. “Two thousand dollars’ worth of gold every week?” Anyone but an Astor would have been pleased to earn two thousand dollars in a whole year.

  “That is shared four ways, sir,” Hardison said.

  “With a capital outlay,” Ben said in the excited tone his father would assume when presented with some unusually attractive deal of business, “of practically nothing. And an expenditure on labor of zero.”

  Hardison was shaking his head. “Our rocker is large, and would cost thirty ounces to buy—you will find that everything, even ordinary timber and nails, comes terribly dear out here. Even I now own a four-ounce donkey. Up from three when I bought him.”

  For an instant they imagined an itty little rodent-sized pack animal, until they realized all prices here were denominated in ounces of gold.

  “Up in the stores around the mill now they get three for a shovel, and nearly that for boots or a shirt. And yes, it is true, as you say, that our little company pays wages to no one,” Hardison continued, “but many do employ Indians, and unless you’re a sheriff”—he had already described the jailer from San Jose who’d arrived in the gold fields with ten shackled Indian convicts to mine his placer—“half an ounce of wages to each digger a day is no pigwidgeon, now, is it?”

>   “But, sir,” Ben said, “do I understand you to say that, as an average, you and each of your partners has been digging up and keeping at least fifty dollars apiece, every day—”

  “Not on Sundays.”

  “And occasionally,” Polly asked, “one hundred twenty-five dollars to each one of you for a day’s work?”

  “Yes, sometimes, but in two months we’ve had no very large nuggets at all. Not like some. Why, Saturday last at Tuttletown, a little girl, the daughter of a Californian, picked a dirty seven-pounder out of her creek. No such luck has come our way.”

  Hardison excused himself, he said, since he was no gambler and “dreaming in a real bed” was one of the main purposes of his visit to the city. In the morning, he would start the return trip early to Timbucktoo, his camp on the Yuba River.

  “Do you remember,” Polly asked her brother after Hardison had gone, “the stories we read to William and Grace in bed that first winter in the city? The Brothers Grimm and the Andersen?”

  It was an odd question to pose at midnight in a liquor saloon. Nearby a pair of Chilean sailors were placing dollar bets on which of the two could drink more, and they were now up to five dollars and five brandies apiece—cinco piscos. Next to them two men were gambling on a dice game called chuck-a-luck, and beyond them a table of five was playing poker. The players bet not with coins or bills but with pinches of gold dust that each plucked almost daintily out of his leather purse or glass jar—their “pokes,” Hardison had called them.