The four New Yorkers had each had a drink themselves to celebrate their safe arrival in El Dorado, and Skaggs was treating himself to a smoke as well.
“Of course I remember reading the storybooks,” Duff replied. The first winter in New York was the twins’ last on earth, and Polly and Duff were only moments out of childhood themselves. “I loved them,” he said, not sure if he meant the tales or the babies or both. “Why do you ask?”
“Because everything I have heard and seen since we arrived here,” she said, “all of it”—a thousand ordinary men each plucking a banker’s income from the dirt, tailors and farmers and seamen making gambling wagers like pashas with gold powder, a child finding a golden ball in a creek, three-ounce donkeys, Timbucktoo, a river called Yuba, chuck-a-luck, a ship’s cabin pulled onto a lot down the street and turned into a store, the witchy Mexican woman greasing and combing her hair in the Portsmouth Square plaza, the breezes scented with piñon and bay and sweet shrub, the sunlight that made shadows inky black and colors exceptionally bright, all of it—“is perfectly fantastic. Every scene here could be from a fairy tale.” She looked around at all three men. “A hundred dollars a day sifting golden dandruff!”
“‘The Midas Touch,’” Duff offered.
“Or ‘The Children of Hameln,’” said Ben, thinking of the deserted streets outside, “the story in which the children are lured away into the mountains forever.”
“That was a real historical incident, you know,” Skaggs said. “The children of Hameln actually did leave en masse one summer day. The story came to seem imaginary only when the Grimms put it in their book of fictions.”
Unlike the boys and girls of Hameln, San Franciscans were already starting to return. Because there were now so many miners desperate to spend money on pans and blankets and beefsteak and whiskey, the invisible hand—and wasn’t that a fairy-story term of art?—had pulled the departed shop owners and saloonkeepers back behind their counters and cash drawers. The weekly Californian was about to resume publishing. And the City Hotel was not only open again but full—Ben and Polly took the last room, in the cellar, and Duff and Skaggs were paying a dollar apiece to sleep on their bedrolls in the ten-pin bowling alley across the plaza.
Polly had not been thinking of King Midas or the Pied Piper. Rather, it was a certain Hans Christian Andersen story that had occurred to her as she watched and smelled Duff light and relight Skaggs’s cigar with a sulfur match. “Do you remember ‘The Tinder-Box,’ brother, from the Andersen book?”
Duff wondered if Polly had learned mind reading from Priscilla Christmas. He had not thought of “The Tinder-Box” for years—not until one day last fall, when he was making his way home on foot from Mexico into Texas, carrying his knapsack, and passed an enormous hollow oak tree in which a dead campfire was smoldering. The hero of “The Tinder-Box” is a young soldier making his way home from the wars on foot with only his knapsack. He encounters a witch who sends him into a magical hollow tree, where he fills his pockets and knapsack with gold and retrieves the witch’s missing tinderbox. Back outside in the world, he cuts off the witch’s head and discovers that her tinderbox allows him to summon magical dogs to do his bidding. They fetch him endless gold and chase off the king so that the soldier can marry the princess and become king himself.
“I never understood that story very well,” Duff finally said. He had considered the soldier’s murder of the witch and resulting windfall unjust. “It lacks any moral. Stories are to have morals—like with the Pied Piper, taking revenge against the town for his unpaid debt.”
“Your tale has a German moral,” Ben said. “Seize what you wish by force of arms, without remorse.”
“Perhaps one day, in some future century,” Skaggs said, taking a long pull on his cigar, “all of this—the gold, the easy fortunes—will be considered a fairy tale of El Dorado, nothing but make-believe.”
“And the four of us,” said Polly, “characters in the story?”
Skaggs smiled. “Minor characters.”
54
late October 1848
the Sacramento River Valley and the gold region
JOHANN SUTTER HAD been the first white man to settle in the Sacramento River Valley that formed the heart of Upper California. It was in Sutter’s millrace that his employee had found the first flake of gold nine months earlier. And it was on Sutter’s schooner that Ben, after he happened to meet the old man at the City Hotel and charm him by speaking German and displaying “the fine tender manners of ein Edelmann,” a gentleman, cadged a ride up the Sacramento River to his fort for himself and his three companions.
The first afternoon on the river, Duff was kneeling on one side, mumbling his rosary and staring down at the water as it began to boil and glisten. He stood, thinking he was witnessing a miracle. But then he realized that it was fish churning the surface, hundreds of red and silver sea beasts swimming upriver. Polly and the others were on the deck not far away, chatting and reading.
“Fish,” Duff shouted. “A mob of furious fish!”
They all rushed over to look. Their two fellow passengers, a Scottish miller and a storekeeper who had just arrived by sea from Oregon, joined them at the railing.
“I believe,” Skaggs said, “the correct term is ‘school,’ not ‘mob.’”
Ben had fished for spawning salmon with his father and grandfather, and explained what they were now watching—the years at sea, the return to fresh water, swimming for miles against the current in order to reach the stream where they were born and to produce offspring.
“How fatiguing,” Skaggs said.
Ben recalled his father telling him that once the salmon hit fresh water, their throats shut tight, so that they are unable to feed. To make them take the bait on a hook, Archibald Knowles had said, “one must annoy them” so that they bite instinctively. “They cannot eat,” Ben said, “but they are powerless not to try.”
“How awful,” Polly said as she looked out over the jostling, speeding mass of salmon.
“How very like us all,” said Skaggs.
“And after they spawn,” said the miller from Scotland, “these Pacific salmon die, every one of them. Not like ours back home. These are all in such a hurry to swim to their doom.”
“How sad,” Polly said.
“Or heroic,” replied Skaggs, “in a Sisyphean way.” He glanced at Duff to see if he would jot down Sisyphean, but Duff now wrote mainly biblical verses in his vocabulary journal. He simply stared at the water.
“I find it monstrously pointless,” Polly insisted, shaking her head.
“Must it be one or the other,” Ben asked, “either heroic or pointless?”
Later in the trip, Captain Sutter, as he preferred to be called, told Ben that the stupid salmon reminded him of the raving idiots rushing into his valleys and hills to find gold. Ach, this Sinneslust, he said to Ben, was a curse as much as a blessing for him. He had tried to deal fair and square with “our diggers,” as everyone called the local Indians, by signing a lease (at two cents per acre per year) for the mining rights around his now-famous sawmill—but Colonel Mason, the damned American military governor, was insisting the Maidu Nisenan had no title to the land. Since the spring, Sutter told Ben, both as brag and complaint, he had let space in the fort to a hotel and two dozen new stores, but now he was going broke faster than ever. He could manage to keep only two mechanics in his employ, and only by paying them a week’s wage every day to fix wagons and shoe horses. Even his Maidu laborers were quitting to go pick out the shiny bits that had been sitting there untouched for the hundred centuries they had inhabited the land. Half the able-bodied Indians were out digging for gold! Squaws as well as men! The world these last months had become like a terrible dream, he told Ben, ein Tollhaus der Möglichkeiten, a madhouse of possibilities…which is why his eldest son, whom he had not seen since the boy was seven, had just arrived to help sort out the affairs of New Switzerland, as Sutter called his eighty square miles. The boy, he said,
was already sketching a true town—Sacramento City would sprout here, at the wharf, this embarcadero, he told Ben as the schooner docked. Sutter invited the young Englishman and his friends to attend a feast for the boy’s twenty-second birthday.
But Ben had already endured days of Sutter’s grandiose, self-pitying, half-German gab. Polly called him “King Lear without the charm,” and Skaggs was threatening to take Duff ’s revolver and “kill the boozy old Switzer myself.” For his part, Duff was unnerved by the sight of several young army officers camped out on the bank of the Sacramento near Sutter’s compound.
“We are in a terrible hurry to get to the mines,” Ben told Sutter as they reached the landing.
“Ach, like all the rest,” Sutter said.
THEY SPENT THE last Sunday of October in a wagon, Polly up front with the Mexican driver, her three companions sitting in the back between barrels of flour, riding across a brown plain at dawn and then up into the splendidly autumnal Sierra foothills.
As they approached the town of Coloma, the driver nodded toward a structure on the south bank of the American River. “El Molino,” he told Duff. It was Sutter’s sawmill, where the first gold had been discovered. They all stared in silence as the wagon passed and then turned south.
“I feel as though we are entering the Holy Land,” Skaggs said, “and seeing the manger in Bethlehem.” Duff made the sign of the cross.
The road became narrower and rougher. Duff asked the driver about the large burned-over patches of ground. “La quemadura, de los indios,” he said, “cada año. Fertiliza la tierra—la destrucción causa la creación, ¿ésa es la vida, entiende?”
“Sí, claro,” Duff answered, nodding emphatically in agreement. The man had told him that the local Indians burned the dried grass and flowers and shrubs every year to encourage new growth in the spring. He had said that destruction causes creation.
They arrived finally at Old Dry Diggings—“diggins,” as it was pronounced locally, and called “old” even though the first gold had been discovered there only a hundred days earlier. Like all of the gold hunters’ communities, it was not called a town or a village but a camp.
Now they saw why. Like the Mormons’ towns on the Missouri River, Old Dry Diggings was conceived as temporary, a frontier limbo in which to sleep and eat only until all the gold was snatched up, and then abandoned. But unlike the Mormons’ sturdy log cabins and orderly streets on the prairie, this place made no bones about being ephemeral. Everything was jury-rigged.
There were two basic sizes of lodging, a smaller type for one or two men, the larger housing six or seven. And there were two basic modes of construction as well. The more regular were canvas tents, roped and staked approximately square, perhaps seventy-five in all—some army-issue, some the kind that hunters and anglers used in the States. The other sort—hut? bush-harbor? hermitage? hovel?—was more various and numerous. There were a score of lean-tos constructed from tree limbs, one having a gabled roof of blood-spattered oxen hides. For another, a Conestoga wagon cover was stretched out and nailed to the trunks of three trees to form a ceiling, then a second piece of canvas was nailed a few inches above it and covered with piñon boughs to make a roof. A tepee consisted of wagon axles and barge poles set on end and wrapped with rugs, buffalo robes, and an American flag. And a ladder led down to a cave home that had been dug out of the earth.
The Diggings appeared to be as populous as San Francisco and as densely packed as Manhattan, yet the dwellings were placed across the hillsides and ravines according to no discernible geometry, as if the only rule of planning had been to exhibit no plan whatsoever. It was squalid, but an energetic, festive, wholly intentional squalor.
When their wagon came to the center of the camp, they saw in one panoramic view a majority of Old Dry Diggings’ population. It was the Sabbath, and hundreds of men in their twenties and thirties milled about on the grass and dirt and rocks, strolling, sitting, drinking, smoking, spitting, chatting, whittling, writing, reading, wrestling, gambling at faro, pitching horseshoes. A bonfire burned. One large group was bowling on a packed-earth alley using eight-pound cannon shot rolled at pins whittled from split pinewood. An accordionist and a trumpeter played. Everyone was tanned, and in a few cases permanently brown—Mexican, Chilean, Polynesian, Negro. Nearly everyone wore a beard and soft slouch hat or no hat at all. And not one—none of the beachcombers and quondam millwrights and truckmen nor even any of the former merchants and schoolteachers and lawyers—wore a necktie or buttoned collar. Dozens were in their undershirts, and many were barefoot.
The new arrivals stared. And the residents of Old Dry Diggings, as soon as they noticed Polly, were returning the stares.
Ben’s fondest boyhood fantasies had merged and come to life. He was Sir Ivanhoe arriving with Lady Rowena and Friar Tuck at Robin Hood’s secret camp, but this Sherwood Forest was on the American frontier and filled with rollicking Davy Crocketts and Natty Bumppos.
“I have never imagined that such a place existed,” he said. “It is so utterly ad hoc. So…so…”
“Improvised,” said Polly.
“Our protean, plastic nation in a nutshell,” Skaggs said as he climbed over the cargo in the wagon, “this ad hoc, improvised, shining squatters’ city of trash upon a hill.” He finally heaved himself out of the back of the wagon to earth.
The driver had stopped his team near the camp’s one quasi-building, a grocery consisting of two adjacent tents with a shed built to join them. It was operated by an apparently well-liked man called Dutch John, who was also known as “the Jew.”
A crowd formed around the wagon. When Polly stood and they saw that her skirt was in fact a pair of billowy green trousers, their murmuring rose audibly. As she prepared to step down from the driver’s box, she looked out over her audience, smiled, nodded—and gave one quick, modest wave acknowledging them. “Hurrah, miss!” a young man shouted, and then the whole assembly applauded.
THE REST OF the afternoon was spent in a ravine a quarter mile away, at a gold-hunting tutorial conducted by several good-natured and very eager volunteers. Among the squad of teachers were two “old-timers”—a pair from Sonoma who had started panning a stretch of Weber Creek on the Fourth of July, one of them explained, “back before this horde of Johnny-come-latelies showed.”
The ground at the bottom of the ravine was upturned as far as they could see, not like furrows plowed in a field, but as if a thousand tiny graves had been dug. They watched one of the miners sink a new placer hole, which appeared no more complicated than preparing to plant a rosebush or set a fence post. They watched another man demonstrate panning, which amounted to staring into a pie pan and swirling an inch or two of water and sand and gravel in order to separate any bits of color from the gray slurry, and looked to Polly and Duff like their childhood game of making mud-pebble soup.
And they watched three of the men demonstrate a rocker, which was like a large wooden thresher mounted on a cradle, with kernels of gold instead of grain meant to shake out through the holes drilled in the bottom.
“How remarkable,” Ben said, by which he meant How utterly unremarkable. On a page of Duff ’s journal, Polly carefully sketched the apparatus as the men talked.
Lawrence Grafton had told the truth. Gold mining in California was hardly “mining” at all. It was more like gardening or washing. There was no racket of blasting and furnaces, no arcane skills or great and costly machines. The reason was simple. The iron that capitalists extracted from the Luckings’ Clove Valley and the copper Ben’s father’s company took out of the Cornish moors sold for less than $50 a ton. Gold, on the other hand, was worth $400,000 a ton. A man using his own two hands could dig out only a bit of gold, but those bits could make him rich.
Ben asked how far it was to Weber Creek.
“You’re standing in it, pard,” a man called Schoolcraft said.
“The smaller streams dried up two months back,” explained his friend Hipwood, “although with winter coming, tha
t’s the rainy time, so we’ll have water again, more’n we can stand.”
Since all of these men had arrived in California during the previous two years and none had ever searched for gold before last spring, they were all equally expert.
“The thing is,” said another, “it’ll be harder and easier in winter. Harder ’cause of being drenched in the rain all the time, but easier too ’cause you got the rivers and creeks running again.”
The youngest of the miners, a boy named Anson, slapped his own cheek. “The goddamned mosquitoes go away in winter, though,” he said in a New York accent. “Excuse me, ma’am.”
“You do need water to get the gold,” said Barney, one of the men from Sonoma and the de facto leader of the group.
A little later, he happened to spot something in the dark muddy rind on one of the rocker’s iron cleats. “Looks as if somebody,” he said to his friends, “got sloppy at the end of yesterday.” He licked his forefinger and touched it to the mud, then reached over to touch and gently rub his dirty finger against one of Polly’s—leaving a tiny shimmering yellow grain on her fingertip.
“A flake of gold,” she practically sang.
Ben and Duff and Skaggs leaned in to have a closer look. The dusky five o’clock light made the metal appear particularly bright.
“Naw, not a real flake,” said Barney. “A fleck, more like.”
As they started the hike back to the center of camp, the men explained the nomenclature that had been adopted over the summer. After dust (or “flour”) came specks, then larger flecks, then flakes. There were small pickers—“You can pick a picker up with your finger and thumb”—nice pickers, and big pickers. All sizable nuggets were also known as plinkers.
Skaggs suggested that for clarity’s sake, they might contrive distinct names for each of the two larger classes of pickers, such as “smidgens” and “boogers.”
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