Heyday: A Novel

by Kurt Andersen

  “Why, I don’t expect the magistrate out here would approve of names like those, Skaggs,” Duff said.

  “Ain’t no magistrate or sheriff or alcalde or any other such a person out here,” said Barney’s partner, George.

  “There’s just…us,” said young Anson.

  “Really? You have no formal governance,” Ben asked, “no oversight by the county—”

  “No county yet.”

  “—or by the state of California—”

  “No state, neither.”

  “We call a meeting every fortnight or so,” George explained, “like the big camps all do, and change any rules we need to change about sharing water, or choosing a new claims recorder when the old one starts whining and whining about the chore of it”—one of the other men slugged his shoulder—“or whatever such matters as that.”

  Near a long ditch that the newcomers thought was another zone of placer diggings but which turned out to be one of the camp’s latrines, Skaggs spotted a flag hanging from an oak limb. It had a picture of a bear, just like the one he had seen waving in the Mexican War victory parade on Broadway. Barney and George said the flag was the very one they had raised at Sonoma during Captain Frémont’s all-American anti-Mexican revolution that had briefly established the California Republic during the summer of 1846.

  “Officially,” Barney said, “it’s the army in charge of things here, officially.”

  The cheerful backwoods anarchy had made Duff drop his guard completely, so this news came with an extra jolt. “The army?” he barked.

  “Uh-huh. We’ve seen some of the officers, the big colonel—”

  “Mason,” George said.

  “—and his West Point boy with the Indian name—”

  “Sherman, William Tecumseh Sherman,” George said.

  “—who came through here in July on their inspection tour.”

  Duff filled with dread.

  “But I believe they’ve all gone back to Monterey,” a Mr. Queen said, “although Sherman and another one of ’em are backing a new store at the mill.”

  “As long as they aren’t any of them mining,” said Hipwood, “or out here trying to officer us.”

  The army is not out here. Duff relaxed as quickly as he had become agitated. Thank you, Lord, you are my strength and my shield; in you my heart trusts. So I am helped, and my heart exults, and with my song I give thanks to you…

  “Mr. Hipwood,” Barney explained, “and young Anson, and Schoolcraft and Queen,” he said, pointing at four of his fellows in turn, “are all just mustered out of Colonel Stevenson’s regiment, the New York Seventh—volunteer soldiers in the late war. They count as seventy of us in all at Dry Diggins these days.”

  Duff winced. When he’d sailed out of New York Harbor for Mexico two Septembers ago, he had passed the regiment’s ships at anchor—the Loo Choo and the Susan Drew—readying to leave for California.

  Perhaps Hipwood and Anson and Schoolcraft and Queen had seen him then. And now they were here, all around. There was no escape. His pistol was in the luggage back at Dutch John’s store.

  “My brother served in the regular army in Mexico,” Polly said, thinking that Duff ’s nervous look was a result of embarrassment, “but he returned to his real life last winter.”

  Let it be done, Duff thought, take me, scourge me, crucify me. “Lucking, Private Horatio Duff,” he said, “Company A, Corps of Engineers. Buena Vista, Cerro Gordo, Vera Cruz…” He took a breath. “And Mexico City.”

  “Well, sir, what do you know,” said Barney with a trace of a smirk as he grabbed Duff ’s right hand and wrist—not to thrash or arrest him, but to offer thanks and, by the way, to tease his four friends. “At long last, I have the privilege of meeting an authentic hero who risked his life in the true war against Mexicans bearing arms.”

  During the five months Colonel Stevenson’s regiment of volunteers had been at sea, the war in Upper California had been fought and won without their slightest participation.

  “Oh, gas, you old dope,” Anson said to Barney. “The Seventh Regiment served proudly.”

  Although the New York soldiers had arrived too late in California to fight the war, they had been among the first Americans in gold country. In the spring, one of Stevenson’s men had literally stumbled across a twenty-four-pound piece of gold on the bank of the Mokelumne River. So they were doubly lucky.

  The thousand men of New York’s other regiment of volunteers, however, had sailed directly to Vera Cruz aboard the brig Empire and the barque Jubilee, and most of them had died in Mexico.

  Life was all in the timing.

  Duff felt wobbly from his second wave of fear and relief in as many minutes. Like Grafton and his Mormon Battalion, he realized, these men here had been in California for the duration, and so knew nothing of the war in Mexico proper, and probably nothing of the San Patricios and the courts-martial and hangings and brandings and whippings in Mexico City. Thank you, Lord.

  “The Seventh Regiment of New York Volunteers?” asked Skaggs. “Yes? Why, all four of us are Gothamites as well!”

  Hipwood said that Anson and he were from Brooklyn Heights and Charlton Street, respectively, and that another two dozen of the regiment here in camp were from New York City. “Maybe you boys are even acquainted with some of them.”

  “You never know,” said Skaggs.

  You never, never know, Duff thought.

  As they approached Dutch John’s, Anson walked double time to catch up with Polly.

  “Miss Lucking,” he said, “I have a proposal to make that I hope is not too impertinent. If you wished to take in washing for money, I would pay a dollar per article, and, also, ma’am? If you wanted to bake a gooseberry pie, I would pick the berries and be more than glad to pay ten dollars for it.”

  “Anson here struck a bonanza on Tuesday,” Barney explained. “He’s dug out eighty ounces.”

  “Hey, eighty-six,” said Anson, now grinning.

  The boy had unearthed thirteen hundred dollars during the last five days, as much as his father, a master house-joiner in Brooklyn, had earned in the last two years.

  DUFF INSISTED THEY pitch their tent a quarter mile beyond the main encampment, ostensibly to secure Polly’s privacy from the wanton glances of five hundred lonely, goatish men. But his companions also thought they understood Duff ’s strong disinclination to mingle with so many former soldiers—that he’d had his fill of military camp life in Mexico, and did not approve, as he said sincerely, of deserting one’s army post on account of mere greed.

  They remained at Old Dry Diggings only two nights and a day, long enough for Ben and Skaggs to gather intelligence about other camps and the latest discoveries of gold so that they could determine the best place to establish their own community. They studied a map of the region and discussed their options and plans all day Monday, feasting on extremely expensive sardines and crackers. They wanted to be near proven deposits and close by a stream, of course, but they worried that too rich a lode would draw in too many other miners who did not share their social and cultural ideals. “We can keep the news of any bonanza we find to ourselves,” Skaggs said, but Polly argued that secrecy and lying “would be contrary to the principles we mean to embody.” They wanted to create a settlement apart, with its own spirit and protocols, but not so isolated that the pleasures of California society would be inaccessible. They wanted a site that was picturesque and salubrious, with a good hilltop for building Skaggs’s astronomical observatory.

  They decided against going up the American River’s North Fork to settle near North Fork Dry Diggings after they discovered why the camp was also called Soldiers’ Springs—another group from the New York regiment predominated there. Then they decided against heading down to Volcano when they learned that it was also called Soldiers’ Gulch by the men from the New York regiment digging there. Duff proposed going much farther south to the rich district suddenly thick with Mexican miners. But Skaggs said that he didn’t wish to learn S
panish, and Polly and Ben argued that journeying to the southern mines—to Angels Camp or Savage Diggings—would require too many wasteful weeks of hard travel. Finally, Skaggs took a pencil, pretended to shut his eyes, and jabbed at the map. He made a mark on the Middle Fork of the American River near a place called Ford’s Bar, about twenty miles due north of Old Dry Diggings. Skaggs and Ben walked immediately to Dutch John’s, where they learned the first placer there had been dug last spring by a certain Mr. Ford, who had taken out thirty ounces every day for three weeks before moving on.

  “A half ounce in every pan,” Ben said, repeating what he had just been told. “The fellow called it ‘fine paydirt.’”

  Duff wanted to study the various possibilities some more before making a decision.

  Skaggs, growing exasperated, said that prices at Dutch John’s were so high that he figured their own stock of equipment and supplies bought in New Orleans for forty dollars was worth a thousand dollars or more. “We can sell everything tomorrow and return home,” he said. “Your knife, Duff, would get another twenty, and your Colt’s a hundred more for sure. A fellow up at the store just now offered me thirty for my eyeglasses.”

  They were sitting on the ground outside between their two tents. The afternoon shadows were long.

  “Is this choice not indeed somewhat…arbitrary?” asked Polly.

  “Yes,” said Ben. “Like most choices.”

  Duff found this philosophical tangent disconcerting. The wind ruffled the trees and deposited a swirl of golden yellow aspen leaves on the map. “OK,” he said, relenting. “We must buy a mule. Or a donkey. And a cart.”

  “A most excellent plan,” said Skaggs.

  55

  October 30, 1848

  on the Middle Fork of the American River, California

  NO ONE HAD said a word for half an hour. They could finally see a true mountain peak in the distance. A falcon swooped and shrieked overhead.

  “We have come so far,” Ben said.

  None of them, including Ben himself, was certain whether he meant the seven-mile walk from Ford’s Bar east or the three thousand miles from London and four thousand more from New York City down rivers and through jungles and over two more oceans—or something more metaphorical.

  Skaggs, huffing and puffing, looked at the nearly treeless hillock beside them and imagined his observatory atop it. “Quite far enough, I vote.”

  And so they had picked their spot, a five-acre glade tucked between a wide, calm stretch of the American River and a low double hill, bordered on the east by a rocky promontory and a deep, fast stream flowing downhill into the river. Late in the afternoon, while Ben and Duff finished pitching the tents and Skaggs gathered firewood, Polly took off her clothes for a plunge in the frigid stream, her first bath in more than a month.

  Ben heard her brief scream in the distance. “Are you all right?” he shouted.

  “Yes,” she replied. Clean cold water, a barrelful a second, free and unending. “Absolutely fine.”

  They had discussed the nature of their prospective utopia dozens of times during the journey, and were agreed on basic principles. But not until their first night on the riverbank of the Middle Fork, after a meal of ham and dry biscuits, sitting on a fallen incense cedar tree in the darkness, did they formally debate and approve the rules that would govern the community. Polly unrolled one of her last big imperial sheets of drawing paper, a paper (they imagined) the size of the Magna Carta or the Constitution, and by the light of the campfire transcribed their eight bylaws.

  1. All labor required by the community shall be determined by a majority vote.

  Although this first vote and those for the other seven bylaws were unanimous, they unanimously voted against requiring unanimous votes, since as the community grew, they knew, unanimity would be impossible.

  2. All necessary labor is deemed to be of equal value.

  Each of the four was eager to dig and wash gold, but it was assumed that Skaggs would do more of the cooking, since the others had virtually no experience at the stove. Skaggs had also hunted deer and turkey in New Hampshire every summer and fall of his youth, so he would be their huntsman, and thus exempt from scullery and laundering duties. Polly could use a needle; Ben had overseen an industrial enterprise (although none without steam engines and a hundred workers to do the hard labor); Duff knew carpentry; and so on.

  3. Each member, male or female, shall work at some necessary labor nine hours a day for twenty-four days in each month unless prevented by illness, injury, weather, or other acts of God. And each member shall determine the best means of conducting his or her work.

  In addition to Sabbath days, Skaggs spoke forcefully of the need for an additional number of monthly “free days,” to be chosen at the discretion of each member, “for making pictures, writing nonsense, observing the heavens, and restorative time-wasting and meditation, as necessary.” He had pressed for five such holidays every month; they compromised on three. The final clause of Bylaw 3 was the result of a small argument concerning the proper cleaning of their dishes after dinner—whether they would boil water for washing twice a day (Duff and Polly) or rely on the local custom of wiping plates and pans clean with a handful of turf (Ben and Skaggs).

  4. All members shall share equally in the expenses and profits of the community.

  They’d talked about devising some scheme of fixed rates of exchange for labor and money and gold, but decided that because unearthing any given nugget could as easily require five seconds’ or five days’ work, and since the prevailing price of gold was anyway beyond their control, any such mechanism was impractical.

  5. All placer claims filed by members of the community are the property of the community as a whole, not of any individual member.

  Miners at every big camp had established a local code governing the size of gold claims—in the vicinity of Ford’s Bar, each was to be 30 by 30 feet or its equivalent. Thus the four of them were entitled to work 3,600 square feet of ground at a time, and each new recruit to the community would enlarge the community’s claim by another 900 square feet.

  6. Members shall endeavor to be openhearted, open-minded, kind, and loyal.

  Each of the founders was allowed to insert one cardinal virtue. These were Polly’s, Skaggs’s, Ben’s, and Duff ’s, respectively.

  7. Moderation in all things is encouraged, but any formal regulation of private behavior is beyond the purview of the community.

  The other three had persuaded Skaggs that his proposed amendment specifically prohibiting “any future ban on cursing, ardent spirits, tobacco, or the Oriental substances” was unnecessary.

  8. All sympathetic persons (including females and any Mexican, Indian, Jew, Kanacker [i.e., Sandwich Islander or similar Polynesian], Chilean, Negro, Irish, Mormon, Transylvanian, Turk, Transcendentalist, or refugee of New Hampshire) may apply to join the community, and shall be admitted by a majority vote of the present members.

  Skaggs had insisted upon appending the last four categories of welcome races, and despite Polly’s complaint that he was mocking her progressive ideals, they approved the final bylaw.

  Finally, each of them suggested names for the community. Polly wanted to call it Arden, her brother proposed La Dorada, and Skaggs argued long and hard on behalf of Flabbergast or Manifest Destiny. But Ben’s sentimental notion prevailed. He would not be there, he said, and in all likelihood none of them would be, if not for the death of his friend Lloyd Ashby. And so in a grand hand at the top of the page, Polly wrote The Charter of the Community of Ashbyville, California, and they all retired for the night.

  56

  October 31 and November 1, 1848

  Ashbyville, California

  THEIR JOURNEY WAS OVER, but all four were filled with the spirit of industry. Surrounded by nothing but heedless, timeless nature—by infinite sky and virgin forest and ancient rock—they were impatient to get on with their enterprise. The unceasing sound and sight of the rushing river was itself a kind
of taskmaster. The woodpeckers’ perpetual tapping was a metronome. The shortening days and falling leaves made them a little anxious.

  They needed to make money. After buying a cart, two donkeys (male and female), and lumber to build their rocker, they had only $93 left. Skaggs shot birds, Ben caught salmon, and Polly and Duff gathered berries and greens, but everything else—flour, bread, beef, onions, salt, sugar, coffee, apples—was $2 to $4 dollars a pound at the store in Ford’s Bar. A candle cost more than a good lamp in New York, and whale oil went for $20 the quart. One could put a girl in New York or London on staff to light and snuff wicks all day long for the price of five friction matches in California. The Ashbyville treasury would be empty by the middle of November unless they found some color.

  Their first cloudy morning in the cold river, Skaggs yelped with each step as he waded in, which made Duff laugh, and Ben called the water “frigorific,” which made Polly laugh. Skaggs had boasted that his and Duff ’s two years of making and developing daguerreotype plates, carefully stirring and tipping the shallow chemical baths, would make them panning prodigies. He was wrong. They all did the work clumsily. At first they stood in water too shallow, only up to their ankles, so that they had to bend over too far to reach the current. They swirled their pans in the water too rapidly, so that they were losing half of any gold hidden among the sand, and then they swirled too slowly. Each managed to wash only a few dozen handfuls of gravel the whole day. The group’s little mound of dust and specks and flakes weighed half an ounce.