Heyday: A Novel

by Kurt Andersen

  But on their second morning, a brilliantly clear day, Ben was facing Duff and saw him suddenly stop swirling, stand up, press his wet pan flat against his chest, and with his right hand in a fist make the sign of the cross. Then he slowly opened his fist and brought the palm closer and closer to his face. Ben watched reflected sunshine flutter across Duff ’s cheeks and nose and awestruck eyes.

  “Is it a nugget, Duff?” Ben shouted to be heard over the river.

  He nodded.

  “Well, then,” Skaggs said, “the custom is to shout, ‘Eureka, I have found it!’”

  “Hoo-oww!” Polly whooped, a kind of rude, manly cry none of the men had ever heard her (or any other woman) make. It so startled Duff he dropped his plinker. Without pausing, he plunged his head and hands and whole upper torso into the water, and after an anxious couple of seconds shot upright, his right hand in a fist again and raised above his sopping head.

  Back on the bank, they each examined their first plinker, grinning as they rubbed and scraped at its sandy black-and-brown crust with their fingers. It was the size and rough shape of half a walnut and weighed just over an ounce.

  “A much dirtier thing than I imagined,” Ben said, “but even more beautiful.”

  “She is indeed,” said Skaggs.

  Together with the specks and flecks they managed to collect, their second day’s total was two ounces and a half. Their skills improved quickly, and once the rocker was built, they were rocking out a half pound almost every day, nearly a thousand dollars each week. It was dull, enervating work, but it was not difficult. They required no special luck, of course, because a stupendous stroke of luck had befallen the whole region, like strange weather.

  57

  November 1848

  Ashbyville

  THE SMALLEST OF the three tents—where they stored barrels of flour and oil and lime, and where at the end of each day they set the trays of soggy gold-flecked sand on the ground to dry—served as Skaggs’s laboratory. It was dim enough to protect the exposed daguerreotype plates from sunlight, but bright enough for him to do the work of fuming and washing and fixing his pictures. Back in New York, Skaggs had not been fond of fixing, a purely mechanical process of gilding the surface of each finished plate with a foul-smelling solution of gold chloride. But in El Dorado, a few paces from a free supply of the main raw material, he took special pleasure in preparing his own batches of solution—a pinch of Ashbyville’s gold dust dissolved in a bubbling vial of the acid the ancient alchemists called aqua regia, royal water. Skaggs fancied himself a modern California alchemist, turning gold into supernaturally realistic pictures of the gold district.

  One afternoon a few weeks after they made camp, he took a picture of Polly and Duff and Ben peeking out over a four-foot-high log wall of one of their half-finished cabins. Back in the tent, he suspended the plate in his fuming box, carefully poured the mercury into the box’s iron tray, and struck a match to light the naphtha lamp to heat the mercury to 200 degrees and release the developing fumes. But when he tossed aside the match, still hot and smoking, it fell to the ground inches from a squirrel cowering in a corner. The animal panicked and ran, leaping and scrambling across the developing table as it escaped the tent. Skaggs, surprised, swiveled and lurched, narrowly missing the lamp flame but knocking his tray of mercury off the pine plank—splashing several ounces of quicksilver onto a tray of wet placer sand.

  “Damn.”

  But when he squatted to examine the spill, he noticed that where the mercury had dribbled onto the wettest areas of the sand, it had collected tiny bits of gold. With his pliers he dug a little mercury canal through the wet sand and saw that it worked like a liquid magnet, picking up still more gold—and, from the look of it, gold alone, leaving the other mineral grit behind. The quicksilver naturally amalgamated with the gold.

  He looked up and stared at nothing for a few long seconds. If he heated the amalgam, he realized, and thereby vaporized the mercury, only pure gold would remain. And then he smiled. Eureka, he thought. A whole flask of mercury, seventy-six pounds, cost $30. In his bottle right there he had more than a pound of the stuff—and there was more among his medicines, and in every percussion cap for any gun. The New York newspaper hacks had ridiculed his daguerreian enthusiasm as a dilettante’s fad, had called him “the photo fool” and “Mr. Mercury.” Mr. Mercury indeed: he had literally stumbled upon a way of making every scoop of placer sand a little richer, perhaps much richer, by retrieving grains of gold that would otherwise wash away, lost. Eureka.

  “Comrades,” he said as he trotted into the roofless cabin where Ben and Duff were ramming a log into place while Polly plastered a chink with lime paste, “I have made a momentous discovery.”

  They looked at him curiously. He was apparently not joking.

  “A nugget?” asked Ben.

  “No, a new process by which we shall take more gold. Amalgamation!”

  Now they were sure he was joking, or delirious from his chemical fumes. “Amalgamationist” was the catchword used to disparage liberals on the Negro question—it referred to someone who approved of sexual congress between people of different races.

  “Quicksilver,” he said quickly, “using quicksilver, we can sift out more gold from every pan and shovel.”

  OF THE TWO dozen newcomers who had made claims within a mile or two of Ashbyville, two inquired about becoming Ashbyvillians. The first was an extremely friendly Philadelphian, a passionate abolitionist, who stayed a week before they caught him hiding gold in his pockets. The second was a fellow from Oregon, by way of Kelsey’s Diggings, who was driven off by Duff at gunpoint within hours of arriving, after he’d asked when he might take his turn in the tent with Polly.

  Others with whom they discussed membership failed to appreciate the special attractions of Ashbyville, since most miners had formed ad hoc companies that shared the work and earnings, but had none of what one man called Ashbyville’s “hoity-toity rules.” And until they received a patent on Skaggs’s amalgamation process, Duff was adamant that it remain secret. The others were willing to share the mercury technique, and Skaggs was dying to tell the world of his discovery. But Polly understood her brother’s strong feeling, which derived from the failure of their father’s endless schemes to profit from patented inventions.

  A third potential Ashbyville recruit had preceded them to the neighborhood by some months. Duff discovered him camped with his son a half mile upriver, using rough woven straw baskets to wash placer gold. He was an Indian called Jack. Jack was short for “jacksnipe,” he told them, the English word for the bird that formed part of his name in his native language. His clan lived five days’ walk to the south—in the valley of the Stanislaus River, he said, which had become overrun with outsiders looking for gold.

  Skaggs asked Jack why the Indians had not taken up the gold for themselves, before the influx of whites. Jack shrugged and smiled and said that his people “did not know before.”

  “About the gold?” Skaggs asked, surprised.

  “About whites’ love of the gold.”

  Polly invited Jack to return with his son on Thursday the twenty-third, to join them for a special annual dinner. He accepted, though he had never heard of Thanksgiving.

  SKAGGS MANAGED TO shoot a turkey, so the essential tradition was observed, and Jack and his son, Badger, brought a crisp, savory acorn-meal bread. Everyone, even the boy, had brandy.

  Jack explained over dinner that the whites called the Indians “diggers” not as an idiomatic twist on “niggers,” as Ben had presumed, but on account of their dietary dependence on acorns, which they dug from the dirt. “Also, some Indian,” Badger added, “call him own person ‘digger’ too.” Their name for themselves, the Maidu, was simply the phrase for “people,” just as their name for the Sierra Nevadas was Hedem Yamani, or “these mountains,” which Skaggs called “a very handy recourse to tautology.”

  After the meal, the white people performed a little play from a book of parlo
r theatricals Polly had bought in New Orleans. It was a comedy called Irresistibly Impudent. Jack and Badger were highly entertained and completely confused. At one point Polly, according to the script, pretended to forget her character’s lines, whereupon Skaggs, playing the character called “the Prompter,” took the stage to pretend to chastise her. At the end of the play Ben, playing “Dick,” turned to Jack and Badger and delivered the final lines directly to them—“You knew it would end that way, didn’t you? Farce always does. The parent relents, the lovers are made happy, and as a matter of course, down comes the curtain.”

  The guests thought it was their turn. Jack stood and recited the prayer of grace he had been taught as a boy at a mission school: “Damos las gracias por todas, el Diós todopoderoso, que vive y reina por siempre…”

  And Duff joined him, in English, for the end. “…And may the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.” Duff made the sign of the cross, and suddenly remembered that Sunday would be the eighth anniversary of the death of old man Prime, in honor of which he would say a special third Act of Contrition.

  In the end Jack politely declined to join Ashbyville, but he was very eager to learn to build and use a Long Tom, as the biggest cradle rockers were called, so he proposed that he and Badger become temporary members of the camp until the next full moon—a little more than two weeks—and remain friendly allies thereafter.

  58

  December 1848 to February 1849

  Ashbyville

  AND SO AS 1848 ended, the socialist community of Ashbyville consisted of two tents, two new cabins, and an ingenious means of drawing more gold from the earth using mercury. It had signed a treaty of peaceful coexistence with Indians. After expenses, it had already amassed a profit of $5,786. But its population remained at four.

  As December turned to January, the sky drizzled as often as not. Just after New Year’s it snowed. By and large, however, the worst of winter in California was no harder than late fall in New York, with a warm, sunny day once a week. They bought heavy woolen jerseys—for seven ounces apiece, a rough knitted tunic for $120! But they got used to the prices. Eggs $1 each. Butter $16 the pound. It was California.

  Little by little, though, all four grew restless. After six months in one another’s constant company, they were familiar with all of the others’ recitations and songs and stories. The parlor theatricals and charades that had diverted them easily in November had grown stale by February. The new amusements—as when Skaggs pronounced their names the way Jack and Badger did, “Pen” and “Pully” and “Duh-vuh”—palled. Each of them had read all of the books they had brought (except Skaggs’s blasphemous Life of Jesus, which Duff refused to open), as well as several new ones Skaggs and Ben had acquired at the big camps. There was one four-page newspaper only once a week. They had named everything in Ashbyville that deserved to be named. The rocky promontory was Mount Aetna. The stream, now gushing with winter rain, was Generosity Creek. The main trails leading west and north and east were called Chrystie, Broadway, and Piccadilly.

  The single men withdrew into their own pursuits. Duff grew quiet and very, very calm. He put in his hours at the placers and helped Skaggs build the observatory, a simple twelve-by-twelve cabin constructed directly atop the promontory’s naked granite, but left the camp for hours each day before dusk to walk alone in the woods and pick blackberries and coffeeberries, and to say his rosaries and novenas and contritions out loud, and thank God for delivering him to the safety of this wilderness. The others were appalled by the recent murders in the south: the Irishman who had stabbed the miner at Sutter’s Mill in the fall had formed a gang that robbed and—with axes and swords—slaughtered a rancher, his pregnant wife, and eight others at a ranch down at Mission San Miguel. But while the news did prompt Duff to dig a hole in which to hide their treasure, he was struck more by the swiftness of justice than the horror of the crimes. Only days after they read about the murders, they learned that two of the outlaws had already been tracked down and shot by a posse as they ran into the Pacific surf, and the other three were executed by an army firing squad just after Christmas in the center of Santa Barbara.

  Skaggs spent most of his time reading about astronomy. He occasionally made a daguerreotype picture—of each of them gripping pans, of their little redwood chest half filled with gold, of piles of dead salmon (“ideal portrait subjects”), of Jack and Badger pointing toward the nearest Sierra peak, of a doe that happened to step in front of the camera where he had set it up to take a picture of the observatory under construction. But he was more eager to contrive a means for photographing stars through his telescope, whenever his telescope finally arrived. And he busied himself with correspondence—ordering new books, writing colorful accounts of life in California to his friend Taylor at the Tribune, replying to a generous letter from his brother Jonah, sending specifications to the Mexican maker of his observatory’s dome.

  He and Ben were the official Ashbyville quartermasters, but it was Skaggs who usually made the one- and two-day trips to and from the stores, where he would smoke and drink and gamble a bit.

  Polly and Ben had each other’s company, which ought to have been sufficient.

  Every couple of weeks, on a provisioning trip, or from a miner passing by on his way to new diggings, they got the news of some fresh discovery of gold. The stories were amazing but true, most of them. The woman living up on the Yuba River who one day, while tidying her hut, swept away just enough dirt from the earthen floor to expose two pounds of embedded nuggets! And the Mexican near the Sonoranian Camp who in a mere eight days of pecking and scratching dug out fifty-two pounds—a pound for every two hours spent mining, $16,000 in a week and a day! And the man along the Tuolumne whose rifle shot at a black bear sent the dying animal flying over the lip of a canyon and onto a ledge some yards below—a ledge of silvery white quartz, the hunter discovered when he climbed down to retrieve the carcass, that was laced with long, thick veins of gold, like some bejeweled czarist bauble expanded to the size of a house. And still another impossibly lucky hunter—Mr. Raspberry, down at Angels Camp, who fired his musket’s jammed ramrod into the dirt of a hillside, in which he then found three pounds of gold hidden in a tangle of tree roots…and ten more pounds the next day…and twenty-five more on the third day. “In the Grimms’ tale,” Duff said, “the boy cut down the tree and found his goose with gold feathers sitting in the roots.”

  At Ashbyville, however, there were no such grand accidents or fairy-story bonanzas. The largest nugget they had found was three ounces, and Duff ’s plinker from the second day of panning was the next largest. Their success was merely steady.

  There were so few women in the gold country, perhaps two dozen, and so many thousands of men, Polly found it unpleasant to visit the camps. Even at little Ford’s Bar, each of her visits inspired a ruckus. And so she seldom left Ashbyville. As the winter passed she found herself drawing fewer pictures. Back in New York, drawing had served as a private respite from moneymaking and society and worry and the clamor of the city. In California, however, there was hardly any clamor or society to escape, and no real cause for worry. Skaggs bought her jars of red and blue and yellow tempera, but she found she lacked easy facility with paint.

  The shock of losing Ashby had led Ben to admit his dissatisfaction with life in London, and propelled him to America. The torture of losing Polly had sent him racing across the continent. In California, however, there was no shock or misery to fire and form his next ambition. The greatest trauma they suffered that first winter was the death of a donkey, the one they called John Donkey.

  In California, the fabulous was real and the most abnormal and remarkable things quickly came to seem normal and unremarkable—the endless free gold, the crazy prices, the haphazard camps packed with hundreds of wild boys and men, Ashbyville’s own fortuitous mercury dribbles and cache of buried treasure, the observatory, the friendly natives named after animals, the absence of poverty, the
peaceable anarchy.

  And so perhaps it was inevitable that Polly and Ben’s particular good fortune—that is, their love and their reunion—also came to seem ordinary, as wonders do.

  Paris had been an adventure for Ben, as had his narrow escape from the French soldier who’d followed him to London. Once Polly left Mrs. Stanhope’s, she had started to see the brothel in retrospect as an adventure, as she did the rescue of Priscilla. To both Ben and Polly their meeting and lovemaking and separation had been adventures. Her search for a utopia and his for her were adventures. Reuniting at a log cabin amid a religious exodus, steaming down the Mississippi through slave country, crossing from one sea to another in a hollow log and on the backs of mules, sailing atop a mountain of excrement through the Golden Gate…

  Now, in 1849, the adventures were occurring elsewhere, to others. Their very experience of time’s passage, Skaggs said at the campfire one night, had been altered, accelerated by the wondrous speed of recent events. Kings dethroned overnight, the nation ribboned with rails and telegraph wire by the day, California conquered and turned into a gold mine, their own settled lives in New York and London abandoned in a flash…According to Skaggs’s theory, they now expected outlandish surprise and speed and high adventure—even needed them, as people acquire a taste for spiced food or drugs. “Perhaps the quiet meandering and murk of ordinary life,” Skaggs said, “is now too ordinary for the likes of us. We’ve been spoiled.”

  59

  February 9, 1849

  Ashbyville

  AND THERE WERE Polly and Ben, dirty and sweaty on another gray Friday, two days after her twenty-fourth birthday, working the rocker alone in silence. Skaggs had left early for his fortnightly ride to North Fork Dry Diggings. Duff was off on one of his rambles. He had panned for an hour at dawn and pulled up two one-ounce plinkers—or chispas, as he now called nuggets, Spanish for “sparks”—so according to the third bylaw, as amended in the new year, he was exempt from mining duties until tomorrow.