Heyday: A Novel

by Kurt Andersen

  Ben carried the day’s ninety-eighth shovel to the Long Tom and tossed the earth onto the perforated iron sheet at its mouth. A small stone ricocheted off the iron and struck Polly’s cheek.

  “Ouch.” She had often suggested that he gently spill rather than throw the gravel onto the sieve.

  “I’m sorry.” He had often suggested that she stand back with the pails of water until they were ready to rock and wash.

  She poured their gallons over the pounds of earth while he rocked the cradle, washing the worthless dirt and sand down the tilted length of the rocker’s trough toward its tail.

  Sometimes as they rocked the cradle Ben could not help thinking about babies. If they had a girl, perhaps they would call her Caroline.

  And sometimes as Polly looked at the cradle—a pinewood box seven feet long, two feet wide, and a foot deep—she could not help thinking of her mother and father and especially her baby brother and sister. The morning she saw William and Grace washed and neatly dressed and squeezed side by side into a single three-dollar coffin—that was the moment Polly had decided she would not remain poor for the rest of her life.

  Ben dripped quicksilver onto the riffles before he and Polly rocked the Long Tom, both of them staring at the nine iron bars nailed across the floor of the trough, watching for color to catch against the metal as the muddy slickens slid past. There were many specks spangling the drifts of dark sand on this washing, then some flakes, and finally two good pickers as well. The product of their labor of twenty minutes was worth a decent week’s wage in the States. Neither of them said a word.

  Polly squatted and used a slat to scrape the bits of gold and wet, gold-studded sand through the holes and into the tray on the ground beneath the tail of the cradle.

  Ben walked back to the placer and resumed digging. We have turned ourselves into proletarians, he thought. Very rich workfolk, one of the great American oxymorons. He recalled a passage from Engels’s pamphlet about how work has “lost all individual character” and “all charm” thanks to engines and the division of labor. But where was the craftsmanship or charm of this work? They had twelve more washings to finish.

  “You have not yet told me what you truly think of my idea,” he said at the end of the day, as they carried another of the heavy wooden trays covered with sludge into the tent. “The flume.” A week earlier he had conceived the construction of a permanent, fixed, sixty-foot Long Tom—a Supremely Long Thomas, as Skaggs called it. It would run parallel with Generosity Creek down the slope at the eastern end of the camp, with its tail at the river. They would build a sluice gate at its head and dig a new channel to divert the creek through the long trough, like a millrace beneath a waterwheel, so that the running water’s own current would wash the gold from the sand and gravel, automatically and constantly.

  They had not yet mined that stretch of Ashbyville in earnest, but it looked rich—Duff had dug out his morning’s two acorn-sized chispas from the riverbank there. Ben calculated that they would clean out five or maybe ten times as much gold each day, even with the labor required to carry the loads of earth twenty paces uphill. (And for that extra labor he had a second phase of construction in mind, involving wheeled wooden barrows drawn by ropes and pulleys.)

  “It is very clever indeed,” Polly said. “I am extremely impressed by your designs. I am.”

  A light rain had started to fall.

  “However…?” Ben said.

  She was quiet for a moment. “To pluck Generosity Creek out of its bed, forcibly and unnaturally, for our own ends, strikes me as somehow…oh, I am afraid it is too ridiculous to say.”

  “What is it? Please.”

  “It seems a little…mean, a blow against the land. A kind of defiling. It reminds me of the greedy kings in stories—like Midas, and the one in Rumpelstiltskin, who get their comeuppance when they go too far. Careful of the skink, Ben.” A tiny lizard with a bright blue tail raced between his feet. “It sounds awfully silly, I know.”

  Ben said nothing but smiled, just as he’d smiled when Lydia Winslow had asked him if he thought it would be impossible to marry at St. Paul’s Cathedral, or, if it had to be St. George’s Church, whether Sir Archie might arrange to clear Hanover Square of traffic on the morning of the wedding. Polly’s scruples about the stream sounded very silly indeed to Ben—whimsical and mystical and girlish. Her flights of fancy were part of what had made him fall in love with her. But he was bored with simply digging and rocking and pouring buckets of water all day long. He was proud of his plan. It had for the first time ignited his passion for the mining enterprise itself. And was not any extraction of gold from the earth a matter of plucking and defiling?

  “Besides,” she continued as they walked slowly, careful not to tip the tray they carried together, “as you have said, to efficiently operate such a mining manufactory”—she pronounced the last word with a touch of distaste—“we should need many more members in the community.”

  THIS WAS A somewhat sore subject. Californians’ general lack of interest in joining Ashbyville had surprised them. At first they’d ascribed it entirely to the gold fever and competitive temper of the time and place—every miner imagined that he would be the one to pull out the next little $10,000 gold baseball, or find the great lode, and had no wish to share his imminent fortune unnecessarily.

  Back in November, Polly had suggested that they advertise for members in the newspaper, and then in December that they reconstitute Ashbyville as “a kind of scattered community of the like-minded,” an archipelago of sympathetic miners from the Feather River all the way down to the Tuolumne who would share costs and profits equally.

  But as Ben and Skaggs made the circuit of the booming camps in the vicinity, they came to understand the true reason for Ashbyville’s failure to grow. Their little utopia was redundant.

  Back in the States, even the most liberal towns and cities were rife with social arbiters and moral aldermen and church ladies who all but forced the come-outers and freethinkers among them to become exiles, to form their own phalanxes and colonies—the Oneidas and Brook Farms and Glees—in rural isolation. But in California there were no Mr. Pecksniffs or Mrs. Grundys, no churches or right-thinking committees, no censoriousness or opprobrium, let alone tyranny or oppression. There were Christian ministers among the miners, but none of them preached. Everyone talked and dressed and behaved as they pleased. What revolution in thought or manners was required?

  And the new economy, the economy of gold, had revolutionized the system of labor and capital as radically as the socialists had proposed. It was the rare man who worked for a wage paid by an employer. Rather, each miner’s very work was unearthing money. For an outlay of fifty dollars, any able-bodied person was as likely as any other to earn a living or get rich. Almost the whole country between the Pacific and the Sierra Nevada was a commons, where on any unclaimed patch of earth anyone had a right to dig and wash and keep the metal he found.

  And because rich new veins and placers were discovered every day in California, there was no scarcity of wealth to fuel the otherwise universal and age-old resentment of the poor for the rich. No one in California felt he was permanently poor. Greed and envy prevailed, just as it did in the settled world, but so did a spirit of rough cooperation.

  In the gold district in early 1849, a community of reformers was superfluous. The Ashbyvillians’ neighborliness and fairness toward Jack and Badger and the other Indians mining on the Middle Fork amounted to the main virtue that distinguished them from most of the other thousands of white newcomers in California. “In this free and rich country,” Skaggs had said just after New Year’s, “I fear that nearly all of our noble intentions are at the present moment moot.” Finally even Polly had agreed.

  BEN HAD ESTIMATED that the Supremely Long Thomas would need at least eight men (or seven plus Polly) to operate it properly. “If the flume washes as well as I believe it should,” Ben said to her now, “its output of gold ought to be great enough to attract oth
ers to our side.”

  “That might be. But then I fear we would draw in members the way a business draws in investors, only for the sake of a better profit. We would cease to be a community of the like-minded.”

  She was right, he knew. But he also thought they could hire Indians to help them conduct the larger operation he envisioned.

  They lay down the gold tray in the drying tent and wiped their hands on their damp, filthy work clothing.

  “‘Output’ is a queer word,” she said. “I have never heard it.”

  And until then Ben had never uttered it. His father had sometimes used the term.

  “Hallo! Hallo!” It was Skaggs, back from a shopping expedition.

  “The quartermaster and his Jenny Lind are returned to quarters with bounties galore!”

  Jenny Lind was their surviving donkey. She was laden with bags and parcels, and Skaggs’s pockets were stuffed with rolled newspapers. He had bought the first several editions of the Alta California, the San Francisco newspaper that only a month earlier had been called The California Star & Californian. They were all hungry for periodicals, since none of the magazines to which Skaggs subscribed had begun arriving.

  The two men lugged a ninety-pound sack of potatoes into one of the tents, and Polly carried a little wooden firkin of butter imported from the States, a bag of corn flour, and several yards of jerked beef.

  Even after hours riding in the open air, Skaggs still stank of Mexican cigarettes and brandy, cigaritos and aguardiente. His hair and coat were soaked from the drizzle.

  “The mingled aroma of liquor and smoke,” Ben said, “all of creation damp and gray, and we two hairy unshaven louts grunting to pull a bushel and a half of potatoes out of the rain. We might as well be in Ireland.”

  Skaggs considered making some reply about his entirely abstemious Irish grandfather, or the Luckings’ Catholicism, or Ashbyville’s un-Irish absence of children. But he could see that his friends’ day in Ashbyville had been less blithesome than his in North Fork Dry Diggings, and said nothing until they had finished unloading Jenny Lind.

  “Ah, foolish me!” he suddenly cried, digging into his coat pockets among the newspapers. “We have mail, via San Francisco!” He pulled out five envelopes. “Two from New York for me”—a book, and correspondence concerning his observatory’s clock drive—“and three from London for you.”

  Ben took his mail. Two carried the seal of the British Foreign Office; they were from his brother. He slipped them unopened into his pocket. The third was from his father’s firm. This he opened, but it contained nothing from Sir Archie himself, only two forwarded pieces of correspondence—a pair of drawings from Professor Darwin, and a letter from his friend Engels that had been sent from Geneva in care of Knowles, Merdle, Newcome & Shufflebotham.

  For a moment Polly had dared to hope she might have a letter from Priscilla Christmas—before she remembered that the mountains to the east and west of Salt Lake Valley meant that nothing and no one could escape or enter until spring.

  “There is talk of a great new bonanza at Old Dry Diggings,” Skaggs told them. “This latest story sounded absolutely fabulous to me, but they swear it is true.” A fellow from Georgia or Mississippi had arrived at the camp with his slave, but they had been allowed to stay. (It was only large-scale slavery that worried the miners, since any true industrial operation would have an unfair advantage in digging out too much gold too quickly.) The Negro had dreamed repeatedly of a certain miner’s hut in the camp. When his master dreamt the identical dream, he bought the hut for cash and the two started to mine right there in the floor. Since New Year’s they had taken out almost a hundred pounds. “And with a roof over their heads while they work,” Skaggs added.

  “I wonder,” Polly said, “how large a share the master has given to his man.”

  The tale from Old Dry Diggings did not improve the mood at Ashbyville that evening.

  NOR DID THE two letters Ben received from his brother. Each contained news of a death. Last summer their father developed rheumatic fever and severe dropsy in his lungs and heart. Despite the attentions of the best physicians, Archie Knowles had died. Philip had written two pages describing the funeral. “I know that Father would have been exceptionally pleased by the new archbishop’s kind remarks, and by the list of mourners, who included Lord Palmerston, of course, as well as HRH Prince Albert.” He had signed himself Sir Philip Knowles. And to be certain Ben understood that he, Philip, had inherited the baronetcy, he had added Bart. after his signature.

  60

  the winter of 1848 and 1849

  Salt Lake City

  THIS NEW JERUSALEM was cloudier, windier, and much colder and snowier than New York. The mercury had not marked as high as freezing in weeks, and the drifts were three feet high. But Priscilla did not mind the weather so much. In fact, she found nothing very objectionable about life among the Saints in their latest instant city on the frontier, certainly not the burnt taste of the parched-barley coffee Billy complained about. She had lived through far worse.

  When Billy and she had appeared that evening in early November at the door of the log cabin, his parents had been overcome. The return of their eldest son, apostate or not, was a miracle. The five younger brothers and sisters started jumping and laughing and wailing at once. And then they embraced Priscilla.

  Billy Whipple hadn’t intended that wintering in Salt Lake City and repairing relations with his parents would draw him back to the church. But as the weeks passed, Priscilla could see his resistance dwindling. And why not? He was with his family again, and Salt Lake City was a place of order and fairness. Polly had inculcated Priscilla with her hope for virtuous social experiments, and Salt Lake City seemed a plausible version. The winter was hard, but all five thousand Saints there were predisposed to share and share alike. When the Whipple family needed extra firewood, it was donated to them, and since they had stored a surplus of potatoes from their garden, they gave away a bushel to the hungry. Unlike James Danforth and his favorites at Glee, Brigham Young and his bishops and apostles seemed sensible to Priscilla. And the Mormons had the steely temperament to survive the rigors of living in a utopia.

  To Priscilla, who had been to church only for funerals, the religion seemed no stranger or more onerous than any other. Their germinal miracles had occurred recently and in America, rather than two thousand years earlier in some foreign desert, but she failed to apprehend any essential difference between the magics. And perhaps it was the freshness of the Mormon revelations and martyrdom that accounted for the fever of the Saints’ faith. They believed in prophecies and visions and speaking in tongues—but who was Priscilla Christmas, given her years of inexplicable premonitions, to gainsay any of that? Furthermore, she entirely approved of the absence of priests. (On a breadline in the Five Points when she was little, a Catholic priest had made her cry when he’d told her she would get only a single loaf because she was not baptized. And an Episcopalian divine, one of her regular customers for yankums in the Bowery Theatre alley, had insisted each time on ejaculating onto her hair beneath her bonnet, for which he’d paid her five cents extra.)

  “I think I am beginning to know that I am a Saint after all,” Billy confessed to her one day in January. When she replied that she knew that already, he blanched, after a pause asking very softly if her premonitions had returned. She smiled and told him no, she had simply watched him blossom among his family and old pals, despite the bare-bones conditions.

  She offered, if he wished, to join the church and remarry him in a Mormon sealing ceremony. He started to cry, and reaffirmed that she would be his one and only wife for eternity, which made her very happy—although she did not disapprove of the Mormons’ custom of plural marriage. To the contrary, she found its lack of hypocrisy astounding and noble. Every man of means in New York, as far as she knew, bought women to serve his carnal needs for one night at a time, in secret and without further obligation; Brigham Young, on the other hand, kept more women than Pr
iscilla could count, all of them wives, none whores, and he was proudly building each of them a cabin in the center of town.

  “Perhaps we should stay a while longer with your parents and your friends,” Priscilla said when he had finished crying. “We needn’t leave as soon as spring comes.”

  “Do you not miss your friends?” her husband had asked her. “They will wonder what has become of their girl.”

  “Poor Mr. Drumont can take the news ahead of us. He can tell Polly and Ben that I am well and happy here.” She thought for a moment. “And if they have become rich now, they can hire their own coach and four to drive them here for a visit whenever they wish.”

  “But what of gold for you and me? Time is wasting. There is no buried treasure in this valley. Only fields to plant.”

  Priscilla shrugged. “Both are rugged, and in either place,” she said, “we would be digging in the dirt to earn our livings.”

  GABRIEL DRUMONT SHARED a cabin on the edge of Salt Lake City with five other bachelors, away from the women. Four of his five bunkies were young Mormon veterans of the American war against Mexico, and the other was a childless widower. It was a barracks, which suited him. In fact, he had to admit he found the military air of the whole place admirable.

  His days were spent sawing and hammering, which suited him as well. His English was improving. The city provided his food and bed and firewood and four dollars a week, although he had liked it better at the beginning when his salary was paid in California gold dust, rather than their new handwritten scrip. Would these priests’ one- and three-dollar notes be worth a sou in California or anywhere outside their own snowy Algeria, this bleak Protestant valley? No matter. He had no choice, as he’d had no choice when they’d asked him at Chimney Rock to pay one hundred dollars, most of his capital, to join their train. And there was no advantage in complaining.