“Men predisposed to melancholy,” Ben said after they had passed the man weeping in the alley, “will be just as sad in El Dorado as they were in New York or Hartford or Leeds. But here they may bawl openly, in the streets. Which I count as progress.”
“The gold is not gone,” Polly said. “I don’t believe it.”
Up ahead, Skaggs spotted their new German acquaintance, the painter, and asked Ben how to say “It’s dinnertime, you Prussian bastard” in German.
64
late March and early April 1849
Ashbyville and Sacramento City
WHEN YAUKA AGREED to marry Duff, Polly and the others immediately accepted his proposed new arrangement. Each week from now on, he would sleep at Ashbyville one night, and work the placers for all the daylight hours during the day before and after, in return for only a half share of gold.
For the first time since the war, he seemed to be at peace.
He brought Yauka to Ashbyville to introduce them to her, and although the communications were halting, with Duff serving as interpreter, she seemed sweet and bright and soft as the spring.
“Where do you wish to hold the ceremony,” Polly asked Duff and his fiancée, “and when?”
Duff did not translate the question into Spanish for Yauka. “They do not hold wedding ceremonies,” he explained to his sister. He had asked for Yauka’s hand, she had consented; he would give some gold to her brother and mother, who would make a separate bed for the couple. And then the marriage would be a fact.
“Your type of freethinkers,” Skaggs said, “eh, Polly?”
In fact, she found herself disappointed that there would be no wedding. And Yauka’s stories of disease at Hembem and the other Maidu villages troubled her. Polly worried that the rigors of her brother’s new life—eating crickets and worms, drinking herbal liquors, going half naked half the year—would make him vulnerable to peculiar Indian illnesses. Yauka’s earliest memories, she told them, were of the days and days one spring spent harvesting hundreds of pink canchalagua flowers. The blossoms were supposed to be an antidote to fever and chills, but the year Yauka turned three, she said, la plaga, the malaria epidemic, took away her father and three siblings and half her cousins and aunts and uncles. And during the last two years, she said, outbreaks of flux and fever and pox had returned. Indeed, Yauka’s cousin Kumisi had been feverish lately.
SKAGGS HAD SUGGESTED several medicines Duff should lay up for the people of Hembem, and it was that errand that took Duff one day early in April down the American River to Sutter’s Fort. It was a work of mercy in the name of Jesus Christ to please his Lord God and Savior, as Bishop Hughes had commanded him to perform a year ago. The morning after he arrived in Sacramento City, dressed in leggings and a serape made from a mountain lion skin, he spent twenty-seven ounces on his medical supply. And he ate lunch at a saloon on the Embarcadero jammed with coughing, sneezing, hand-shaking, jovially unclean newcomers all crawling with germs from two dozen different pestilential ports of call.
As he was leaving town that afternoon, he came upon a crowd listening to a speech by a man standing on the back of a wagon. The fellow had a southern accent. He was campaigning to be elected as a Democratic delegate to California’s first constitutional convention, and he said he had always fought for the rights of the downtrodden. Duff liked the sound of that. His name was Peter Burnett, and he had served as a judge and legislator in the Oregon Territory before coming south for the gold last fall. Before that he had been a lawyer, and despite his own Roman Catholicism had defended the Mormons’ founder, Joseph Smith, against trumped-up charges of arson and treason in Missouri. Duff liked the sound of all that, too.
“But, gentlemen, my deep-seated passions, and my long struggle for the liberty of every man from every nation on earth,” he said, “are not those of a fanatic.” In Oregon, he said, they had outlawed slavery, but they had also passed a law that “forbade the emigration of free Negroes and mulattos into our virgin country…”
Duff did not much like the sound of Oregon’s Territorial Exclusionary Act.
“And as for the race of beings who teem in their nakedness and dig in the dirt of this beautiful land, I am afraid we are faced, my California friends, with two choices. Either we shall indulge their savagery and permit them to usurp the land and water and gold—or we must wage a sort of war, a war of extermination that shall continue until the Indian race dies out, as extinct as the dodo.”
In Duff ’s valise, among the medicines, was his Colt’s revolver. This man Burnett deserved to die. Duff crossed himself. He wondered how close he would have to get to be sure of a lethal shot. He would need to load the chamber and edge his way to the front of the crowd. He could do it.
But if he killed Burnett, he would immediately be captured and hanged. Yauka and her people would never receive the life-giving elixirs and pills in his bag. And he imagined how the fact of his Indian costume might provoke revenge against the Maidu. He would let the villain live.
AS HE RODE Jenny Lind east past Sutter’s Fort, he spotted thirty gaunt and tattered packers making camp on the riverbank. They were pitiful. A few, he saw, were Indians. He approached one of the company, a white man standing at some distance from the tents, smoking a pipe and staring at the river. The fellow’s eyes looked fatigued and forlorn, like a soldier’s after a battle.
When Duff introduced himself, the man said he was a geologist from Baltimore, and complimented his English.
“Some of our men are Indians, too, from back east,” he said, nodding toward the camp.
Duff was flattered. Did this Baltimore geologist truly believe that Duff Lucking could be an Indian’s name? And that California Indians, even half-breed cholos, had blond hair?
“Where have you traveled from, then?” he asked the man.
The man looked down, shook his head, and sighed. “More or less straight from hell,” he said. They had set out in October from St. Louis on a private expedition to find a southern route to San Francisco. But they had become lost and then snowbound in the Rockies for a month. A third of the men and all the mules had died. In January they had finally reached the settlement of Taos. “We rested awhile there at Kit Carson’s rancho, praise God, before we marched on across the desert and up to here.” He shook his head again and puffed on his pipe.
Duff wanted to make the sign of the cross. “At Kit Carson’s? The real Kit Carson?”
“Yes, of course, ‘the real’ Carson. He’s the colonel’s dearest pal.” He cocked his chin toward the tents. “Frémont and he more or less founded this country here together, don’t you know.”
Duff was astounded. This fresh camp was John Charles Frémont’s. He was speaking to one of Frémont’s men. Frémont himself—the archvillain responsible for the murders of Yauka’s kin and one hundred of her neighbors by Kit Carson and his gang in 1846—was within hailing distance, a stone’s throw away. A Colt’s shot away.
“Yes,” Duff said, “I do know. Well, welcome to California.”
65
April 11, 1849
Ashbyville
THEY HAD NEVER dammed and diverted Generosity Creek or built the Supremely Long Thomas. Others elsewhere built flumes with great success, however, and Ben read enviously in the Alta California of the great aqueduct that drained a rich flat by guiding water in a wooden flume suspended above a stream. He recalled that Duff had been in the Company of Sappers, Miners, and Pontoniers—trained by the army in Mexico to rip holes in the ground with canisters of black powder. So when he heard about the new, laborious mining practice of “coyoting”—searching for gold by digging thirty feet deep, then digging secondary holes perpendicular to the main burrow—he proposed that they blast into the bedrock buried along the river in Ashbyville to expose new veins.
Duff had already used powder to level the top of Mount Aetna for the observatory. But Polly repeated her arguments about despoiling the land, and Duff himself was torn. He was exhilarated by the prospect of unleashing pure
explosive energy—he had reveled in detonating the charges for Skaggs, bombs that maimed and killed no one and destroyed nothing but rock. But the green and eager California spring and his months learning Maidu ways made him agree with his sister that blasting for profit would amount to a kind of war against the earth. And Skaggs worried that repeated explosions might disturb the telescope’s delicate mount.
“But was it not you, Duff,” Ben had said crossly at the end of the community’s final meeting on the subject, “who suggested that with a good fire pumper and hose we might wash away promising hillsides at the rate of one hundred fifty gallons per minute?”
Duff shrugged. He hated disappointing anyone.
“We are old-school, I am afraid,” Skaggs replied, “and you are now more American than the native-born Americans.”
Ben knew that Ashbyville would not be a lasting enterprise if it failed to grow, and that it could not grow if they failed to innovate. His thoughts returned to his talk with Professor Darwin the year before. The professor had suggested that as any creature developed in the womb, as an embryo, at each successive stage of development it resembled each of its ancient ancestors in turn. Ben saw that the same principle applied to the birth of the new California. Mining had already passed through all of its embryonic stages, from swirling pie pans and scratching at rocks with knives and forks to big rockers to dams and flumes, to deep tunnels and broad pits and man-made floods designed to remove any acre of soil daring to hide a vein. Centuries of industrial progress had been recapitulated in a year’s time. And soon, Ben knew, mining in California would achieve the form and scale of the present century—flumes four yards wide and a mile long, steam turbines and railway tracks and great machines grinding and washing a ton of dirt and rock each afternoon.
There were still fortunes to be made in California. But now luck had become occasional and scarce, like luck in most places at most times. The true-life tales of gold in hollow trees and hidden beneath dead bears were rarer. Most of the easiest color had been taken. The beginning of the end was nigh, for the Gold Rush had begun. In Ashbyville and the rest of the mining districts they had almost no inkling of its magnitude. But at the moment tens of thousands of gold hunters in hundreds of ships—and now, with spring, thousands of wagons as well—were racing for California.
Although the mercury trick had given Ashbyville a longer run than other diggings, even their output was in decline, despite the sunnier season.
Yet Ben had Polly, thank heavens. Hadn’t he? She was all that he required. Wasn’t she? They lacked the official bonds of matrimony. But what of it?
Alas, however, today of all days she had abandoned him, off since dawn to the German painter’s tent at North Fork Dry Diggings, the damned fulsome fawner, playing his artist’s model again.
She would return tonight to their bed. Wouldn’t she? And perhaps, he thought, if not tonight, then some night soon, tranquilized by a balmy spring breeze and birdsong, she might consent to grant him the other gift for which he longed. Ben wanted a child.
At Ben’s age Archibald Knowles already had his firstling, although that child was the notoriously colicky Philip. Philip was in Ben’s thoughts because the monthly mail from the east had arrived the day before with a letter from London.
Philip—Sir Philip—had written Ben to announce his engagement “to marry Lydia at the beginning of spring at St. George’s Church, with Hanover Square to be cleared of ordinary traffic owing to the good offices of Lord Palmerston.”
So: weeks after the unexpected death of Philip’s wife, the grieving widower had become engaged to remarry.
And he was marrying his brother’s former fiancée.
And now, Ben Knowles knew as he chewed on this bitter new information, Lydia Winslow was already Lady Knowles of Grafton Street. He was certain that nothing had ever pleased her more. Lady Knowles: the title his mother had died too soon to assume.
Ben released the bowstring and let the arrow fly toward the painted circles on his old, shredded shirt. He hit his 102nd bull’s-eye of the day. To give himself a new challenge lately, he had been postponing his final rounds until dusk and beyond. He could strike bull’s-eyes even in moonlight.
Duff walked up from the placer, having put in one of his exceptionally long days of labor. “How many have—”
“One hundred two,” Ben said.
“Really? Out of—”
“One hundred forty-one.” Ben was in an ill humor.
If only a telegraph wire had been laid across the seabed of the Atlantic from the Old World to the New and across the American desert all the way to San Francisco—if only a dozen more years had already passed—then Ben would have had the latest news of his brother and new sister-in-law. And his spirits on that evening in California would have been lifted by the guilty pleasure of schadenfreude.
He would have known that Sir Philip and Lady Knowles had disembarked the previous afternoon at Gibraltar, the first port on their honeymoon trip through the Mediterranean to Malta and the Nile. Philip had gone for an hour to the governor’s residence for a bit of gin and Foreign Office business. Then, walking back to his hotel after dark, he’d found the town’s Main Street intolerable—the rabble of Italian sailors and blobber-lipped Africans and superior Jews was simply too much. He took a detour. As he turned down a side street called Bomb Lane, a trollop—an Irish convict, transported to Gibraltar a decade earlier—had approached and proposed that he pay half a crown to have his way with her. He did not slow his gait, but on principle informed the woman that she was “not worth sixpence, and an absolute disgrace to the United Kingdom.” “An’ I won’t touch that itty cock o’ yours for a guinea, ya mincing sod,” she replied. He turned back and slapped her face. She screamed, whereupon a hulking Spaniard appeared and clubbed Philip to the pavement with an Allsops ale bottle. He awoke with two little Barbary apes crouched beside him, lapping up the mixture of ale and blood, and staggered back to the governor’s house, where he passed out. A physician had told Lady Knowles that Sir Philip must not be moved—his lacerations were superficial, but the concussion was a serious matter.
However, Ben knew none of this, and would have no idea of his brother’s fate until the news reached London and followed him across the Atlantic to New York, down to the isthmus and up the Pacific coast to California. And even with gold hunters’ ships blowing out of northeastern ports two and three a day bound for San Francisco, that letter would not arrive until summer.
As the light dimmed on the Middle Fork of the American River, Ben felt none of spring’s hopefulness. He was angry with his brother, angry with the woman he himself had declined to marry, and angry with the woman who now declined to marry him. His final arrow hit the bull’s-eye.
“A hundred and seven, and one left to shoot,” Duff said. “Wow.” In Ben’s previous best round of 144 he had shot 101 bull’s-eyes. Duff quickly made the sign of the cross, as he now did twenty times a day—following any remark that seemed blasphemous, prideful, greedy, envious, angry, lustful, gluttonous, or slothful. Or otherwise unsettling.
Ben offered the bow to Duff.
“Will you shoot?” he asked.
Duff shook his head. “Bayam and Kumisi say the twilight is a trickster. They say you really want to shoot only when the shadow of the arrow stuck in the ground is no more than twice as long as the bow.”
The sun was now behind the hills. Ben got a whiskey bottle from the tent and they took the path around and up Mount Aetna—the summit was only forty feet high, but reaching it required a real climb.
Skaggs came up each clear evening at around five to pull back the tarpaulin, make adjustments to the mount in daylight, read his Scientific Americans and Sidereal Messengers, and watch the magnified Venus. After “coming down to earth,” as he called it, to join the others for supper, he would return to the observatory until midnight to stare at the moon and planets and stars, scribbling notes by lamplight. He had the past week made two lunar daguerreotypes, experiments to test th
e new iron collar that fastened his camera’s lens to the eyepiece of his telescope.
He heard the others coming up the rock.
“I have read here just now,” he shouted out before they had entered the building, “that the new observatory in Cambridge—Cambridge, Massachusetts—is fixed atop blocks of granite twenty feet wide and fifty-five feet high—half sunk underground. Our foundation, sirs, is at least the equal of Harvard’s.” Skaggs knew, however, that the telescope at Harvard, the so-called Great Refractor—such puffery!—was fifteen inches in diameter, three times as large as his. “Welcome.” He spotted the unopened bottle in Ben’s hand. “We are drinking tonight, I see, as well as observing the wonders of the universe.”
A rail encircled the top of the little house, a circle within a square awaiting its great dome top. Until now, Ben had not seen the big iron bearings installed. He reached up to the rail and rolled one.
Duff crossed himself and looked away. The iron balls looked to him like one of the exploding shells that had flown from the navy’s 68-pounder, raining death on the innocent people of Vera Cruz. He picked up a daguerreotype from Skaggs’s bench. “This is the moon?” he asked.
It was. The plate showed a spectral white oblong smudge, unrecognizable as the moon. The clock drive, when it arrived, would nudge the telescope smoothly across the sky so that any heavenly object would remain in sharp focus.
“Once we have the clock,” Skaggs said, “the craters will be as clear as the pockmarks on my face.”
“And do you think you can make good pictures of the stars as well?” Duff asked. He brought his fingers to his chest, but refrained from making the cross.
“We shall see.”
“If you are able to photograph the stars, and the sun, you should be ‘the Daguerreian of Fire’ once again, more brilliant than ever.” Now Duff crossed himself: pride.
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