The Rush

by Edward Dolnick

  It was a thundering shame to treat a poor little child so, Bruff shouted. If he could manage it, he would protect the child himself. Lambkin stormed off. Later that day he turned up in Bruff’s camp, young William in tow. He was headed off to round up supplies. He would return in a few days. If Bruff wanted William so badly, he could take care of him.

  By November 25, Bruff admitted he was in trouble. He was now too sick to hunt or even to walk any distance, and he was nearly out of food. “Home” was a crude, three-part lodge. In the center was a tall tepee, open at the top, with a fire. Bruff’s tent joined the tepee at one side, Poyle’s at the other. Poyle continued to hunt but with little success. Stuck in his tent, Bruff could only hope that someone would bring help. “Unless succor is sent me from the valley, I am corner’d, for a spell.”

  The weather grew worse. December 3 saw “strong gales and snow all night, causing our cotton castle to oscillate much.” On December 13, Bruff and Poyle ate their last piece of venison. They gave William the biggest share. Now they were down to two meals a day, of soup made from boiled ox bones or deer bones. Poyle could have made it safely out of the mountains but he refused to abandon Bruff, who was now too weak to travel. Young William was feverish and malnourished, his eyes sunken, his skin pale. Bruff and Poyle cut back further on their rations, to leave more for William.

  Bruff thought he knew the whereabouts of an ox that had died not far away. If they could find it in the deep snow, its meat would be “as safe as in a refrigerator, if the wolves and bears have not found it.” But help was bound to come soon. Otherwise, “I & the child are doomed, perhaps.” Poyle was strong and should survive.

  The snow grew deeper. It was hard to find enough dry wood to keep a fire going, and hard to chop it up, harder still to find carcasses in the snow to butcher, nearly futile to hunt. The poles that held up the tents and tepee (cut from tree branches) buckled and cracked under the snow’s weight. In the collapsed tents, Bruff and Poyle did their best to regroup. “All wet, and confusion.”

  By December 19 they had cut back to one meal a day. Bruff looked ravenously at Nevada. “An extremity has come,” he wrote, “and we are considering about killing & cooking her.” But Bruff was a soft touch and the gruff words a sham. The poor pup was so skinny, Bruff observed. What kind of meal would she make? And without their loyal dog, who would guard the camp at night?

  In the end, Bruff indignantly rejected his own suggestion. “Must I then eat my faithful watch? My poor little Nevada, who has shared my sufferings? For one meal and then die regretting it? I will not.”

  They could eat their candles, if it came to it. These were ordinary, cheap candles made of animal fat, not expensive ones made of beeswax. A few bites of melted fat hardly made a meal, but something in your belly was better than nothing. Nevada could share a candle or they might try soap again. She’d eaten it, the first time. On December 21 Bruff shot a raven. On December 22, he found a few bones from a deer’s leg that had been stashed away eight weeks before. (The idea had been to use the bones as a source of oil, for their rifles.) Roasted, the bones provided a tiny bit of meat, along with a considerable quantity of burnt hair.

  Bruff and Poyle struggled through the days, not quite cheerily, perhaps, but far from downcast. The menu on December 23 was rotten ox—they had found a carcass under the snow and dragged it home—washed down with coffee. After the meal, “we enjoyed our pipes and a long chat and consoling ourselves with the argument that there are thousands in the world worse off than we are. We hear small birds singing quite merrily.”

  Bruff, who had counted so many things on his journey, now tallied his blessings. “We are exceedingly fortunate in having plenty of good coffee, condiments &c., bedding and clothing in abundance, arms and ammunition, matches, some spermacetti and tallow candles, a couple of good lanterns, 2 iron candlesticks. In fact we only needed provisions, a more secure protection from the weather, and fuel more convenient to get in severe weather, and we would have laughed at the elements.” All they were missing, in other words, was food, fuel, and shelter.

  On December 24, Bruff managed to shoot a squirrel. As usual, he was exuberant rather than embittered. “So we have a Christmas dinner.” First, they would have a Christmas breakfast. The resourceful Poyle set to work early on Christmas day. He chopped up a few shards of neck and shoulder from an old ox, added the squirrel, threw some deer bones into the pot, sprinkled in plenty of salt and pepper, and stewed it all for an hour or two. Bruff beamed with pleasure. “Are there not persons, surrounded by plenty and every comfort, who do not enjoy their breakfast as we do?”

  Later in the day Poyle recalled the whereabouts of yet another ox carcass under the snow. More food for dinner! Bruff and Poyle fed young William and then tucked into their feast. Poyle proposed that they improvise some after-dinner entertainment. “We can each sing a song and tell a story,” Poyle suggested, “and then take a pot of coffee and call it ale, egg-nogg, or what you please.” And so they did. The world looked brighter. “The child is doing well,” Bruff remarked, “and we can probably keep our pup.”

  But the respite was brief. Rotten meat and imaginary ale could not sustain a man. Even Bruff conceded that things looked bleak. “Poyle and myself are too weak to walk far,” he wrote, “and the absence of one would seriously jeopardize the life of the others.” The weather was cool and drizzly, not snowy, “but if another violent and long storm comes over us soon, we are doomed.”

  The next few days brought no relief. On December 29, dinner was a bit of ox meat fried in a melted candle. “We are rapidly failing,” Bruff admitted. On the first day of the new year, he copied down the inscription from one more grave marker. Bruff had written this one himself. “WILLIAM, Infant son of LAMBKIN, an Unnatural Father, Died Jan. 1, 1850.”

  By now Bruff had accumulated so many afflictions that he could scarcely list them all. “Pain in my face very severe,” “my mind much depressed, anxiety, weakness, and forebodings of evil,” “swelling of body,” “severe toothache,” “pain and extreme weakness of the spinal column.” New ailments joined the list almost every day—“pain in back very bad,” “legs and loins very weak,” “pain in kidnies very annoying”—and no old ones ever dropped off.

  Bruff could rarely muster the strength to hunt, but he and Poyle had gained a companion. Their new ally, Warren Clough, was himself an emigrant to the goldfields and a self-described “old hunter, and used to a rough life.” Clough “expressed a desire to join me,” Bruff wrote happily, “from motives of humanity alone.” He would prove as loyal a friend as a man could have.

  The men had set up a new camp, Bruff staggering and almost fainting on the way. It was only a mile from where he’d passed the previous two months, but perhaps a move would bring a change in fortune. It didn’t. On February 5, Bruff sent Poyle to get help. No desperate man ever shouted for rescue in so formal a way. Poyle carried a letter from Bruff explaining his predicament in carefully composed polysyllables. “A series of circumstances & misfortunes have detained me here, and for upwards of two months, I have been too feeble to travel any distance.” Bruff requested aid in “extricating me from a very disagreeable exigency.” He would of course repay any pecuniary outlay involved in coming to his rescue, and he would forever cherish the feeling that “such an act of friendship must indelibly make on a grateful heart.”

  With Poyle gone, Bruff and Clough settled into a routine. Every morning Clough took up his rifle and ventured off for a day’s hunting. February 24 was typical. “About 7 p.m. my comrade returned wet, cold, and fatigued, and luckless,” Bruff wrote. “His hair was full of snow and froze to his cap. Shirt sleeves froze stiff. He shot 2 deer but they escaped in the brush; the storm & lateness of the hour prevented him from searching for them.” Bruff’s role was more domestic. “I always have a good hot meal ready when he returns from a hunt.” That hot meal, many nights, was mashed acorns and coffee.

  At ten in the morning on March 25, Clough set out once again. In t
he rain and fog, deer might be hard to find. Clough thought he might have to spend the night out. Two days later, he still had not returned. Lame and sick, Bruff was alone. “I am now in a snap truly,” he wrote on March 27, “without food, helpless, and subject to spells of prostration.”

  On March 28 Bruff managed to shoot “a very small blue woodpecker. I took a small saucepan of water, put an inch of tallow-candle, the bird, pepper & salt, in; and boiled it; and made a pot of coffee. This is the first meal I have had in 48 hours.” Nonetheless, the sky was clear and the wind mild. “What a delightful day!” Bruff exclaimed. If only he weren’t starving to death.

  On March 30 Bruff found some scraps of deerskin with a bit of dried-out flesh still clinging to the hide. He scraped off the worms with a butcher knife. “This boiled with 2 old cracked leg-bones, and another inch of tallow candle, made me broth, which with coffee, had to serve for breakfast.” Then he went out hunting, stumbling through the woods. He collapsed on the ground in a faint and dreamed that he was at home and his little boy was patting him on the head. A wolf’s howl roused him, and he limped home. “I made coffee and eat the grounds, with salt, for supper.”

  The next morning Bruff forced himself out into the rain, to try hunting once more. He followed the tracks of a grizzly bear to an ancient, mangled ox carcass and cut off a few ribs for Nevada. For his own dinner, Bruff made broth from deer hooves, water, and candle wax, with a side dish of coffee grounds and salt.

  Around midnight a grizzly bear—was it the same one?—began snuffling around. Nevada barked furiously. Bruff muzzled her with a handkerchief. The bear approached within ten feet, contemplated Bruff contemptuously over the course of three long minutes, and ambled off.

  Bruff now began each day with a grim reckoning. April 1 marked “the 8th day of Clough’s mysterious absence!… and the 56th of Poyle’s.” Bruff threw some ancient bones into a kettle with water and put his coffee on the fire. Then, tragedy! “Attending to the coffee, my kettle of broth fell over, and I thus lost my last meal! I picked up the pieces of bone & gnawed them, drank my coffee, and eat a spoonful of the grounds.”

  He shouldered his rifle and tottered into the woods. After two miles he gave up. Back in camp, Bruff found a half-decayed deer’s head. He chopped it up with his hatchet, gave half the tongue to Nevada, and cooked the other half for himself. The sound of a far-off wolf—but was it a wolf or his own labored breathing?—echoed incessantly in his ears. Bruff began to fear that he was losing his mind.

  Over and over again, he contemplated his options. He was too weak to travel. If he set out, he would collapse, and bears and wolves would devour him. Or he could stay put and heal. Perhaps he could finally shoot a deer or another bird. He still had a few candles to eat.

  On April 3, Bruff did shoot a little bird, about the size of a sparrow. He cut off the wings and gave them to Nevada, and made the rest into soup for himself. That night two wolves ventured within thirty yards, snarling and snapping their teeth. Bruff changed his mind. He could die in his tent or he could die on the trail. He would give it a go.

  He set out on April 4, headed for the nearest camp or cabin, so weak that he had to stop and sit every thirty or forty paces. As the day wore on, he grew weaker still. Now he fell after every few steps. Nevada would run several feet ahead and whine, as if to implore Bruff to try to get up. By day’s end he could not walk twice his body length. He collapsed one last time. Several deer came in view, but he didn’t have the strength to find his rifle and take aim. Dinner was coffee grounds. “Made a fire, rolled up in my thin quilt, and laid down for the night, may be for ever.”

  On April 6, still tumbling his way along, stopping occasionally for a bite of candle, Bruff saw a group of men in the distance. “I saluted them, staggered, fell, and asked in the name of God, for something to eat, that I was starving!” These were prospectors, it turned out, and one handed Bruff a piece of bread smeared with a little pork fat. When he had revived a bit, he happened to see a gravestone by the roadside. Dutiful as ever, he copied down the inscription.

  The next morning the prospectors shared their breakfast of biscuits, pork, and coffee, and then rode off, leaving Bruff empty-handed. He fumed. “They hearty and robust, with 8 or 10 days full rations, and I an emaciated starveling! Such is human nature! Oh selfishness, thou makest wolves of mankind!” Then he scolded himself. “I will not, however, be ungrateful. They fed me, and saved my life. For this, I am very thankful.”

  On April 8 Bruff spotted a fresh footprint, made by someone barefoot. Aha! That’s what Nevada had been barking at the other night. An unchivalrous thought popped into his head. “My mouth fairly watered, for a piece of an Indian to broil.” Bruff ate his last piece of candle and gave the wick to Nevada. He came to a creek and bent a pin into a hook, with a beetle for bait. Nothing doing. But Bruff managed to kill a lizard with a stick and roasted it for dinner.

  Staggering on the next day, he met a small, nearly naked Indian holding a bow and arrow. Bruff tried a few words in Spanish. Nothing. Bruff signaled that he was hungry. The man indicated that he had no food and was on his way to shoot birds. The two men parted, but Nevada ran after the Indian’s dog. Bruff shouted for the stranger to shoo Nevada away, which he did. Could this be the very Indian Bruff had dreamed of eating only the day before? But he couldn’t shoot a man in the back. “Besides, he had done me a favor.”

  Bruff trudged on. Only a few miles more… He kept himself going by murmuring, “I will soon have plenty to eat! Bread and meat, coffee and milk! A house to sleep in! And an end of my sufferings!” Eventually he fell to the ground and sank into a sleep. Nevada’s barking roused him, but Bruff was too weak to stand. He lifted his head. Poyle!

  His loyal friend had found him. There was a cabin only three hundred yards off. It took fifteen minutes to stumble the distance. Breakfast was “pancakes & molasses, rolls and fresh butter, stewed and boiled beef, coffee & milk!”

  PART III

  REALITY

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  FIRST PEEKS AT THE GOLDEN LAND

  HAPPY BUT EXHAUSTED, LUZENA and Mason Wilson crept toward the finish line. They had climbed over the Sierra Nevada. Sacramento was nearly in reach. Now they spotted a man riding toward them. This was thrilling. A visit from an earlier arrival meant firsthand news of what to expect in California. But almost at once, excitement gave way to mortification.

  Since they had left Missouri, the Wilsons had seen hardly anyone but their fellow emigrants, all of them as worn and shabby as they were themselves. Now, imagining this outsider’s gaze, Luzena cringed. “The sight of his white shirt, the first I had seen for four long months, revived in me the languishing spark of womanly vanity.” Her achievement forgotten, all Luzena could think of was that her “skirts were worn off in rags above my ankles.… My sleeves hung in tatters above my elbows; my hands, brown and hard, were gloveless.” Pulling her ragged bonnet low over her suntanned face, she retreated behind the wagon.

  The newcomer explained that he had only recently arrived in California himself, but it was clear to Luzena that his transformation had already begun. “A day or two before, this man was one of us,” she marveled. “Today he was a messenger from another world, and a stranger.”

  The next-to-last day of Luzena’s journey, September 29, 1849, offered her a peek at the promise of that new world. She had cooked dinner over the campfire, as usual. A miner who happened to be nearby spotted her. Hungry, and drawn by the sight of a woman besides, he inched closer and announced, “I’ll give you five dollars, ma’am, for them biscuits.”

  Luzena hesitated. Five dollars was a week’s pay. For a plate of biscuits? Luzena looked quizzically at him. The miner misread her look. “He repeated his offer to purchase, and said he would give ten dollars for bread made by a woman, and laid the shining gold piece in my hand.”

  Luzena took the coin and handed over the biscuits. She ran to tell Mason of their good fortune. The couple gazed at their gleaming prize and hid the precious
coin away “as a nest-egg for the wealth we were to gain.” Who doubted California now?

  When she fell asleep that night, Wilson dreamed of bearded, wealthy miners at work in the diggings. Every swing of a pick turned up gold, and much of that gold tumbled her way. Morning brought less cheery news: tipped over on its side on the wagon floor was the little wooden box where Wilson had put her ten dollars. The box was empty, the coin presumably lost somewhere on the trail. “So we came, young, strong, healthy, hopeful, but penniless, into the new world.” No matter. They would start again.

  Before them lay Sacramento. “All around us twinkled the camp fires of the new arrivals. A wilderness of canvas tents glimmered in the firelight; the men cooked and ate, played cards, drank whisky, slept rolled in their blankets, fed their teams, talked, and swore.” A few glanced up at the new arrivals and saw a woman. “They stared at me as at a strange creature,” Wilson wrote, “and roused my sleeping babies, and passed them from arm to arm to have a look at such a novelty as a child.”

  In time the young, lonely men handed Wilson’s children back to her. “We halted in an open space, and lighting our fire in their midst made us one with the inhabitants of Sacramento.”

  Since she’d left home, Wilson had imagined that she would eventually find work cooking or running a boardinghouse. Her encounter with the biscuit-buying miner emboldened her. Within three days of arriving in Sacramento, the Wilsons sold their oxen, for $600, and used the money to buy part ownership of a hotel.* It was hardly a grand structure, but it was made of wood, not canvas, and in the circumstances that counted as high-toned. (“The present of this city is under canvas and the future on paper,” wrote a New Yorker who had arrived in Sacramento just before the Wilsons. “Everything is new except the ground and trees and the stars, beneath a canopy of which we slept.”)