The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (Arbor House Library of Contemporary Americana)

by Robert Lewis Taylor

  Forty dollars seemed cheap to me, and I said so.

  Flour, bacon, sugar and coffee were each fifty cents a pound, biscuits ran as high is $1.25, beef was forty cents, and pickled pork a dollar. There was a kind of boardinghouse near us, made of log and clapboards, with a long common table, where a man named Sumner sold “full board” for twenty-one dollars a week or single meals at $1.25 a throw. He had what he called lodging, too, which meant that a body could sleep outside in a tent with several others, furnish his own blanket, for a price of three dollars, “bedbugs and lice at no extra charge,” he said, but nobody laughed.

  We paid twelve dollars for three picks, eighteen dollars for three shovels, eight dollars for a new pair of shoes for Mr. Kissel, and a dollar a foot for two planks: then we were all but cleaned out

  Mr. Kissel couldn’t go right to farming, as he planned to in the beginning, because his stake, including what I’d put up at Laramie, had dwindled down too low. He had some tools but no seed, so he was obliged to join us and hope to make a strike. It was a pity, because my father wrote in his Journals: “Fine places along this river for farmers to squat on, since it is yet unoccupied.” As for Mr. Coe, I don’t think he had any more interest in gold-mining than he did in raising hogs, but he was observing and annotating, he said, and besides, he wanted to help out. He appeared to have plenty of money, but my father and Mr. Kissel refused to let him pay more than his share, at least at this stage of our adventures.

  Well, that night at supper we found that the flour the trader sold us was full of long black worms. My father said a fair exchange would be to go back and fill the trader full of long lead bullets, but we strained the worms out instead, then went ahead and used it. Nobody suffered; the meal was so satisfactory my father swung around to believe that the worms had improved the flour, saying they likely “aerated” it, same as they did soil, and he hoped to introduce the idea to millers when he returned home.

  Most of this food we bought came from a long way off, the pork and butter clear around Cape Horn from New York, beans and dried fruit from Chile, yams and onions from the Sandwich Islands, and sea gull eggs from someplace called the Farallones. These eggs sold for a dollar each. California was so crazy over gold that nobody was raising any food, you see. People were starved for flavor things like sweet and sour and salt. When we bought our provisions three men were sitting on a log out in front, eating a mixture of vinegar and molasses, sopping it up with bread, wolfing it down like animals.

  At dawn we got up and climbed the wooded slopes into the hills. Away from the river proper, there was plenty of ground not spoken for. We found a handy ravine and started to dig, the three men handling picks and me standing by with the pan. We’d left the women and children behind, of course, and given them guns for a precaution, but this wasn’t necessary in that spot, because decent people were camped nearby, and a medium-sized yowl would fetch assistance in a jiffy. One of our neighbors, too, had given us a lot of information about gold, so we hoped to fill a sack full of nuggets and cash in at Marysville before dark. First (according to instruction) the men chose a hole about the size of a hat, in the lowest part of the ravine, after rolling away stones on top; then they filled the pan with the dirt taken out. Carrying this to a stream, we washed out the pebbles and dirt, using a kind of circular motion. Mr. Kissel did it first, squatting down beside the stream and holding the pan by both sides. This first dirt was washed several times, but nothing showed in the bottom, so we dug another hole, farther up. Nothing here, either. Altogether, we tried as many as a dozen places and then moved to another ravine.

  On the first washing in the new spot we found three or four small black particles, looking like discolored bronze, in the pan. Everybody gave a big whoop, even Mr. Coe, because there’s something about gold, looking for it and finding it, that makes you feverish. It’s just as they say in the books. It does something funny to you, not all of it good. For instance, when we were digging without luck, we had a fine, enjoyable time, but now we’d washed up say two dollars’ worth of gold, we looked around uneasily, as if somebody might burst in and snatch it out of our hands. We had something to protect, now, so our free and easy outlook was gone for a little.

  But we got busy, on fire to drive ahead, and dug one hole after another. Most had nothing; every fifth or sixth turned up a few bits like the first ones, say as big as very small gravel. These we tucked away in our sack. Some of the washings were little more than dust, not positively gold, but we dumped it in, anyhow, whatever failed to wash out with the dirt and stones. By noon we had what they estimated was better than an ounce, net, which meant that, with gold bringing sixteen dollars an ounce, we’d made about twenty dollars. This wasn’t bad; but as my father said toward late afternoon, when the pickings were growing slim, we’d done a square day’s work for it. Also, with prices the way they were, we wouldn’t pile up much of a backlog at this rate.

  We got home early enough to ride into Marysville and have the “dust” weighed out. And right here we got a new shock. It didn’t seem to weigh what we’d estimated. Our total haul came to $18.50. Not until several days afterward did we learn that this particular weigher was a known crook. He’d cheated everybody for upwards of a month, but he wasn’t due to go on much longer, because in a week a party of sailors from Sacramento, once bit, weighed their next dust first on an honest scale, then took it to this fraud and got the same cheating treatment. So they waltzed him right out of there, down to the riverbank, stripped him, tied him face up on a raft of three logs and shoved him out into the stream. They told him, “Come back and we’ll fill you so full of holes you can serve as the underside of a cradle.”

  After buying more provisions we laid into the diggings early the next day. We’d worked out the good ravine, so we pushed up into the hills. For an hour we got nothing but mud and stones, then we hit more gold, in about the same amount as before. Taking turns at the pick and the pan, we toiled away, adding up our store, one after another calling off how much we thought it was.

  “I’d say well over an ounce, maybe two. And if my considerable researches on the subject are correct—”

  “Nigh an ounce, not more.”

  “Oh, come now. We must have two here at least. There might even be three, actually.”

  “Let’s dig another hole,” I said.

  At suppertime on Saturday, at the end of five days, we went over everything to see how we’d done this first week. The way it shook down was, we’d made plenty to buy provisions and had put away eighty dollars besides.

  “The implication is perfectly clear,” said my father, “There’s gold here, but it’s spread out thin. Until we make a real strike, the answer is larger production. I vote to invest in a cradle.”

  Next morning we scouted around among the traders, hoping for a bargain. It being the Lord’s Day, a good many miners had knocked off and came in to visit the saloons and gaming houses. Although they were as rough a crew as you could meet outside of jail—many of them foreigners like Mexicans, Chileans, Chinamen and islander savages—it was interesting that they believed in the Bible lesson of working six days and resting on the seventh. So in they tramped, the mud scraped off their clothes, shaved, too, some of them, except the Chinamen and Indians, which hadn’t any beards to start with, and passed the Sabbath getting drunk and shooting craps and fighting, not working even for a minute. It gave me a warmer outlook, and made me wonder if there wasn’t something to religion after all. Altogether I saw five fights, except one shouldn’t count because both men were so drunk they couldn’t exactly see each other, so that one hit an awning post, breaking two knuckles, then fell in the river. I stood by while they fished him out and examined him.

  We went into one saloon to talk to the proprietor, who had a cradle for sale. My father, after a look around, a long smell of the sour, yeasty air, and a big sigh, made a drawing of the interior for his Journals on the sly: two very rude tables, a four-legged bench, several wooden food boxes with names of far pla
ces printed on them, canvas walls with squares of light ribbing to fix them in place, a pine bar made out of boxboards, an earthenware pitcher of water on top, bartender with scraggly moustache and a low-cornered hat standing behind it with his hands in his pockets, and a row of flimsy shelves behind, holding five or six bottles; two men wearing hats seated at a table examining a sackful of dust; a rough, black-bearded fellow with a hat full of holes leaning against the bar, right foot against a rolled-up blanket on the floor, so as to keep tabs on it, I expect.

  The proprietor said he’d “hoped to fetch three ounces”—forty-eight dollars—for the cradle, which though small was in tiptop condition; he’d used it only a few weeks before deciding he could get rich quicker by peddling grog at fifty cents a drink. He was a confidential sort of man, not at all ashamed of swindling the poor, thirsty miners with his outrageous prices. And he said, indicating the ramshackle mess around us, “I’ve built up a nice place here and I haven’t got hardly no overhead except for whiskey and spring water to cut it with.”

  Being in a testy mood, because of the price, my father made one of his typical jokes. “You haven’t even got enough overhead to keep out the rain,” and he looked up at the roof, through which the sun was sifting about every few inches.

  “It’s funny about them holes,” said the man. “The water washes right across; it forms a little film. She only leaks in three or four spots—those there the size of your fist, and nary a one of them’s over the bar. Anyhow, you take most of my customers, and they’re too drunk to notice.”

  We paid for the cradle and left, and in the morning we tried it on a new ravine where there was very good water trickling down. The way it worked was this: the cradle was an open oblong box about three feet long and half as wide; it was nine inches deep at the upper end and sloped down shallower with the lower end left open. Over the top half fitted another box, a kind of hopper with a bottom of perforated iron—holes half an inch wide and an inch apart—and beneath this was a canvas apron, which was supposed to catch most of the gold. The whole apparatus was placed on a rocker not unlike a child’s cradle. When one threw dirt in the hopper, another rocked the cradle, while a third poured in water, using a half-gallon dipper. The water dissolved the dirt, which fell through the holes into the sloping apron and finally into the upper half of the cradle. They had what they called a “riffle bar,” an inch or so high, placed crossways at the center, so that what gold left the apron stuck in the top of the cradle, being heavy, as the dirt and stones washed on out.

  We spent over an hour getting it set up right in the best place. Then Mr. Kissel began to dig, Mr. Coe shoveled in dirt, and I poured water while my father rocked. It wasn’t hard work at all; my father said he preferred it to the rotary motion of panning, which made his head swim.

  After two hours we made an inspection and had perhaps half an ounce of dust. This was disappointing, but it wasn’t certain we had a good place, so we killed another hour moving farther up, skipping two ravines because a bunch of Chinamen were working a cradle in the first one and some people had a Long Tom going in the second. We ate lunch—sandwiches of pickled pork, as sour as crab apple, biscuits and dried apples—then got back on the job. My father said this ravine looked good; he smelled gold. And he was right for once. It wasn’t a strike, but it was rich pay dirt, so good we made three signs and staked out a claim, placing them on upright sticks. Then we really buckled down. By twilight, we’d cradled two leather pouches full of dust—what we figured would run better than four ounces—sixty-four dollars—besides what we had got in the morning.

  Mr. Coe expressed the general feeling when he said, “This thing gets in one’s blood. Money for nothing; I wouldn’t have missed it for a king’s ransom. It’s precisely what we live for—the incomparable boon of not being bored.”

  There was a discussion whether we should leave a guard overnight, on account of claim-jumpers, but we hadn’t brought blankets or a poncho and it was two miles back to camp. So we stuck our signs in firmer, hid the cradle up in the trees on a hill, covering it over with brush, and went home. The women were hopped up about the gold, specially the prospect of laying in a really fat supply of food. The Kissel children looked white and thin, and Mrs. Kissel said she intended to buy a cow if we struck it rich. Then she thought she might get a proper frock, made out of printed cotton, for Po-Povi.

  “Don’t you feel the need of anything for yourself, ma’am?” asked Mr. Coe, who always thought she was slighting herself over this thing and that. For instance, he claimed she never took her share of the food.

  “Laws, no. I’m too ugly to be improved by adornment.”

  “As one of my countrymen has remarked, the quality of beauty exists largely in the eye of the beholder. I think I can speak for us all when I say that you don’t seem ugly to the members of this party.”

  Without a doubt, this was the most personal remark we’d heard Mr. Coe make to anybody—that kind of statement doesn’t come easy to an Englishman—and he seemed embarrassed, once he’d got it out.

  “In that case,” she said, smiling around, “maybe I’d better just say I’ve got everything I want.”

  To break the ice a little, and show off his knowledge, my father began a gusty discourse on the number of times the word “beauty” occurred in famous poems, and we had supper.

  Full of push, we turned out early, having buried our gold at the foot of a tree, and shoved off toward the ravine. But a lot of these ravines look alike, and when we got to what we thought was ours, we didn’t see the claim signs anywhere.

  “I’m positive this is our digging,” said my father. “Yet we must be wrong; there’s no other answer.”

  We inspected the next two, and sure enough, we found the signs three hundred yards or so away. But something was mixed up; it just didn’t look right. And when we went up the hill to uncover our cradle, it was missing. Neither were there signs that it had been there. And in the low part of the ravine, we could find no telltale marks of digging, no holes, no rock piles, no muddy spots where a washer had stood.

  Facing the others, my father looked grave. “There’s been some hanky-panky here. Back we go to the other place.”

  When we arrived, a party of rascally-looking men were already digging, using two or three pans and a cradle. I recognized one of them; the night before he had come by our camp after supper and asked for a drink of water. And somebody, I forget who—my father, likely—had bragged about our take-out of that day.

  We marched on up the hill and went to where we had hid our cradle. The hiding place was there, bushes scattered apart, but the cradle was gone. So we walked down into the ravine, as those villains knocked off to watch. Not a sound, no movement, just a tensed-up waiting by both sides. I didn’t care for it. We were outnumbered; there must have been eight or nine of them. Then I saw the leader, a squatty, black-haired Frenchman known as Le Chat, which they said meant The Cat, who had been pointed out to us in town as being the worst bully and villain in all the Feather River diggings. He had on very foppish clothes for a roughneck, made out of silk, with a filthy brocaded vest, and he wore a rapier in a fancy scabbard, besides two pistols stuck in his belt. His expression was both sly and amused watching us walk up. The others had stopped all work, and now one of them laughed shortly, then spat in the stream.

  This Frenchman was some kind of quality gone bad. They said he came from a high family in France, but was the black sheep. Three or four here with him were French; they had come over in his ship, so the talk went, but had run into trouble of some kind; I heard it whispered he’d turned pirate. Whether or not, they didn’t arrive at Sacramento in the same ship they left with. People said this was a Spanishman, plain as daylight, very high in the bow and stern.

  The Cat wasn’t the only quality around here. We met a man named Kelly who was writing a book about the diggings; he’d put in the following paragraph, and let my father copy it out:

  “By the end of the week another pack-mule company came i
n, and several fresh hands from the coast, all the latter of the amateur or dandy class of diggers, in kid gloves and patent leather boots, with flash accoutrements and fancy implements, their polished picks with mahogany handles, and shiny shovels, resembling that presentation class of tools given to lords, baronets, and members of Parliament, to lay a first stone, or turn the first sod on a new line of railway. It was good fun to see those ‘gents’ nibbling at the useless soil, and then endeavoring to work their pans, with outstretched hands, lest they should slobber their ducks. Subsequently I used to meet members of that school wending back to the coast from the various diggings, ‘damning the infernal gold,’ and ‘cutting the beastly diggins’ in disgust.”

  When we reached this band of ruffians, my father brushed by to inspect the cradle.

  “It’s ours, all right.” he called back to Mr. Kissel and Mr. Coe. “I recognize it from the nick on the left side of the hopper. Our claim, too, of course.”

  None of the men moved a muscle; all waited for the Frenchman. He had a kind of accent that I won’t try to imitate, being no hand at that sort of thing.

  “Ah, so,” he said, “we have a complaint here, yes?”

  In view of the unholy company that now dropped their tools and began to move in, I thought my father spoke up very bravely:

  “You might construe it so—this is our cradle and our claim. And I’ll ask you to take your helpers and move to another spot.”

  Coming forward, the Frenchman widened his smile. He had his black hair pulled into a queue behind, like a pirate, all right, and he walked with such easy, flowing motions I began to see where he had got his name.

  “Perhaps I have misunderstand. How could this be, your cradle and claim? You see”—he made a pointing-out gesture with his hand—“we use them. Plainly.”

  “You stole them,” said Mr. Kissel in his simple style. “We’ll take them back.”

  I was scared. There was something chilling about this fellow. He was dangerous, and looked especially so right now.