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

by Robert Lewis Taylor

  Now everything was being improved. They had sawed plank and board coming down from Oregon, and bricks unloading from other ships, and the streets were taking on a fresh look. The main thing that helped build the city was three monster fires, or conflagrations, as they said, which burned down the trashy stuff around Portsmouth Square, which was the main square, so that they hadn’t any choice but to replace it with better.

  Also filling in gullies, leveling sand hills, and planning a wharf to extend out a half a mile into the Bay. They had started grading the streets, too, and later they meant to put down planking for pavement.

  The city lay five miles across the Bay from the entrance to the ocean, and a better harbor would be difficult to find, for the tidal ebb and flow brought big ships right in and out, to anchor directly in front of the city, without needing the slightest breeze; they could make it even with the wind smack in their face.

  All in all, there were some that predicted the city, so situated, had a tolerable chance to grow; and one man, who they laughed at, because you can go too far in these things, said he figured to see it at a population of a hundred thousand, before he “handed in his bucket.”

  Once ashore, we hiked to the post office after mail, and I found out that Po-Povi had left me a letter behind. Funny thing was, it didn’t bother me. I wouldn’t say I missed her, because nobody can really miss an Indian, but I found myself seeing things on that trip we would have talked about, and it’s perfectly possible I might have missed her if she’d been white. She had a kind of way about her, almost wise, never answering you right off, but thinking things over first so as not to talk a lot of nonsense. Most important, she wasn’t like Jennie; there wasn’t anything bossy about her, or sassy like that. And she was nowhere near as ugly as she could have been. Not only in the face, with her plain black hair and dusky-pale skin, but all over, because I’d seen her bathing in the stream, just like Pretty Walker, and then walking out, and she looked like a slim piece of statuary out of a garden, standing there in the grass. But don’t let slim fool you—she was grown. It was interesting to see how she wasn’t a child any longer, being somehow larger undressed than dressed, both forward and rear. To be honest about it, this was the first time I’d noticed how she looked especially.

  She said, “Dear Jaimie: How nice that I have learned to make letters in the English tongue. We leave tomorrow on a great ship, with white wings like a bird. I am to be a lady. Mr. Coe has told me that I shall stand the country squires on their heads. I do not know exactly what he means, or who these are, but it will be very funny to see them so.

  “He is a kind and good man; I must prepare myself to serve him in any way he desires. But I know him very little. He has beautiful yellow hair that ripples like the waters of a brook. I recall that your hair is stiff, the color of sand, and that it is not combed very often.

  “I am lonely for the people who bought me from the A-rap-a-hoe. Do you please take care of the doctor, that his great and foolish heart shall not lead him into trouble. He is a child’s spirit imprisoned in the body of a man. How I shall miss you all! I have cried in my sleep from this sorrow.

  “Now you must write a letter to your sister. Dear Jaimie, think of me sometimes when you wander in the woods.

  Po-Povi”

  It made my head dizzy for a few minutes, when I read that. It was just what you’d expect from an Indian. She was sorrowful, now she was leaving, and after everybody had practically begged her to stay, too. As for Mr. Coe and his beautiful hair—that exhibit would look uncommonly well hanging from the tip of a Crow spear.

  I read it over, itching to write an answer right away, so as to straighten some things out. But I wasn’t quite so mad when I read it a second time. She had learned to write very well. There were a good many girls in my grade in Louisville, specially Daisy Coontz, who could chin herself, all right, but would never know the difference between the Greeks and the Spartans if she lived to be a hundred, that couldn’t do anywhere near as well. I’m not the best writer in the world, but I’ve read most of the books back home, certainly all those about robbery and murder, and I could see that this Indian girl had shot right ahead. Once she’d got onto using a few long words, and dropped all those short ones, she’d be a credit to her race. It’s off the subject, but she had the same trouble that way as the Bible, which my mother read from in the evenings. I hate to knock something religious, because those old Hebrews likely put in a lot of time on it and hoped it would succeed, but the book lacked style. It hadn’t any words that amounted to a hill of beans, and alongside a work like The Last Days of Captain Kidd, by Morton E. Jenkins, it was mighty thin stuff. No, in some ways, the Bible was a very ignorant book.

  While my father stood in the post office door, reading a letter from Mr. Coe, I went over her remarks again. I didn’t like that part about her crying in her sleep. It was a coincidence, for many and many a night since they left, I lay in our tent feeling very blue, lonesome for my mother, I reckon. This Indian girl was my sister, red or white, and I didn’t think I’d have much trouble thinking about her when I wandered in the woods. I’d done it already. All of a sudden I began to wonder if I hadn’t lost something. I didn’t feel so good; I had a hollow in my stomach, and went over and sat down on a box. I had this funny idea that maybe I was going to throw up.

  But there’s something I forgot to tell. When collecting our mail a few minutes before, a strange thing happened. The man in the window looked up sharply and said, “Doctor Sardius McPheeters, formerly of Louisville?”

  Astonished, my father replied, “That is correct, sir. May I ask how you know?”

  The man looked embarrassed. “There was an inquiry. We had a note here about it. Would you mind very much to say where you are stopping here?”

  “Why—” my father began, and I could see he was about to give out a high-sounding address, but he was handicapped, not knowing any, so he said, “We aren’t settled in, sir. Not as yet.”

  “When do you expect to come in for mail again?”

  “I’ll call at ten tomorrow.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said the clerk, and scribbled a memorandum on the note he had.

  “Most mysterious, most mysterious indeed,” my father said, as we walked down the street. “But in no way uncivil. No doubt one of the old wagon train, desirous of renewing our acquaintance.”

  We walked around, looking the place over and keeping an eye out for “opportunities,” but none appeared to arise, so that night we paid three dollars to share a small, lumpy, ill-smelling bed in a mean lodginghouse. Neither of us slept much, because my father was in one of his snoring humors, which sounds like a cross cut saw ripping into a nail, and my legs have the habit of twitching, or kicking, as the muscles get rested and smooth out. “I don’t know when I’ve taken such a hiding,” he said when we got up, both pretty grouchy. “I’m black and blue from ankle to thigh. It was an interesting experience, not unlike being shut up in a four-foot stall with an especially vicious donkey.”

  I mumbled something just as surly, and we got dressed.

  Out early to have breakfast in a coffeehouse, and killed time till ten, when we went back to the post office. There wasn’t any more mail, of course, but the clerk seemed glad to see us, and said, “The gentleman was here only a moment ago. I believe he will make himself—”

  “Good morning, sir,” cried a very dapper little man, with a beaming smile, who had come up behind us. He was soberly dressed, almost with elegance, though businesslike, and had on striped pants, a frock coat, and a bowler hat. His nose was long and thin, his eyes very sharp and black, and his mouth a perfect straight line across, with what seemed like no lips at all, unless he broke into a smile, which for some reason I thought was made for reasons of business.

  “May I introduce myself—Junius T. Peters, on commission for a client who must, at the moment, remain anonymous.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand, sir,” said my father, a trifle warily.

  “
Dear me,” said Mr. Peters, “it is awkward, is it not? For I have nothing to say, nothing at all, except to request, with apologies, that you be so good as keep the Government post office apprised of your address, by word if in the city, by dispatch should removal occur.”

  “Mr. Peters,” said my father, growing slightly nettled, “I have no wish to be rude, but this is most unusual. A less patient man might regard it as an intrusion. Will you kindly state the nature of your business.”

  “I quite understand,” said Mr. Peters, keeping pace with us, as we had all begun to walk away from the building. He made a ridiculous figure, for he hopped around like a tomcat in a patch of briers, trying to stay in step, shifting first to match my father and then me, hoping, it appeared, to draw us all in line. But he never did; I saw to that, not having much else to do at the moment.

  “Yes,” he said, “your attitude is quite what one would expect. Doctor Sardius McPheeters,” he went on, with a shrewd, sidelong look, “of Louisville?”

  “Precisely.”

  “Son Jaimie, diminutive of James. Aged fourteen?”

  The humor of this odd little man began to appeal to my father, who realized now he was nothing but a harmless lunatic, so he said, “Wife Melissa, age unstated.”

  Instead of being offended, Mr. Peters cried, “Aha! That was a fact I didn’t have, sir,” and whipping out a notebook, he wrote it down carefully.

  At the end of the square, he stopped with an air of great decision, working his business smile again, and said, “In my mind, sir, identity is fully established, but when Client remains in absentia, as he must, all possible caution should be maintained.”

  Suddenly my father spoke up, serious again, to say, “There’s something I think you owe us in this—tell me, if you will, should we expect trouble or benefit from your attentions?”

  I could see the business smile opening and closing like a fish’s gills as the little man thought it over, wrestling with his conscience. Finally he gave a sigh, looking almost human, and asked, with a sharp glance:

  “Sir, do you enjoy sound and restful sleep?”

  My father started to nod yes, and Mr, Peters said briskly, “Client would not wish it disturbed. Good day, sir”—lifting his hat—“we shall meet from time to time.”

  We watched him go, trim and proper, filled with respectability. At last, my father burst into a merry laugh. “Probably, I should resent it, but you know, somehow I couldn’t. The fact is, I like him.”

  “So do I,” I said. “I really think he wanted to do better.”

  “He did, didn’t he?”

  On this odd note, we took up our life in San Francisco. Later in the day, we checked and found we had only ten dollars and a few pennies left. Plus a picayune that my father found in an otherwise empty gold sack back near Marysville.

  Having to do something quick, we commenced a search for employment, but it was a discouraging job. I remember those first days as ones of endless street trudging, polite inquiries at first, anxious ones as the time passed, and then, after a week, something approaching despair.

  Leaving the lodginghouse, we slept in a tent with four sailors. Our food was mostly biscuit and coffee, but in loitering around the waterfront, we often were given bits from the galleys, when friendly Scotsmen or Englishmen heard our story. The grand opportunity that my father had mentioned seemed disinclined to turn up.

  For two days in the second week we made six dollars a day wheeling dirt on the city streets, where gullies and ditches and ruts the size of a wagon were being filled in.

  Then we visited the British Consul, who eyed my father’s garments sourly and said he would “place on file” our request for clerical work. But neither of us believed him, and we never heard from him again. Next day, we called on a Mr. Gillespie, the president of the New Wharf Company, which was building a bigger landing wharf for ships, forty feet long, but when my father, “pleading his Scotch name,” requested employment and wanted to show his papers, Mr. Gillespie “spurned them with cool civility,” as I find written in the Journals.

  To make things worse, the sailors in the tents where we slept began to row about keeping us on. Two men said it was all right, but the others, whiny, oafish fellows, said we weren’t “making enough of a contribution.” So my father, leaving me behind so as not to witness his disgrace, went to call on a Mr. Austin, a Scottish baker, and came back with to loaves of bread, which he had begged, of course, and put the sailors in good temper for a while.

  This tent of theirs not only was patchy but it was full of pinprick holes besides, and the canvas was worn so thin that a touch of your hand underneath caused the rain to come dripping through. It rained sheets one night and we lay miserable and shivery. It had got to be early November now, and while this San Francisco weather was never severe, you could suffer sleeping in a tent. The nights were often cold. Already on the sunny tops of the mountains, in plain sight beyond the city, a white eagle’s cap of snow could be seen on some mornings.

  They said the climate here was unlike any other about, being entirely local. During the summer and fall, the wind blew from the west or northwest, directly in from the ocean. Then the mornings were warm and calm, but around noon, as a general thing, the ocean wind lifted to a regular gale, driving dust and paper and filth over the streets so thick you had to shield your eyes. And always, at sunset, it died away to nothing, leaving a time of peaceful quiet. The early evenings were pleasant but after dark it turned so cool you could wear woolen clothing nearly any old time you chose. In the winter, they said, there was nothing but soft, gentle breezes from the southeast, with temperatures always mild, the thermometer rarely sinking below 50.

  When the wind blew in from the ocean the rains seldom came, but when it blew from the land, in both winter and spring, showers were very common, just like April and May back home. From the standpoint of climate, San Francisco wasn’t any bad place to be destitute on the streets in this autumn of 1850.

  Chapter XLIII

  I’ll say this for my father, he tried hard in those first weeks. No matter how low we got, he was up early and off to make his rounds, calling on this merchant and that, trying for honest work. Until lately the commerce of the city had been largely in the hands of a very few families, a Mr. Leidesdorff, from Denmark, a Mr. Grimes, Mr. Davis, and a Mr. Frank Ward, from New York. Their houses did a bustling business, using very large sailing ships, with Oregon, the southern Pacific coast, and the Sandwich Islands. From Oregon they brought lumber, flour, salmon and cheese, and from the Islands, sugar, coffee and preserved tropical fruits. The main articles traded in return were hides and tallow.

  Before these gentlemen, California hadn’t any trade to speak of. Commercial houses of Boston and New York had hogged it all for years, sending out ships loaded with dry goods and knickknacks that did a retail business going from port to port, holding auctions right on deck when the rancheros came in from their back-country places. They charged some pretty fancy prices, too; common brown cotton cloth, for example, sold for a dollar a yard.

  With the finding of gold, everything changed, of course. New businesses sprang up everywhere, money rolled in by the wagon-load, and probably the most noticeable, and worst, difference was the gambling halls. These now stood all over town, dancing a gay tune, to a silvery, golden tinkle, and there was trouble in them a-plenty. Often in the evenings, having nothing better to do, my father led me from one to another—the El Dorado, United States, Parker House—saying it would prove “educational.” But the truth is, he was drawn by the excitement and the lights and the fiddler music and the sight of people gambling. They were noisy places; a body could see how they might get to be a habit. Most of them were combination hotel and casinos, their walls spread over with the splendidest kind of paintings—women, mainly, minus their shifts—the tables along both sides stacked high with gold and silver coins, musicians on a platform in the rear, polished plank in a corner near the entrance, where a “gentleman of the bar,” or bartender, serv
ed out what they called “the needful,” and several circles of men drinking each other’s health in that foolish-formal, over-warm complimentary way, likely hoping down inside that nobody would slop over and hit them.

  Crowds were always streaming in and out, and rouged women with sweet faces were on hand everywhere, to act as a sort of mother, I reckon, although when one chucked me under the chin and said, “Here’s a saucy duckling,” my father pushed her away. He was downright rude, after she’d taken the trouble to introduce herself that way. The rackety laughter, shrill curses, shouts, money chinking, feet stamping, fiddles scraping, glasses pounding on the bar, and dealers crying out numbers was enough to flatten your eardrums.

  One night a wholly innocent man was stabbed to death in a scuffle, right before me, and on another, half of the ceiling fell down where we were. Being nothing but calico tacked up, the rising night wind got between it and the roof. But it made a gaudy mess with drunks trying to crawl free, women screaming and busting out of their low-front dresses, dust everywhere, and a number of men that didn’t get hit laughing fit to kill.

  In the daytime we continued our search for work. The old word of “opportunity,” which was to mean a big fortune in a hurry, hadn’t been mentioned for a while. What we worried about instead was keeping body and soul together. It sounds complainy, but I don’t remember once not being hungry along in that period.

  We called on a Colonel Collier, head of the Customs House, who was very kind and said he would help us find something soon, after my father showed him his medical documents and others. When we left, he said if a vessel arrived tomorrow, he could put us both on the payroll. Then we called on Mr. Edwin Bryant, who was formerly the alcalde of San Francisco, now a judge, and I don’t think we’d met such a good and interested man since we left home. He insisted on hearing every detail of my father’s story, after which he made us drink a glass of claret and loaned us five dollars. Leaving his house, my father had recovered a lot of his pomp and good cheer. But when we returned to the tent, those four sailors wouldn’t let us in any more. They threw out our ponchos and gear, and said, “Shift for yourselves; we’ve got troubles of our own.” That night we slept on a pile of shavings, collected from a half-built house, in a corner of an alley protected from the wind. Two days later we moved into an empty shed that the owner, a merchant named Dobbs, was planning to knock down for lumber but mightn’t get around to for upwards of a month yet.