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

by Robert Lewis Taylor

  “ ‘Cherished friends of the Trail,’ ” Mr. Peters read, trying not to enjoy himself but failing. “ ‘I am taking the liberty of leaving behind a reminder of a companion who would use this selfish means of staying on with you in spirit. Perhaps by now you have made that rich strike which we sought for so many, to me, pleasurable months. If true, I shall be deprived of my gesture. If not, I shall spend many happy hours thinking of you, content in your glorious California. It seems unlikely that we shall meet again. The responsibilities of my new role do not admit of much travel. It is not a bad role, by the way. For better or worse, this is the England that bred me, and I find the matter of discharging my debt in many ways rewarding. Would you, doctor, compress your buoyant spirit into a few pages of correspondence once each year, at Christmas time, to help me to renew my memory of a period that I shall ever regard as among the most priceless treasures of my life?

  God bless you all; may good fortune attend your ventures.

  BLANDFORD

  (Henry T. Coe)

  Postscript: I must add that it would be quite useless for you to refuse; the property is yours, whether or not you wish actively to manage it.

  H.T.C.’ ”

  Mr. Peters’ face appeared to have strayed from business for a moment. He blew his nose. “To proceed to the point, His Grace, the Duke of Blandford, has seen fit, through the Bank, for which I act as agent, to place on deposit, soon to be in Trust, the sum of ten thousand pounds—approximately fifty thousand dollars—for the purpose of buying, stocking, equipping and Perpetuating—you will kindly note the clause ‘Perpetuating,’ for it has a bearing on the Trust provisions—an estate, or ranch, of not less than six thousand acres, the ownership to be divided among the parties hereinafter named, subject, again, to Trust (for a period of years), the management to be effectuated by any method you decide upon, once again, within the limitations of Trust.

  “That, in brief, is the commission which I am herewith, ah, able, or, as it were, pleased, or even happy, though the viewpoint is unprofessional, to discharge.

  “Doctor McPheeters,” said Mr. Peters, arising, “my congratulations, speaking entirely personally, you understand. You are a wealthy man. I wish you and your son and your colleagues the very best of luck!”

  My father sat there like a stone. “It’s too late,” he said finally. “Look at me, a drunken ruin, my family split, hearts broken, hopes dashed, my son’s education knocked into a cocked hat, and by whom? By me, and me alone.”

  “Permit me to say—Nonsense!” cried Mr. Peters. “I ask you to look upon me as a friend. The main business is over and finished. I think I may flatter myself that it has been carried out in a way that would have done credit to my father, who was, as stated, a banker of import. I don’t wish to seem unfilial, but I believe a case might be made that he was all business.

  “What remains is trivial, principally a matter of counsel, advice, assistance. I shall be working with you on behalf of the Bank. Speaking for myself, and not for the Bank, I feel that you will, with no difficulty, rise to this great occasion.”

  My father looked up, and said, “What do you think, son? Do you suppose you could ever believe another promise of mine?”

  They’d said I was grown now, and I felt grown after this past year of starving and looking after my father and wheeling dirt on the streets of San Francisco.

  I stooped down, trying not to notice the gray hair and veiny skin and the flesh hanging slack and purplish on his cheeks.

  “You kept us together on this trip, however bad things got,” I said. “Strong or not, it wasn’t Mr. Kissel, nor was it Buck Coulter, tough as he is. It has to do with what Mr. Coe wrote in his letter, the part about spirit. And I don’t think a thing like that ever dies out. The way I see it,” I went on, “this is just about the perfect example of Opportun—”

  “Mr. Peters,” my father said suddenly, getting up and brushing off his hat, and having to hold onto a table, a little, for support, “what’s next in the order of business?”

  Chapter XLVII

  At the bank we learned that the actual transfer of the funds would be done only after it was certain that none of us—the Kissels, Coulter and them—had made a big strike up to October twentieth. But they hadn’t; we knew that, because they weren’t prospecting any more, and besides, we’d heard from them only a few days since.

  Came a morning soon when my father and Mr. Peters and I boarded a sailing vessel bound upriver for Sacramento. We had a farewell dinner with the Reverend Ebersohl, using real food at a hotel for a change, which Mr. Peters insisted on paying for, though making it clear the money would come out of Administration. When my father and I begged Reverend Ebersohl to join us in our new life, he declined, with a wistful but determined shake of the head, saying that his real work lay in San Francisco, because the devil had clamped a grip on this region that might take forty years to unhook. Still, he promised that, if he and his associates did get the upper hand, through day and night campaigning, he would come to see us, wherever we were.

  He stood on the wharf when we sailed, waving his hat, bareheaded, smiling, half starved, filled with courage and duty, a great man, as my father said, by every measure known.

  We’d posted letters of thanks to Mr. Coe and a long one home, a letter that had a real ring of truth for once. Then I’d written a note to Po-Povi, but I won’t tell what I said; I’m not much good at that mushy stuff. Before we reached Vernon—actually by Sacramento—my father had begun to take on a fresher look. During the days riding up the river, he never mentioned whiskey, although some gentlemen in the saloon were drinking freely every night. For several nights he lay wide awake, though. I knew it well enough because he had an upper bunk, with me in the lower, and I heard him tossing around. By now, I could guess how he suffered. In the moonlight that shone through our door, I saw his hand gripping the outside of the bunk, the skin white, tight-drawn over the knuckles. There wasn’t a thing could be done; Mr. Peters knew it, too. So we kept quiet and waited.

  The miserable part was that his pomp and bluster were gone. He’d lost most of that bubbling-up confidence, the real honest feeling that Fortune lay just round the corner. I hated to see him so. But standing day after day on deck in the sun and wind and spray toughened him up and helped his appearance some. The gray hair was there, and would stay, but the blotchiness was disappearing fast. Hard going or not, he was on the mend, and before Vernon his appetite had come back almost to normal.

  Disembarking at last, we started down the street, me with a nervous fluttering in my stomach. It had been a long time. But there it was, standing right in the same old place. The identical exact butchery stand, though added to considerable, and a little house, with a number of rambling rooms built out behind. The sun was in my eyes, so I shaded them with my hand, trying to make out who I saw. Then I heard Jennie’s happy cry, and the next minute she was flying up the road, holding her petticoats as usual. Her soft, starchy, sweet-smelling hug somehow made up for the whole year of pauperdom. Then it was Mrs. Kissel, and her brood, and, finally, the usual bear’s grip from her husband, confound him; he was dangerous when carried away by good feeling, and my father said the same.

  We all had a good cry, even Mr. Peters, who had, as he stated several times, no more than a business interest in the reunion; so that he was, as he told us (blowing his nose) uninvolved in any emotional way. For which he was thankful, since he doubted if his late father would have approved of the other.

  And later that day, when Coulter and Uncle Ned and Todd came in from a trip to the mines, we did it all over again.

  Then we told about Mr. Coe and the ranch, and nobody could take it in, it was so awesome. But I guess the most affected were the Kissels. Mr. Kissel said five or six times, so as to pound it in, “He was a farmer born; I always felt it,” and Mrs. Kissel went aside to hide her face in her apron, but later on she came back to say she would send him some tomatoes out of the very first stand that was raised.

 
The only flaw in our good feeling was that everybody seemed embarrassed by my father’s new manner. They hated to see him so quiet and abject. I watched Coulter at dinner—we had it indoors, now, instead of around the old campfire—and afterward, when he got my father aside, I followed out of curiosity. I found me a handy place behind a tree.

  “Doc,” said Coulter, taking my father’s elbow, “you did me a favor once that I’m not apt to forget. Far as I can see, my turn appears to have come. It might be you’re feeling like a failure right now, blaming yourself for hardships and losses. No, don’t interrupt. Likely you don’t feel so good about drinking, either. Well, you’re in the same boat I was in when you gave me the preaching.” My father started to speak again, but Coulter waved him down.

  “I ask you—who’s responsible for Mr. Coe and this thing he’s done? Me? a backwoods ignoramus that can’t more than sign his name? Matt Kissel, who couldn’t hook three sentences together to save himself from drowning? Mrs. Kissel? Jennie? No, it was you all down the line. Doc, you’re the backbone of this party, and always was. There was a kind of poetry in all those stories you spun around the campfire. I don’t think anybody entirely believed all your fancy dreams, but we enjoyed hearing them told, and what’s more, they kept us going. Uncle Ned Reeves and I were talking about it the other day. Doc, you made us feel good; it’s something that can’t be bought. We miss it, and hope it comes back soon.”

  My father turned away and walked off toward the river. But the next morning, when we got up, he seemed to have undergone a change; he didn’t look hangdog any more.

  “About the location for the ranch,” he said, putting on his spectacles and removing a booklet from his pocket, “I’ve been doing some research and feel that Opportunity, the real opportunity, lies in the Sandwich Islands, coming to be known more commonly as Hawaii, the vowels to be pronounced independently for strictly pure usage.

  “During the course of my practice in San Francisco, I had reason to converse with a number of people from there. The climate is salubrious, the land fertile and cheap, the mineral situation largely unexplored. To go a step further, news of a gold strike in that area at any minute would not surprise me.

  “However, the point of particular interest is this: the present native ruler, King Kamehameha III, is a confirmed sot”—he had the good grace to wince slightly when he got the word out—“and in truth appears at Court functions almost invariably carrying a brandy bottle under his arm. This is not hearsay; it is factual material that will soon appear in the book of an English acquaintance of mine.

  “Most important from our standpoint is this: the king is completely under the domination of a Scottish minister!

  “Now, can you not envision the preferential treatment we must enjoy with such a racial tie at Court? I allude, of course, to my own Scottish origins.

  “So—there is no question in my mind of geography. Fortune, probably wealth undreamed of on the mainland, lies in Hawaii.”

  He paused here and took off his spectacles; then he said briskly, “Boat passage may be booked from San Francisco every fortnight.”

  It was pleasant to hear him; his remarks were downright musical, and made about as much sense as before; that is, there was certainly something in them, but not much. Anyhow, he had returned to normal, and everybody looked glad.

  Coulter said, with a smile, “Let’s save Hawaii to use as the other side of the fence, doc. It’ll be there to think on. We can keep it permanent, like, for when we get restless.”

  “There’s land,” said Matt Kissel. “Green rolling land, with thick black dirt underneath, along the Bear River. I’ve bore it in mind this last year.”

  Nobody questioned him. Any time he made a statement of that length, it amounted to pronouncing the benediction.

  So, I’ll move along—these adventures have taken up too much space already—and say that, by depending on Mr. Peters’ shrewd, calculating eye, we sold out the butchery and the mules and found our way, early in November, into a well-watered valley lying north of the Bear River bottoms; a succession of richly green and fertile fields, with woodlands, that rolled up from the bottoms to the foothills of the mountains above. Meadows with good pastures, and groves of black oak with mistletoe clumped in their branches, creek beds full of yellow willows, and digger pines, black and twin-trunked, in the high reaches. Flowering trees and shrubs such as we hadn’t seen since the prairies: dogwood and climbing grape, berries, wild peas and manzanitas—“little apples”—and nuts very sweet to the taste.

  My father wrote in his Journals: “There is room here for the great cattle ranches that we mean to create out of this overflowing wilderness. This valley of ours comes close, I believe, to a Paradise on earth.”

  The arrangements had all been made. We’d scouted it thoroughly, and not bought it on the spur of the moment, as my father urged of each new piece inspected. This land itself cost next to nothing; in fact, you might have grabbed it by squatting, but Mr. Peters insisted on “unclouding” some Spanish land-grant titles and some claims made by Indians, too. It was free and clear, over seven thousand acres, ownership divided equally between those of us together on the trip, divided in three, that is, with a section and home for Todd and Uncle Ned, with advantages to get them started and assistance to buy more if they chose.

  Our houses were on their way up before Christmas. We had fenced pastures, but had left most unwooded acres as open range. Then we’d bought cattle from people like Captain Sutter, Mr. Johnson, of Johnson Ranch down the Bear River, Mr. Yount and Mr. Chiles, in Napa Valley, and General Vallejo and his brother, Colonel Salvador Vallejo, both fine, generous men, at Sonoma.

  Matt Kissel, still determined to farm crops, along with raising cattle, had laid in wheat, corn and barley, and now waited impatiently for the spring.

  Altogether we had hired about a dozen Indians to help out with the work, and now we made things move. I never before saw my father so hard put. But something remained missing; he wanted the family out. He’d written letters saying he was coming home to fetch them, and now he could hardly wait. So, after a very merry Christmas spent in the Kissels’ half-finished house, of timber and adobe brick, we bade him farewell. I was to stay behind, living with Buck and Jennie, to keep the work going on our place.

  We gathered early one morning in the Kissels’ front yard, with those smoky-blue mountains in the background, and hallooed him off. Mr. Peters was there, too, on one of his trips out to supervise the buying.

  Giving me an embrace, my father shook hands with Mr. Kissel and Coulter and Uncle Ned and Todd, and kissed the women on the cheek.

  “Six months, eight at the most,” he cried, swinging up into the saddle. “We’ll be reunited and wander no more.” Then he called to Jennie, “Take care of the future Governor of California,” which was his way of mentioning the baby they were going to have that summer.

  I will remember him as he looked that morning. He was healthy; the gray hair now seemed more dignified than old, and his face, tanned and taut, had the appearance of a man who has finally come close to finding what he wants. He held his hat in his hand, and his eyes shone with the fun of starting out on a new venture. The Santa Fe Trail. Who could tell, there might be a fortune in it. Opportunity, opportunity …

  Standing there watching him, I was glad he had never grown up. Probably I should have been sad, because I had an uneasy feeling that we would never see him again. But I couldn’t help smiling instead. It was all right. The pot of gold, the real strike, his dream run to earth, lay somewhere up ahead, around the next bend of the trail. It was all right. That next bend was my father’s pot of gold, just as I’d said in my letter. I wondered how long he could have lasted before those beckoning hills stirred the old restlessness. How many months before the ranch itself was his enemy, and, the first crack had appeared that told of trouble coming? We waved goodbye, and I watched him ride away to keep his appointment with Fortune.

  Spring had arrived—the willows were budding along
the creek beds and snow was melting in the high ranges—when a solitary rider covered with dust walked his horse up to the Coulters’ doorstep late one evening. Hearing him, we stepped out, and he said, “Can you direct me to James, or Jaimie, McPheeters?”

  Somehow, without asking, I knew he brought news of my father. When I spoke up, he dismounted and handed over an envelope.

  I took it indoors, to lantern light, and examined the contents, which were twofold: a short note of condolence from Mr. Peters and a dispatch, containing a report, from the Bishop of Zacatecas, in Mexico. It appeared that, without notifying us first and perhaps causing needless alarm, Mr. Peters had started inquiries after receiving by mail a number of papers (in which his name and address were mentioned) that my father carried when he left. The dispatch from the Bishop of Zacatecas read as follows:

  Mr. Junius T. Peters

  Miners, and Seamen’s Bank Trust Co.

  San Francisco, California

  Sir:

  I received your letter of March 15, but have delayed my reply as I was waiting for information I had requested from the Rector of the Colotlán. His report has now reached me and reads as follows:

  “Rectory of Colotlán,

  April 19, 1852

  “Most Excellent Sir: Desiring to satisfy the wishes of Your Holiness about the assassination of Dr. McPheeters, I have the honor to make the following statement: Dr. McPheeters was wounded on Tuesday, February 3, in an abandoned house on the outskirts of this city where he had been taken on the pretext of calling on a patient, by a man disguised as a woman, who came between 9 and 10 at night to Mr. James Dwyer’s house, in which Dr. McPheeters was living.

  “The Doctor accompanied the disguised man to the house of the supposed patient, and having gone as far as the patio, was surrounded by three men, one of whom stabbed him in the chest with a dagger and struck his head with a stick, inflicting seven serious head wounds. The police found the dying man there, being guided by his moans. He was carried to his residence, which was the same as Mr, James Dwyer’s (an American quack), and lingered there in bed till the fifth, then was buried the same day in the cemetery which lies south of this city.