Bound for Gold--A Peter Fallon Novel of the California Gold Rush

by William Martin

  Cletis jerked a thumb toward me. “That’d be Harvard, here.”

  Emery pushed past Chin, then stopped in the door. “They say you Chinks know about herbs and medicines and such. If you know how to stop men from shittin’ till there’s nothin’ left inside ’em but white bone, you might make good money in Rainbow Gulch. Damn good money.”

  After Emery left, Chin said to us, “Medicines? I no doctor. No magic priest.”

  “Maybe not,” said Flynn, “but if you do some good, you might make a few more friends, earn a bit more respect in these parts.”

  “Respect?” said Chin.

  Cletis said, “Don’t be gettin’ his hopes up.”

  November 11, 1849

  Rainbow Gulch

  As the next day was the Sabbath, we took Emery’s suggestion and visited Rainbow Gulch. We also brought Chin. It was bold of us, I know, but he wanted to see a bit more of the country, and he thought he might have a remedy for what ailed those loose-bowel miners.

  “Bring your sister,” said Flynn. “The sight of her would cure anything.”

  Chin did not even dignify that. But somehow he managed to look dignified riding our burro down the road to Broke Neck, then across the river and onto the muddy trail that ran southwest over the rolling country.

  We passed many a miner along the way. Some were heading to Broke Neck in high spirits, intent on a little Sunday spending. Others trudged along, intent on nothing more than the ground in front of them, weighed down by the mud that clung more heavily to their boots with every step and sucked them deeper and deeper into their own disappointment.

  Flynn offered each of them a smile, a nod, a greeting. That was why we let him lead. Quick to anger, quick to calm, convivial as the town crier, that was Michael Flynn. A much better face for our trio than a nervous Chinaman or Yr. Ob’t Correspondent, who was often accused of being too damn serious for his own good.

  After about five miles, we came out of a stand of blue oak and brush on a ridge that looked across a ravine toward an open plateau.

  A light rain was falling. The clouds had closed down the vistas. The ravine and the gulch draining down from the plateau appeared as nothing more than gutters running through a crowded neighborhood. Scores of tents and lean-tos hid in the shadows below us. A miasmic fog of campfire smoke trapped all the odors of this tight-packed hill-country slum, a commingling stink of stale food, unwashed bodies, and human waste. And a din rose to assail our ears, the noise of men jawing and laughing, or relaxing to music from harmonica or banjo, or moaning their Sabbath away in some deep yet undefined misery.

  A hollow-eyed miner was climbing the path toward us, as if he would escape before he was swallowed by the earth.

  I said, “Excuse me, friend. Is this Rainbow Gulch?”

  “Not for me, it ain’t. No pretty colors here. Just another rainy day. But—” His eyes fell upon Chin. “Is he your pardner, or does he work for you?”

  Chin was smart enough to keep quiet.

  I said that he was my servant. “And a kind of healer.”

  I expected an unfriendly response. Instead, the miner asked if I hired white men, too, because he needed a job. I said I had no more work, so he nodded and strode on.

  Meanwhile, Chin had dismounted and was staring across the ravine, which was about four times as wide as deep, fifty feet down, two hundred across.

  Flynn said, “What’s got your slanty Chinese eye now?”

  “I look. I think.”

  “What about?”

  “Land. I think, why gold someplace and not other? Why gold there in … in—” He made a motion with his hand, describing the slope and the big cut in it.

  “The gulch?” I said.

  “Many claims along gulch. That mean much gold. But where gold come from? Wash down from flat land above? And why flat land go south then turn west, like river of grass between hills?”

  Flynn looked at me. “Fair questions, Jamie.”

  “Questions for another time,” I said.

  And down we rode into the ravine. Here it was darker, colder. The gloom of a cloudy November day was an unassailable force, even in California. Here the stream merely trickled, despite a month of rain. I could not imagine how we might keep water coursing through it all summer, even if we could dig a trench six miles from Big Skull Rock.

  We rode past tents and huts and covered wagons. Then Flynn reined his horse, startled by one of the rarest sights we had seen in gold country. Beside a wagon, a dozen men had lined up, each with a bundle of clothes under his arm. A man was taking their bundles and their gold and writing down their names. Beside him, bent over a washboard in a big metal tub, a woman—skinny, scraggly-haired, worn—did woman’s work, and men who had not washed clothes in months paid handsomely.

  She glanced at Flynn. He tipped his hat. She looked down again into the suds.

  Flynn turned to me. “Do you got any dirty clothes?”

  “All of them,” I said.

  We asked along the ravine for Wilson and Selwin until a hairy miner sitting on a tailing pile pointed to a tent about halfway up the south side. “Might find ’em there or down at the shit pit, down where the streambed straightens. That’s where all the quick-steppers try to get to ’fore they let go.”

  Scrawny Selwin was sitting on a hogshead in front of his tent, his head in his hands, his body curled in on itself. He looked up as we approached, and an emotion crossed his face, but even his features seemed too exhausted to define it. He said, “You come to see the dying? Or to do some gloating?”

  I dismounted and said we had come because they had asked for us.

  “I didn’t. I’d never ask help from a man who took a shovel to me.” He slurred his words and smelled of shit, both dried and fresh.

  But his stink was as nothing compared to the stench in the tent.

  Hiram Wilson lay on a pallet. His cheeks had sunken. His eyes did not focus. His breathing came in short bursts. The air created by his exhalations and other emissions fogged the space with a hot, fetid foulness, strangely sweet, like a rotting rose head.

  Chin took it all in, then stepped out.

  Michael Flynn listened to Wilson and said, “That’s the death rattle.”

  I said, “How can you be sure?”

  “Heard that sound before, and smelled that smell, though it’s about as bad in here as—” He took off his hat and fanned the air in front of his face.

  I knelt beside Hiram and said his name. He groaned and tried to speak, or so it seemed. Then his brow furrowed and he made a different sound, a liquid sound, followed by a fresh stink. Whatever the mechanism draining him of life, it was working still.

  Scrawny came to the flap of the tent. “He’s been shitting for a week.”

  “It looks like a lot of men around here are doing the same,” I said. “Dysentery.”

  “Dysentery, diarrhea, the bloody flux … what’s it matter?” said Scrawny. “There was cholera in the wagon trains, and—aw, Jesus.” Suddenly, he doubled over and went running out of the tent.

  So this was the end of the rainbow in Rainbow Gulch.

  I put a hand on Hiram’s forehead and said, “Can you hear me, lad?”

  Chin came back into the tent with a mug in his hand.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Black tea. Black ginger tea. Ginger good for stomach. Black tea good for … for…” He brought his hand to his belly and the region below.

  “Bowels?” I said.

  “In China we give. Sometime help.” Chin knelt beside Hiram Wilson and gently raised his head, then poured some tea into his mouth.

  Wilson gurgled and the tea came out.

  “Try again,” I said.

  So Chin tipped the mug a second time to Hiram’s lips. Again the tea fountained out of his throat.

  Chin stood. “No good. He die.”

  “I could’ve told you that.” Scrawny was back, trembling from the exertion of shitting again after shitting all day.

  An
d I was filled with sudden, overwhelming anger at the futility of it all, of potential wasted, of hope lost, of dreams denied, a sense far more oppressive to my mind than the stench in this pitiful tent.

  I said, “You should have listened. You should have gone home in August.”

  Scrawny wobbled, seemed to use all his energy holding himself up. “Home to what? Teaching arithmetic to Boston brats? We couldn’t go home … as failures.”

  “Better than dying here, shitting yourself to death or drinking yourself to it.” I pushed past him and stepped out into the fresher air.

  Scrawny staggered after me. “I haven’t had a drink in a week. Too sick.”

  Chin followed us and handed Scrawny the tin cup of black gingered tea. “You drink this, then. Maybe help you. No help friend.”

  * * *

  WE BURIED HIRAM WILSON in the gloomy mist. We wrapped him in his excremental blanket, dug him a deep hole on the rise overlooking Rainbow Gulch, and put him into the ground. At least he was not alone. A dozen lumps of dirt marked a dozen other dreams. Some had a stone or a cross or a crudely lettered sign. Others were as anonymous as the earth itself.

  I recited the Twenty-third Psalm. Scrawny Selwin turned the first shovel of dirt and shed a few tears, as much for himself as for his partner. Then we covered Hiram Wilson, tamped the dirt down, and stood for a time on that bald hillside, in the pattering rain, beneath that lowering California sky, and I considered again the waste of it.

  I shook Scrawny’s hand and told him to keep drinking Chin’s tea. I thought to invite him to stay with us until he was better, though I knew that the shits could be catching. And he would not leave because, as he said, they had finally staked a claim that was producing. So he would pan and shit and shit and pan until he took enough gold from the ground that he could go home or shat enough of himself into it that he could do no more than go into it himself.

  We mounted, and I noticed Chin gazing again across the ravine.

  Flynn said to him, “Still lookin’? Still thinkin’?”

  “Someday, I know more, then think more, then look more, then find more.”

  “Well, that’ll be just grand. But as for me”—Flynn took a breath—“I’ve found enough.”

  I whipped my head around. “Enough?”

  “Thinkin’ that the season for gold minin’ may be just about over. Time to do some gold-spendin’ … in Sacramento, maybe, or San Francisco.”

  “That might be a good idea,” said Scrawny.

  I whipped around again. “What makes you say that?”

  Scrawny looked down, as if embarrassed. “Hodges knows.”

  “Knows what?” I asked.

  “Knows you’re in Broke Neck.”

  “Did you tell him?”

  “No, but that blacksmith, that Matt Dooling, he came through. He said that he’d heard Hodges and the Sagamores were looking for a place to set up, and they needed a good man on the anvil. So he was headed north to find them.”

  “And you told Dooling about us?”

  Scrawny trembled and said he was sorry, then he doubled over again and went running for the trees. Even a man with dysentery wants a private place to shit.

  If Dooling had carried news to Hodges, who could tell what might come of it? But if we spent the winter below, as Cletis had already suggested, Hodges might find that there was enough to keep him and his friends busy without ever bothering about us.

  For a month, the weather varied between too rotten to travel and so nice that they just had to stay and wash a bit more dirt. Then, on December 18th, it began to rain and did not stop for five days. It grew cold, nearly New England cold. And day by day, the river rose ever higher and roared ever louder. It was time. But one more thing …

  December 24, 1849

  A Celebration

  We could not leave Cletis on Christmas Eve, of all nights, when men most desired good fellowship. Besides, the rain had left the roads so slick that mule teams were slipping and sinking everywhere between here and San Francisco.

  Christmas Eve in Broke Neck meant drinking, gambling, and laughter—all regular nighttime pursuits—to which were added celebratory gunshots to welcome the Infant Jesus. But the most memorable moment came when a bedraggled young man from Maine walked into the middle of the street and began to sing “Adeste Fideles” in a voice so pure that it seemed an angel of the Lord had found this tiny outpost on this holy night.

  A man from Virginia joined in. Then a Mexican in a serape added his voice. Flynn took a swallow from his jug, announced that he had been educated by Irish priests, and slipped into the Latin himself. I could not resist, either. And before long, two dozen men were caught up in the ancient carol and thoughts of home.

  Never had that song sounded more ethereal yet more assertive in the holy message it sent into the black night sky above us. We may not have found the Promised Land, but each day here heightened my sense of my own existence.

  On the day after Christmas, Flynn and Spencer headed for Sacramento. Cletis stayed behind to watch the claims. Neither he nor Flynn wished to entrust their gold to Abbott Express, so Cletis kept his in the hiding place beneath Big Skull Rock and Flynn carried his to spend. Only James Spencer was willing to pay 10 percent to Abbott for assurances that the amount would be placed “on account” for him in their Boston office.

  They waved to the Chinese as they left, and Michael Flynn placed a bag of peppermints on a flat rock by the river, on the Chinese side.

  December 28, 1849

  An Open Cesspool

  We reached Sacramento after a day’s ride and took lodgings in the relative comfort of Sutter’s Fort.

  And, wonder of wonders, two letters, both mailed in June, were waiting for me in the satchel of Abbott’s rider, whom we happened to meet as he was heading east.

  My mother and sister wrote proudly that my seagoing dispatches had made a great splash in Boston.

  Janiva wrote of how much she missed me. She said she had filled her days by studying her father’s bookkeeping operations, her nights by attending meetings of the Boston Female Antislavery Society. I reread her letter a dozen times, to assure myself there was no hint of a new beau hidden between the lines. But each time I read, she closed with a single word, “Love,” and it was as if she had whispered it in my ear.

  As for Sacramento, I would not have stayed, had intelligence not reached us of disaster in San Francisco. On Christmas Eve, a fire had erupted near the waterfront and incinerated two thirds of the tents, shacks, and warehouses now proclaiming themselves the first city of the West. Even the Parker House fell in a shower of embers.

  So, Sacramento it was, though it promised no pleasure. After six weeks of rain, the city had become a wallow of mud, garbage, animal guts, and human waste. Men had been in such a rush to make money here that they had neglected to dig necessaries, with what consequences for the health of the public, I could not say. Perhaps a lively epidemic of cholera would cause prices to spike and spur outhouse diggers to work.

  But there was also a business opportunity: Mark Hopkins, the man we helped on the trail in August, was good to his word. He remembered us. He had retreated from Hangtown, his New England Mining and Trading Company having failed at both, and was determined instead to become a wholesaler of hardware and foodstuffs. So, while Flynn planned for San Francisco, I took a winter position in the Hopkins store.

  December 31, 1849

  Farewells to Friends

  The side-wheel steamer Senator now ran a regular route between San Francisco and Sacramento. Laid down in Boston, she had steamed around the Horn and gone into river service in November. Ever since, she had been doing a lively business, ferrying the hopeful upstream and the despairing down, all in twelve hours rather than three days.

  This morning, I accompanied Flynn to the landing, where he bought a $30 ticket and got into line with hundreds of others, including a group of Sagamores—three Brighton Bulls, worn, tired, hollow-eyed, and Matt Dooling.

  Our ey
es met, and I said, “I hear you’re reporting my movements to Hodges.”

  “Hodges?” Dooling laughed. “I’ve had enough of that son of a bitch.”

  “A point in your favor,” said Flynn.

  “I wasn’t put on this earth to build his empire. He’s up the hills, tellin’ men where to stay, where to mine. When he started givin’ me orders, I told him he could treat me like an employee if he paid me like one. Otherwise, he could say ‘please.’”

  I asked, “Did you tell him where we were?”

  “He knew already. But it wasn’t my doin’. Never my doin’.”

  I took my hand from my gun and relaxed.

  Dooling pointed to the tool bag at his feet. “San Francisco’s burned to the ground. They’ll need men who know how to make nails and hinges and hardware and have the tools to do it. If not for you, my tools’d be rustin’ in Boston Harbor. And like I told you once before, I never forget a favor.”

  Just then, the Senator gave three blasts, and the men at the quayside pressed forward. Had I brought my gear, I might have gone with them. But I knew that if I reached San Francisco, I might keep going. I might climb aboard the next vessel bound for Panama or Patagonia and go home. And my work here was not yet done. So I stayed at the landing and watched the big steamer churn downstream beneath a cloud of its own smoke. Then, I returned to my room at Sutter’s Fort and tried to write.

  January 28, 1850

  News for Boston

  Herewith, the first commentary I have written for the Transcript in almost a month:

  Ask me about a California winter, and I will say I prefer New England. I prefer dry cold to cool damp. I prefer snow to rain. Yes, snow falling gently on the cobblestones of Boston, snow bending the branches on the white pines of Concord, snow sending husbands and wives to cozy hearthstones of a stormy evening, snow white and pure, blanketing a world reborn when cold sunshine comes again.

  California is reborn in winter, too, but in a fashion more biblical than poetic.

  Whatever they may tell you of the balmy air flowing over any page of the calendar, they have not told you of the rain. They could not tell you because it is nearly impossible to describe. The gentle showers of October give way to the torrents of November and the downpours of December, and sunny days become as commas in a long, wet sentence.