Hard Gold

by Avi

  All we could do was sit together. It was a small thing in a big world—but what else were we to do? I had to acknowledge to myself that when I’d set out to find Jesse, I hadn’t known what I was doing, hadn’t known (and still didn’t) where I was going or what might happen. I felt small, weak, and stupid.

  For the first time in my life I wondered: Would I live?

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The Long Trail

  June 24, 1859

  WOKE TO hail big as peas, which later turned to rain.

  When the rain finally stopped, some of our train, so discouraged by the unfortunate emigrants we had met the day before, turned back. We were now a train of twelve.

  Mrs. Bunderly worsened. Lizzy was grim.

  June 25

  We rolled on, always looking for water. Reached Fremont Springs, which had some. I supposed the place was named after the man who had first explored this area for the United States.

  A curious, grotesque thing occurred. The children found a dead buffalo. The poor beast was so bloated with decay gas, the children took to jumping on it. The gas-filled carcass served them like a spring, bouncing them high. That went on until the bloat burst and a child fell into the beast’s putrid innards. Much glee, and disgust.

  Fortunately the spring was close.

  June 26

  We reached the place where the Platte River divided. Follow the trail along the north branch, and you eventually get to Salt Lake, California, or Oregon. The South Platte, however, would lead us to Cherry Creek, and so we turned and camped upon its banks.

  I wondered how close we were, how far we had come. There was nothing about the trail to tell us. No markers. No fingerposts. Though surely we were on the trail—the wagon ruts told us so—but we could as well have been lost.

  Mrs. Bunderly, faring most poorly, remained in the wagon. Lizzy tended to her all day. When I saw her, she was sad. But sometimes angry.

  June 27

  Went twenty miles along the riverbank. The water was shallow and warm. Lizzy and I did a calculation and determined that it was forty-six days since we had left Wiota! We told that to Mr. Bunderly. He reminded us that Noah was afloat for only forty days and nights.

  I told Lizzy what Jesse had claimed, that he could have walked to Cherry Creek on his hands—backward.

  “Maybe what your brother Adam said is true,” she snapped. “That Jesse’s a fool.”

  “He’s smart,” I insisted.

  She said nothing, which made me sulk over her remark.

  There being no wood to burn for our meal, I went with the youngsters to collect buffalo chips. Whenever I left the train, I kept an eye open for Mr. Mawr. I would see him watching me.

  How, I worried, would I be able to free myself of him once we got to Cherry Creek? Surely I’d have to get rid of him before I reached Jesse.

  Around the fire that night, the men were talking about what it was that made men want gold. All kinds of opinions were offered, but the best was Mr. Bunderly’s. He said, “Gold attracts men because its nature is opposite their own. That’s to say, no matter how old gold gets, it keeps its value, is forever malleable, and remains bright.”

  I puzzled that in my head and determined he meant that as a man gets older, he loses his value, does not change, and grows less wise. Did he mean himself? I resolved that would not be me.

  June 28

  Went twenty-two miles. Passed an Indian trading post at Julesburg.

  Now and again we have met Indians—the Pawnee and Sioux. They are different peoples and at war with each other. Sometimes they come and ask for food, or wish to trade for horses or guns. We try to be accommodating about food. We heard some stories how they have returned lost children to emigrant trains. Still, some of our people mock them, but never to their faces. Others are frightened. A few like Mr. Boxler, our train captain, have tried to learn their different languages, insisting we can only gain by their friendship. For the most part we keep our distance—like mutually uneasy strangers.

  Indian trading post. Emigrants bought supplies, too.

  June 29

  During the night, Mrs. Bunderly died.

  Mr. Bunderly was consumed by grief. He blamed him self for his wife’s demise, bemoaned ever leaving Iowa, chastised himself for not heeding her complaints. Lizzy was full of sorrow, too, but she had to lay her mother out, and insisted she’d do so alone. Then she and her father went out from the trail to dig a grave. Not long after, she came back to me, tearful.

  “My father is too stricken to dig,” she told me. “I must beg your help.”

  The two of us dug the grave in hard ground. Lizzy’s tears did not soften it. Mr. Bunderly, saying he could not watch, left us.

  Lizzy and I went along the trail until we found an abandoned and broken wagon. We took boards from it and made the crudest coffin.

  When Mr. Bunderly heard of what we had done, he said, “Dear children, learn from this: the most broken wagon can carry one far.”

  We buried Mrs. Bunderly the next day. The whole train was in attendance. Mr. Boxler read from the Bible, the twenty-third psalm. Looking about the prairie, I wondered if I would ever see green pastures again.

  Lizzy sang. Her voice gave me thoughts of Iowa meadowlarks. My homesickness swelled.

  As I grieved, I recalled Reverend Fobbscott’s words about a cold coffin in a colder grave. That the day was so hot made no difference.

  Mr. Boxler urged that we leave the grave unmarked, lest impoverished emigrants in search of valuables dig it up—as he claimed sometimes happened.

  That night we traveled beneath a full moon so as to avoid the heat. The pale yellow light made the prairie seem even more still. We heard coyotes bark, and once an owl gave call. I thought perhaps it was not an owl but Mrs. Bunderly’s unhappy spirit trying to follow us.

  It made me shiver.

  At night, before falling asleep beneath the wagon, I wondered: Is this journey the hardest thing I’ll ever do?

  I wept some tears. The tears were for not for Mrs. Bunderly, but for myself.

  June 30

  As we went along, the oxen snorting, the wheels creaking, the harness jangling, I could not help but think of the lonely silence of Mrs. Bunderly’s unmarked grave, left ever farther behind, never to be visited again. Even if we tried, we would never be able to find it.

  Lizzy must have been thinking the same kinds of things.

  “Early,” she said, “I think the heaviest burdens we carry are our unhappy memories.”

  “I shall have only one happy memory of this trip.”

  “What?”

  “You.”

  “Early,” she whispered, her voice broken, “your kindness is as sweet as cool water.”

  July 1

  The hot dryness made our lips chapped, hands cracked, and brows wrinkled. So we “mooned”—which is to say, we traveled all night to avoid the heat. Above, the ever present stars seemed infinite in number. Did they, I wondered, see us, and think of us as we thought of them, emigrants traveling through the vast emptiness?

  July 2

  For much of the night we went along the river. There was little sound, save the heavy breathing of the oxen laboring and the creaking wagons. Once we heard the long, mournful howl of a coyote.

  Lizzy walked with me, but I respected her sad silence. She being without her usual joy, I tried yet again to think what I should do when we reached Cherry Creek, but had to admit I didn’t know what to expect. If I could not find Jesse, I imagined I would need to find my way back to Iowa. I would miss Lizzy.

  Lizzy must have been thinking these same thoughts, for at one point she turned to me and said, “Early, what will become of us?”

  I wanted to say something cheerful, but honesty compelled me to say, “I suppose we don’t ever know.”

  July 3

  Though it was a Sunday, it was cooler, so we traveled by day—twenty miles.

  At one point, Lizzy said to me, “Early, I have a confession to make.” />
  “I’m willing to hear.”

  “I loved my mother, but I did not admire her.”

  “Why?”

  “My mother used her illness to shield herself from the world. That made her weaker. I am bound and determined to be strong, but I fear I didn’t pity her enough. It gnaws on me that I wasn’t strong enough to be kind. I can’t forgive myself.”

  “She was hard on you.”

  She grasped my arm. “Do you really think so? Truly?”

  “You did the best a daughter could.”

  “Early …” She didn’t finish her sentence, but turned and to my astonishment, kissed me on the cheek, then ran to the wagon and vanished.

  I felt my cheek burn—not too unpleasant a sensation.

  I used to think Jesse was my best friend. Lizzy … Well, she had really become my sweetheart.

  July 4

  The Glorious Fourth! We traveled twenty miles today.

  At campfire, Mr. Griffin and Peter, who had not played for a long while, offered “Yankee Doodle.” Being so weary, our hurrahs were halfhearted.

  July 5

  No travel. Too exhausted. Visited by Indians. They were amazed by Lizzy’s red hair. Kept wanting to touch it. One young Indian, who spoke English, called her “Fire Girl.” She liked that.

  July 6

  Light rain. Went just eight miles but saw scrubby pine trees. That gave hope that the desert would soon be behind us.

  Mr. Bunderly, still consumed by sadness, talks little. He is like a drum with a broken head.

  An Indian camp by a stream.

  There are times I would have liked to stay.

  July 7

  In the afternoon we crossed a stream called Bijou Creek, and in the distance for the first time we saw blue mountains. We stopped and stared, for it was not easy to grasp what we were seeing. Hard to know if they were close or far. Hard to know if we were close or far.

  July 8

  Continued south along the riverside. At the end of the day, we saw Pike’s Peak, or at least so Mr. Boxler claimed. Our whole company thrilled. Lizzy said it looked like an immense thundercloud.

  But the skies above were a brilliant blue.

  July 9

  Traveled all day. Mountains always to the west, growing bigger. At first I saw what I believed were small white clouds against those mountains. Then it occurred to me that I might be seeing gold, and my heart was in my eyes. Mr. Boxler disabused me by saying that what I saw was snow. Snow in July! Someone also said that while the mountains were now known as “the Rocky Mountains,” they used to be called the “Shining Mountains.” I liked that name better. It held more hope. We needed some.

  July 10

  Passed ruins of Fort St. Vrain. Sunday, nobody wanted to stop. Last of the dried fruit gave out. Coffee almost gone.

  The river was pretty. Many little islands. A fair number of trees. I thought they were willow.

  Skies so blue, it made my eyes ache.

  At campfire the only talk was what people would do with the gold they found. No talk about how they would find it.

  July 11

  Still in Nebraska. Reached Fort Lupton, which, being abandoned for a reason I didn’t know, was in complete neglect.

  Skies blue. I had never seen such white clouds. Each day, late afternoon, they towered toward the heavens. Against the far horizon you could see rain falling—like a distant veil.

  In the west you can see farther. Having no boundaries, even distance feels different.

  July 12

  When we camped for the night, we knew that next day we would pass the border that marked the divide between the Nebraska Territory and the Kansas Territory. Growing excitement. We were so close to our great purpose: the gold of Cherry Creek!

  Though I’d pined for our travels to be over, I was more nervous than ever. For once we were there, what would I find?

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Cherry Creek!

  July 13, 1859

  AFTER A journey of more than two months and feeling as though we’d walked a million miles through heat and desert, we went twenty miles more and thereby reached the place where the South Platte River met Cherry Creek. We had arrived!

  Though there was no town called Cherry Creek, the creek itself was real enough. It got its name from the chokecherries growing along its banks. I tasted them and they were bitter. But the Arapaho Indians—who lived thereabouts—used the juices to preserve their meat.

  For most of the year, the twenty-foot-wide stream was a dry streak of reddish sand. When it did flow, it came out of the treeless prairie into the South Platte, along whose banks grew cottonwood trees.

  After the long trek to Cherry Creek some folks just rested, glad not to move for a while.

  Some explorers from Georgia first “raised color”—prospector talk for finding gold—a few miles upstream on the Platte. The gold they got was worth six or seven cents. True, they found more in other places along the river, but not much. That was enough. The word gold! sped back to the states. To think that so many emigrants came because of that tiny find!

  Stand where creek and river met, look south, and you could see Pike’s Peak looming. Look northwest, and you could see what they call Long’s Peak, a great mountain, too, sharp at the top. Gaze beyond the river straight west some forty miles, and there was nothing but mountains: the Rocky Mountains.

  They were vast, jagged, monster mountains, cliffs, towers, and peaks reaching up into the sky, sometimes higher than the sky and into the clouds. They had snow that never fully melted, but remained, glistening and glowing white, all year round: a place where summer never came. These mountains stretched clear across the western horizon as if to say “You’ve come this far, but you’ll go no farther!”

  In truth, though we had traveled long, hard, and close together—so close we knew the number of buttons in one another’s shirt—no sooner did we arrive, foot-sore and weary, than we began to go our separate ways.

  I was surprised but glad to see Mr. Mawr’s back as he trudged off, never saying a word, going I didn’t know where. But since I hardly thought that he’d come so far only to give me up, I knew I needed to watch for any sign of him.

  Mr. Bunderly chose to bring our journey to an end on the banks of the South Platte. There, on a dirt path they called Ferry Street, was a small raft ferry that had a rope-and-pulley system to haul people and their wagons to the western side of the river.

  Once Mr. Bunderly had halted, he set his barbering tools on a barrel, shaved himself clean pink, then wrote on the wagon canvas:

  CHERRY CREEK BARBERING 25¢ SHAVE!

  Lizzy and I helped with encouraging words. Then he set out a box to sit on and waited for his first patron to stop by.

  Once all was set, he stood before us, hand on heart. “Dear children,” he said, “behold Ebenezer T. Bunderly, a living mountain of hopeful enterprise. Let us only hope that my head is not in the clouds.”

  For my part, I was so eager to learn some news of Jesse, I announced I was going to start right away. When Lizzy said she’d join me, her father requested that we seek a place for the Bunderlys to live.

  We started wandering. To either side of Cherry Creek were towns. On the north side was what they called Denver, named after a Kansas territory governor so as to gain his favor—except by the time they did, he was no longer in office. On the south side was Auraria, named after the place in Georgia state where the people who had first found gold came from. As we later learned, the two towns were always feuding—not that it mattered to us.

  There were a few dusty streets, eighty feet wide with names such as Blake, Larimer, and McHaa. On them a fair number of pigs, chickens, and dogs ran free.

  All told there were, at most, a hundred and fifty houses—for the most part, poorly built log ones with canvas roofs, probably from the wagons in which folks arrived. I’d say a quarter of the houses were not finished and sat abandoned. Some were frame houses, with a few glass windows, roofs, and real doors—bu
t not many. Tents were plentiful. By the creek, some Arapaho Indians were living in their teepees. But in this paltry setting, there actually was a newspaper, The Rocky Mountain News.

  An early view of Denver (on the right) and Auraria (on the left)

  This is Denver after about a year. It really grew fast.

  We were informed that about a thousand people lived in both towns. They were mostly from the states, but Mexicans and Canadians were there, too. They looked much like Council Bluffs people, which is to say young men (salted with a few gray heads), plus a very few women and children. Ragged clothes were the fashion, slouch hats (along with some bowlers and top hats), tattered red wool shirts, and sagging trousers, from which revolvers and bowie knives hung. Boots were worn, but bare feet were not uncommon. And—if beards were ever going to be shaved—which seemed unlikely—Mr. Bunderly was bound to become the richest man in the territory.

  To be fair, Lizzy and I looked no less tattered. My gar ments were threadbare and ill-patched. The hem of Lizzy’s long skirt was much singed from campfire embers. Her bonnet was long gone, her red hair woven into one long braid.

  As we wandered, I kept glancing back.

  “What are you looking for?” asked Lizzy.

  “Mawr. Can’t believe he just left us. But it’d make sense for him to act like he was going away so he could follow us.”

  In Auraria, we noted two hotels, one bakery, a printer’s shop, two meat markets, a blacksmith, carpenter, tinsmith, and a tailor. There were three dry goods stores. And what stock they had was expensive!

  BREAD—Fifteen cents a pound!

  SUGAR—Fifty cents a pound!

  BUTTER—Seventy-five cents a pounds!

  That was more than double—and sometimes triple—the cost back home.

  As for saloons, while there were too many to count, there was no church, and there wouldn’t be a school until October. For that matter, there was nothing that looked like a city hall, or any kind of government building. Cherry Creek seemed to be about riches and drink.