The Gold Mountains teemed with men and women on the move, chasing dreams from coast to coast, city to city, mining camp to mining camp. Her dream, the end of the tightrope, was here. But she could not answer for the dreams of the children she and Charlie might have.
She scooped up a handful of sand. It glittered like the copper coins in her father’s hands when he had gambled and lost, the gold Charlie had gambled with Hong King and won. And now she too must gamble.
The sand filtered through the cracks of her fingers, sending sand crabs scurrying out of reach. She tightened her hands into fists. How could she bear to lose this canyon, Charlie.
He tipped her chin. “What is it?”
She looked at her twin reflections in his eyes, the one that yearned to say yes, the one that could not. “Children.” She shook her head. “No children.”
Charlie took her fists, loosening the fingers until her hands lay open in his. “It’s you I want, Pol, nothing more.”
Her eyes misted, blurring her twin reflections, making them one. “Then yes, Charlie. Oh yes, I marry and come live with you here.”
TWENTY-SIX
The ground cherries rustled in their paper shells as Polly tossed them into the five-pound lard bucket beside her. Their first fall in the Salmon Canyon, she had only had the cherries and wild thimbleberries, huckleberries, and blackberries to can. But each year, as her garden expanded and the trees she had planted in her orchard matured, her harvest had increased, and by the time the first snow fell on this, their fourth winter, the shelves that lined her root cellar would be crammed with bottled bear cracklings, plum butter, canned peaches, apricots, garden truck, venison, and grouse.
In addition to fruits and vegetables, she grew her own wheat and ground her own flour to make bread. The single cow and the hens provided all their dairy needs, and she rendered her own grease and made soap from the occasional bear Charlie shot.
On his trips to check on his saloon in Warrens, Charlie traded Polly’s produce for the few necessities they could not grow or make, like coal oil, fabric, thread, and shoes. Polly did not accompany Charlie on these trips, for she had sold her boarding house. Everything and everyone she wanted was either already in the canyon or would come to her here.
During the spring, summer, and fall, there were only the occasional prospectors and adventurers Charlie ferried across the river. But in the winter, when the river froze over with huge chunks of ice, ranchers and old friends from Warrens would come. They would stay up all night, getting caught up on news, retelling old stories, playing poker, eating, and drinking whiskey made from her own rye and hops. Then Charlie would bring out his fiddle, and there would be singing and sometimes dancing, and for days, their snug, two-storied log cabin would fairly shake from all the laughter and foot stomping.
“Polly, come here,” Charlie called.
Polly tossed a last handful of cherries into the bucket, rose, and stretched, proudly surveying Polly Place. Slender green tips of asparagus peeked above flat gray boulders at the base of the steep canyon slope. Grain hay, sowed to rest the soil, spread a golden aura around long rows of dark green cornstalks, beds of lettuce, cabbage, carrots, turnips, and the special herbs she grew for Li Dick. Roosters strutted among the hens which cackled as they scratched in the straw beside the stable. Meadowlarks sang above the roar of the river, and from the trees beyond the creek, pheasants drummed on a log.
Across the river, the Mallicks’ farm stood empty, for they had left for a homestead near Grangeville where their children could attend school. Polly would like to have been nearer to Bertha and Bertha’s children, and a farm anywhere would probably give her many of the same pleasures. The feel of rich soil crumbling between her fingers, the warmth of the sun on her back, the ache of muscles after a day’s weeding, the steamy fragrance of cooking fruit, the pungent odor of pickling spices. But only this canyon could infuse her with such deep contentment, and she would never leave it. Never.
“Over here,” Charlie said.
She could not see him, but his voice came from the direction of the chestnut and mulberry trees she had planted that spring. Polly walked toward them. A big, bald squash peered out from a few dry, hairy green vines which had fought their way through the willow fence enclosing her garden. She took out her bowie knife and cut the stray squash from the vine, rescuing it from the chipmunks and porcupines which came in the night.
“Just look at this nest of ants,” Charlie said from where he lay, belly down, studying the ants scurrying around a mound of pine needles and fallen leaves.
Polly set the squash down beside him and dropped to her knees. An earthworm, half buried in the rich black soil, caught her eye. She plucked it out, dusted it free of clinging dirt, and deposited it in her apron pocket.
“If you work like these ants, I have time to go fishing later,” she said, lightly patting the worm wriggling in her pocket.
His blue eyes danced. “You want me to plow?”
They both laughed, remembering their first spring in the canyon and the steer Charlie had purchased to break for the plow. Expecting resistance, he hitched the animal to the top of a fallen tree so that if it ran, the branches would gouge into the earth and stop it. The beast ran as predicted. But the branches, instead of gouging into the earth, slid like runners of a sled over the hard ground and Charlie, too surprised to jump out of the way, was knocked down and pushed under the limbs. When the steer finally stopped, Charlie had emerged clothed only in scratches and bruises. And one sock.
“It’s the wrong time of year for plowing,” Polly said when she stopped laughing. “But you can help me bring up my buckets of cherries.”
He retrieved his hat from beneath a bush and put it on. Two large cabbage leaves covered the crown of the hat, and fluttering over the back of his head and neck was a large white handkerchief fastened to the hat band. Polly, pointing to Charlie’s hat, burst into a fresh fit of laughter.
Charlie drew himself up. “This book I read said it’s important to shade the neck from the sun.” He took a few steps. “See how the handkerchief moves? That keeps a constant current of air passing through to cool the neck and head.”
“Charlie, it’s October, almost winter, not August,” Polly gasped, using her sleeve to wipe the tears streaming down her cheeks.
“I’m trying it out,” he said with mock dignity.
“Even in the summer you don’t stay out in the sun long enough to need that.”
“I will be.”
Trying desperately to keep a straight face, Polly said, “Yes?”
“I’m going to rock for gold.”
“You give up mining years ago,” Polly reminded. “You say it’s too much work.”
“Maybe your industry is rubbing off on me.”
“Good. Then after you take the cherries up to the house, you can chop wood for my wood box and hull the corn.”
“Can’t. Got to start staking my claim.”
“Right today?”
“You remember the prospectors that came down from Buffalo Hump in August, the ones that were in such a hurry they didn’t want to stop to eat or talk?”
She nodded.
“Rumor has it the ore they carried will assay enough gold to start a whole new rush.”
A chill ran down Polly’s spine, raising the soft, downlike hairs at the back of her neck. A rush would mean men pouring into the canyon on their way to the Hump, destroying the peace, the land. And though she was protected by her marriage certificate and her new certificate of residence which Charlie had sent for from the government office in Montana, there was nothing to protect her home, the farm she had carved out of wilderness no one else had wanted. Until now.
“The ranch?”
Charlie waved his hat at her, laughing. “Don’t you see? That’s why I’m going back to mining. You can’t be a partner in a homestead, and you can’t own land, but plenty of Chinamen hold claims. So I’ll stake out the ranch as a mining claim and file it the next time I go to
Warrens.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
They worked well together, Charlie fitting the crude wooden box he had made out of a coal oil crate around the tenderfoot’s crushed leg and foot, Polly padding the box with cotton ripped out of old quilts, then binding the leg and box in place with long strips of torn sheets.
As soon as she tied the last knot, the boy swung his good leg off the bed.
“No, no,” Polly said. “You must rest five weeks, maybe six, before your leg is strong enough for you to leave.”
Holding on to the edge of the mattress with both hands, the boy raised himself off the bed. “Haven’t you heard about the strike at Buffalo Hump? If I wait six weeks, there’ll be no claims left.”
He rested his weight on his good leg, took a step, and winced.
Charlie gripped the boy’s shoulders and pushed him back on the bed. “You don’t know it, but you’ve got the Angel of the Salmon River caring for you, and if she says five to six weeks before you’re fit to move on, that’s how long it will be.”
The boy propped himself up on his elbows. “But this is a chance in a lifetime.”
“You already used up your chance in this lifetime when you tumbled down the mountain and lost your outfit and your horse. If I hadn’t happened on you by accident, you would have lost your life too. Don’t tempt fate twice,” Charlie said, swinging the boy’s legs back onto the bed. “Besides, you can’t cross the river if I don’t row you.”
“They say the strike at the Hump is so rich you only need a few days with a shovel and gold pan to get enough dust to be a millionaire!” the boy pleaded.
His eyes, his face, his whole person shone with the same naive hope that had buoyed Polly and all the other men and women crowded into the hold of the ship which had brought her to America, and she knew there was nothing either she or Charlie could say that would deter the boy.
Smiling, she pulled a quilt over him. “With this bad leg, it will take you one week, maybe two to reach the Hump. If you do not die first. On a horse, with Charlie to show you the way, you can get there in two days. So you stay here two weeks, then Charlie will take you.”
From the moment Charlie had come home with the tenderfoot across his packhorse instead of a deer, Polly had realized that the winter snows would not protect them from the rush for Buffalo Hump, and Charlie’s trip to the Hump with the boy had confirmed it.
The vein of ore was huge, fully visible for five miles, and its course ran down through the Salmon. Despite several feet of snow, more than one hundred prospectors were already living in tents along the vein, and every day more arrived. They came on horseback, often two men on a horse. Or on foot, with huge packs on their backs. And they all had one thought. To have Charlie ferry them across the river so they could climb up to the Hump and stake a claim before all were gone.
The ranch, the only claim Polly and Charlie cared about, was staked out, the claim form completed. But it was not filed, for the ten-foot deep ditch required by law had not been dug.
They had cleared an area near the creek where their sluice boxes would go, and they had started to dig, swinging their picks into the, by then, frost-hardened, ungiving earth. But as the four-foot-square shaft deepened inch by inch, the weather worsened, and Charlie’s cough grew more worrisome until Polly insisted he stop.
Coughing and panting, his wet clothes frozen stiff, he refused. “You’ve heard the men coming through. Grangeville’s a madhouse, and Florence and Elk City and a lot of other camps are empty because people are rushing to the Hump. They’re staking claims in ten, fifteen feet of snow.”
“Most of those claims won’t hold up.”
The scar from the shooting stood out harshly red in a face gray with exhaustion. “Exactly. This one will,” he coughed.
Polly covered Charlie’s mittened hands with hers, preventing him from lifting the pick. “You think I care about the claim if this is your grave we are digging?”
That night she wakened to feel Charlie burning with fever. In a voice hoarse from coughing, he complained of tightness in his chest. For days Polly made hot mustard and linseed poultices for his chest, simmered herb teas for him to drink, and brought up kettles of steaming hot water for him to inhale. His cough worsened, his nose bled, and she ran up and down the stairs cleaning the slop bucket, changing the sweat-soaked sheets. Finally, in the second week of illness, his fever broke. But it was almost a month before he was well enough to go downstairs again.
He sat hunched over the stove, puffing on his pipe, staring through frost-crusted windows at a world turned white as mourning. Across the river which crashed and roared beneath slabs of congealed ice, the fires of prospectors camped along Crooked Creek winked, mocking.
Polly rammed her fist into the dough she had left to rise. While Charlie had demanded her constant attention, she had not had time to think of the ditch left unfinished, the claim not filed. But now, with his recovery assured, fears she had refused to acknowledge surfaced.
She pounded the dough with calloused brown fingers balled into fists, kneading, pressing down unwanted thoughts as well as dough. Then she shaped the formless mass into loaves which would rise and fall and rise again. Like lives.
Was that the reason for the New Year cake families in her village made each year? It was the one time her father supervised the cooking, shutting all the doors just before her mother eased the dough into the huge boiler to steam. Then he would light the incense to time the cooking, hovering as it smoldered into ash. Finally, as he lifted the lid, waving away the cloud of steam which burst out like a winter mist, they would all crowd around, anxious to see if the cake was a fluffy, delicious omen of good luck or a flat portent of disaster.
Polly set the pans of light bread on the stove to rise. Her mother’s cake had always risen. Even the New Year before the winter wheat. The New Year before she was sold. It was not luck that determined the rise and fall of cakes or bread or lives, but skill, strength, the right ingredients.
She wiped her floury hands on her apron and wrapped herself up in coat, scarves, boots. She had skill and strength. And she would create the right ingredients.
Alternately urging him to hurry and to walk slowly, Polly led a well-bundled Charlie toward the frozen creek. The wind-whipped mountain slopes glared a painful white against the sunny blue sky, but dark shadows slashed the snow-covered floor of the canyon, and the sharp frosty air, fragrant with wood smoke, stung Charlie’s sallow cheeks into a chapped red. From the hen house came the sleepy clucking of chickens jostling in their roosts, and from the stable the tinkle of the cow bell, the restless nickering and pawing of horses.
Their boots crunched in the ice-crusted snow.
“The canyon is not the same when the river is frozen silent,” Polly said.
“Makes travel to the Hump easier,” Charlie said gloomily, his breath puffing out like smoke.
Polly playfully caught at the wispy streamers of white breath. “The Hump is not the only place people go.”
“This winter it is.”
“Not you,” she said, bringing them to a sudden stop. “You will go to Warrens.”
“What for?”
“To file the claim.”
Stooping, she dragged away broken pine branches laden with clumps of new snow, revealing a ditch exactly four feet square and ten feet deep.
Charlie gaped. “That’s impossible! The ground is frozen solid.”
“Not when I dig,” Polly chuckled, enjoying Charlie’s astonishment. “Each day I build a fire in the hole and warm the top of the ground. Then I dig. When I reach frozen earth again, I stop and build a new fire.”
“This calls for a celebration!” Charlie said.
“Not yet. When you come back from Warrens.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
During her twenty-two years in Warrens, Polly had observed that there were five types of miners. The happy-go-lucky prospectors, men of few words who roamed the forests and mountains with boundless patience and optimism. Placer min
ers who drifted from stream to stream, seesawing between poverty and riches, hardship and hard living. Promoters, flabby and soft, who were not above salting samples before assaying in order to attract investors. Financiers, capitalists who knew little and cared less about mining and miners, but whose money bought the machinery, organization, and engineering necessary for proper development. And hard rock miners, men like John Long, courageous and reliable, who brought the leavening influence of wives and children into the camp.
The strike at Buffalo Hump, advertised as “the greatest gold camp on earth,” brought men from all around the world. Men with the same hopes and fears, greed and generous good natures, rugged individuality and prejudices as the ones Polly had observed in Warrens. And at first, during the tense months before Charlie successfully filed the claim for Polly Place, she had felt the tightrope returning. But with the ranch secure, the fears and bad dreams which had returned vanished.
By July of the following year, the only claims left were those invented for sale to suckers, and the steady stream of hopeful men trudging through the canyon on their way to the Hump dwindled to a trickle. But promoters enticed capitalists from the East, and a year later, mill operations were started at the Big Buffalo, Crackerjack, Badger, and Jumbo Mines, and development began in earnest.
Then in July of 1901, there was a new rush, this time for Thunder Mountain. “The gold on that mountain is skin deep,” Charlie said scornfully. Nevertheless, optimistic prospectors, miners, and smooth-talking promoters were able to keep rumors and mines alive for almost a decade until a slide in 1909 created a lake, putting Roosevelt, the supply camp, underwater.
Traffic through the canyon shrank back to the occasional prospector and adventurer, and the peace Polly loved so well returned, more satisfying and deeply valued than before.
There were a few permanent changes. In order to keep the claim on the ranch valid, she and Charlie now placered each spring when the creek was at high water. And they had new neighbors, Charles Shepp and Pete Klinkhammer, who had bought the Mallick’s old farm across the river.
Thousand Pieces of Gold Page 14