Deadville

by Robert F. Jones

  “Tell me, Spy, you mentioned back at the Crow camp that you’d had trouble up here. What was it?”

  “The other day I started to tell you about it but couldn’t continue. Last spring the booshway Dade, traveling with a party of Grovan, caught me and my son trapping on the Buenaventura. Dade has some Delaware Indians traveling with him, cruel men but very efficient. You may have noticed them when they visited Beckwourth’s camp. The Delawares killed my boy. I barely escaped with my hair. When I returned to my wife and told her, she left my bed. So I came west again, and that’s how I met you and your brother.”

  Again a strained silence, then I said, “Maybe your wife was right. Maybe you should have stayed back east, learned the white man’s ways. Sometimes I think this life we lead out here isn’t, well, normal.”

  He stood up suddenly and turned his back to me. From the stiffness of his spine I could see he was angry, enraged, and for a moment I felt an icicle of fear hit my heart. Then he turned again, his eyes on fire.

  “Is it normal for white folks to breed like rabbits so that they run out of land and have to move west to steal space from other people, my people? Is it normal to kill Father Beaver so that rich fops in London can look fancy in their tall shiny toppers? For that matter, is it normal for a man to work twelve hours a day behind a plow or in an airless mill or factory just to put a skimpy plate of greens and a sliver of sowbelly on the table for his wife and children of an evening, if the blight or the locusts or the goddamn hard times don’t wipe him out first? Well, I have no wife and children anymore, but still, none of that for me, thank you.”

  He walked back to the campfire, leaving me there in the dark.

  THE GROVANS DID not bother us; we’d given them the slip sure enough. Next day we crossed the Madison without incident, but no gold either, which made Owen even more sullen and anxious. Then the Jefferson. With the Tobacco Root Mountains to the north of us and the Gravellys to the south, we began a long, hard climb up to the Encantadas, and thence to the headwaters of the Garnet Greek. It took us two whole days to get there. The Garnet Greek, Spy told us, had been named by some trappers who found an abundance of those stones along its banks, at first mistaking them for rubies. “Though in the end they realized a small profit from the stones, they were sore disappointed to discover they were not the real item,” Spy said.

  . “I hope that is not an omen,” my brother said, his face as long as a gravedigger’s.

  The Encantadas were mean enough: abrupt, spiky mountains that looked like the teeth of a saw poised to rip at the sky’s soft belly. Once across them, though, the going was easy. We followed the fast-rushing Garnet on down to its junction with the Buenaventura and pitched camp above a vast jungle of alders that filled a gulch draining down alongside the larger river. Without a word, Owen grabbed his pan and shovel from the pack and headed down to the gulch. His brows were furrowed, and I could swear he was trembling.

  Spy and I had seen beaver sign aplenty on the small creeks feeding both the Garnet and the Buenaventura, so while the Daughters were cooking supper that evening we went out to set our traps. By the time we got back it was dark.

  Owney jumped up from beside the fire, trying without avail to keep a big grin from splitting his face. Once again he was ablaze. He unwrapped a bandanna, and there nestled in its folds lay half a dozen nuggets, one as big as a wren’s egg. It gleamed a rich yellow in the firelight like the eye of a wildcat.

  “We’re rich, Brother! I knew I’d find it sooner of later, I knew it was up here.” He wrapped an arm around me and kissed me on the mouth. “Yahoo! All this in just three pans of gravel.”

  I looked at the gold. “Near a hundred dollars’ worth I’d say. Couldn’t have been salted, could it? Like those gravel bars down in North Carolina you read about?”

  “To what end?” he said, bristling. “No one owns this land, so there could be no reason to drive the price up falsely. The land is free for the taking—first come, first served.”

  “The Blackfoot was here first, so he’ll surely agree with you on that score,” Spy said. “So, too, will the booshway Dade, who has the Grovans’ permission to hunt this country, and who’s warned us away from it in no uncertain terms.”

  “We’ll worry about that when and if they find us,” Owen said. “We’d better keep a damned good guard of nights,” I added.

  “Oh, they’ll find us, sure enough, one group or the other,” Spy said, “no matter how close a watch we keep. And when they come, they’ll have blood in their eye. Count on it.”

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING Owney and I, along with my girls, set to work cutting timber for the sluice boxes. Owney wanted at least a hundred feet of them, each section to measure twelve or fifteen feet long by some eighteen inches wide, built narrower at the downhill end so as to telescope neatly into the next one. There were blowdowns enough in the area—ponderosas and lodgepoles mainly—so that we didn’t have to fell any trees, which was all for the better, since the sight and sound of them toppling might have attracted curious Indians to our campsite. We sectioned the downed logs to the proper lengths, then hammered in wedges to split them. The saw didn’t make much noise, but the chink of the mauls on the iron wedges rang loud, and I could see Spy and the Pine Leaf, who were standing guard up on the rimrock above camp, flinch at each echoing blow.

  We did not saw the split logs into board lengths; there was no need to if we built our trestles sturdy enough to support the half-logs, smooth side up, but we did work over the flat faces of the split logs with adzes and froes to smooth the wood as much as possible. Ditto with the splits that would form the sides of the sluice.

  Then Owney cut riffle bars two-thirds the width of each box and nailed them alternately the length of it. Gravel is lighter than gold, and so would wash right over the riffle bars when we diverted water into the top of the whole affair; the heavy gold would sink to the bottom, catching on the riffles. We might lose some of the finer gold dust over the bars, it being washed down along with the gravel, but Owney planned to build a catch box at the very bottom of the rig to trap this runaway gold, and pan it out every little while.

  “If we had brought boards to use, we could build removable riffle trays for each section of sluice,” Owney said. “Then we could lift the trays out separately to remove the gold. But we don’t have the time to saw out enough boards for the job. We’ll have to scoop out the gold from the fixed emplacements themselves. Probably lose some in the process, where the fine stuff has sunk into the grain of the wood, unless we bum the sluices when we’re finished here and then pan the ashes; but there seems to be an abundance of gold in the overburden. God only knows what we’ll find down at bedrock, if we ever get that far. It could contain whole pockets of gold dust, as much as a pound or more.”

  By first dark that evening we had the sluice built and installed. Not enough light was left to start it working, you might think, but Owney shoveled a load of gravel into the topmost box and then swung the trough we had built to run water into the rig from a natural catch basin we found upstream. It went plashing and tinking down through the riffle bars, some of the water leaking out from the bottom to be sure, but the boards would swell as they got wet, and we could caulk the widest seams with moss and pine pitch in the morning.

  Ayuh, I thought a bit uneasy, even nature herself seemed to be smiling on our get-rich-quick scheme.

  But it had been a good hard day’s work, to be sure, and my little Grow darlings were exhausted, their usually tough hands rubbed raw by lifting and shifting all those rocks and rough tree trunks. Pine Leaf had brought down a nice blacktail doe with her arrows, so we fried up some sliced deer heart and liver for our supper, and set a kettle of stew into which Plover had sliced some tubers and edible roots grubbed up from the hillside, to simmering over the fire. Spy and I went out to check our traps—in them were ten good-size beaver, which we duly skinned, stretched, and grained before sitting down to eat.

  We all ate good and then I dossed down for a few
hours of sleep until it came time for my watch. The Daughters did not bother me this night; they were too weary for the usual nightly frolic.

  Owney was up at first light, working the sluice. By noon he couldn’t stand the wait any longer and decided to “clean up,” as he called it. That morning alone we had moved four cubic yards of gravel down the sluice. From the riffle bars he removed six ounces of fine gold, along with more than twenty small nuggets, a few the size of a pea, all of which he weighed carefully on the apothecary scales he’d packed along from Saint Louis.

  “Fifteen ounces all told,” he announced. “That will come to 200 dollars back in civilization!”

  “Ayuh, provided we get it there,” I said.

  “Don’t get all pessimistic on me now,” he snapped back. “You’re beginning to sound like that damn Shawnee.”

  “He knows this country; he knows the Blackfoot. And he is equally fearful of what the booshway Dade might do if he finds us in his country. Dade’s Delawares killed his son up here last year.’

  He looked up at me for a moment. Then he said, “So that’s why he’s so spooky. But you’d think he’d want Dade and his boys to show. You’d think he’d want to take revenge on them, wouldn’t you? Perhaps deep down he does. Maybe it’s only you who’s yellow. Pine Leaf certainly isn’t and those two girls of yours are too dumb to feel fear anyway. Well, we should stay—we will stay— and if Dade shows up we’ll have it out with him.”

  “Now dammit, Owen. …” I rose to my feet with clenched fists. “Do not even think of it, pipsqueak. You know what happened the last time you challenged me.” Then he laughed and poured the gold into a doeskin pouch which he tucked into his bedroll.

  “Now come help me on the sluice,” he said. “There’s a fortune to be made.”

  THE GULCH DIGGINGS proceeded rich all that week and the next, with Owney weighing in some 500 dollars’ worth a day after cleanup. By now we were nearing the end of August and the nights had a nip of frost to them. In the mornings we found thin collars of ice on the edge of the catch pond and along the slower runs of the Buenaventura; the popples on the ranges across the way were yellowing high up. The beaver pelts were getting thick and heavy, and a black bear Spy killed had near an inch of sweet yellow fat under its hide and across the kidneys. It snowed a bit one night, that grainy light com snow that spells winter coming on, and at sunrise the peaks around us wore caps of white that shone dull red in the early light. The Pine Leaf was all healed up now, but getting restless at staying in one spot so long. She said she was ready for the war trail.

  “How much do we have so far?” I asked Owney one night around the cookfire. Spybuck was on watch, Pine Leaf busy down by the creek, steeping a buckskin in alder bark to tan it.

  “Near on five hundred ounces.” Owen replied. “About eight thousand dollars’ worth, I reckon.”

  “There’s your fortune right there,” I said. “Why not clear out now, with winter just around the comer?”

  “A week more and we’ll have 12,000 dollars,” he said. “A third of that belongs by agreement to your Shawnee. That will leave 8,000 for the two of us, enough to go anywhere in the world. New York, London, Paris, Venice, or, hell, Constantinoplel Why, we could even return in triumph to Wales, buy us a lord’s castle on the Wye, like that one Da always mooned about.”

  I studied the fire for a bit. A night owl hooted; the creek ran light-hearted over the rocks; then I looked up over our heads to where the stars burned hard and white against a cold black-velvet heaven.

  “Are you going to bring Pine Leaf with you?” I asked him.

  He thought about it for a moment and then laughed. “Can’t you just see me with her in Milan, though, sitting in a box at La Scala awaiting the curtain of an opera premiere? Or gliding haughtily into the lobby of the Ritz in Paris? Dressed to the nines in the latest silks and satins, of course—with her lance and her tomahawk and her goddamned string of dried scalps? No, I think not. Better to leave her here, in her natural habitat.”

  “But, Owney, don’t you love her?”

  “Of course,” he said. “But in her place, and I fear that place is not a town. Not even so mean a one as Saint Louis.”

  “That’s where we differ, then,” I said. “I love my girls, but I do not love a town, not even a so grand one as Paris. Nor do I love a castle on the Wye. These mountains have my heart now, along with the prairie and the game, but especially the people. No, I am not for the East.”

  He glared at me.

  I said, “Perhaps we could split the gold back in Saint Louis. I wouldn’t even begrudge you the lion’s share. All I’ll need is enough to buy me a new outfit. A string of horses, some more traps, a good rifle like that Hawken of yours, maybe a brace of pistols, powder and ball, some gifts to make friends with any Indians I happen to meet.” “Then you are a fool,” he says sharp and angry. “You are young and romantic still, and it will cost you your foolish young life to remain out here. What is more, you have not yet reached your majority; thus I am by law your legal guardian. You will come east with me when we go.”

  “There is no law out here,” I said. “How will you compel me to come with you? Will you bring the town constable down upon me?” He stood of a sudden and dashed the dregs of his coffee into the fire, where it hissed and spit as eloquent as his mood. “You shall come back east with me, if I have to tie you to your horse and drag you there by main force. Now let’s have no more of this rebellious talk.”

  He stalked away into the dark, back to his precious bags of gold. But the events of the next few days would prove this palaver to have been for naught. In the end, Owney himself would be tied to a horse and dragged away by main force, and then some. Our lives would never be the same.

  NINE

  MY GIRLS HELPED us at the sluice only when the mood struck them. They didn’t like shoveling, so they usually busied themselves by picking out the larger rocks as they rattled down the flume and throwing them aside. But they could rarely stand even such easy work for more than an hour at a time, and the sluice was a demanding master, ever hungry for more gravel. Often the Daughters would wander away along the riverbanks in search of pretty garnets, or into the surrounding woods seeking small game for the stew pot, or into the hills to grub up tasty tubers with their elk-shoulder root diggers. On one of their excursions they discovered a grove of wild plum trees which, as autumn approached, yielded juicy purple fruit so sweet it would nearly dissolve in our mouths.

  That following morning, though, they returned to camp with a surprising treasure. Around her neck Plover wore suspended on a rawhide whang a great shiny crucifix, while the Calf bore in her hands a golden chalice. They stood before me proud as peahens.

  I dropped the shovel. “Where did you find those things?”

  “Back in the alders,” Plover said.

  I called Owney over to us.

  “Take us there,” he said.

  The Daughters led us deep into the alder jungle, along a winding deer trail ankle-deep in foul-smelling black muck, to an overgrown clearing at the face of a bluff. This was higher ground, drier as well; broken rocks, sheared from the cliffs above the river by the frost heaves of many a winter, had covered the base of the bluff to the height of a man. Veins of quartz glittered on the face of the cliff. Out about fifty yards from the rock pile was a shallow circular pit, curbed with a ring of loosely stacked boulders. It looked at first like the curb of a well, but there was no water down there; and why indeed should any men camped here require a well, with the river so close at hand? In the bottom of the pit, along with matted leaves and rotting branches, lay a big, round stone, from the top of which protruded the decayed remains of a log, probably pine, which had once been secured into a socket obviously hollowed out by the iron tools of white men. A deep, well-worn path circled the pit, a path that could only have been formed through months of wear from the hooves of horses or mules or perhaps oxen.

  “I know what this is,” Owney said. “The Spaniards call it an arras
tra. It is an ancient method for crushing ore so that it can be panned to remove the gold. They must have had a mine near here, and threw the broken-up rocks containing the ore into this pit; mules turned this giant pestle—that boulder down there—and crushed them into workable gravel. Yes, there must have been a proper gold mine somewhere nearby, probably hidden now by that rockfall. It contains the mother lode that spawned the gold we are finding in the river gravel.” He turned to the girls. “Where did you find the cross and the cup?”

  They led us into a dense grove of popple farther along the face of the bluff. In among the trees we found the faint outlines of cabin walls, the pines from which it had been built rotted now into moss-grown pulp. Owney kicked the pulp; it crumbled to his moccasin. The ghost log was black inside, and the faint but acrid scent of ancient wood ash rose through the air.

  “This place was burned down,” he said. “Either by accident or on purpose.”

  We searched the interior of the cabin and found some shards of old pots, a rusted-out kettle with the wire bale still intact, and some strange black beads on which hung a small silver cross, gone dark now with age.

  “A Papist rosary,” Owney said. “The Roman priests pray upon it, one prayer for each and every bead.”

  Over in a comer I found something suspiciously round, all covered with moss. I scraped off the fuzz with my knifepoint. A human skull, the empty eye sockets staring up at me. We unearthed more bones, femurs mainly, along with half a rib cage, vertebrae attached. Then two more skulls, these bearing the char marks of fire. Plover rooted around near the fallen-down chimney and came up with a leather-bound book of some kind. The pages were stuck together due to dampness, but Owney pried it open. It was a Roman Bible. Written faintly in faded ink on the blank pages at the back of the book was something in French or Spanish; at first we could not make out many of the words. But then Owney found a handwritten date: “21 Octubre 1753.”