A New Eden

by Quent Cordair

  Thomas was caught between the risks inherent in trying to catch up, which might take up to a week if he survived, and which would mean leaving the books, or he could wait on the trail for another party – if there would be another. For all he knew, his party might have been the last on the trail for the season. If so, he would most likely succumb to hunger and the elements before the next party came through in the spring.

  He chose to wait with his father’s books, which were now his own.

  Ian paused to refill their glasses.

  “I’m thinking you might be at least part Irish yourself,” Paige said. “You tell a fine story, Ian Argent.”

  He smiled. “There’s probably some Irish in me, along with the Basque, Scottish, French, Viking, German – and more, surely, depending on how far back you go, on which side. I’m American.”

  Yes – yes, you are, she thought, taking in the line of his jaw, the set of his mouth, the potential in the lean muscles of his forearms below the rolled-up sleeves.

  With a drink of wine to wet his lips, he continued –

  Thomas survived eight days on the pilot bread, a snake, part of a dead rabbit stolen from an eagle, and a few crickets roasted on a hot rock. The dust plume coming up the trail from the east was a welcome sight.

  Perhaps out of pity for the stranded boy standing next to his father’s grave, they allowed Thomas to bring along his books, for which he offered and promised to pay twenty dollars in freight as soon as he had the money, a promise he made good within a few months of arrival in California.

  Less than three years after the discovery of gold, the land west of the Sierras was already a teeming, crowded place. Thomas spent the next years working in every type of gold-mining operation, from pans and rockers in the streams, to long toms and sluices along the rivers, eventually going underground as a hard-rock miner. At seventeen, having survived a cave-in that killed half of the men in his shift, he took employment in a mill where the ore was crushed and refined, the particles of precious metal extracted by amalgamation with quicksilver. As he had done while working in the river and underground, he diligently examined every step of the process, every piece of machinery, every technique and every person and relationship in the industry. He questioned his coworkers and superiors incessantly, particularly the itinerant prospectors who passed through the camps and towns, learning what types of rock species, formations, outcroppings, and other geological clues they were looking for in search of gold.

  The first two years of working in and around the rivers were hard labor, with precious little reward to show for toiling through hundred-degree summer days and freezing winters. The food was poor, the clothing inadequate. He lived in leaky, drafty tents with unkempt men of marginal hygiene, worse manners and, on occasion, unexpected sexual proclivities. From the time he got out of the rivers and found employment in the underground workings, he made a better wage and his living conditions improved, but no matter for whom he worked, he was never fully satisfied with the way his employers were going about things, and they were seldom willing to take suggestions from a teenager. He could have worked his way up through a mining company, but he was impatient. Moreover, he saw no reason why he, too, couldn’t become as rich as the mine owners if he put his mind to it. Indeed he was intent on doing just that. When he decided that he had learned just about everything he could learn of the industry, he determined to set out on his own, but unfortunately, by then, nearly every square inch west of the Sierras worth prospecting or mining had already been claimed.

  So at age eighteen, Thomas bought a mule – Spaetzle, he named it, after his favorite pasta, introduced to him by a Bavarian cook in one of the camps. He loaded Spaetzle with prospecting supplies, camping gear, and food, all purchased from his own savings, and he set out east, retracing the route over which he had come with the wagon train four years earlier.

  He explored and prospected the mountains around Lake Tahoe and the eastern Sierra foothills above what is now Carson City, searching for a vein of gold-bearing ore while trying to avoid being shot for wandering onto a stake already claimed. He encountered thousands of other prospectors roaming the hills, doing the same. The odds were slim of finding a promising patch of land or a stream anywhere in the region that wasn’t already being worked or hadn’t been thoroughly picked over. At night, staring into the embers of his campfire, his mind would travel back to a place – a place he had been unable to forget.

  The piece of quartz from the hill was still with him, carried in his pocket every day he had worked in the rivers and underground and in the mill. He was in the habit of holding it, turning it in his fingers. The rough edges had worn smooth from the handling. Many a night he had fallen asleep with the rock clutched in his hand.

  And so it was that on a warm night in late September he was camped with Spaetzle above Mormon Station, next to yet another promising ledge he had spent a week picking and prospecting, with no success. He was examining the quartz’ winking crystals in the firelight, as he often did. Over the years, he had shown the rock to a half-dozen prospectors and assayers. Those more likely to lose at poker would light up when they saw it, wanting to break it down and assay it on the spot to find out if there was any gold in it and, if so, how much. Those more likely to win at poker would examine it intently and react with a dismissive shrug as if it were worthless – yet they would begin to pry, nonchalantly but persistently, to learn where he had found it. But he never divulged the source to anyone.

  He hefted and turned the quartz over and over that night by the fire, after months of fruitless prospecting. Tossing it in the air and catching it again, he declared, “Spaetzle, I do believe it’s time.”

  Spaetzle failed to glance up from munching his tuft of grass.

  “My friend,” Thomas said, “Your capacity for appreciating a momentous occasion is sorely lacking. Fortunately, you make up for it in strength and reliability.”

  He brought out his mortar and pestle, put the rock in the mortar and, without a second thought, proceeded to pound, grind and pulverize it. After boiling the resultant powder with mercury, salt and soda in his prospecting pan, he poured off the liquid, washed away the residue, wrapped the remaining amalgam pill in a twist of parchment and set it on his shovel over the fire. What remained after the mercury burned off would be his prize.

  The shovel heated. The smoke and steam twisted around and above, rising into the night sky like a braid of witch’s hair. When the mercury had finally and fully evaporated, what remained in the shovel was – nothing. Not a speck of gold, or of anything else.

  Thomas laughed. He had taken only the smallest of samples from the rusty vein running through the hill’s summit – hardly a reliable representative of its composition. When he had first stood on the hill four years before, he hadn’t the faintest notion of what he was looking at. It could be a gold miner’s dream or his worst nightmare, a promise that could be worked to enormous profit – or to little, or to none. There was a fair chance that gold might be found in a vein such as that – he had worked rich, gold-bearing ore from nearly identical sources below California’s mother lode, to the profit of the mines’ owners.

  He had laughed because he realized, in that moment in which others might have thought that Thomas Hale had watched his hopes and dreams go up in smoke, that he still loved the valley he had discovered. He still loved the hill – his hill. He wanted to return and make a go of it there regardless. If mining the hill proved unprofitable, then maybe other resources in the valley could be exploited. With work, the land might be ranchable or farmable. As he considered the possibilities, he was already packing Spaetzle, knowing he wouldn’t be able to sleep that night anyway. With the moon full and the sky clear, he could follow the trail easily, getting a good start on the journey across the Forty Mile Desert before the heat of the day. And that is what he did.

  Paige waited as Ian paused to take a bite of a sandwich. He enjoyed a leisurely second bite, watching a hawk glide by at eye level, a hundred
yards out.

  “And – he came back here and discovered gold?” she prompted.

  He finished the sandwich, following it with a slice of cheese, before continuing.

  “It took him two weeks to cross back over what is now the state of Nevada – which was then still part of the Utah Territory. It took him two years to dig the quartz vein deep enough to find much gold. But he found it, and then deeper in the hill he found silver. A lot of silver.”

  “Two years? How did he survive out here for two years?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know? You knew the first part of the story in good detail! Were you making any of that up?”

  “Hardly.” He smiled. “That was almost word for word the way it was published in the old local-history book they used here in school back before I started. Every student in the valley used to know Thomas Hale’s story, at least that first part of it. My uncle, who owns the gallery, still had his copy from when he was in school. He used to read the story to me when I was a kid. I made him read it over and over again until I had practically memorized it. I even named my first dog Spaetzle. Spaetzle and I would go out poking around through the washes, panning the streams for gold. Years later, when I was in high school, I was looking for the book for a report I wanted to do on Thomas Hale for a history class, but it had been sold in a yard sale or misplaced. I haven’t been able to find another copy. The first part of the story was reprinted from an early edition of Aurelia’s local paper, from a weekly series they were going to run on Thomas Hale’s life back when he was still alive. But the newspaper office burned down after the first installment was printed, and the editor, who had interviewed Thomas for the material, died in the fire. So in the book, the details of what followed were much thinner. Suffice it to say that Thomas Hale came back to the valley and discovered gold and silver. He became very rich and owned the better part of the valley, and a great deal more, before he was done.”

  “Impressive. You’d have thought someone would have researched his life and written a biography.”

  “You’d have thought it, but it hasn’t happened. When I was working on the report, I checked thoroughly through the school and public libraries – made a pest of myself with the librarians – but there’s precious little information about the man, in print or online, outside of some references by his contemporaries here and there and a few civic and social mentions. There’s nothing comprehensive or in depth. Even his descendants don’t seem to have much on him, or certainly less than you’d expect.”

  “You don’t talk much like a cowboy, you know. At least not like the ones in the movies.”

  He chuckled. “I doubt I’d be very popular in the movies. Do you know that it wasn’t uncommon in the nineteenth century for cowboys in the West to carry copies of poetry, history, and classic literature around with them? The culture was different then. Knowledge and learning were more highly valued by the common man – even cowboys.”

  “Next you’ll be telling me that you happen to have a copy of Byron in your saddlebag.”

  “Byron’s good, but I favor Longfellow, Kipling, Frost – ”

  Her gaze came to rest on the glass-faceted cathedral below, a great frozen crystal pushing up from the valley floor, gleaming in the sun. She wondered what role the Church may have played in Aurelia’s history. A Frost poem came to mind. She recited the opening lines –

  Some say the world will end in fire,

  Some say in ice.

  From what I’ve tasted of desire

  I hold with those who favor fire.

  She paused. He picked up where she left off –

  But if it had to perish twice,

  I think I know enough of hate

  To say that for destruction ice

  Is also great,

  And would suffice.

  The afternoon wind had begun to whistle through the cracks of the foundation where the mortar had crumbled and fallen away. She tossed a loose stone into the rubble. A furry rodent scurried out from behind a rock and, with a squeak of alarm, dove beneath a charred, blackened edge of broken timber.

  “So,” she posited, “the ‘H’ on the gate we passed, that’s for ‘Hale’ – ‘Thomas Hale’.”

  “It is.”

  “And Thomas Hale mined the hill, made a fortune, and – ” there was a hollowing in her stomach. “He loved the view of the valley. . . .”

  “He did.”

  She took in the vista again, following the line of low hills along the east, all the way to the horizon beyond the reservoir at the valley’s end, across to the mountain range towering along the west, up to where the river that was a canal flowed into the mouth of the gorge. She tried to imagine what the valley must have looked like then, with the thriving, bustling boomtown below. It was a perfect view.

  “We’re sitting on the foundation of his home, aren’t we?”

  “This was Thomas Hale’s mansion, yes.”

  She could picture it, the green grounds with flowers all around, views of the valley through the southerly windows, gentlemen and ladies in their finery arriving in carriages for grand balls and gala dances. She could make out the grade where the drive had come up from the east. The collapsed space before her had surely been the mansion’s great hall. There would have been dinners with dignitaries and esteemed guests, servants moving about on the periphery, harried kitchen staff treading the edge of disaster to pull off another perfectly presented feast, children playing on the narrow lawn, chasing each other in the twilight in their white summer suits and dresses. Quiet, romantic evenings on the porch in rockers, watching the sunset – a parasol of pastels over hills turning tangerine and deep saffron, the mountains tinted cornflower-blue and violet. . . .

  She didn’t want to ask the next question but she had to. It was what she did. There were too many blackened edges.

  “What happened here, Ian?”

  “It wasn’t ice.”

  For

  the reader’s convenience,

  a map of Aurum Valley

  is located

  at the back of this book.

  The story continues on the next page. . .

  Four

  They finished lunch in silence, remounted the horses in silence and rode on in silence, following the path east. When they came out on a two-track road, Paige again nudged her mount alongside.

  “If you don’t mind,” she asked, “what is Passion Week?”

  “How long are you staying?”

  “I leave Monday.”

  “Oh . . .” After a moment he continued. “Passion Week starts this Sunday and runs through next Sunday, Easter. It’s quite the spectacle. A tradition in these parts. You’re not from anywhere around here then.”

  “No . . .”

  “East Coast?”

  “New York presently. What denomination is the church?”

  “We have a year-round population of over fifty thousand in the valley and the surrounding hills. Close to half are members of the Church. The religion’s official name is The Church of the Flock of the Prophet Obadiah, but it’s often abbreviated as the FPO, or referred to informally as just The Flock or The Church. The members call themselves Obadites – you might hear non-Church locals refer to them as ‘Flockers,’ though the Obadites don’t care much for the term. Internationally, their membership is up to about a half million.”

  “That’s a lot of Obadites. I’ve never heard of them.”

  “Small potatoes, really, relative to most religions. The Episcopalians have two million in the U.S. alone, and they’re not even in the top dozen of the largest Protestant denominations. The Mormons might have over thirteen million worldwide, and their numbers are miniscule relative to the billion-plus Catholics. Then of course there are the Buddhists, the Hindus – ”

  “ – and the Muslims.”

  “Yes, who can forget the Muslims? They’re pretty good at making themselves unforgettable these days, aren’t they? And there are over
one and a half billion of them.”

  “How do you know all of this? Religions are an interest of yours?”

  “I minored in Religious Studies in school.”

  “What was your major?”

  “Art History.”

  “Interesting combination.”

  “Religion and art have been closely related down through history, often inextricably linked. . . . Anyway, Aurum Valley is the Flock’s birthplace and headquarters, and every year, the week leading up to Easter is their Passion Week. It’s the Church’s major observance.”

  “They’re Christian, then.”

  “Essentially. They claim that their founder was a prophet, as the Mormons do, but their teachings are otherwise more or less in line with most other evangelical Christian sects. That being said, the Obadites are more fundamentalist than most, and culturally they’re quite conservative and insular. Insular until lately, that is – they’re pushing hard to change that.”

  “Are the men dressed in black Obadite?”