I took it as a bad omen of what was to come. If that wasn’t enough of a sign, the first California mining camp we rolled into was named Trouble.
I’d have preferred to stop in a place called Opportunity, Happiness, or Serenity, but I suppose it could have been worse. The place could have been called Futility, Misery, or Death, all of which would have been a more accurate description of what awaited us.
It certainly wasn’t a pretty place. The main street was a mire of mud, sawdust, rocks, and horse droppings with an occasional wood plank or two flung atop it to make crossing less of a slog.
Everything looked like it was erected in a hurry by people with little regard for outward appearance, skill in construction, or any thought of permanence.
Most of the structures were one story, with log walls and sawed-timber storefronts with tall, flat cornices of varying heights. There was also a smattering of shacks, log cabins, and tents of all kinds, some crudely cobbled together out of boughs and old calico shirts. The hotel was a lopsided, two-story building with a sagging veranda. There was a wood-plank sidewalk on each side of the street and plenty of hitching posts.
I didn’t see a church, but that didn’t mean one of those tents didn’t contain a preacher or two. In my experience, preachers and gamblers always showed up where there was whiskey and money around.
The men on the street looked like they’d all just crawled out of their graves. They were covered in dirt. It was caked to their tattered wool shirts and patched britches, it dusted their mangy beards and ragged hats, and it clung to their hair, which was slicked back with wagon-wheel grease and caught everything.
If there were womenfolk around, they were either in hiding or hadn’t emerged from their graves yet. Seeing the menfolk, I couldn’t blame them for keeping out of sight.
The only evidence of prosperity that I could see was the existence of the camp itself, and as ugly as it was, it was a strong indicator. Trouble wouldn’t have been there at all, or expanding, if there wasn’t gold to support it.
Hank and I might have passed right through, and probably should have, but he couldn’t wait to stick his pan in a river. He found some flakes of gold in that first pan of gravel and was so excited about it that he staked himself a claim right away, convinced that we were sitting on our mother lode.
We weren’t.
When that patch didn’t pan out, we worked our way up and down that river, never straying far from Trouble, staking new claims, hoping we were just one pan away from striking it rich.
We didn’t know much about geology but we’d learned that gold was easiest to find in gravel bars where the river widened and bent or where it once did. Gold being heavier than other minerals, the flakes and nuggets would settle in, sometimes near the surface, and sometimes down deep.
The gold wasn’t hard to recognize. There was the color, of course, and the soft way it felt when you bit a nugget in your teeth — not that we found many nuggets.
The gold was there, that was for sure, but getting enough of it out of the ground to make a living was back-breaking, soul-bleeding work that was much harder than farming. But gold fever kept men like Hank going in a way that farming never could. There were too many people striking it rich all around us for him to ever stop believing that it could happen to him. The fever blinded him to the pain, futility, poverty, and hardship.
I didn’t have the fever. But I had a marriage and a man that I loved. Keeping them both healthy and strong was what kept me going.
We lived in a tent so we could move wherever the gold was. I kept house, cooked our meals, and sometimes patched and sewed up clothes for some of the other prospectors in exchange for necessities, while Hank worked our claim.
A man had to pan half an ounce to an ounce of gold a day, about sixteen dollars’ worth of color, if he wanted to survive and set a little aside for the lean days.
But we rarely panned more than six dollars a day worth of color, roughly six pinches of gold dust, and with molasses at one dollar a bottle and flour going for fifty cents a pound, we could barely keep ourselves fed.
Most of the time, our bag of flour was worth more than our pouch of gold.
I tried to convince Hank to give up on prospecting and try something else. We argued about it for most of that first year until I finally just gave up and resolved to do my best to support him, no matter how wrong-headed I thought he was. That was what I’d been taught a good wife was supposed to do.
Two years of panning in the cold river water, day in and day out, bowed Hank’s back and swelled his joints. It got so bad that he couldn’t stand and could barely breathe. And even then, with all those ailments, his biggest ache was the desire to pan for more gold.
They say it was rheumatic fever that killed him, but I know better.
It was the dream of gold that did him in.
His death left me alone, but not without assets. I had our claim, our tent, and his tools, but they weren’t worth a sack of potatoes. What I had that was worth something was my body.
Women were scarce in Trouble, so the instant Hank was buried, I became as rare and valuable a commodity in those parts as gold.
There were a couple of ways I could mine that value.
I could marry a wealthy man, of which there were few, most of whom were living in their San Francisco mansions while others toiled for them in the mines.
Or I could become involved with many less-prosperous men, of which there were multitudes, most of whom were willing to pay a pinch or two of gold to enjoy a woman’s affection for a short time.
Women who engaged in that sort of barter were called sporting women and lived in rooms behind the saloons. They were generally held in higher regard than such women back East, perhaps because the population in Trouble was made up mostly of lonely men in desperate need of their services. That might also explain why vices that weren’t tolerated back home were taken so casually in the mining camps, whether it was drinking, gambling, whoring, or murder.
A few of the sporting women did all right, made enough money to support themselves until they could find a man with plenty of gold, and low moral standards, to marry and move on. But it seemed to me that most of the women died young, taken by syphilis, abortions, or suicide by laudanum.
I tried to survive instead by sewing and laundering for the miners. But there weren’t many men willing to part with their hard-earned gold dust on something as frivolous as clean clothes that were just going to get dirty again the next day. They felt their gold was better spent on whiskey, food, and sporting women.
However, there was one peculiar and extraordinary man who valued cleanliness and order above all else.
I’m talking, of course, about Artemis Monk, Trouble’s only assayer.
I’ve heard it said that assaying — analyzing stones and such and determining the mineral content — is the third oldest profession, after doctors and sporting women.
Every prospector and miner came to Monk with their rocks so that he could determine how much gold was in them, the quality of the gold, and estimate the potential yield of their claims. That made him easily the second or third most important man in Trouble.
There was either something very unusual about the geology of Trouble, or unique to Monk’s calculations, because the various minerals in the samples he analyzed always showed up in even amounts. He attributed it to the “immutable balance of nature,” but if that was so, the rest of the world was unbalanced.
As odd as that was, the fact remained that Monk always turned out to be right in his estimates of the worth of a claim, and anybody who ever questioned his conclusions eventually found that out for themselves the hard way.
But even if you never had business with Monk, you certainly knew who he was. Monk stood out. He was the only clean-shaven man in the camp, his hair was neatly trimmed, and he bathed every day, which in itself was astonishing. He always wore the same thing — a derby hat with a domed crown and a flat, round brim, a long-sleeved white shirt buttoned to the collar, a sleeveless vest with four pockets and four buttons, wool pants, and fine black boots.