The report reached the diggings before we did. It went round and round and still goes round today: an expedition perished under a bad storm. The Missouri Overland Mutual Protection Association. Trapped in the mountains with nothing to eat but their own dead.
III. THE RESCUING SHE-ASS
We survived in the sink on quail which Errol shot and what scant rations the others could not carry. But both supplies and game swiftly dwindled. One night when I lay awake considering starvation and Indian ambush and cougar attack and worse, I saw shadows moving along our canvas. I remained in my ruck, petrified, not even reaching for the knife near my feet nor the musket near my sleeping brother’s. The shadows grew monstrous in size until finally a dark shape loomed at the rear of the wagon. When the form emerged through the slit in the canvas, I nearly laughed aloud at my own cowardice.
It was the head of a burro. She stared at me, ears twitching, an almost intelligent expression on her long face. I donned my spectacles and climbed quietly from the wagon. I ran my hand along her coarse mane and dust rose from it. I did not recognize the animal. She likely belonged to another caravan and had been abandoned, like us.
In the dimness I saw that her back bore the black cross of Bethlehem. I traced my fingers along this coloring and felt beneath it each individual knob of her spine. I wished I had an apple to give her, or a pear. I was overcome then by the melancholy that had been accumulating in me since I left Ohio. I wrapped my arms around the beast’s soft brown neck and wept. The jenny blinked her long-lashed glassy eye and began to walk. I, trail-weary and homesick and perhaps resigned to death, let her pull me along, stumbling and wetting her mange with my tears.
We walked together through sand and scrub and rock for I knew not how long. We crested a hill and then another. And then the old girl stopped. Before us, quaking in the moonlight, was the giant spherical head of a cottonwood. It was the first tree I had seen in seven hundred miles.
I ran down the hill to the tree, stumbling, and fell finally at its raised roots. Beside the cottonwood was a stream, icy and clear. I drank from it, drank and drank and drank. The water soon returned some of my faculties and I turned to account for the burro. She stood, miraculously, on the hill where I left her.
I retrieved her and we both drank. As the sun rose I rode the old girl back to the wagon, calling hullo hullo to Errol. The look on his face suggested he thought us a mirage, and indeed when I drew near he reached up and touched my jaw, lightly. The jenny and I led him to the cottonwood, a warm wind at our three faces. Errol took a bit of the stream in his hand. “It’s meltwater,” he said.
Errol wanted to set out that day but it was the Sabbath, and he surprised me by agreeing to observe it, which we had not done but once the entire journey. So Errol sat drinking beside the crick and I spoke a service, the first of my life. I knew then that the Word was my calling, but knew as well that it was too late to follow.
At dawn we loaded the jenny with our supplies and those which the others had not been able to carry. That same curiously warm chinook was with us as we followed the stream into the hills, where it branched from a mountain river throbbing with snowmelt. The river led us through the Sierra Nevada, and we spent some threatening cold days in those mountains, our burro growing so weak that we were forced to discard nearly all her load, save for the meagerest provisions and two books — the Bible and The Odyssey—which I insisted on keeping with me always.
Finally, she bore us to the diggings. I recall the moment we crested the last ridge on our journey. It was dusk, and lightning bugs blinked among the shrubs. I cleaned my spectacles and saw then that they were no insects but the fires of the gold fields, strung along the foothills below us. We howled in joy and exhaustion. I knelt, and asked Errol to do the same. I spoke a prayer of thanks to God and to the rescuing she-ass He’d sent us. Errol, blasphemer that he was, spoke a prayer of thanks to me.
IV. DECEPTION AT ANGEL’S CAMP
So it was that we arrived at the diggings penniless and without any equipment. Our first stop was the general store in Angel’s Camp, which was at that time a log house rudely thrown together with mud. There, we had no choice but to sell our burro to the store’s proprietor, a Swede who denied us a fair price, saying she was an Arkansas mule and not of the sturdier Mexican stock.
God had tested my brother with a wicked temper and a walloping hook. It was a test he often failed back home, bloodying Ohio noses and blacking Ohio eyes for no good reason I could see. I was worried he might put his pique to use here, where we had no one. I discreetly reminded my brother that we were not in the East anymore and that this man was likely the only merchant in the entire county. Inwardly, though, I envied the way my brother could make a man cower.
So, in the first of many injustices in the territory, we sold the jenny to outfit ourselves with a fraction of the very supplies we had dumped in the Sierra: an iron pan for the outrageous sum of sixteen dollars and a shovel at the ungodly price of twenty-nine. We also purchased two red shirts, two pairs of smart-looking tan pantaloons, a tent, a sack of flour, and a shank of dried pork.
Errol sent another letter to Marjorie, which contained many standard fabrications as to our good luck and our promising claim and the clement passage overland, which despite accounts to the contrary was entirely manageable for a lady. I scribbled a postcard to our mother, telling her only the truth: that we had arrived, and that we were alive. Outfitted, we hiked three miles to the American River and established our humble camp at a sand bar where the fat-pocketed Swede had told Errol there was gold for the picking.
I had envisioned the diggings a place of desolation and solitude — such was the portrayal in the literature on the subject — and so I was rather dismayed to find that the American had other Forty-Niners populating her banks. By their accents I made out Southerners and Yanks, Pikes, Limeys, Canadians, and Keskydees. By sight I identified Mexicans, Negroes, and Indians. A Pike who claimed he had been a riverboat captain in St. Louis informed me that the Negroes were former slaves — fugitives, though he didn’t say the word. The Indians, he said, were current slaves.
Whether white or colored, every man wore the same red work shirts which Errol and I had so recently purchased, though most were by now a sort of purple with filth. Their pantaloons had gone a snuffy brown. Some had added sashes about the collar for a touch of the dude, and most of these were all but shredded with wear.
The only deviants from this diggings uniform were two Chinamen who worked the claim adjacent to ours. I had never seen a Chinaman before and I fear I gazed quite rudely at them. The two — a father and his son, whose age I estimated to be around thirteen — wore billowing yellowish frocks gathered in a queer fashion. They panned not with iron but with the same type of pointed bowls of woven straw they wore as hats. Beneath those brims were their curious slit eyes and skin so hairless and smooth as to appear made of wax. But strangest of all were the snake-like black pigtails gathered from a snatch of hair at their napes and falling down their backs. The boy’s descended past his shoulders impressively. But it was a sapling compared to his father’s, which was so long that when he stooped at the river its tip dipped into the green water and swayed there as he panned.
We staked our ten-by-ten claim and worked it twelve hours a day for two days, Errol at the shovel and me at the pan, then, after Errol called me a duffer, another ten days with me at the shovel and Errol at the pan. Rumor had the territory brimming with gold so handy that men had gouged their wealth from the rock with a pocketblade or a spoon. In truth the work of extracting color was of the spirit-defeating sort, a labor which combined the various arts of canal digging, ditching, stone laying, plowing, and hoeing potatoes. The law required us to work our claim every single day, including the Sabbath, lest we lose our rights to it. Thus we toiled in the freezing river and under the burning rays of the sun from dawn to dark, day after miserable day. When finally we went to bed I could not sleep for the pain coursing along my back and between my shoulders. Even Errol complained, the numbness in his hands from rotating the pan all day over-riding his obstinate nature. When I did sleep, I woke shivering and soaked in heavy dew. Soon I was rousing myself by scratching my body and scalp bloody where I’d been munched by fleas and lice, which the Forty-Niners called quicks and slows. Added to this misery was the constant terror of those dark mountains looming behind us, sheltering cougars and grizzly bears and other unknown beasts that I sometimes heard moving through the forest in the night.