California Gold (3 page)

“Maybe, but I’m going.”

“Then start now,” the man with the badge broke in suddenly. “We got an ordinance against loafers and tramps.”

Mack felt anger welling up, but he fought it down. “Sheriff—sir—I need work. I need to earn the price of a meal.”

“Not in this town.”

“Maybe the next one,” the salesman said. “Here.” He flipped a silver coin with his thumb. It spun through the air, right into Mack’s eager cupped hands.

A faraway train whistle sounded and the salesman squinted into the western light. “That’s my train to Des Moines. Good luck to you, son. I still say you’re crazy, but I’d give a lot to go with you, see California.”

“You mean you’ve never seen it?”

“No. The railroad just pays me to sell it.” He smoothed his peacock cravat. “Anyway, I have a wife and nine children in Rock Island…I couldn’t…well…I envy you.”

It thrilled Mack to have a man so worldly approve of his undertaking, and it took away some of the sting when the sheriff said, “Get moving.”

Mack waved to the salesman and stepped from the shade to the blazing light. Watching the Burlington & Missouri local pass him in a cloud of steam and cinders and a
scree
of steel braking on steel, he grinned and waved at two girls in the single passenger car.

Then, whistling, he turned and resumed walking west.

Toward the Missouri River, the Platte. Toward the Rockies and the Sierras. Donner Summit, Emigrant Gap. California.

The first treasure California began to surrender after the Gold Rush was the oldest: her land.

After Mexico had freed itself from Spain in 1821, the new Mexican government in California secularized all the property that had belonged to the missions. The Franciscans returned to Spain, defeated, and the Indians were set adrift.

The first Yankees who reached California perceived the value of the land at once. To obtain their share, some of these Anglos professed Catholicism, married into leading families, and settled down to comfortable lives as owners and masters of rich cattle ranches.

After California came into the Union, other, less principled newcomers also recognized the land’s potential worth and set out to acquire it in a somewhat ruder but typically American way: by using the law. The United States Congress had mandated the clarification and settlement of land claims, and a commission was set up to hear the arguments of disputing parties. Unfortunately, not one of its members spoke Spanish.

Further, most of the original land grants had been written in the haziest of language, with claims described and delimited by such landmarks as a tree (perhaps blown down in a recent storm), a stream (its course changed over two or three decades), or a rock (gone completely). And if ill-defined boundaries would not carry the day for the claimant, a forged grant was certain to do so. With the great majority of claims decided by Anglo judges in favor of Anglo clients represented by Anglo lawyers, the Californios—the peaceful, civilized, gentleman-ranchers of Mexican descent—were soon robbed of their land.

As the
ranchos
disappeared and apocalyptic seasons of drought and flooding rains turned the once-rich beef-cattle trade into a risky and unpopular venture, land baron and small farmer alike turned to wheat, a more stable and profitable crop. Though wheat had been grown at a few of the missions, it was only now that Californians recognized its perfect suitability to the soil of the Central Valley. It would sprout in the short, wet winters, it matured and flourished in the hot, dry summers, it could survive seasons of scant rainfall, and it was hardy enough to withstand long sea voyages to the markets of the East Coast or Europe, where it was soon in great demand. By the 1880s, California was shipping forty million bushels a year.

This new golden crop transformed the flat and featureless Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys into a source of unprecedented wealth. It was the first great agricultural bonanza in one of the greatest agricultural regions on the face of the globe, and it was not to be the last.

But the bonanzas of the future awaited the arrival of something the flat, fertile land could not itself supply in adequate quantity—water.

IN OMAHA, NEBRASKA, MACK Chance swabbed floors in a saloon for a few days. On the afternoon that he received his wages, the barkeep’s bulldog bit him, and for the next week he was dizzy with a fever. Limping along a rutted pike leading west, he tried to convince himself that the salesman was wrong when he said, “Son, you’re crazy.”

Outside Kearney, a farmer shot at him with both barrels of a shotgun. Mack dove over the fence, stolen apples spilling from his pockets. He despised thieving, and being forced to be a thief, but the apples provided his only nourishment for the next four days.

With his mouth dusty-dry, he ignored warnings in the guidebook and sank to his knees beside the sludgy Platte and drank. The water had a peculiar acidic taste. By nightfall he lay on the ground, clutching his gut while his bowels boiled. He was ill for a week.

On the prairie he watched a Union Pacific express flash westward, a long, rattling segmented monster made of mail, freight, and first- and second-class passenger cars. One of the latter, packed with pale people in dark clothes, had a canvas banner nailed to its side.

INDIANA EXCURSION

TO

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

The train raised an enormous cloud of dust. A few of the excursionists spied Mack standing beside the right-of-way and waved mockingly, and he clenched his teeth and trudged on after the train, the dust settling like yellow flour on his hair, his ears, his eyelids.

Camped near Fremont’s Ford, where the trail branched away for lower California, he sat reading T. Fowler Haines by the light of the full moon.

His father had kept a small shelf of California books, yellowing books, mostly secondhand, but full of bright visions, extravagant promises. But T. Fowler Haines was Pa’s favorite. Like the other guidebook authors, Haines gave mileage and described landmarks on the old Oregon Trail and, farther west, the California Cutoff. Mack intended to follow this route partway, though he didn’t need to rely slavishly on Haines. Almost forty years after Haines had made his trip as an “eye-witness” and written it up, many more hamlets and towns dotted the route, along with railway lines and serviceable roads. Even in the mountains, Mack expected to depend less on Haines than on the transcontinental rails. What he treasured in Haines were the wonders.

So he read again some of Haines’s excerpts from the old Spanish novel that had given California its name. The novelist said California was peopled by incredibly strong black women, Amazons, and “their arms were all of gold, and so was the harness of the wild beasts which they tamed and rode…There were many griffins, on account of the ruggedness of the country.”

That night he dreamed of the griffins and the black women instead of hanged men, snow, death.

Sometimes he sheltered in a barn or a stable, sometimes under a tree in a downpour, unless there was lightning. He saw spectacular things: a cyclone’s funnel cloud, a prairie fire burning over an expanse of ten city blocks, a herd of bison grazing—Buffalo Bill hadn’t slain them all, evidently.

His clothes tended to stiffen and smell despite conscientious washing whenever he found a suitable stream. He occasionally caught a ride in a wagon, but mostly he stayed on foot. The excruciating pain in his thighs and calves that had tortured and impeded him during the first part of the journey now reduced to a steady ache. He was discovering new muscles all over his body, and he’d not been exactly weak before.

Foraging food was the hardest part. Sometimes he dined on nothing but berries and water. He lost weight, a lot of weight.

Rather than follow the northerly curve of the railroad up through Wyoming and down again to the Salt Lake, he struck more directly westward, for Colorado. Wherever he could, he traded work for food and a bed, or a few cents. He cut and stacked firewood, slopped hogs, whitewashed the interior of a Grange hall.

As the land grew flatter and more desolate, he tended to forget that he lived in a highly civilized country where Grover Cleveland was president, the great Civil War was more than twenty years in the past, and men once considered young heroes were now garrulous old storytellers.

It was an age of plenty, an age of marvels, with Pullman Palace Cars and steam-driven elevators, public street illumination and incandescent lamps perfected by Mr. Edison, telephone service beginning to link major cities, and three years ago, the new Brooklyn Bridge—an architectural wonder to rival the Pyramids. Although Mack knew about all these things, and a lot more, increasingly they seemed to belong to some other place, some other planet. He tramped for long periods without seeing a tilled field, a freight wagon, telegraph poles, or even a single wandering sheep. He felt that he was approaching the remote border of the civilized world. Once he passed that, and conquered the mountain barriers, he would be in a land beyond all imagining—just as the old Spanish novel said.

There was less daylight every day, and it had a sad, cool cast. He tramped among aspens and alders and sycamores instead of the scraggly cottonwoods of the plains. The beautiful sunlit trees bent in the wind, which stripped them and flung clouds of bonfire-colored leaves around him.

The falling leaves made him sad, reminding him that he had no home.

Except the one that lay ahead.

He stood silently in a roadway that rose at an angle of thirty degrees and shivered. The snow was falling and blowing hard now, already covering the ground. It brought visions of his nightmare. He ran his icy hand through the long beard that reached halfway down his chest, his eyes fixed on the menacing obstacle before him. The Rockies. Black granite and gray ice. Common sense told him to turn back. He listened to other voices.

Never be poor again.

Never be cold again
…

He stepped out on the snowy, flinty road bordered with boulders and fallen slabs of granite and cried aloud when his weight came down on his left foot, swollen because his mule-ear boots were so tight, the left one especially. He’d cut it open with his clasp knife; now it resembled the ruined shoes he’d thrown away. He’d also ripped up one of the shirts from the roll on his back, and wrapped his foot. The shirting had been clean yesterday. Today it glistened and oozed blood.

He scorned himself for the outcry. Although there wasn’t anyone to hear, he thought it unmanly, an admission of weakness.

The wind raked and numbed his face, and fear swirled up as the snow stung his cheeks. He set his mouth and dove his hand into his pocket to clasp the leather cover of T. Fowler Haines, his thumb finding the bold embossed C in
California.
Leaving bloody footprints in the snow, he climbed up the steep road toward the peaks.

WHITE LIGHT WOKE HIM. He sat up, grumbling, bone cold.

Hearing voices, he remembered where he was: miles east of Donner Summit and Truckee, in the Sierras, but still on the Nevada side of the border. A late-spring storm had driven him to shelter at sunset inside one of the high-mountain snow sheds built all along the Central Pacific’s right-of-way. He’d fallen asleep. Lucky he hadn’t slept all night; he might have frozen to death.

Creeping toward the light at the end of the shed, he resembled an upright bear more than a man, a shaggy thing bundled inside several shirts, a filthy buffalo-hide coat, and a fur hat he’d tied tightly under his beard. He wore three pairs of soiled socks, and work shoes he’d bought after cooking for a week for a CP section crew plowing the line in Nevada. He thrust his gauntleted hands under his arms and peered out. Light snow fell through the brilliant headlight of the locomotive hissing and squirting steam fifty yards down the track. Mack saw a coal tender, a single freight car, and a caboose. The night was vast, cold, forbidding, with a sense of implacable rock all around, and lifeless space.

A lantern swung to and fro between the train and the utility shed of a small coaling station. It belonged to the brakeman, who’d run up from the caboose. The engineer and firemen crunched the snow as they hurried back to join him, their voices carrying clearly in the still night.

“Saw him when he peeked out, Seamus. Hold my lamp while I get my truncheon.”

Mack clung in the shadow just inside the shed, squinting against the headlight. The freight car door rolled back noisily.

“All right, you. Get out of there. Out, I say. There’re three of us, one of you.”

That convinced the stowaway; a shadow shape in the steam jumped down. Landing off balance at the edge of the long snowy incline that sloped away from the track, he groped for the freight car to steady himself. The brakeman said, “No free rides on C. P. Huntington’s line, mister.” Mack blinked at the sound of the truncheon striking the stowaway’s bare head.

The man groaned and swayed toward the slope. Laughing, the engineer kicked the man’s rear and the brakeman clubbed him again. That pitched him over with a muffled cry. Down the slope he went, rolling, stirring up clouds of snow. Mack heard another strident yell from below, then silence.

The train crew exchanged comments he couldn’t hear as they returned to their posts. The brakeman stopped to urinate in the snow, then climbed aboard and waved his lantern. As the locomotive drivers shunted back and forth, the engineer sounded the whistle, and its throaty wail reverberated through the mountain fastness. Now the train came chugging toward Mack, its headlight reflecting on the two steel concaves of the jutting snowplow. For a moment they flashed like mirrors.

As Mack grabbed the beam at the end of the shed and swung around to the outside, his shoe slipped and he nearly fell. Clinging to the outside of the shed, he twisted to look over his shoulder. A chasm. Just a black chasm.
God…

Chugging, rumbling, the work train entered the shed. Mack couldn’t help coughing loudly in the thick steam and coal smoke, but the train’s noise was so great, no one heard. His nose ran and his teeth chattered. The train passed.