Daughter of Fortune (33 page)

“I was afraid that would be your reaction, Jeremy,” his sister replied. “And that is precisely why I didn't tell you then.”

Three weeks after telling Tao Chi'en good-bye, Eliza was with five miners panning for gold on the banks of the American River. She had not traveled alone. The day she left Sacramento she had joined a group of Chileans leaving for the placers. They had bought mounts and pack animals, but no one had any experience with livestock and the Mexican ranchers had skillfully disguised the age and defects of the horses and mules they bought. These were pathetic beasts, doped, their bald spots painted over with dye, and within a few hours after starting they had come up lame. Everyone in the party was carrying a full load of tools, weapons, and tin utensils, so that the dreary caravan crept along amid a clanging of metal. Along the way, they began shedding equipment, which lay scattered among the crosses that dotted the landscape to indicate the dead. Eliza had introduced herself as Elías Andieta, only recently arrived from Chile with instructions from his mother to look for his brother Joaquín, and prepared to travel California from top to bottom to carry out his duty.

“How old are you, kid?” the miners had asked Eliza.

“Eighteen.”

“You look more like fourteen. Aren't you kind of young to be looking for gold?”

“I am eighteen, and I am not looking for gold, only my brother Joaquín,” she repeated.

The Chileans were young, cheerful, and had not yet lost the enthusiasm that had motivated them to leave their country and travel so far, although they were beginning to realize that the streets were not paved with treasure, as they had been told. At first Eliza did not show them her face and kept her hat pulled down over her eyes, but soon she noticed that the men paid little attention to one another. They took for granted that she was still a boy and were not surprised by her size, her voice, or her behavior. Each of them was self-absorbed and didn't notice that she went off from them to relieve herself or that when they came to a pool of water where they could take a dip, while they were taking off their clothes Eliza jumped in with hers on, even her hat, claiming that that way she could do her laundry at the same time. Besides, cleanliness was the least of their worries, and after a few days Eliza was as filthy and sweaty as her companions. She discovered that their grime made them all equally sordid: her bloodhound-sharp nose could scarcely distinguish her own body odor from theirs. The heavy cloth of her trousers chafed her legs; she was not used to riding long distances, and the second day her buttocks were so raw she could scarcely take a step, but the others were tenderfoots, too, and in as much pain as she. The dry, hot climate, the thirst, fatigue, and constant assault of mosquitoes, quickly killed any banter. They rode forward in silence, metal clanking, sorry before they began. For weeks they looked for a good place to set up and look for gold, time that Eliza used to ask around about Joaquín Andieta. Neither the information they had gathered nor their badly drawn maps were of much use, and when they did reach a good site for panning they found hundreds of miners ahead of them. Every prospector had the right to claim a hundred square feet; they marked their site, working it every day and leaving their tools there when they were away, but if they were gone for more than ten days, someone else could claim the spot and register it in his name. The worst crimes, claim-jumping and stealing, were punished with the gallows or with a horsewhipping, after a quick trial in which the miners played the roles of judge, jury, and executioner. Eliza's party met bands of Chileans everywhere. Recognizing them by their clothing and accent, they would embrace enthusiastically, share their
mate
, liquor, and the jerked meat they called
charqui
; they would exchange colorful tales of misadventures and sing nostalgic songs beneath the stars, but the next day they would say good-bye: there was no time for excessive cordiality. From their speech and conversation, Eliza deduced that some of her countrymen were privileged young men from Santiago, upper-class dandies who a few months before had been wearing frock coats, patent leather boots, kid gloves, and slicked-back hair, but in the placers it was nearly impossible to tell them from the rough peasants with whom they were working side by side. Class affectations and prejudices went up in smoke when they met the brutal reality of the mines, but not racial hatred, which exploded in deadly fights on the least pretext. The Chileans, more numerous and more enterprising than other Hispanics, had drawn the Yanquis' hatred. Eliza heard that back in San Francisco, a group of drunken Australians had attacked Little Chile, setting off a pitched battle. Several Chilean companies had peons from their fields working at the placers, hands who for generations had worked for a pittance under a feudal system and so were not surprised that whatever gold they found wasn't theirs but the
patrón
's. In the eyes of the North Americans, that was simple slavery. American laws favored the individual: each piece of land was reduced to the area a man could work by himself. The Chilean associations scoffed at the law, registering claims in the names of each of their peons in order to work more sites.

California was swarming with white men of various nationalities in flannel shirts, pants tucked into their boats, revolvers in their belts; Chinese in quilted jackets and full trousers; Indians in ruined military jackets and bare behinds; Mexicans in white cotton and enormous sombreros; South Americans in short ponchos and broad leather belts in which they carried knife, tobacco, gunpowder, and money; travelers from the Sandwich Islands, barefoot and wearing brilliant silk sashes—all in a hodgepodge of colors, cultures, religions, and tongues, but with a single obsession. Eliza asked each of them about Joaquín Andieta and urged them to spread the word that his brother Elías was looking for him. As she moved deeper and deeper into that territory, she realized how enormous it was and how difficult it would be to find her lover in the middle of fifty thousand foreigners constantly on the move.

Eliza's party of bone-weary Chileans finally decided to stop and set up camp. They had come to the valley of the American River in a time of baking heat, with only two mules and Eliza's horse left: the rest of the animals had fallen along the way. The land was dry and cracked, with no vegetation but pines and oaks, although a swift-running, clear river rushed down from the mountains, leaping over large boulders and cutting through the valley like a knife. On both banks were rows and rows of men, digging and filling pails with sandy dirt they washed through a sluice, a contrivance that looked like a child's cradle. They worked bareheaded in the sun, legs in icy water, clothes soaking wet; they slept stretched out on the ground, weapons in hand; they ate hard tack and salted meat, drank water polluted by the hundreds of excavations upriver and liquor so adulterated that many ended up with cirrhosis or the D.T.'s. Eliza watched two men die within a few days, writhing with pain and bathed in the foamy sweat of cholera, and was thankful for the wisdom of Tao Chi'en, who had taught her not to drink water that hadn't been boiled. No matter how thirsty she was, she waited until evening when they camped to brew tea or
mate
. From time to time they would hear shouts of jubilation, which meant someone had found a gold nugget, but most were content with extracting a few precious grains from tons of useless dirt. Months earlier, it had still been possible to see gold particles gleaming beneath the clear water, but now nature was turned upside down by human greed, the landscape altered by heaps of dirt and rocks, great pits, rivers and streams diverted from their beds and the water caught in countless pockets, thousands of tree stumps where once there had been forests. Getting at the gold sometimes called for the determination of titans.

Eliza did not mean to stay, but she was worn out and knew that she could not keep aimlessly riding on alone. Her companions had staked a claim at the last of a line of miners, some distance from the nearest burgeoning town with its tavern and general store where miners could buy basic supplies. Their neighbors were three Oregonians who worked and drank with uncommon endurance and wasted no time greeting new arrivals; on the contrary, they let Eliza and her companions know immediately that they did not honor the right of greasers to exploit American soil. One of the Chileans countered with the argument that the Oregonians had no claim, either, since the land belonged to the Indians, and the two would have drawn their weapons if the others hadn't intervened and cooled things down. The air was filled with a constant uproar of shovels, picks, rolling rock, running water, and curses, but the sky was limpid and the air scented with bay. Every evening the Chileans would drop with fatigue while the counterfeit Elias Andieta started a small campfire to brew coffee and water his horse. Out of pity, Eliza also watered the wretched mules, even though they weren't hers, and unbuckled their loads to give them a rest. Fatigue clouded her vision and she could barely control the trembling of her knees; she realized that Tao Chi'en had been right when he warned her that she needed to build up her strength before setting out on this adventure. She thought about the little board and canvas shack in Sacramento, where at that hour Tao would be meditating or writing with pen and China ink in his beautiful calligraphy. She smiled, amazed that her nostalgia did not evoke Miss Rose's peaceful sewing room or Mama Fresia's warm kitchen. How I have changed, she sighed, looking at hands blistered and burned by the harsh sun.

In the morning, Eliza's partners sent her to the store to buy the supplies they would need to survive, and one of those cradlelike things for processing the dirt, because they saw how much more efficient that contrivance was than their simple pans. The one street in the town—if that was what the cluster of buildings could be called—was a mud pit littered with garbage. The store, built of logs and boards, was the center of social life in that community of solitary men. Anything bought in the area was sold there, and liquor was served in large quantities, along with a little food. At night, when the miners came to drink, a violinist livened things up with his melodies. A few men would tuck a kerchief into their belts, a sign that they were playing the part of women, and the others took turns asking them to dance. There wasn't a single woman for miles around, but occasionally a mule-drawn wagon would pass through filled with prostitutes. They were avidly awaited and generously compensated. The store owner was a talkative, good-natured Mormon with three wives in Utah, who offered credit to anyone who would convert to his faith. He never took a drink, and while he sold liquor, he preached against the vice of drinking it. He had heard about a man named Joaquín and he thought the last name might be Andieta, he told Eliza when she questioned him, but that man had come through quite some time ago and the proprietor couldn't say what direction he had taken. He remembered him because he had gotten into a fight between some Americans and Hispanics over a piece of land. Chileans? Maybe. All he was sure of was that he spoke Spanish; he could have been a Mexican, he said, to him all greasers looked alike.

“And how did it turn out?”

“The Americans ended up with the land and the others had to move on. How else would it be? This Joaquín and another man stayed here at the store for two or three days. They laid out some blankets there in a corner, and I let them take it easy until they mended a little because they were pretty well beat up. They weren't a bad sort. I remember your brother, he was a young fellow with black hair and big eyes, pretty good-looking.”

“That's the one,” said Eliza, her heart galloping.

F
our men, two on each side tugging at heavy ropes, led the bear into a ring where a fired-up crowd sat waiting. They dragged him to the center of the arena and tied one hind leg to a post by a twenty-foot chain and then spent fifteen minutes undoing the ropes while he clawed and snarled with world-stopping rage. He weighed more than thirteen hundred pounds, his coat was dark brown, one eye was blind, he carried the rakes and scars of old fights on his back, but he was still young. Foaming slobber dripped from jaws filled with yellow teeth. Standing erect, slashing futilely with his prehistoric claws, he looked over the crowd with his one good eye, jerking desperately at his chain.

This town had sprung up from nothing in a few months' time, built in a sigh by transients who never intended it to last. In place of a bullring, such as those in California's Mexican settlements, it had a large cleared space that was used for breaking horses and corralling mules; the fence was reinforced with boards and wood bleachers had been added to accommodate spectators. The late November steel- colored sky threatened rain, but it wasn't cold and the ground was dry. From behind the barrier, hundreds of spectators answered the animal's every roar with a chorus of jeers. The only women, a half dozen young Mexicans wearing embroidered white dresses and smoking their eternal cigarettes, were as conspicuous as the bear, and the men greeted them with shouts of “
Olé
!” while bottles of liquor and bettors' bags of gold dust passed from hand to hand. The gamblers, in their city clothes, fancy vests, wide neckties, and top hats, stood out among the rowdy, unkempt rabble. Three musicians were playing favorite tunes on crudely made violins, and as soon as they spiritedly attacked “Oh! Susanna,” the miners' hymn, a pair of bearded clowns dressed like women leaped into the ring and athletically danced a jig amidst obscenities and thunderous clapping, lifting their skirts to show hairy legs and ruffled drawers. They were rewarded with a generous shower of coins, cheers, and raucous laughter. When they left, a solemn bugle call and drumroll announced the beginning of the contest, followed by the guttural roar of an electrified crowd.