Fool's Gold (2 page)

Chapter Two

The minister’s gig bumped its way down the dusty track, rocking from side to side over the uneven surface. Alicia held the child clasped firmly to her side; she was desperately tired and anxious, terrified at the thought of coping without Kai for the first time in four years, but she knew she must hide her fears.

The first few miles were covered in silence. No doubt the minister was misreading the situation as so many before him had done, and feeling morally outraged at having to take such a woman into his gig.

Strange how much more indignant the Anglo-Americans were at the idea of one of their own women as mistress to what they regarded as the lesser races: French ‘keskeydees’, Spanish-American ‘greasers’ or, worst of all, the ‘Chinees’. And yet she had known ministers in the larger mining camps and small townships who had accorded the mistress of a leading Anglo citizen all the dignity of a wife, however infamous she or her man might be. To Alicia, however, the nationality was the least aspect: to be a kept woman was the deepest degradation she could imagine.

When the track levelled out on the valley floor, she eased her arm from Tamsin’s side and opened the bag the Colonel had handed her; the sight of the food made her mouth water! On top of the food was a small purse. She untied it and could hardly restrain a cry of surprise at the stream of dollars that poured out into her hand.

‘But this is far more than the fare to Sacramento!’ she exclaimed.

The Colonel has always been a generous man,’ replied the minister drily. ‘Perhaps he hopes you’ll have the sense to get back east again. California’s no fit home for a woman with a small child, protected only by a Chinee. What fools you immigrants are! Like lemmings. Some fool shouts “Gold!” and you all run …’

Odd to hear herself described as an immigrant. And yet, if one wanted to be pedantic, they were all immigrants except the native Indians, and few enough of them had survived the great influx of the white man. But she regarded herself as a Californian, bred if not born, for she had grown up here with the first settlers, the Spanish-Americans; certainly she had more right to call herself Californian than most.

And how shocked her New England mother would have been, she thought inconsequentially, to hear her strictly brought-up daughter call herself Californian!

It was almost fourteen years since they had first set foot on Californian soil in ‘42 after an appalling voyage round the Horn — the Connecticut lady all fear and foreboding, the eleven-year-old child all restless curiosity. They had settled among the Spanish ranchers, Russian fur traders, American whalers and hide and tallow dealers in the little village on the Bay, called Yerba Buena for the medicinal herbs that grew in abundance on its many hills.

She could barely remember her birthplace: the handsome New England estate with its gentle, undulating hills and valleys, the elegant classical mansion looking across the Hudson towards West Point was only a collection of fugitive memories now. And lost to her for ever.

She had been eager for the new life in this vast empty country where everyone spoke Spanish and all the other children had black hair and fiery dark eyes, and soon grew impatient with a mother pining for the niceties of Connecticut Society. Papa had to come to the new lands of California and Oregon to make his maps and surveys, so it was folly to yearn to be anywhere else.

Only later, some time after her mother’s death, married herself and walled in by the miseries of her own circumstances, could she understand how her mother had felt, uprooted from a settled society and replanted in an alien land where, of the four hundred and fifty inhabitants, barely half were American and of these only a handful female. It was a society in which Judith Jameson’s rigid upbringing and innate pride did not allow her to take a part; she had withdrawn firmly behind the shuttered windows of the wooden house which looked down Pleasant Valley to the waters of the bay, there to brood on the sad chance which had brought her to this miserable and wretched corner of the continent.

She had married Major Owens when he was an officer instructor at the West Point Academy, and had never come to terms with the footloose, adventurous mapmaker he had become, ever eager to join one of the mad expeditions to Oregon or the Mexican borderlands, to the Platte or the Sweetwater River with Frémont, or up the Pacific Coast with Commander Wilkes.

She would not accept any invitations from the Spanish speaking ladies in the little settlement by the Bay, or even from the wives of the American whaler captains. One group she stigmatised as heathens, the other she regarded as so very far beneath her that to notice them would be mutually insulting. She withdrew like a snail into her shell and, before long, the invitations ceased. Her only joy in life was the constant scheming to get her daughter back east to prepare for the inheritance which would eventually come her way as the last of the Jamesons.

But Alicia had been quite uninterested in the glowing future held out to her as the chatelaine of Valley Hall and its wide acres: she was far happier if she could escape, with the connivance of the Mexican maids, to ride with the daughters of the Mexican governor, the
Alcalde
, with only their black-robed confessor as chaperon. And escape became far easier as her mother lapsed into imagined invalidity, hardly ever leaving her bedchamber.

The most exciting moments in Alicia’s monotonous life were when her father and his companions made a rare return to base. Most of the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers were former West Point men, like her father, selected not only for their qualities of leadership and adventurousness but also for their specialised knowledge.

The United States wanted to purchase California from Mexico. The planned surveys were part of the American strategy to acquire the vast area before the British moved in from British Columbia and Vancouver Island, or the Russians — already established just north of Yerba Buena at Fort Ross — from Alaska, to annexe California from the weak and inefficient Mexican governors for the sake of its flourishing fur trade.

Travelling with each survey were geologists, map-makers, guides, topographers, mountaineers and artists, as well as the necessary military support. They surveyed new routes for possible future emigration overland, for improved communication, from the frontiers of Missouri to the mouth of the Columbia, even making a rash crossing of the Sierra Nevada in the middle of the winter and nearly losing some important scientists en route.

When they did have the chance of leave in Yerba Buena, they took it enthusiastically and the young girl, playing hostess during her mother’s illness, was for all of them a fond reminder of the homes they had left behind. As she grew up, she had no difficulty coaxing her father’s colleagues to initiate her into the mysteries of geology, cartography, or daguerrotyping, for which exacting science she soon showed a remarkable aptitude. On a few memorable occasions, they even took her up into the mountains with them, to make maps and take photographic plates. She rode the mountains, swam in the icy streams and gloried in the freedom of the empty valleys and the splendour of nature unsullied by any human presence but their own.

Then they would be off, gone as swiftly as they had come, leaving her to the stifling, enclosed atmosphere of the unhappy house. In the empty days that followed their departure, she would sit at the open window, oblivious to the sea fogs blowing in from the bay and drifting up the valley, oblivious to the boom of Borica’s shore batteries sending the flocks of startled pelicans to wheel in a screaming mass over Alcatraz Island, and dream of the day when she would be old enough to travel up into the mountains with her father and his companions, surveying, mapping, photographing new scenes, strange Indians, mountains that no white man had ever seen, until her mother sent the servant to bid her come and read to her from some improving volume or play for an hour on the inlaid piano which had come round the Horn with them.

Apart from her father’s all too infrequent visits, little else happened in the small settlement as Alicia Owens was growing up. In ‘42, the Russians withdrew from Fort Ross and returned to Alaska; they sold their stock to Sutter, a Swiss immigrant, for his new ranch up on the Sacramento which he called New Helvetia, though travellers called it Sutter’s Fort. More immigrants arrived, many of them in wagon trains over routes mapped out by her father. In ‘46, the
Brooklyn
deposited over two hundred Mormons on the shore, which vastly increased the numbers in the small settlement, as well as the racial and religious variety! The Mexicans began selling off to the newcomers the land which the Spanish had originally assigned to the Missions; private ranches began to spring up from the coast to the Pacific Ranges, north and south of the great bay. By her fifteenth year, relations between the new, mainly Anglo-American immigrants and the Mexican government had deteriorated and the
Alcalde
, prophesying war, left for Monterey, taking his daughters with him.

*

‘Washington or Sacramento?’ asked the minister curtly, his voice bringing her back to the present with a jolt.

‘I — I beg your pardon?’ She tightened her arm around the child, sleeping peacefully between them, her face buried in the woman’s lap.

‘Will I put you down in Washington or Sacramento?’ He gestured to the river ferry tied up at the levée, embarking a flood of passengers, on foot and on horseback, from the teeming river front.

She looked around her at the garish saloons and the raucous passers-by.

‘Sacramento, if you will be so kind,’ she said firmly.

‘Stay in the gig then, or they’ll charge you extra for the crossing,’ he said, negotiating the horse and cart through the lounging crowds and across the rumbling gangway onto the ferry.

‘I can pay for my own passage,’ she replied sharply. She drew out the purse and tried to pass one of the gold coins over to the minister.

He turned to her in exasperation. ‘Let me give you some advice, ma’am which I hope you’ll take for the sake of my calling, if for naught else: if you’re too good for Washington, then you’ll need every last red cent of that money to find a lodging in Sacramento that’ll come up to your requirements. Accept a kindness when it’s offered with the best of intentions; pride is a vice, ma’am, and one you can’t afford in your situation, if I may say so.’

The ferry cast off and worked its way across the broad brown river between a number of skiffs and sailing ships and past a huge white-painted sidewheeler, taller above the water than anything she had ever seen before.

At the far bank, she stepped down out of the gig, unassisted, and lifted the child down.

‘Thank you for driving us this far,’ she said primly. ‘It was very — Christian of you.’

Before he could stop her, she had slipped away down the gangplank and disappeared among the loafers on the quayside.

Sacramento: a hustling, bustling city. Alicia had last been here in ‘48 when there was barely more than the white-washed adobe buildings of Sutter’s Fort, just beginning to gather around it the tents and shanties of the first goldminers in the American River Valley. The fort was still there, on the bluff where the American River poured its swirling waters into the mighty Sacramento, but now it was dwarfed by the spreading streets of Sacramento City. The town had been laid out by Sutter’s son in an attempt to bring some order to the sprawling mass of tents and shacks that had sprung up almost overnight. In spite of fires, floods and cholera, the town had continued to grow and in 1854, mindful of its proximity to the gold that provided the wealth of the new State, the politicians had designated it state capital. More permanent buildings had sprung up along the grid system and the town was pushing the surrounding forest back a little further each year as it expanded.

Alicia looked around her in confusion, almost regretting the instinct which had made her give the minister the slip. Even this late in the afternoon the town was full of men from the mines and ranches that spread out along the Sacramento Valley and up the length of its many tributaries. Sacks and bales were stacked along the broad Embarcadero and the levée, waiting to be loaded on to the numerous ships berthed alongside. The labourers shouted and hollered as they worked, but few took any notice of the stooped woman who stood bewildered in front of the warehouses, her face hidden by the domed straw hat.

‘Lisha,’ whispered the child. ‘I’m very tired.’

Resolutely, she turned her back on the bustling riverside, forcing her tired legs to carry her deeper into the heart of the town. The main street was alive with crowds of men, walking, lounging, exchanging news on street corners, despite the heat. Although a hundred and twenty-five miles from the Pacific Ocean and well on the way to the high mountains of the Sierra Nevada, Sacramento itself was only thirty feet above sea-level and the heat could climb to 110 in the shade at the height of summer. The unmade roads and constant coming and going of horsemen, carriages and carts combined to stir up a stifling blanket of fine white dust that hung like a pall over the town, irritating the eyes and burning the throat.

The crowds that passed behind them were a motley selection: Negroes from the Southern states, mulattoes from Jamaica, Kanakas from Hawaii, Peruvians, Chileans, Mexicans, French, German, Italians, even Australians.

On every corner thimble-riggers, French monte-dealers and string-game tricksters were vying to part the miner in search of entertainment from his hard-earned gold. ‘Three ounces no man can turn up the jack!’ or ‘Six ounces no one knows where the little joker is!’