Calico Palace (20 page)

“Well, one day me and Bert and Al, we were working in the storeroom at Chase and Fenway’s, and we heard a commotion outside. We thought it was just somebody drunk and hollering, but the noise came nearer and the commotion got bigger and we went out and looked. And who did we see running down the street but this here Mr. Brannan, and he looked like he was drunk and crazy both. He had a quinine bottle full of gold dust and as he came running he was waving this bottle over his head and yelling ‘Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!’”

“Bright young man,” murmured Marny.

Foxy spoke in a voice of awe.

“Ladies, you never saw anything like it. He was yelling so loud you could hear him half a mile, and men were running out of their stores and workshops all along the street to see what the fuss was about. But he didn’t stop, he kept right on running and hollering and waving that bottle over his head. So the men started running after him to find out if it was really gold.

“I tell you, by this time his face was so red it was shining, and with him running and all those other men tailing after him, it was like a comet going down the street.”

At the memory, Foxy mopped his forehead with his sleeve.

“Well naturally, he couldn’t keep going forever. By the time he got to the waterfront he had such a crowd after him he had to stop. Me and the other boys, we went out too, and we all huddled up around him wanting to see that bottle of gold. Soon as he got his breath he showed the bottle around and told us we could pick up that much in practically no time.

“So, me and the other boys, we decided we’d go up there and get some gold. But everybody else decided the same thing.”

Foxy spoke impressively.

“Ladies, as the word went around that day, it looked like every man in town quit what he was doing. The carpenters working on the Parker House, they threw down their hammers right where they stood, left their saws in the boards they were sawing. Didn’t even wait for the wages due them. Just walked off. And the same with all those other buildings half built.

“It was like that all over. The shoemakers and clerks and stable boys and the gamblers in the City Hotel and the cooks and bakers and the teacher at the school and the doctor who ran the drug store—they left. It was like somebody had said
Boo
and the whole town had gone off in a puff of smoke. At the market on Kearny Street, the market man put up a sign that said ‘Help yourself,’ and he went off, leaving his meat and produce right there. And he wasn’t the only one.

“But Mr. Chase and Mr. Fenway said they were going to stay in town and sell their goods. Mr. Chase told us boys if we’d wait two or three days and help him, he would give us our whole outfit, boots and shirts and picks and shovels and jerky and salt pork, all free for nothing. So we stayed on. Men were buying food and clothes, and picks and pans and knives and shovels and horn spoons. They bought anything that would hold gold dust—bottles and cooky jars and jam pots and snuffboxes and tea canisters, anything. Mr. Chase kept putting up the prices but they didn’t care.

“We ran out of everything they could possibly use at the mines. But they kept coming in, begging us to sell them things we didn’t have any more. A man came in with a bag of money and said he’d pay fifty dollars for a shovel. Just a plain shovel he could have bought for a dollar before the rush began. But we didn’t have any. I had the shovel Mr. Chase had given me for staying on, but I hid that in a box of cabbages.”

Marny and Kendra laughed appreciatively as they listened. Kendra filled the coffee cups again.

“And, folks,” said Foxy, “you should have seen the trouble they were having, getting out of town. Any man who had any kind of boat could make money taking people to Sutter’s Fort. All along the beach they sat, with their bundles of food and clothes and their picks and pans, hoping for boats. Not just men, but whole families, even ladyfolks with babies that couldn’t walk yet, sitting on boxes, waiting.

“So me and the other boys, we decided to go by land, around the bay like you did. There was a lot of people going that way, with horses and mules or covered wagons, or even walking and carrying their outfits on their backs. We got around the bay all right, but when we had to cross Carquinez Strait—you must know, you crossed there, didn’t you?”

“Why yes,” said Marny. “By Semple’s ferry.”

“Did you have any trouble getting over? I mean, was anybody there ahead of you?”

She shook her head.

“When was that?”

“About the end of April,” said Kendra.

“I guess it was about three weeks after that when we got there,” said Foxy. “And do you know what? There was two hundred and forty-three wagons—I counted ’em, didn’t have anything else to do while I waited my turn to go over. All those wagons were waiting to cross, besides the horses and mules and the men who rode them and the other men who had walked all the way. I didn’t count the people, couldn’t, they kept moving around, but I guess there must have been five or six hundred, men and women and children and babies, waiting for the ferry.”

The girls marveled, thinking of the strait as they had seen it, the wide green landscape with the willows and wild flowers, and the ferryboat splashing on the quiet water.

Foxy sighed. “And nobody to run that ferryboat,” he said, “but Semple.”

“What about those young men,” Kendra asked, “who worked for him?”

“He didn’t have any young men when I was there,” Foxy returned. “I guess they were off to the diggings. He was working day and night, still is, I reckon. I don’t know what he does for sleep, but if he lives through this he sure will be rich because he puts his prices higher every day and still the people pile in. Us boys were lucky because we didn’t have a wagon to take over. The boat carried two wagons at a time, and on each trip Semple would tuck in a few extra men like us. So we didn’t have to wait but three days to cross.”

Foxy sighed.

“Then,” he said, “we came to Sutter’s Fort.”

“Are Bates and Cunningham still running their raft?” Marny asked.

“No, I heard tell of them but they’re gone now, gone prospecting. Mr. Sutter has a rowboat, with a crew of them so-called Indians—”

“We call them Abs,” said Kendra.

“Abs? Well, the Abs take this rowboat back and forth across the river, and it’s all right if you can stand the lice. But you have to stand ’em because that’s the only way to get over, and when you do get over you find the river around the fort is full of men who came over before you, washing off the lice, so that’s the first thing you do yourself.”

Foxy chuckled ruefully in remembrance.

“The fort,” he said, “was full-to-busting of people on their way to the mines. And that store of Smith and Brannan’s, you should have seen the business.”

Kendra and Marny nodded in amused understanding. “Was Gene Spencer still there?” Marny asked.

“Yes ma’am, he was there, but he said he was coming up to Shiny Gulch pretty soon. That store sure is raking in money. And gold dust, pounds of gold dust. And you know where they keep that dust—oh gee, excuse me, ladies—”

Kendra and Marny began to laugh. “That’s all right,” said Kendra. “We saw it.”

“Saw
it
?” repeated Foxy. He began to laugh too. “There’s a whole row of ’em now.”

“Marvelous,” said Marny. “Go on.”

“Well, we rode to Mormon Island. There’s forty or fifty men there, rocking cradle things like the one your menfolks are rocking up yonder. They told us every man of ’em was taking at least half a pound of gold a day. So now we want to get to work too. Mrs. Parks, do you think Ted would explain to us about that cradle?”

Kendra said he would be glad to do so.

Foxy looked along the strip, a slow grin spreading over his bony face. “It sure is wonderful,” he said. “Half a pound a day. But there’s some,” he added eagerly, “who say there could be even more. Ladies—have you heard anybody talk about a Big Lump?”

“Why yes,” said Marny. “They talk about it at my place. Every day or two I hear of somebody who’s gone to look for it.”

Foxy sighed. “Gosh! I say, Marny, do you believe that?”

“No,” said Marny, “I don’t believe it.” She gave a shrug. “They used to shout with joy at a hundred dollars a day, now they complain because they aren’t picking up a million dollars a month. So they go looking for the Big Lump. Some people,” said Marny, “are just plain greedy, and they’re going to be sorry for it.”

I
N THE NEXT FEW
days Kendra heard more talk about the Big Lump, but not from Delbert. What he talked about—when he talked at all—was his need for more liquor to sell at the bar. A man known as Stub Crawford, a weaselly character with a dirty face and a voice like a cat’s meow, came up to Shiny Gulch with a load of liquor, expecting Delbert and Marny to buy it at a fancy price. Delbert bought one drink, tasted it, and threw the rest on the ground. “That stuff,” he said, “would pulverize tin.”

To the rage of Stub Crawford he refused to buy so much as a pint. Delbert had no scruples about selling rotgut, but he agreed with Marny that the Calico Palace ought to keep its good reputation. Now and then a peddler came up with a keg of drinkable gin or brandy, enough to keep the bar in business. Marny told Kendra the Calico Palace was doing better than they had dared to expect. More men were coming in every day to hunt gold, and they found it. They found it in such abundance that many of them forgot it had any value, and spent it or gambled it away as fast as they gathered it up.

Even Ellet of the great beard, who had started the talk of the Big Lump, seemed to have forgotten it, for Ellet too was getting rich where he was. He had brought two wagonloads of goods from the fort, and opened a trading post.

He set up his business at the lower end of the strip, about three miles below the high end where Ning’s party had made their camp. Ellet placed the post here because the Ab village stood close by, around the turn of the stream. The men at Shiny Gulch—and even more the women—did not want the Abs roaming through the camp, scattering stinks and vermin, and carrying off anything that caught their fancy. Everybody, however, was willing to trade with them because the Abs came to the trading post with their hands full of gold.

Through their uncounted centuries in California, the Abs had not paid much attention to the bright sand they saw in the creeks. But now these strange new people wanted it. In return the strangers offered all sorts of delights: raisins and tobacco and face paints, colored glass beads the size of walnuts; dried beans, which the Abs pounded into a delicious paste with fresh grasshoppers; silver coins, which they loved to pierce and hang around their necks.

For a handful of beans or raisins, Ellet charged them as much gold dust as he could pick up between his thumb and his two first fingers. As Ellet had big hands, this was a good deal of gold. For coins the Abs would give even more. The bigger the coin the more they wanted it. Ted had a silver dollar he had been carrying as a luck piece, but now he took the dollar down to the trading post, where an Ab joyfully bought it for its weight in gold. Ellet kept ten per cent of the gold as his commission, and all three were happy.

Kendra wondered about the rightness of these transactions. She did not ask anybody, for she liked to answer her own questions. When she had made up her mind she told Marny what she thought.

“It’s as fair as any other trade,” she said. “It’s as right for Ted to take gold for that dollar as for a jeweler to take gold for that spray of opals I’m going to buy. It’s as right for Mr. Ellet to take gold for beans as for a man in New York to take it for caviar. What’s anything worth except what somebody is willing to pay for it?”

They were sitting on the grass, waiting while Ted saddled a pair of horses so he and Kendra could ride down to the trading post. Their food supplies had to be replenished, but the men dreaded going all the way to the fort to buy more and leaving the rocker while other men gathered gold. Kendra had suggested that if they would spare Ted for an hour or two this afternoon she would see what Ellet had for sale.

Ted brought the horses, and he and Kendra rode down the strip. About two hundred men were here now, working with picks and pans in the water or with rockers and shovels on the hills. By this time there were also about thirty women in camp. Most of these were sturdy sunbonnet pioneers like Hester and Sue. But several, Ted had told her, were the sort you might expect in a place where there was such a surplus of men. As they rode they saw Mrs. Posey washing clothes, and Kendra asked what she was doing about those women.

With a chuckle Ted said he didn’t think she was doing anything. “My dear,” he added, “it’s not Marny’s morals that Mrs. Posey objects to, its Marny’s sizzling self. Haven’t you noticed, she objects to you as much as she does to Marny.”

Mrs. Posey did not look up to greet them. They rode on.

The trading post was a rawhide shed. Close to the mountainside Ellet had set up poles with the bark still on, laid crosspieces over them, and made a roof of rawhides thatched with leaves. The mountain made the back wall of the shed, and more hides hung at the south side, for shade. The other two sides were open. In the shed, a wagon stripped of wheels had been turned upside down for a counter. On this Ellet had placed a tin cup to serve drinks to men who did not bring cups of their own, and a pair of scales for weighing gold.

Near the shed Stub Crawford sat on a rock, smoking. Kendra had not been close to him before, and now she thought whoever had called him Stub had named him aptly, for he did look like a useless leftover. Stub was a smallish fellow with a sour little face, dandruffy hair and black fingernails, and clothes that looked as if he had been wearing them for weeks. As she dismounted, his nasty little eyes crept over her as if he could see through her dress.

Ted and Kendra went into the shed, and Ellet came around the wagon-counter to welcome them. “Howdy, folks! Come right in. Make yourselves at home.”

Though not much cleaner than Stub, Ellet had a big hearty friendliness that made him far more agreeable. With a backward glance at Stub, Ted asked, “What’s he doing here?”