Calico Palace (39 page)

They had a pleasant journey to New Orleans. The
Falcon
was a brand-new vessel equipped with every luxury of travel, and they were looking forward to their days in port. General Persifer Smith, who was on his way to take command of the army in California, had spent several years of duty at a post near New Orleans and while there he had married a local girl. General and Mrs. Smith had promised to guide their fellow travelers on sightseeing tours of the town.

As Norman got this far, his lips began to twitch. “But in the meantime—” he said, and glanced at Rosabel.

“Things were happening in New Orleans,” said Rosabel.

Lying on the sofa, she raised herself on her elbow. She and Norman looked at each other. They both began to laugh. Norman said,

“I suppose you folks know about that army courier, Lieutenant Loeser. The fellow who went to Washington with letters from Colonel Mason and a box of gold.”

They said yes. Kendra added that the last time she had heard of Loeser had been when she read the
Alta
’s report that he had gone as far as Callao in Peru. Norman said Loeser came from Callao to New Orleans, where a newspaper editor sent a reporter to ask him the latest news from California.

Loeser showed the reporter the box he was carrying to President Polk. A little box that had once held tea, now it held two hundred and twenty-eight ounces of gold.

“Look at it,” Loeser said to the newspaper man. “Handle it. And you can print in the paper—men are coming in every day from the placers, bringing so much gold that they can hardly carry it. I’ve seen them.”

The newspaper printed the interview.

New Orleans caught fire. All of a sudden, in the streets, the taverns, the banks, the gambling rooms, everywhere you went, people were talking of nothing but California gold. Everybody in town wanted to go to the placers.

Loeser took a coastwise boat for Washington, but behind him the fire continued to blaze. A few days after he left, the New Orleans
Picayune
published an article headed “Ho for California!” This article gave more details about the steamers that were to sail from New York to Chagres, every one of them stopping at New Orleans on the way.

“By this time,” said Norman, “the town was wild.”

“In the shops,” said Rosabel, “the salesmen were so excited that their hands trembled when they tried to measure a yard of ribbon. When you went to a show, so many people were whispering about gold that you could hardly hear the actors. One man even told me girls in California were wearing nugget necklaces—”

“They are,” Marny said smiling.

Archwood asked, why had New Orleans exploded in front of Loeser, when Washington and Baltimore had shown only mild interest in Beale?

Norman could only guess. Maybe it was because Beale had been needed to prepare people’s minds. Maybe it was because Loeser’s report, based on Colonel Mason’s own tour of the placers, carried move vivid details. Or maybe it was a difference in the two men themselves. Norman could not say. All he could say was, New Orleans was the first town in the United States to get the gold fever, and New Orleans really got it.

And on the way to New Orleans was the
Falcon,
with half her berths still empty. The steamboat line had an office in New Orleans, and when people inquired there they got a clear answer. If you wanted to go to the gold fields you could buy a ticket. This ticket would entitle you to passage on the
Falcon
from New Orleans to Chagres, and then passage on the west coast steamer from Panama City to San Francisco. (Crossing the Isthmus, said the clerks, was up to you.)

The questioners hardly heard this last remark. What they did hear was, if you bought a ticket on the
Falcon
you could go to San Francisco. But the
Falcon
was almost here.

The passengers already on the
Falcon
had had months in which to put their affairs in order and prepare for their voyage. But if you were going to board when the
Falcon
stopped at New Orleans, you had only a few days to make ready.

Only a few days—and this was no short and easy journey. From New Orleans to the Isthmus was about two thousand miles; from the Isthmus to San Francisco was nearly four thousand miles farther. And those miles meant dollars. That ticket cost money. A lot of money.

Norman had said everybody in town wanted to go to California. But in New Orleans or anywhere else, it would be a rare man who could drop his whole present life so suddenly. Men of property could not wind up their business in a week or two. Men of no property could not pay their way. Dutiful fathers were not going to abandon their families and run off to the end of the world. Fathers with no sense of duty were not often the sort to have saved up so much cash.

And if there were few men ready for such a jaunt, there were even fewer women. A woman was less likely than a man to have a purse full of money; she was more likely to want security instead of wild chances; and she was even more likely to be serious about such obligations as children and aged parents.

The only people who could scramble aboard the
Falcon
would be those who had no ties and no cares. Or at least, none that they bothered about. They would be people who could throw away the past and laugh at the future. But they had to be people with ready money.

Were there any such people? Yes, of course. The professional gamblers, and the most reckless of their lady friends. People like Norman and Rosabel.

T
HE
Falcon
STEAMED PLACIDLY
into port at New Orleans. And here, bags packed and tickets in their hands, she found a hundred and sixty persons ready to start for the land of gold.

They were a varied company. Among them were troublesome rich boys whose families had bought their passage to get them out of the way; men of the hopeful sort who are always chasing rainbows and who always seem able to borrow money for it; even a few responsible citizens who wanted adventure and had nothing to keep them at home. But by far the greatest number—about two-thirds of them all—were gamblers from New Orleans and the Mississippi River boats, and the girls who worked with them. And of course, said Norman, women—

Here Norman cleared his throat and glanced at Kendra, as if just remembering her presence. “Excuse me, Mrs. Shields,” he said.

Kendra gave him a smile. “Go ahead, Norman. It’s all right.”

“It
is
all right,” Marny assured him. “Kendra has lived at a gold camp, which is more than you have. You can talk.”

Loren laughed and agreed. Thus encouraged, Norman laughed too and talked frankly. While in New Orleans, he said, Lieutenant Loeser had spoken of California’s excess of men. So, naturally, among those who had bought tickets on the
Falcon
were several of the town’s most enterprising madames of parlor houses. As the trip was so costly, most of them planned to look for girls after they reached San Francisco, but not all were willing to leave so important a matter to chance. In particular, one keen-witted madame known as Blossom had thoughtfully chosen the four most engaging girls in her establishment and was taking them with her. They were all named for flowers—Lilac, Iris, Clover, and Daffodil.

“And they
were
pretty,” said Norman. “And not stupid. Hardly as smart as Blossom, but they knew their way around.”

All these people had tickets entitling them to passage from New Orleans to Chagres, and then to San Francisco, on the steamboat line. They were all determined to go there.

The captain of the
Falcon
warned them that his vessel, only half as large as the
California,
had berths for only fifty passengers. Half of these berths were already taken. Such a crowd as themselves would be most uncomfortable. Did they mind?

They did not.

Very well, said the captain. A berth meant for one could always hold two, and if they were willing to sleep in hammocks, on bare planks—?

They were.

Well then, let them do it. The voyage to the Isthmus would take nine or ten days. He would get them there.

And so the little steamer
Falcon,
jammed with nearly two hundred people, left New Orleans.

Marny got up from her chair, took the seat cushion and plopped it on the floor and sat upon it.

“I am breathless,” she said. “Four clergymen, a general, all those fine ladies—do go on.”

Norman and Rosabel spoke together.

“It was dreadful,” said Norman.

“It was funny,” said Rosabel.

Norman continued,

“The captain couldn’t force the old passengers out of their berths, so he had to pack us into what was left. This meant they were more cozy than we were, but they were mighty unhappy all the same. The food was awful—salt meat and hardtack, there was no room to carry luxuries—and the ship was so crowded we could hardly move, but this wasn’t the real trouble. The trouble was, they were the steady sort, and we—” He shrugged again, and looked at Rosabel as if asking for words.

Rosabel lifted her black velvet eyebrows and spread out her hands. “My dears, the general had brought three menservants to shave him and shine his boots and wait on him. And the general’s wife had brought a maid of her own, a real elegant lady’s maid like in a show. Those army ladies were used to being treated with
respect.
On military posts I guess everybody steps aside to let them pass. They sure didn’t like us. They sat in a huddle with their embroidery and pretended they didn’t see us—”

Kendra choked into her handkerchief. She was remembering how she had been ordered not to see those two white houses on the cliff at Valparaiso. She thought of Eva on the
Cynthia,
with her pretty sewing; Eva in San Francisco, the colonel’s wife. She pictured Eva among those motley travelers. Yes, Eva would have gone on with her pretty sewing. She simply would not have seen them.

“And those ministers!” said Rosabel. “They were young men and they weren’t bad-looking, but they sure were pious. One Baptist, two Presbyterians, and the other—what was he, Norman? Doesn’t matter. Anyway, they set out to reform us. They couldn’t understand that we were doing all right the way we were. We sat on the floor and played cards—for money, of course, what’s the fun of it otherwise?—and they thought this was wicked. And we played on Sunday and they didn’t like that either. I had brought my banjo, and we sang songs, and they didn’t like our sort of songs. They didn’t like anything we did.”

Kendra caught Marny’s eye. They both bit their lips to keep from giggling. They both suspected that Rosabel, out of respect for the company, was omitting to say that the real basis for the consternation of the clergy was neither songs nor gambling, but the fact that Blossom and her flower garden had gone right into business as soon as they came aboard.

Rosabel said, “We were crowded and cross and the weather was as hot as the inside of a cow. But then we got to Chagres.” She gave a long deep sigh. “And after that, everything that had happened on the
Falcon
seemed like bliss.”

The
Falcon
dumped her passengers at Chagres. The captain, having done all he had promised to do, turned his vessel around and left them there.

Seven degrees above the equator, Chagres was a swampy village on a river bank. In Chagres it was always hot and nearly always raining. The few hundred people who lived here were the mixed-up descendants of Indians, Negroes, Spaniards, and sailors of many races whose vessels had touched here in years past. Their homes were huts made of canes, often raised on stilts because of the swampy ground. The
Falcon
reached Chagres in the last week of December, but now as usual the weather was so hot that the people wore hardly any clothes, and some of them no clothes at all.

“The army ladies,” said Norman, “were horrified.”

“I was horrified myself,” said Rosabel. “I never saw such ugly people.”

She made a face and continued,

“The town is filthy. It swarms with every kind of vermin you ever heard of or saw in a nightmare. Every afternoon it rains, then the sun comes out and everybody starts to steam. I never smelled anything like it. There was no place for us to stay, nothing to do about our baggage except sit on it with a gun so nobody could steal it. They have a few little trading booths that sell things from the ships, and we bought umbrellas, but there weren’t nearly enough. We were all so miserable together it actually made us kind of friendly.”

“What did you eat?” asked Kendra.

“Stuff we bought at the trading booths. Mostly hardtack and jerked beef. Dreadful.”

Kendra smiled in sympathy, remembering all the jerky she had eaten at Shiny Gulch. Norman took up the tale.

“We couldn’t find anybody who spoke English, but some of us from New Orleans could get around in Spanish and we asked how to cross the Isthmus. They said we should take boats up the Chagres River as far as it went, and get mules to carry us the rest of the way. The only kind of boat they have is a thing called a bongo.”

He explained.

“They take a big log—I mean
big,
the trees down there grow ten or fifteen feet across the trunks. They hollow out this log till they have nothing left but a slab of wood at each end, then they put up a sort of awning made of palm leaves, because the sun would kill even the natives if they didn’t have some kind of shade on their heads.”

He paused, and Rosabel said,

“You pile into the bongo, ten or a dozen people and your bags. We threw away a lot of stuff, not room to take it along. There aren’t any seats in a bongo so you sit on the bags. And each bongo is poled up the river by three or four boatmen. And those men, my dears—”

She drew a long breath like a groan.

“They are big, they are mean, they are always yelling and quarreling and fighting, and they are stark naked. On that trip up the Chagres River they did not wear one single thing.”

“They wore hats,” said Norman.

“Excuse me, gentlemen,” said Rosabel.

She cuddled into the sofa cushions as if her memories had made her tired. Norman said,

“Well, here we went, a string of bongos poled by those naked savages. They poked along at about one mile an hour. Every time we came to a patch of shade they stopped to rest. Nothing could make them work harder. We offered double wages, extra food—they would
not
hurry.”