Destiny - The Callahans #1 (25 page)

Young Katrina will make a fine addition to our
family, and we are pleased to have her in our household. However,
to establish a firm and lasting relationship with the Cardenas
family, Don Sebastian and I have agreed to cement the family ties
by arranging for the marriage of my eldest son to his daughter,
Teresa, during your visit to Mexico. If you see the wisdom in this
arrangement, you, my son, will commence the colony in Mexico as the
husband of Teresa Maria Cardenas. By the time you receive this
note, she will have been apprised of the arrangement, and, as is
customary in their society, she will have been prepared to enter
into the marriage, in accordance with the wishes of her father.

While this will no doubt come as a surprise to you,
so quickly arranged and all, and so soon after your marriage to
Katrina, it will also establish you as the heir apparent to the
Stromberg line and the person with whom Don Sebastian will be most
anxious to reach agreement.

Be assured, my son, that the Lord is pleased with
our actions. Because it is only our desire to follow His will, we
shall be blessed.

One final note: Do not under any circumstances
advise Señor Cardenas or any of his household of your recent
marriage to Katrina. We must move carefully so as not to offend
Mexican or Catholic sensibilities. Proceed with due caution, and
may your trip and mission to establish our colony be blessed with
success.

Lovingly, Your father

P.S. I offer my deepest regrets that I will not be
able to attend your wedding. Follow the established Catholic
tradition, Harold, as would be proper and acceptable for a guest,
and we shall arrange for the ultimate proper ordinance as quickly
as possible.

In the west wing of the house, a light tap on
Teresa’s door brought her small voice.

“Come in.”

Don Sebastian entered his daughter’s bedroom,
where she had changed into her night clothes and robe.

“Well, my daughter. It is not so bad a
proposition, is it?”

Teresa smiled at her father. She had been
brushing her long, dark hair in the light of the kerosene lamp on
her dresser, but she laid aside her brush to address her
father.

“He has not the blood of our Spanish
ancestors flowing through his veins, Father, but he seems a most
respectable young man.”

“Well said, my daughter. And as to your
appreciation of him, personally?”

“He is not unattractive, Father. I understand
our interests and will of course obey your wishes.”

Don Sebastian moved close to his daughter,
kissed her lightly on the forehead, and stepped back toward the
door. Turning to admire her reflection in the mirror, he said
lovingly, “You look so like your beautiful mother when she was at
your age. Harold Stromberg is a most fortunate young man.”

Teresa Maria Cardenas would be a major player
in the amalgamation of two powerful families. She knew she had no
choice but to follow her father’s wishes and had in her heart hoped
this Harold Stromberg would be someone she could love. Her
assessment was that she could readily marry the handsome, young
Yanqui who proposed to establish a new colony in Mexico. She would
demonstrate her obedience to her father’s wishes and at the same
time produce heirs to two dynasties. To do otherwise would be
unthinkable and unbecoming the obedient daughter of Don Sebastian
Cardenas. Besides, she was confident of her ability to retain in
her relationship with her American husband the same kind of
independence she had always enjoyed under the hand of her father.
She had no fears.

In Salt Lake, Katrina Stromberg filled her
days with reading, sewing clothes for the expected baby, and
watching for mail from Harold. Only one letter had come since his
departure, and that had been posted in San Francisco the day his
ship left for Mexico.

Katrina’s mother, Jenny Hansen, was only
marginally helpful in assisting Katrina to accept Harold’s absence
and to help her to deal with the discomforting early stages of her
pregnancy. Her mother’s counsel, understandable in the face of her
own marriage, was simple: “You’re married now, Katrina. Think to
your husband and plan for your family. All will be well.”

Living alone in the house Harold had rented
was lonely, but Katrina frequently invited her younger sisters to
stay with her, and on those occasions, Katrina reverted to her
childhood and filled all their time together with fun and
laughter.

Only in the quiet of the lonely nights did
Katrina pour her heart out to Nana about the yearnings in her heart
and the feelings she had that sometimes bordered on misery. Afraid
of putting her eternal promises in jeopardy, she resisted the
temptation to reflect on what she thought of as her “passing
fancy,” for that is what she had taken to calling Tom’s journey
through her life. She tried instead to dwell more on her
forthcoming motherhood than on either Tom or Harold.

Another thing was that Katrina never felt
entirely comfortable in her in-laws’ home. Though she was treated
in a kindly manner, Father Stromberg had become increasingly
outspoken with regard to his feelings about what he saw as the
Prophet’s “lack of vision.” Katrina frequently felt a dark spirit
in her husband’s parents’ home, and although she was unaware of the
full purpose of Harold’s trip to Mexico, she had a feeling of
foreboding that she found impossible to shake. She knew Father
Stromberg’s constant criticism of the Prophet was not right.

Nearly fifteen hundred miles up the Yukon
River lay the small community of Ft. Yukon. Situated at the
confluence of the Yukon and the Porcupine rivers, the settlement
had been in existence since early Russian control of the territory,
and had been an Athapascan Indian campground before that. A one day
layover allowed Tom and John the opportunity to stretch their legs
and buy some prospecting gear. Gold panning, or placer mining as it
was technically called, didn’t actually require much in the way of
hardware, and in fact many a miner got by with nothing more than
the traditional pan and a rock hammer. Rumors of higher equipment
costs in Dawson, most likely started by the merchants in Ft. Yukon
who wanted the business, convinced John that they should outfit
before they arrived.

Since it was early in August, there were no
immediate concerns about their ability to reach Dawson before
freeze-up, and the late summer weather was pleasant enough, even
though Ft. Yukon was positioned precisely on the Arctic Circle. For
most of the trip, Tom had lazed about on the deck of the
sternwheeler, watching spectacular scenery roll before him, mixed
with endless miles of flat tundra, which was nearly as mind numbing
as the prairie had been, west of Kansas City.

How long ago that all seemed. It was almost
inconceivable to Tom that he had experienced so many changes in
just over one year, and melancholy frequently overtook him. John’s
promptings for the lad to join him in “a few pints,” nearly
persuaded him on a number of occasions to abandon his determination
regarding alcohol. The fact that John drank nearly as heavily as
Tom’s father had caused Tom some concern, but John’s drunkenness
produced a jovial, rather than a combative personality.

The trip provided Tom ample opportunity to
reflect on all that had happened to him since his hasty departure
from Tipperary. The walk through Ireland, the ocean voyage to
America, and everything since then, seemed as though it were a
dream—especially the part of his memory dominated by the innocent
face of a blonde, Norwegian young woman. When he allowed himself to
think about it, the fact that she should be married to another man
filled Tom with a feeling of despair. Because they were so painful,
when thoughts of Katrina intruded, he made an almost desperate
effort to drive them out of his mind. One thing he frequently
thought of was that because he had thrown a punch at some mayor’s
son-in-law in Ireland, he was now caught in the wilds of Alaska. He
recalled as well the stories he had heard in Ireland of Irish and
English alike being hauled before the courts and banished to the
penal colony in Australia, merely for stealing a loaf of bread. At
least he still had his freedom.

Before leaving Anvil, John explained to Tom
that since transport out was impossible during winter, they would
be in Dawson, or nearby, for the remainder of the year and well
into ’97. Tom’s letter to Sister Mary, posted before they left
Anvil, had been nearly as hard to write as the note he’d written
the night he so quickly departed Salt Lake City. He left out the
part about the law being after him, rationalizing that Father
Scanlan had probably covered enough of that to ease Sister Mary’s
concerns. Tom’s main purpose in writing the letter was to assure
her that his departure had nothing to do with dissatisfaction over
his job at Holy Cross or the treatment he had received there.
Indicating “General Delivery, Dawson City,” as his forwarding
address through the year, Tom felt he’d honored his commitment to
Father Scanlan to keep his friends advised of his location.

Several hundred miles further up the Yukon
lay Dawson City and an unknown future for Tom. Spending a year with
Uncle John would be tolerable, he figured, and as he’d explained in
a letter to his mother, posted at the same time as the one to
Sister Mary, it would be good to spend time with her brother. Tom
knew the news that he had located Uncle John would please his
mother and that she would feel her son was in good hands.

As the riverboat approached Dawson, Tom
thought someone had made a mistake in calling it a “city.” New York
was a city. Dublin was a city. And even Salt Lake was a city. But
the ramshackle cluster of wooden structures off the port bow of the
riverboat would by no standard Tom knew qualify the place to be
called a city. Within two hours of arriving on 19 August 1896, John
Ryan had located Carmack, a grizzled, nearly toothless man with an
almost skeletal physique, who had just arrived from his claim. John
and Tom listened in astonishment as Carmack, his words whistling
through his missing front teeth, breathlessly described his amazing
gold strike of two days earlier. In town to file his claim, Carmack
was heading immediately back to Fortymile, an even smaller cluster
of shacks up the Klondike River, and from there to his claim. Ryan
was welcome to join him, Carmack said, but he’d better file for a
claim first, if he wanted to participate in the “find of the
century,” as he called it.

Of course, Carmack added, within the first
few hours, most of the claims on Rabbit Creek, where he’d made his
find, had been taken and miners were already en route to join in
the bonanza. There were, Carmack suggested, small tributaries of
Rabbit Creek, itself only a slightly larger tributary of the
Klondike, and even though the various other feeder streams probably
wouldn’t be as rich as his claim on Rabbit, Carmack told John Ryan
and his nephew that they most likely could scratch thousands of
dollars from the sand and gravel laying in the stream beds.

And so it was that Tom Callahan, approaching
his twenty-first birthday, and his uncle, John Ryan, these nine
years out of Ireland, filed two claims on a small creek in the
upper reaches of Yukon Territory, Canada. Each claim entitled them
to five hundred feet on either side of the creek. Their two
adjacent claims gave the Irish kinsmen one thousand feet of creek
frontage to prospect. Not much was expected by either man, although
John, having prospected for several years along tributaries of the
Yukon, was aware that the color and concentration of Carmack’s gold
was of extremely high quality. Tom, totally ignorant of anything
having to do with prospecting, simply followed along with what John
said and got caught up in the gold fever rampaging through Dawson
and Fortymile, both of which had been emptied of miners racing for
their share of the golden dream.

Arriving at the site, Tom and John quickly
staked their claims, which they named Emerald One and Emerald Two.
From Tom’s point of view, the location seemed fine, but John’s
assessment left him dour. The claims immediately above and below
Carmack’s had, indeed, been taken by early arrivals. The small
creek which held Carmack’s Discovery claim, was surrounded by One
Above, One Below, and Two Below, traditional names attached to the
claims surrounding significant gold finds. Discovery and One Below
belonged to Carmack as the original filer, who, by tradition, was
entitled to two personal claims. One Above and Two Below went to
his two Indian brothers-in-law.

As miners arrived in growing numbers during
the closing days of August and early in September, the traditional
names of the creeks were quickly changed. Rabbit Creek became
Bonanza Creek, in honor of the find, and an adjacent creek,
Thron-diuck, was tagged Klondike, a name by which the entire region
would come to be called. Within a year, the Klondike gold strike
would make the world’s headlines, and tens of thousands would
scurry and scramble for their piece of Nirvana.

However, the most surprising development to
the local miners, who raced to stake claims close to Discovery and
One Below, would not be known to any of the parties involved until
much later that year. It was the small, previously unnamed
tributary, which flowed into Rabbit Creek, that eventually came to
be called El Dorado. And the richest and most profitable claims,
from which came wealth that exceeded even the wildest dreams of the
most optimistic miners, were those in the side stream claims, the
ones taken up by those who originally thought they were too late.
It was in the sands and gravels of the El Dorado—the secondary
stream to which Carmack directed John and Tom—that the gods of
fortune had distributed their greatest concentrations of
wealth.