Savage Girl (2 page)

In the Drone Cage

1

In June of 1875, we made our way down Virginia City’s “A” Street, proceeding south from the center of town toward the mountains.

Inwardly I had to smile at the picture rendered by our little group. Two women, one earthly, one Celestial. My mother, Anna Maria Delegate, and her lady’s maid from China, Song Tu-Li.

My mother swaddled herself in vast amounts of white satin. Tu-Li wore the blue silk smock of her countrymen, hers rendered in rich brocade, so that at first you might mistake her for a peasant while on closer inspection you would conclude she was a princess.

Then, wandering behind milady and her maid, adding the zest of oddity, the berdache, the Zuni man-woman, Tahktoo. Anatomically male, garmented as a female, an indigene from the deserts of the Arizona Territory.

And me, along on this tour of the American West with my mother and my father, to be shown the family business and be removed from the unhealthy vapors of a New York City warm season. I had been in a sanatorium, down with a woeful bout of disturbed thoughts, restlessness and depression of spirits. Having barely seen the inside of Harvard Hall all spring, I wound up taking a leave from school.

The funny thing, the striking fact of the matter, was that amid the numberless crowds on “A” Street that afternoon, our company elicited not a wayward glance or comment. A Celestial, a man-woman, and two terrestrials, one of them a nutter. Few among the busy rabble noticed us.

In the High Sierra, a brisk, springlike Nevada summer. The crowded, unpaved thoroughfare rang with shouts of teamsters and
the noisy leather-and-wood creak of their rigs, the snorting of mules, the excited bellow of commerce. Wide pedestrian walks ran alongside the street in both directions, packed shoulder to shoulder with people.

It astonished me that my mother and Tu-Li were the only women among the multitudes, the only ones on “A” Street, “B” Street or “C” Street either, the only ones in the whole of Virginia City (except, perhaps, those in the very specific red-lit neighborhood down on “D” Street).

Out and about in the mining town, sometimes it seemed that Anna Maria Delegate and her maid were the only females in the newly minted state of Nevada, for that matter the only ones on the whole planet.

My own private musing, of course. I knew that the governor himself had a wife somewhere. And there was “The Mencken,” a performer who strapped herself to the back of a horse in a nude body stocking and did tricks on the stage of Maguire’s Theater.

Still, the unbolted street hordes were entirely male. Prospectors slathered in dried muck. Drunks pickled in tarantula juice. Assorted dips, tossers and clips. Mountain men carrying their Navies on their belts, ready for a quarrel. Mexicans hawking corn flatcakes. Paiutes in rags and fringes. Potbellied nabobs in cutaways.

And Chinese laborers, universally called coolies or, more poetically, Celestials, since they hailed from the Celestial Kingdom.

Any farther from the States, locals said, and you’d fall into the Bay.

We were following Tu-Li to a spectacle of some sort, one that she had discovered but would not describe, keeping us in suspense.

“Where is it?” asked Anna Maria.

“Just ahead, madam,” Tu-Li said.

I have never called my mother “Mother” nor my father “Father” since I was a child. This was at their insistence. Mother was Anna or, more properly, Anna Maria. Father was “Freddy.”

We were “equals, equals!” Freddy informed me, over and over. My parents were much under the sway of Dr. Froebel and the other new child-raising experts. Freddy’s real name was Friedrich-August-Heinrich, too much of a mouthful for anybody.

“My God, what a place this is,” Anna Maria said.

Virginia City was most definitely a “my God” kind of place. Like a riot at a carnival. The north-south avenues in the town were so infernally busy that a buggy could wait a full half hour to cross them. New arrivals and Comstock veterans alike trotted along pushing wheelbarrows piled high with their belongings, weaving in and out amid the wagon traffic.

I amused myself, for a time, by dropping back and walking a few feet behind the cross-dressing berdache, Tahktoo. Passersby, those not too boiled to focus, allowed a look of confusion to pass over their features before they walked on. Was that . . . ? Man? Woman? The berdache existed in the crowd like a question mark.

Just then a wild-eyed creature ran pell-mell past us down “A” Street toward the iron-fronted, vaultlike headquarters of Wells Fargo, a handful of blue dirt gripped in his fist, screaming out, “The assay! the assay!”

No one else paid the yowling fellow any mind, but my mother turned her head to follow his progress. He dodged wagons and drays until he disappeared. The assay, the assay. Would he be trampled by mules? Swindled at the government assay office when he attempted to place a valuation on his scrap of ore? Or would he be the newest entry in the swelling ranks of Washoe millionaires?

Virginia—locals dropped the “City”—was a town that drove men mad.
There is a hole in the human heart,
Anna Maria once informed me, part of her effort to school her son in the ways of the world.
It is deep and cold,
she said solemnly,
and can never be filled.

Except by gold
.

From beneath our feet as we walked came the muffled
whump-thump
of explosions, repeating every few minutes. I could feel the force rise through my ankles. They were blowing apart veins of silver in the mines below the town.

If gold could not be found to fill the hole, then silver might do.

My mother had clearly worn the wrong clothes. Dressing Anna Maria this morning, Tu-Li told her, “You will be the only woman in fashion west of the Mississippi.” Her trailing silk overskirt with its
ruffles, pleated frills and ruching, her bonnet, a parasol! All in white. She looked like an angel, a stern angel, the kind that might knock you on your behind.

But here in the Washoe Valley, white was redundant.

The street, the mountain that rose over the town, the canvas wall tents and saloons and banking establishments, and especially the men—all were covered in alkali grit, plaster white, fine as flour, taken up off the ground by the constant, hellish wind, swirling out of the myriad man-made holes in the earth, stinging the eyes, burning the lips, sweeping everywhere before settling on everything like thick cream on a spoon.

Until the whole place resembled a whited sepulcher.

Dust and wind, dust and wind. You went to Virginia and what did you find? Dust and wind.

It hadn’t mattered what my mother wore. She could have been in mourning black and she would have wound up in white. Dust freckled Tu-Li’s blouse of deep indigo blue. A Negro, walking those streets, magically became a white man. Dust lay ankle deep on the porches and walks.

“A” Street, the first thoroughfare settled in Virginia City, was no longer the busiest in town. By 1875 it had been fifteen years since miners carted the first “blue stuff” out of the earth.

Blue stuff.

Wet, mucky cobalt gravel, at first carelessly discarded, considered only as a waste by-product of the tiny bits of gold-flecked ore it carried within.

Some genius finally bothered to look at the blue stuff closely, and the detritus revealed itself to be silver ore of the highest grade. Silver ore can be made to pay at six-percent purity. This was sixty-eight percent.

Bonanza!

A dismal wagon-track crossroads in the middle of the Nevada nowhere saw itself instantly transformed into a silver-rush boomtown. Within a week after the discovery, “A” Street was packed thick with tents, plain-board shanties, and had wooden-framed storefronts going up.

Virginia. Or the Comstock, for the man who gave his name to the
first famous mine. Or the Washoe, for the valley it faced. The Silverland. The residents called it by every name except its own. They cursed it when it came up dry, and worshipped it when it came in blue.

The assay! The assay!

Above the town, silver seekers had carved the slope into numerous narrow ledges, dotted with rictuslike wildcat mines, the face of the mountain eaten away and pitted as if with a wasting disease.

Overhead, the turquoise reaches of the sky flooded with the sparkling sunlight omnipresent in the West. So different from our home in New York City, with its dull cloudscapes in every season, even summer.

But what amplitude Virginia had in sunlight it made up for with a total lack of vegetation. No trees, no shrubbery, no green grass. Only sparse sagebrush, its pungent, earthy scent floating on the ever-present Washoe winds.

“Give way!” came a shout.

We all jumped back, nearly run over by a dray muscling past, its flatbed stacked with gleaming silver bricks under a loose sheet of flapping canvas. The slouch-hatted bullwhacker managed to hold the reins loosely in one hand and a bottle tightly in the other, while his cargo’s guards, two stone-faced men propping scatterguns against their thighs, sat stoically suffering every jolt.

Late afternoon, near the end of the second shift in the mines. The work at extracting wealth from the earth ran on around the clock, day and night, every day of the year. Capitalism, as my political-economy professor at Harvard said, was a perpetual-motion machine.

My mother brushed off the mud that clung to her snow-white hem after the near collision. She stepped forth under the balconies of the flat-fronted buildings, an intrepid schooner navigating between Scylla and Charybdis.

My father styled himself a social scientist, but I considered Anna Maria to be the more discerning observer of the family. The raucous Nevada settlement offered much in the way of spectacle: mansions, parades, cockfights, bear and bull baiting, duels, bicycles, nitroglycerin, wild Indians.

Whiskey over all. Virginia City averaged a booze-soaked murder a day.

We proceeded past the Nevada House, inviting diners to take meals at fifty cents but with a smell of rancid grease wafting from inside that repelled all appetite.

Next door a bounty stockade, stinking also, stack after stack of ill-cured wolf pelts, bearskins, immense piles of mountain lion hides, the maculate coat of a jaguar nailed to the pine-log wall, eagle and hawk carcasses collected in heaps.

A bounty officer lounged at the portal of the place. Hunters got paid in government money (fifteen dollars for a wolf skin, ten dollars for bear or cougar) for their exterminating efforts. Coyote, fox, lynx, bobcat, wolverines. Man the predator clearing out competing predators, claiming his territory.

What really distinguished Virginia was its saloons. We had only recently arrived in town and were staying not more than a week, but I most wanted to investigate these popular gambling-and-drinking venues, the site of so much rascality.

Enter and lose your shirt. Leave and win a kick in the pants.

“I am interested merely as a witness,” I told Anna Maria. “Not as a participant.”

“A witness is a participant,” she said.

The Red Dog. The Old Globe. Bucket of Blood. The Silver Queen. The Suicide Table.

And now, at the far south end of “A,” my personal favorite so far, a dangerous hybrid establishment, Costello’s Saloon and Shooting Gallery. The threshold of the front doorway, I noticed, had been set with dice.

Through the saloon’s single window shone an amber whiskey gleam. A peppering bang of gunshots could be heard from the interior.

“Just ahead, madam,” Tu-Li said, motioning my mother forward. Tu-Li had been out at dawn to bring our garments to the Chinese district to be laundered. There she heard of a place to visit that might attract the curious of mind.

“Just ahead where?” Anna Maria said, halting and holding on to my arm. “There is nowhere else to go.”

“A” Street stopped just past the saloon, dead-ending at the steep rise of the mountain. Above, the ledges and mucked-out mine holes. The men working them appeared, in the slanting afternoon light, like scarabs crawling over the raggy surface of an Egyptian mummy.

Garish billboards punctuated the slope directly above town. Carter’s Livery. Balthazar Bier-Keller. The Melodeon Hall of Dance. A large freshly painted sign for the International, the town’s respectable hotel, in which we had taken a floor.