Zachary's Gold (5 page)

For two days I did nothing but hunt, stare at my map, sleep, and wander about. Sitting on the crest of the ridge above my camp with my telescope and my rifle, I would leaf through my options over and over.

I could choose the best hundred feet of Binder Creek and carry on my work as dutifully and systematically as I was able, but that would leave me with only a few hundred dollars—perhaps a thousand, by winter. It seemed scarcely enough to justify a hellish winter camping in ten to twelve feet of snow, nor again the thousand miles of hard travel it had taken to reach it, should I decide to return south before the real cold hit.

I could pack up, call my past weeks of prospecting a bad venture, and try a new location, but chances were that whatever new gulch or gully I moved to would be no more kind to me than this, and I would only have wasted the time I had already spent preparing my camp and building my tools.

Neither of these choices was very desirable, and the third was not much better—namely to return to Barkerville and see what other opportunities arose. For a while, I persisted with the coarse, dull work of gold mining, but my thoughts began to return more and more to this last possibility.

There must, I thought, be other ways to earn a good living in this country than shovelling muck. Where ten men can become wealthy digging up gold, one more must be able to draw good pay looking after their needs in some endurable way. There would not be much call for dockworkers, Pinkerton agents, or student lawyers in Barkerville, but I decided that before I committed myself to working a claim in that isolated little valley, I would see what work was available in the great gold-rush city.

I believe it was the first day of August when I started for town.

I SUPPOSE THAT MY RETREAT
to the relative civilization of Barkerville was due to boredom more than anything else. We human beings carry on a strange relationship with the unknown that allows it to control us in both positive and negative fashions. It is the unknown that fills us with the greatest fear, and again it is the unknown—the gambler's unknown, and the explorer's—that spurs a man on to strive for more than the bare necessities.

Once Binder Creek had become to me a known quantity, I found it difficult to keep her as my wife and only love. I had no plan to abandon her, but the joy of the place had gone with its mystery. Nonetheless, when I arrived in town, my first stop was the gold commissioner's office in Richfield, where a government clerk—tall and very dour—had me sign a form, give descriptions of the terrain, and trace a location on a counter map. I assured him that my stakes were carefully placed in an obvious location, although I had completely forgotten to put them in before I left. I promised myself to do so immediately on my return.

I next proceeded to the far end of the active section of Williams Creek, where I looked for the three friends I had made on my last trip in. I found instead that the owner of the claim had returned from his winter absence and was now alone there, carrying on his work. He was a polite and friendly Scotsman who seemed to bear no ill will toward the fellows he had found on his territory. In fact, he was able to inform me that one of the trio was, to the best of his knowledge, working in a mine on Stout's Gulch. I got the impression from the man that he had been taken on as a partner, which was an impressive achievement, as the claims along Stout's Gulch were, as a rule, more than decently rich. Since most men were not interested in working for wages in the goldfields, accepting a partner was sometimes the only way for an operation to get help.

I looked him up there—the oldest of the three companions, a man named Carl—and waited for him to quit for the day. The other two were brothers and had returned to Upper Canada after receiving news that their father had passed away.

Carl had the build of a bulldog—low to the ground and very muscular, with a decisive spring to his step, even when he was at his ease. He wore rather thick spectacles, which he tied behind his ears with string, making his blond hair stick up like a rooster's comb. He was not yet in fact a partner in the Stout's Gulch operation, but had agreed to work for wages for one year with the promise that he would become a full partner the next season. This would still be a good arrangement, he thought, as the mine showed no sign of being depleted at all, so five or six months of work would leave him with several hundred dollars in his pocket and a sixth part of a prosperous enterprise.

To emphasize his point, he stood me to a good meal at a hotel, then spent the evening putting beer into me and several other fellows who suddenly seemed to know him well. After this I followed him home and curled up in the corner of his new living quarters—the tool shed at his place of employment.

During those hours of food and drink, Carl advised me strongly that I should try to make an arrangement such as his. He even said he knew of a place that needed men and might turn out to be a good opportunity. I was convinced and the next day followed his suggestion to a large underground outfit on Lightning Creek, which employed at that time eleven men.

I lasted exactly one day, working in the cold and dark alongside a bunch of Frenchmen from Canada. At some point in the middle of the afternoon I came to my senses and remembered that I had come to town to escape the toil and tedium of mining, not to pursue it in a more repugnant form. I took my wages at the end of the shift.

There were indeed other occupations to try, and I hired on at a couple more over the next few days. It took me again only one morning as a tinsmith's assistant to realize that it would be a most unsatisfactory career, particularly if one were apprenticed to a pompous buffoon who drank while he worked and wept about the wife he had left in California.

I lasted twice that long as a carpenter, working for the firm of Masters and Carson, putting shakes on the roof of a new hotel. The work was better, the air was cleaner, and I got along well with the men. The bulk of them spoke English and did not smell worse than myself or carry any more exotic forms of vermin on their persons.

My sojourn in the city was going well enough. Whether at work or at leisure, I felt a certain enjoyment in the company of my peers. In the evenings, men would eat and drink in crowded saloon bars, or stand around open fires on the backstreets, or just sit on the planks of the sidewalks and talk pleasant nonsense, but I found myself spending much of my time in quiet contemplation.

On one particularly pleasant evening I was standing outside the back door of Top George's saloon, watching a group of fellows toss coins. I fell into conversation with the fellow next to me, a miner of some years' experience named Ben, whom I had met briefly on a previous occasion. He had the habit of cursing so foully and continuously that I dare not transcribe his exact words, but he expressed great surprise when I happened to mention that I was not working my claim at present.

“There's plenty good gold country all different directions,” he suggested. “Head yourself out and find a new claim if the first one don't work out!”

“Oh, I don't suppose I'd be likely to do much better at any other spot.”

“Then you wasn't gettin' totally left dry at your claim?”

“Not at all.”

“You was makin' wages?”

“Good wages, sure enough.”

“Then you're plain stupid, ain't ya?”

Ben had a way of saying this that made it seem unlike an insult. In fact, I had a good laugh over it, even while I tried to defend my actions. “Looking for gold is not the only thing a man can do in the world,” I said. “Right now I'm making good money as a carpenter. I'm enjoying the job, too. It's something different.”

“It won't be something different after you done it for a week or so,” Ben replied, and I had to agree.

“There's always something new to try my hand at if I get fed up with building hotels, though.”

“But why would you come all the way up to the goldfields to do that for? That's plain stupid! You think you're gonna get lucky and get yourself rich in one day, poundin' nails? Not a chance! But you get back to workin' that claim of yours, and you just might!”

And with that, Ben proceeded to launch into an hour or more of stories of miners who had been on the verge of abandoning their efforts when they finally made the big strike.

I returned to Binder Creek the next day, and the inference might easily be taken that the old mucker had convinced me of the error of my ways. In reality, he had only reminded me of what I already knew to be true, and I would soon have followed that route with or without his advice.

I was being paid six dollars per day—three times what I would make in San Francisco—but good wages were not what I came north to find. I had come for excitement, plain and simple, and it was the idea of sticking a pan in the ground and lifting it up as a suddenly rich man that had seemed exciting. Ben's stories had been effective in one way, of course. As I trudged my way back up the valley, I was once again filled with a dreamy sort of expectancy. Unfortunately the attitude did not last. Within a few days of my return, I had reverted to my habit of spending every third or fourth day away from the business at hand—hunting when I really had no need of meat, or exploring territory I had no real need to know.

My creek-bank operation rewarded me well enough—yielding some days an ounce and a half of gold, which at sixteen dollars per ounce amounted to ten times a good day's wages where I was born and raised. Still, it was too predictable for me, and I say this to my discredit, for I know I should have been more than happy to spend every waking moment toiling for those returns. I did not, though—usually leaning my shovel against the sluicebox long before darkness compelled me to do so, and spending the last hours of each day eating a leisurely meal or sitting on the ridge of land upstream from me, where I could watch the setting sun plate the broad valley to the north with that more ethereal form of gold.

In late August I took a few days away from my labours to travel into that valley and prospect down some of the creeks and gulches along its near side. Some places I found no colour at all when I panned, while in others the tantalizing flecks of brightness would appear, but never in any amount greater than Binder Creek had to offer. As far as I could tell, the Negro barber had been correctly informed.

Returning from one of these forays, about four or five o'clock on an afternoon of cold spitting rain, I was just about to start up the hillside towards the ridge boundary of Binder Creek when I saw a man leading a pair of mules along the far side of the swampy meadows. It was the same man I had seen a couple of times before, the man I originally had taken to be a prospector but later had recognized as a trapper. Again, both his mules were laden with pelts. He was evidently on his way to town to sell them. Uncharacteristically for me, perhaps, I felt like a bit of casual conversation, and I shouted across to him, setting down my pack under a stunted pine tree. At first it looked like he might ignore me and carry on, but after a second look in my direction, he stopped. He didn't speak or take a step towards me, but he half-saluted with one hand and spun the animals' lead ropes around a twig while he waited.

Because of the scattered swampy pools that dotted the meadow, I was slow covering the ground between us and had to keep both eyes on the path ahead, so that after five minutes, I was only halfway across. Looking up, I saw him waiting patiently, twisting the strands of his beard between two fingers. He seemed to be thinking, perhaps smiling, although I couldn't say for sure, at that distance. As I approached, he circled behind the near mule and began to rummage around in the saddlebag. The idea crossed my mind that he might be looking for a bottle or a flask, and the notion of sharing a drink was quite appealing, cold and tired as I was. Then suddenly he caught sight of something behind me and straightened up abruptly. Without a word, he took hold of his mules and started away down the valley at a brisk pace, ignoring my further calls to him. I turned my eyes to see what he had spied behind me and found that it was none other than Greencoat, looking down at us from that particular viewpoint I considered part of my personal domain. His presence there irritated me greatly, although I could not have done anything about it, even if he had still been around when I got there.

Two uneventful days of work passed, and once again I happened to be seated on a log on the ridge eating an evening meal of cold grouse meat and bannock when I chanced to see someone far across the valley moving eastward along the creek. I had my telescope with me, and in the failing light I was able to see the same trapper, this time accompanied by only one mule, still carrying furs, or so it seemed at that distance.

His progress across my field of sight was slow, and I was given ample time to wonder at the sequence of events that might bring him back along that path in that manner. Why with one less animal, I thought, and why should the remaining one still carry its full load of goods? My best speculation was that he must have disposed of both his beast of burden and his furs at the same time and was unable, for some reason, to sell the remainder. It was too late in the day to pursue the matter, and I returned down the creek bed to my claim, guessing that I would never know what the true story was.