The Ballad of Lucy Whipple (17 page)

Now that the way was open, some miners went home with their profits. Others, unwilling to work for someone else, went to Gravel Bar or Bedbug Flat or somewhere unknown and unnamed but rich with the promise of easy gold. The rest sold their claims to the mining company and learned to fix and run and clean the machines that dammed the river and crushed the rock. And that's how the Green Mountain Investment Company of Poxley, Vermont, ended up owning so much of the California land that the Americans had taken from the Mexicans who had taken it from the Spanish who had taken it from the Indians and the salmon and the bears.

But all that was yet to come. Right now the stage was leaving for Skunk Valley and assorted other stops. When it returned in two days, I would get on it with Belle and her family. We'd take the stage to Sacramento, then hire a wagon and team for the trip to St. Louis, where we'd board the train for New York; in only eight weeks or so, I'd be home. My heart thumped with excitement, but I was a little bit sorry to leave so soon. Changes were coming to Lucky Diggins, and I was mighty curious to see what would happen.

Next afternoon a strange miner appeared at the tent with a wrapped package. "You the gal they call little sister?" he asked me.

"Unfortunately so," I answered.

"That mean yes or no?"

"Yes. They call me little sister."

"Well, I ran into a fella in New Orleans, me coming to California and him going home. He gave me this here parcel and asked would I deliver it to little sister of Lucky Diggins, near Marysville, in California. So I done it and now I'm off." He tipped his head and walked away before I could say "Howdy" or "Thank you" or "Have an onion or some beans."

I ripped the parcel open. It was a copy of
Ivanhoe.
Inside was a note:

Little sister,

I heared you was burned out. I'm sorry for the loss of yer books. You never met me but I read this book of yers once in California. Borryed it from someone who borryed it from someone who knew someone who knew you. When I saw a schoolteacher fella in Missouri with the same book, I thought it should go to little sister, to replace the one the fire et up. So here it is back again. Didn't take too much to persuade the schoolteacher to part with it. He was a puny fella.

Yer friend, Maxwell Parsons

I sat for a long time reading
Ivanhoe
and then, strangely restless, went for my last walk in Lucky Diggins. I climbed up the ravine path to the top and looked around. Hawks danced in the relentless, endless, cloudless blue sky. In the distance the hills were turning yellow with wild oats and ripening grasses. Here and there patches of growing things had escaped the fire: late-blooming gentians, asters, goldenrods, mosses, and liverworts. Lizards scampered over the dry, cracked ground.

Around a bend I came upon a fawn. She looked closely at me and then, startled by my human smell, tried to run, tripped over a branch, and fell to the ground flat, four legs splayed out around her. Before I could move, she was up again and took off into the brush. Why was she alone? Had she lost her mama? Or was she on her own, maybe for the first time?

The sun set rose and crimson over the dark mountains that stood watching over me. "Magnificent," I said to a lizard who was sunning on my boot. "And beautiful. But you better move now. It's getting late and I have to go on home." And I did, surprised at my choice of words.

I climbed down to Lucky Diggins, the gold and dusty air fragrant with the smell of pines, mint, and ripening berries. From the shacks and tents came laughter and the clanking of tin dishes as folks got ready for supper. Rusty's mouth harp sang, accompanied by the honking of wild geese. I could smell burned beans and mules and privies. It all seemed as familiar as morning, and I was filled with happiness, sadness, and something powerful but nameless.

Dear Mama,

I picture you standing barefoot on a beach with wind blowing your hair and a coconut in your hand. I reckon you have never been so happy. Except for missing you something fierce, I am happy, too.

I have things to tell you. I hope there are places to sit there in the Sandwich Islands, for I suggest you sit now.

I joined Belle and her husband and Fanny Melinda at Mr. Scatter's, ready to climb up to where the stagecoach waited. Jimmy and the Gent had come to see me off, the Gent with an armload of wild sunflowers and Jimmy awash in tears. Lizzie and her ma, who is now Mrs. Scatter, watched quietly from inside the store. No one was smiling or patting me on the back. It felt like a funeral.

And then, Mama, all the thinking I had been doing while I waited suddenly came together, like the pots and pans melted in the fire. And there it was. I realized that east isn't home, Massachusetts isn't home. Home is you and Pa, Butte, Prairie, Sierra, and the baby Golden, Gram and Grampop. The Massachusetts that is home is in my heart, not a town forty miles west of Boston. And I can take it with me wherever I go, but I can never go back there again.

Seems to me home is where I am loved and safe and needed. And that's Lucky Diggins. Finally, Mama, Lucky Diggins is home and I'm not going anywhere after all.

I tried to explain this to Belle. I'm not sure she understood, but she wished me luck and began to bounce Fanny Melinda. Marriage sure has softened her edges.

I was mighty regretful for a while after they left, being all alone here with no Mama, no pickle crock, and no hope for Massachusetts. I thought I had made a prodigious mistake. What was I to do? I didn't hanker to spend my days baking pies.

I talked to Lizzie and to Butte and read the
Ivanhoe
sent me from New Orleans and then was inspired. I went to see this Mrs. Porterhouse, who came to town with the Green Mountain Investment Company to save Lucky Diggins. She said their entire Vermont house is being shipped in pieces around the Horn and up the trail to Lucky Diggins for rebuilding. Can you imagine? What a sight. She's determined to civilize California, starting with Lucky Diggins, and is campaigning for a school and a real brick church. So I told her my inspiration: a lending library in the church basement. She said, "Lucille," her being a grand and formal kind of person, "Lucille, girl, you think like me." You could tell she meant it as a compliment. I hugged her so tight I almost burst her corset.

I have spoken to the miners left around here and some farmers in the valley. They agree to pay a dollar a month apiece to run the library and pay a librarian. We do not
have many books yet, just mine that have come back and some books on manners and household decoration that Mrs. Porterhouse brought. But we will. For one, I am donating
Ivanhoe.

I am Miss Whipple, town librarian! Lizzie is helping me sew a shirtwaist with a high collar and long skirts, suitable for a professional. I will stay right here in a room over the general store and run the library, ordering books and mending torn pages, keeping track of who borrows what, reading whatever I like, living and working surrounded by books. Mama, imagine. It is my heart's desire. My real heart's desire.

Last Sunday I was missing you all so much, I went again to be with Butte. Mr. Scatter is building a great house right over the spot where the boarding house was, so I dug up the flower bulbs and planted them on Butte's grave. He will have flowers come spring. And I brought him a present: antifogmatic, the fifty-first word for liquor. From Mr. Porterhouse. Butte must be plumb tickled.

Give my love to Brother Clyde and Prairie and Sierra. I think of you all the time and cry sometimes, and I worry about you there in the wilderness without me. But I am doing fine on my own.

Yours truly,
Your loving daughter,
Miss California Morning Whipple, happy citizen and librarian of Lucky Diggins, California, U.S.A.

The story of the California gold rush has always been as much myth as history. The myth says that the Gold Rush consisted entirely of men who left home and family to strike it rich in California. Indeed, I discovered an 1850 census that estimated that ninety percent of those who came to California to search for gold were male. But what about the other ten percent? They were wives, mothers, sisters, daughters, and sometimes women like Arvella Whipple who came without a man. They walked across the country in long skirts and long hair, bore babies on the trail or in brush huts along rivers, cooked and washed for their own families and as other prospectors as they could to earn money. I admired the strength and of these women and of the children who crossed the continent with baby sisters and brothers on their shoulders or in their arms. Theirs was the story that interested me and led me in search of Lucy Whipple and her mother.

California itself has long been a land of myth, from as far back as its naming in the seventeenth century for the fictional Queen Calafia, ruler of a mysterious island inhabited by tall bronze Amazons. Spanish explorers, following a map that depicted California as an island in the Pacific, came looking for the legendary Seven Cities of Cibola, the kingdom of La Gran Quivara, and the fabled El Dorado, places of untold wealth where even the kitchen utensils were made of gold.

The myth also tells us that the Spanish "discovered" the land known as California. Obviously it had already been found by the native peoples who had been there for hundreds—perhaps thousands—of years. The Spanish met, defeated, and enslaved them, and then Mexico revolted against Spain and took California for its own.

Despite the myth that Americans "settled" California, and in violation of their own treaty, the United States actually conquered and annexed it from the Mexicans who had taken it from the Spanish. Those who suffered the greatest losses in this shifting and reshifting were the California Indians, who numbered over 360,000 in the early 1800s but fewer than 15,000 by 1900. The Maidu, the native people who lived in the area of the gold rush, numbered 9,000 before the white men came. By 1856 6,000 Maidu were dead or gone. The native Californians lost their land, had no legal rights in the new state of California, and were beaten, enslaved, or killed by violence or disease.

The lumps of gold lying in the streams and fields of the California mountains were also mythical. The fantasy of easy gold was a "carnival of hope" that lured more than 300,000 people to California by 1853.

Most of those who came were searching for gold, not putting down roots or building homes. When they realized that gold was hard dug and hard won, not lying around for the picking up, most left. Ninety percent of the population of Grass Valley, a typical mining town, in 1850 was gone by 1856. Those who stayed became Californians. They opened stores and lumberyards, brickyards and iron foundries. They ran newspapers and banks or turned to teaching and farming.

The myth also claimed that mining put all men on the same level. Supposedly, family, background, manners, and looks didn't count for much: Anyone could strike it rich. In truth this did not extend to those not white or not American. The gold rush story is filled with tales of riots, fights, and murder, not only over gold but over race and color. The Fugitive Slave Laws worked against blacks seeking freedom, and the repressive Foreign Miners' Tax was enforced primarily upon the Chinese and Hispanics.

The real gold in California proved to be the rich, fertile land. The farms, cattle ranches, and orange groves of the new Californians grew into today's multibillion-dollar agribusiness.

The gold rush, which brought thousands to live on and off the land, also brought ecological disaster. Miners stripped the soil, leaving behind piles of refuse and rusting machinery. Creek beds were mangled by massive dredges. Giant hoses pounded the hillsides with millions of gallons of water, turning rivers into mud. Mountains were torn down and the courses of rivers changed. Years of mindless waste and pollution damaged and destroyed wildlife and natural resources. Parts of California were ravaged, used up, and left to die.

The gold rush's promise of easy money—whether myth or not—affected people's values and expectations. It was another manifestation of the nineteenth-century belief that anyone could get rich in America. Gone was the Old Country and its fixed economic and social classes. Americans believed they were free to choose their lives, better their conditions.

Politicians and preachers claimed that the New World offered an abundance of riches for the taking, and the optimistic, opportunistic Americans took them. Those who went to the gold fields believed they had a right to the land and its wealth, no matter whose it had been before.

Perhaps even more than the gold, it was the promise of opportunity that brought so many to California. In 1850 California was so populous and powerful and so desirable to the United States that it became the thirty-first state in the Union, the only state in the west not to have been a territory first.

The different kinds of people who came to California brought a diversity of cultures—and culture. California was not merely made up of those frontiersmen who pushed on from other areas of the west. California attracted easterners, midwesterners, southerners, Europeans, Asians, South and Central Americans—a mix of people from all over the world who brought their own cultural influences. Newspapers, literature, theater, and opera flourished, a situation you wouldn't think to find on the "frontier."

One of the fruits of this transplanting of culture was the library. New England had had subscription libraries in meeting halls and coffee houses for a century. In 1834 Peterborough, New Hampshire, began the nation's first free public library. Those westerners who like Lucy had grown up with the libraries of the east were anxious to bring them to California. Libraries sprang up in some gold rush towns as early as 1849.